AI Superpowers: China, Silicon Valley, and the New World Order

by Kai-Fu Lee

Advocates of job retraining often point to two related trends as crucial for creating an AI-ready workforce: online education and “lifelong learning.” They believe that with the proliferation of online education platforms—both free and paid—displaced workers will have unprecedented access to training materials and instruction for new jobs. These platforms—video streaming sites, online coding academies, and so on—will give workers the tools they need to become lifelong learners, constantly updating their skills and moving into new professions that are not yet subject to automation. In this envisioned world of fluid retraining, unemployed insurance brokers can use online education platforms like Coursera to become software programmers. And when that job becomes automated, they can use those same tools to retrain for a new position that remains out of reach for AI, perhaps as an algorithm engineer or as a psychologist.