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

by Kai-Fu Lee

In an age in which intelligent machines have supplanted us as the cogs and gears in the engine of our economy, I hope that we will value all of these pursuits—care, service, and personal cultivation—as part of our collective social project of building a more human society.

“You can’t connect the dots looking forward,” Jobs told the assembled students. “You can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future.”

If we are not careful, this single-minded rhetoric around an “AI race” will undermine us in planning and shaping our shared AI future.

in the coming decades, AI’s greatest potential to disrupt and destroy lies not in international military contests but in what it will do to our labor markets and social systems.

Leveraging technology to build the kind of societies we desire will mean following the real-world impact of these policies across geographies and remaining open-minded about different approaches to AI governance.

We were not put on Earth to merely grind away at repetitive tasks. We don’t need to spend our lives busily accumulating wealth just so that we can die and pass it on to our children—the latest “iteration” of the human algorithm—who will refine and repeat that process.

If AI ever allows us to truly understand ourselves, it will not be because these algorithms captured the mechanical essence of the human mind. It will be because they liberated us to forget about optimizations and to instead focus on what truly makes us human: loving and being loved.