by Kai-Fu Lee
Rifling through stacks of medical reports and test results from the hospital, I dug out the information for each metric: my age, diameter of largest involved node, bone-marrow involvement, β2-microglobulin status, and hemoglobin levels. Of the five features most strongly correlated to early death, it seemed to appear that I exhibited only one. My eyes frantically scanned the page, sifting through charts and tracing lines between my risk factors and survival rate.
And there it was: while the stage IV diagnosis from the hospital meant a five-year survival rate of just 50 percent, the more detailed and scientific rubric of the research paper bumped that number up to 89 percent.
I kept going back to check and double-check the numbers, and with each confirmation I grew more ecstatic. Nothing inside my body had changed, but I felt that I had been pulled back from the abyss. Later that week, I would visit the top lymphoma expert in Taiwan. He would confirm what the study had indicated: that the designation of my lymphoma as stage IV was misleading, and my illness remained highly treatable. Nothing was certain—I knew that now more than ever—but there was a good chance I would get through this alive. I felt reborn.
RELIEF AND REBIRTH
There’s a certain sensation most people experience right after narrowly avoiding disaster. It’s that tingling feeling that crawls over your skin and across your scalp a few seconds after your car skids to a halt on the highway, just a few feet away from an accident. As the adrenaline dissipates and muscles relax, most of us make a silent pledge to never again do whatever it was that we were just doing. It’s a pledge we might keep for a couple of days or even weeks before slipping back into old habits.
As I underwent chemotherapy and my cancer went into remission, I too vowed to hold onto the revelations that cancer had given to me. Lying awake at night in the weeks after my diagnosis, I ran over my life again and again, wondering how I had been so blind. I told myself that however much time I had left, I wouldn’t let myself be an automaton. I wouldn’t live by internal algorithms or seek to optimize variables. I would try to share love with those who had given so much of it to me, not because it achieved a certain goal but just because it felt good and true. I wouldn’t seek to be a productivity machine. A loving human being would be enough.
The love of my family during this time served as a constant reminder of this promise and an abiding source of strength during my cancer treatment. Despite years of giving them too little of my own time, when I fell ill my wife, sisters, and daughters all sprang into action to care for me. Shen-Ling was always by my side throughout the exhausting and seemingly endless chemotherapy sessions, tending to my every need and stealing a few hours of sleep leaning against my bedside. Chemotherapy can disrupt digestion, with normal smells and flavors causing nausea or vomiting. When my sisters brought me food, they took careful note of my reaction to each smell or taste, constantly adjusting recipes and tweaking ingredients so that I could enjoy their home-cooked food during treatment. Their selfless love and constant care during this time simply overwhelmed me. It took all the ideas that I had come to understand and turned them into emotions that washed over me and came to live within me.
Since my recovery, I’ve come to cherish time with those closest to me. Before, when my two daughters came home from college, I would take just a couple of days off work to be with them. Now when they visit from their busy jobs, I take a couple of weeks. Whether on business trips or vacations, I travel with my wife. I spend more time at home taking care of my mother and try to keep my weekends free to see old friends.
I’ve apologized and tried to mend friendships with those that I have hurt or neglected in the past. I meet with many young people who reach out to me, no longer communicating only through impersonal blasts across my social media accounts. I try to avoid prioritizing these meetings by who “shows potential,” doing my best to engage with all people equally, regardless of their status or talents.
I no longer think about what will be written on my tombstone. That’s not because I avoid thinking about death. I’m now more aware than ever that we all live in direct and constant relationship to our own mortality. It’s because I know that my tombstone is just a piece of stone, a lifeless rock that can’t compare with the people and memories that make up the rich tapestry of a human life. I recognize that I’m just beginning to learn what so many people around me understood intuitively all their lives. But simple as these realizations are, they have transformed my life.
They’ve also transformed how I view the relationship between people and machines, between human hearts and artificial minds. This transformation crept up on me as I reflected on the process of my illness: the PET scan, the diagnosis, my own anguish, and the physical and emotional healing that followed. I’ve come to realize that my cure came in two parts, one technological and one emotional, each of which will form a pillar of our AI future as I explain in the next chapter.
I have great respect and deep appreciation for the medical professionals who led my treatment. They put years of experience and cutting-edge medical technology to the task of beating back the lymphoma that grew within me. Their knowledge of this illness and their ability to craft a personalized treatment regimen likely saved my life.
And yet, that was only half of the cure for what ailed me. I wouldn’t be here today if it weren’t for medical technology and the data-driven practitioners who use it to save lives. But I wouldn’t be sharing this story with you if it weren’t for Shen-Ling, my sisters, and my own mother, who through quiet example showed me what it means to lead a life of selflessly sharing love.
Or people like Bronnie Ware, whose heartfelt book on the regrets of the dying gave me life at my weakest moment. Or Master Hsing Yun, whose wisdom shook me from my career delusions and forced me to truly confront my own ego. Without these unquantifiable, nonoptimizable connections to other people, I would never have learned what it truly means to be human. Without them, I would never have reordered my priorities and reoriented my own life. I soon began working less and spending more time with the people in my life. I stopped trying to quantify the impact of each action—who I took meetings with, who I wrote back to, who I spent time with—and instead aimed to treat all those around me equally. This shift in the way I treated others wasn’t just beneficial to them; it filled me with a sense of wholeness, satisfaction, and calm that the hollow accomplishments of my career never could.
The reality is that it will not be long until AI algorithms can perform many of the diagnostic functions of medical professionals. Those algorithms will pinpoint illness and prescribe treatments more effectively than any single human can. In some cases, doctors will use these equations as a tool. In some cases, the algorithms may replace the doctor entirely.
But the truth is, there exists no algorithm that could replace the role of my family in my healing process. What they shared with me is far simpler—and yet so much more profound—than anything AI will ever produce.
For all of AI’s astounding capabilities, the one thing that only humans can provide turns out to also be exactly what is most needed in our lives: love. It’s that moment when we see our newborn babies, the feeling of love at first sight, the warm feeling from friends who listen to us empathetically, or the feeling of self-actualization when we help someone in need. We are far from understanding the human heart, let alone replicating it. But we do know that humans are uniquely able to love and be loved, that humans want to love and be loved, and that loving and being loved are what makes our lives worthwhile.
This is the synthesis on which I believe we must build our shared future: on AI’s ability to think but coupled with human beings’ ability to love. If we can create this synergy, it will let us harness the undeniable power of artificial intelligence to generate prosperity while also embracing our essential humanity.
This isn’t something that will come naturally. Building this future for ourselves—as people, countries, and a global community—will require that we reimagine and reorganize our socie
ties from the ground up. It will take social unity, creative policies, and human empathy, but if achieved, it could turn a moment of outright crisis into an unparalleled opportunity.
Never has the potential for human flourishing been higher—or the stakes of failure greater.
8
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A Blueprint for Human Coexistence with AI
While I was undergoing chemotherapy for my cancer in Taiwan, an old friend of mine who is a serial entrepreneur came to me with a problem at his latest startup. He had already founded and sold off several successful consumer technology companies, but as he grew older he wanted to do something more meaningful, that is, he wanted to build a product that would serve the people that technology startups had often ignored. Both my friend and I were entering the age at which our parents needed more help going about their daily lives, and he decided to design a product that would make life easier for the elderly.
What he came up with was a large touchscreen mounted on a stand that could be placed next to an elderly person’s bed. On the screen were a few simple and practical apps connected to services that elderly people could use: ordering food delivery, playing their favorite soap operas on the TV, calling their doctor, and more. Older people often struggle to navigate the complexities of the internet or to manipulate the small buttons of a smartphone, so my friend made everything as simple as possible. All the apps required just a couple of clicks, and he even included a button that let the elderly users directly call up a customer-service agent to guide them through using their device.
It sounded like a wonderful product, one that would have a real market right now. Sadly, there are many adult children in China and elsewhere who are too busy with work to devote time to taking care of their aging parents. They may experience a sense of guilt about the importance of filial piety, but when it comes down to it, they just don’t feel they can find the time to care for their parents in an adequate way. The touchscreen would make for a nice substitute.
But after deploying a trial version of his product, my friend discovered he had a problem. Of all the functions available on the device, the one that received by far the most use wasn’t the food delivery, TV controls, or doctor’s consultation. It was the customer-service button. The company’s customer-service representatives found themselves overwhelmed by a flood of incoming calls from the elderly. What was going on here? My friend had made the device as simple as possible to use—were his users still unable to navigate the one-click process onscreen?
Not at all. After consulting with the customer-service representatives, he found that people weren’t calling in because they couldn’t navigate the device. They were calling simply because they were lonely and wanted someone to talk to. Many of the elderly users had children who worked to ensure that all of their material needs were met: meals were delivered, doctors’ appointments were arranged, and prescriptions were picked up. But once those material needs were taken care of, what these people wanted more than anything was true human contact, another person to trade stories with and relate to.
My friend relayed this “problem” to me just as I was waking up to my own realizations about the centrality of love to the human experience. If he had come to me just a few years earlier, I likely would have recommended some technical fix, maybe something like an AI chat bot that could simulate a basic conversation well enough to fool the human on the other end. But as I recovered from my illness and awakened to the looming AI crises of jobs and meaning, I began to see things differently.
In that touchscreen device and that unmet desire for human contact, I saw the first sketches of a blueprint for coexistence between people and artificial intelligence. Yes, intelligent machines will increasingly be able to do our jobs and meet our material needs, disrupting industries and displacing workers in the process. But there remains one thing that only human beings are able to create and share with one another: love.
With all of the advances in machine learning, the truth remains that we are still nowhere near creating AI machines that feel any emotions at all. Can you imagine the elation that comes from beating a world champion at the game you’ve devoted your whole life to mastering? AlphaGo did just that, but it took no pleasure in its success, felt no happiness from winning, and had no desire to hug a loved one after its victory. Despite what science-fiction films like Her—in which a man and his artificially intelligent computer operating system fall in love—portray, AI has no ability or desire to love or be loved. The actress Scarlett Johansson may have been able to convince you otherwise in that film, but only because she is a human being who drew on her experience of love to create and communicate those feelings to you.
Imagine a situation in which you informed a smart machine that you were going to pull its plug, and then changed your mind and gave it a reprieve. The machine would not change its outlook on life or vow to spend more time with its fellow machines. It would not grow emotionally or discover the value in loving and serving others.
It is in this uniquely human potential for growth, compassion, and love where I see hope. I firmly believe we must forge a new synergy between artificial intelligence and the human heart, and look for ways to use the forthcoming material abundance generated by artificial intelligence to foster love and compassion in our societies.
If we can do these things, I believe there is a path toward a future of both economic prosperity and spiritual flourishing. Navigating that path will be tricky, but if we are able to unite behind this common goal, I believe humans will not just survive in the age of AI. We will thrive like never before.
A TRIAL BY FIRE AND THE NEW SOCIAL CONTRACT
The challenges before us remain immense. As I outlined in chapter 6, within fifteen years I predict that we will technically be able to automate 40 to 50 percent of all jobs in the United States. That does not mean all of those jobs will disappear overnight, but if the markets are left to their own devices, we will begin to see massive pressure on working people. China and other developing countries may differ slightly in the timing of those impacts, lagging or leading in job losses depending on the structures of their economies. But the overarching trend remains the same: rising unemployment and widening inequality.
Techno-optimists will point to history, citing the Industrial Revolution and the nineteenth-century textile industry as “proof” that things always work out for the best. But as we’ve seen, this argument stands on increasingly shaky ground. The coming scale, pace, and skill-bias of the AI revolution mean that we face a new and historically unique challenge. Even if the most dire predictions of unemployment do not materialize, AI will take the growing wealth inequality of the internet age and accelerate it tremendously.
We are already witnessing the way that stagnant wages and growing inequality can lead to political instability and even violence. As AI rolls out across our economies and societies, we risk aggravating and quickening these trends. Labor markets have a way of balancing themselves out in the long run, but getting to that promised long run requires we first pass through a trial by fire of job losses and growing inequality that threaten to derail the process.
Meeting these challenges means we cannot afford to passively react. We must proactively seize the opportunity that the material wealth of AI will grant us and use it to reconstruct our economies and rewrite our social contracts. The epiphanies that emerged from my experience with cancer were deeply personal, but I believe they also gave me a new clarity and vision for how we can approach these problems together.
Building societies that thrive in the age of AI will require substantial changes to our economy but also a shift in culture and values. Centuries of living within the industrial economy have conditioned many of us to believe that our primary role in society (and even our identity) is found in productive, wage-earning work. Take that away and you have broken one of the strongest bonds between a person and his or her community. As we transition from the industrial age to the AI age, we will need to move away from a mindset t
hat equates work with life or treats humans as variables in a grand productivity optimization algorithm. Instead, we must move toward a new culture that values human love, service, and compassion more than ever before.
No economic or social policy can “brute force” a change in our hearts. But in choosing different policies, we can reward different behaviors and start to nudge our culture in different directions. We can choose a purely technocratic approach—one that sees each of us as a set of financial and material needs to be satisfied—and simply transfer enough cash to all people so that they don’t starve or go homeless. In fact, this notion of universal basic income seems to be becoming more and more popular these days.
But in making that choice I believe we would both devalue our own humanity and miss out on an unparalleled opportunity. Instead, I want to lay out proposals for how we can use the economic bounty created by AI to double-down on what makes us human. Doing this will require rewriting our fundamental social contracts and restructuring economic incentives to reward socially productive activities in the same way that the industrial economy rewarded economically productive activities.
This won’t be easy. It will need a multifaceted, all-hands-on-deck approach to economic and social transformation. That approach will rely on input from all corners of society and must be based on constant exploration and bold experimentation. Even with our best efforts, there remains no guarantee of a smooth transition. But both the cost of failure and the potential rewards of success are too great not to try.