AI Superpowers

by Kai-Fu Lee

  “Good morning,” the man behind the wheel said to me. “Can I offer you a ride?”

  Not wanting to keep Master Hsing Yun waiting, I accepted and climbed into the cart, telling the driver where I was headed. He was dressed in jeans and a simple long-sleeved shirt with an orange vest over it. He looked to be in his fifties like me, with streaks of grey in his hair. We rode in silence for a few minutes, absorbing the stillness of the landscape and the gentle breeze of cool morning air. As we rounded the hillside, I filled the silence with a bit of small talk.

  “Do you do this for a living?” I asked.

  “No,” he replied. “I just volunteer here when I can find time outside my job.”

  I noticed that stitched across the left breast of his orange vest was the word “Volunteer” in Chinese characters.

  “Well, what do you do for work?” I asked.

  “I own an electronics manufacturing company and work as the CEO. But lately I’ve been spending less time working and more time volunteering. It’s really special to see Master Hsing Yun sharing wisdom with people here. It brings a sense of serenity to help out with that in any way I can.”

  Those words, and the calm demeanor with which he spoke them, struck me. Electronics manufacturing can be a brutally competitive industry, one with razor-thin margins and unceasing pressure to innovate, upgrade, and optimize operations. Success often comes at the expense of health, with long hours at the factory bleeding into long nights drinking, smoking, and entertaining clients.

  But the man driving the cart seemed healthy in body and totally at peace as he steered the golf cart up the winding path. He told me about how his weekends volunteering here at Fo Guang Shan had become a way to cleanse the burden and stress of his work week. He wasn’t yet ready to retire, but the act of serving those who visited Fo Guang Shan let him tap into something both simpler and more profound than the machinations of his company.

  When we reached Master Hsing Yun’s quarters, I thanked the driver, and he replied with a nod of his head and a smile. During the breakfast that followed, the wisdom shared by Master Hsing Yun would have a profound impact on how I thought about my work and my life. But the conversation with the volunteer driving the golf cart also stayed with me.

  At first, I thought his devotion to humbly serving those around him was something unique to the monastery, a function of the power of religious faith to unite and inspire us. But when I returned to Taipei for my medical treatment, I began to notice people wearing those orange volunteer vests all around the city: in the library, at busy traffic intersections, in county offices, and at national parks. They held up stop signs for children crossing the street, told park visitors about the indigenous flora of Taiwan, and guided people through the process of applying for health insurance. Many of the volunteers were elderly people or recently retired. Their pension plans took care of basic necessities, and so they devoted their time to helping others and maintaining solid bonds with their community.

  As I underwent chemotherapy and began to contemplate the coming crises of the AI age, I often thought of the volunteers. While many individuals these days pontificate about using UBI as an all-purpose social sedative, I saw a certain wisdom in the humble activities of these volunteers and the broader communal culture they were creating. The city could, of course, go on functioning without this army of orange-vested, grey-haired volunteers . . . but it would feel a little less kind and a little less human. In that subtle transformation, I began to see a way forward.

  THE SOCIAL INVESTMENT STIPEND: CARE, SERVICE, AND EDUCATION

  Just as those volunteers devoted their time and energy toward making their communities a little bit more loving, I believe it is incumbent on us to use the economic abundance of the AI age to foster these same values and encourage this same kind of activity. To do this, I propose we explore the creation not of a UBI but of what I call a social investment stipend. The stipend would be a decent government salary given to those who invest their time and energy in those activities that promote a kind, compassionate, and creative society. These would include three broad categories: care work, community service, and education.

  These would form the pillars of a new social contract, one that valued and rewarded socially beneficial activities in the same way we currently reward economically productive activities. The stipend would not substitute for a social safety net—the traditional welfare, healthcare, or unemployment benefits to meet basic needs—but would offer a respectable income to those who choose to invest energy in these socially productive activities. Today, social status is still largely tied to income and career advancement. Endowing these professions with respect will require paying them a respectable salary and offering the opportunity for advancement like a normal career. If executed well, the social investment stipend would nudge our culture in a more compassionate direction. It would put the economic bounty of AI to work in building a better society, rather than just numbing the pain of AI-induced job losses.

  Each of the three recognized categories—care, service, and education—would encompass a wide range of activities, with different levels of compensation for full- and part-time participation. Care work could include parenting of young children, attending to an aging parent, assisting a friend or family member dealing with illness, or helping someone with mental or physical disabilities live life to the fullest. This category would create a veritable army of people—loved ones, friends, or even strangers—who could assist those in need, offering them what my entrepreneur friend’s touchscreen device for the elderly never could: human warmth.

  Service work would be similarly broadly defined, encompassing much of the current work of nonprofit groups as well as the kinds of volunteers I saw in Taiwan. Tasks could include performing environmental remediation, leading afterschool programs, guiding tours at national parks, or collecting oral histories from elders in our communities. Participants in these programs would register with an established group and commit to a certain number of hours of service work to meet the requirements of the stipend.

  Finally, education could range from professional training for the jobs of the AI age to taking classes that could transform a hobby into a career. Some recipients of the stipend will use that financial freedom to pursue a degree in machine learning and use it to find a high-paying job. Others will use that same freedom to take acting classes or study digital marketing.

  Bear in mind that requiring participation in one of these activities is not something designed to dictate the daily activities of each person receiving the stipend. That is, the beauty of human beings lies in our diversity, the way we each bring different backgrounds, skills, interests, and eccentricities. I don’t seek to smother that diversity with a command-and-control system of redistribution that rewards only a narrow range of socially approved activities.

  But by requiring some social contribution in order to receive the stipend, we would foster a far different ideology than the laissez-faire individualism of a UBI. Providing a stipend in exchange for participation in prosocial activities reinforces a clear message: It took efforts from people all across society to help us reach this point of economic abundance. We are now collectively using that abundance to recommit ourselves to one another, reinforcing the bonds of compassion and love that make us human.

  Looking across all the activities, I believe there will be a wide enough range of choices to offer something suitable to all workers who have been displaced by AI. The more people-oriented may opt for care work, the more ambitious can enroll in job-training programs, and those inspired by a social cause may take up service or advocacy jobs.

  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.

  OPEN QUESTIONS AND SERIOUS COMPLICATIONS

  Implementing a social investment stipend will o
f course raise new questions and frictions: How much should the stipend be? Should we reward people differently based on their performance in these activities? How do we know if someone is dutifully performing their “care” work? And what kinds of activities should count as “service” work? These are admittedly difficult questions, ones for which there are no clear-cut answers. Administering a social investment stipend in countries with hundreds of millions of people will involve lots of paperwork and legwork by governments and the organizations that create these new roles.

  But these challenges are far from insurmountable. Governments in developed societies already attend to a dizzying array of bureaucratic tasks just to maintain public services, education systems, and social safety nets. Our governments already do the work of inspecting buildings, accrediting schools, offering unemployment benefits, monitoring sanitary conditions at hundreds of thousands of restaurants, and providing health insurance to tens of millions of people. Operating a social investment stipend would add to this workload, but I believe it would be more than manageable. Given the huge human upside to providing such a stipend, I believe the added organizational challenges will be well worth the rewards to our communities.

  But what about affordability? Offering a living salary to people performing all of the above tasks would require massive amounts of revenue, totals that today appear unworkable in many heavily indebted countries. AI will certainly increase productivity across society, but can it really generate the huge sums necessary to finance such dramatic expansion in government expenditures?

  This too remains an open question, one that will only be settled once the AI technologies themselves proliferate across our economies. If AI meets or exceeds predictions for productivity gains and wealth creation, I believe we could fund these types of programs through super taxes on super profits. Yes, it would somewhat cut into economic incentives to advance AI, but given the dizzying profits that will accrue to the winners in the AI age, I don’t see this as a substantial impediment to innovation.

  But it will take years to get to that place of astronomical profits, years during which working people will be hurting. To smooth the transition, I propose a slow ratcheting up of assistance. While leaping straight into the full social investment stipend described above likely won’t work, I do think we will be able to implement incremental policies along the way. These piecemeal policies could both counteract job displacement as it happens and move us toward the new social contract.

  We could start by greatly increasing government support for new parents so that they have the choice to remain at home or send their child to full-time daycare. For parents who choose to home-school their kids, the government could offer subsidies equivalent to a teacher’s pay for those who attain certain certifications. In the public school systems, the number of teachers could also be greatly expanded—potentially by a factor as high as ten—with each teacher tasked with a smaller number of students that they can teach in concert with AI education programs. Government subsidies and stipends could also go to workers undergoing job retraining and people caring for aging parents. These simple programs would allow us to put in place the first building blocks of a stipend, beginning the work of shifting the culture and laying the groundwork for further expansion.

  As AI continues to generate both economic value and worker displacement, we could slowly expand the purview of these subsidies to activities beyond care work or job training. And once the full impact of AI—very good for productivity, very bad for employment—becomes clear, we should be able to muster the resources and public will to implement programs akin to the social investment stipend.

  When we do, I hope that this will not just alleviate the economic, social, and psychological suffering of the AI age. Rather, I hope that it will further empower us to live in a way that honors our humanity and empowers us to do what no machine can: share our love with those around us.

  LOOKING FORWARD AND LOOKING AROUND

  The ideas laid out in this chapter are an early attempt to grapple with the massive disruptions on the horizon of our AI future. We looked at technical fixes that seek to smooth the transition to an AI economy: retraining workers, reducing work hours, and redistributing income through a UBI. While all of these technical fixes have a role to play, I believe something more is needed. I envision the private sector creatively fostering human-machine symbiosis, a new wave of impact investing funding human-centric service jobs, and the government filling the gaps with a social investment stipend that rewards care, service, and education. Taken together, these would constitute a realignment of our economy and a rewriting of our social contract to reward socially productive activities.

  These are not an exhaustive list or authoritative judgment on the ways in which we can adapt to widespread automation. But I do hope they provide at least a framework and a set of values to guide us in that process. Much of that framework comes from my understanding of artificial intelligence and the global technology industry.

  The values guiding these recommendations, however, are rooted in something far more intimate: the experience of my cancer diagnosis and the personal transformation inspired by people like my wife, Master Hsing Yun, and so many others who selflessly shared their love and wisdom with me.

  Had I never undergone that terrifying but ultimately enlightening experience, I may never have woken up to the centrality of love in the human experience. Instead of seeking ways to foster a more loving and compassionate world, I would likely view the looming crises through the same lens as those who are deep into AI today—as a simple resource-allocation problem to be dealt with in the most efficient way possible, likely through a UBI. It is only after going through my own personal trial by fire that I now see the hollowness of that approach.

  My experience with cancer also taught me to appreciate the wisdom that hides in the humble actions of people everywhere. After so many years as an “Ironman” of professional achievement, I needed to be knocked off my pedestal and face my own mortality before I appreciated what many so-called less successful people brought to the table.

  I believe we will soon witness the same process on an international scale. The AI superpowers of the United States and China may be the countries with the expertise to build these technologies, but the paths to true human flourishing in the AI age will emerge from people in all walks of life and from all corners of the world.

  As we look forward into the future, we must also take the time to look around.

  9

  ★

  Our Global AI Story

  On June 12, 2005, Steve Jobs stepped up to a microphone in Stanford Stadium and delivered one of the most memorable commencement speeches ever given. In the talk, he retraced his zig-zagging career, from college dropout to cofounder of Apple, from his unceremonious ouster at that company to his founding of Pixar, and finally his triumphant return to Apple a decade later. Speaking to a crowd of ambitious Stanford students, many of whom were eagerly plotting their own ascent to the peaks of Silicon Valley, Jobs cautioned against trying to chart one’s life and career in advance.

  “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.”

  Jobs’s wisdom has resonated with me since I first heard it, but never more so than today. In writing this book, I’ve had the chance to connect the dots on four decades of work, growth, and evolution. That journey has spanned companies and cultures, from AI researcher and business executive to venture capitalist, author, and cancer survivor. It has touched on issues both global and deeply personal: the rise of artificial intelligence, the intertwined fates of the places that I’ve called home, and my own evolution from a workaholic to a more loving father, husband, and human being.

  All of these experiences have come together to shape my view of our global AI future, to connect the dots looking backward and to use those constellations as guidance
going forward. My background in technology and business expertise has crystallized how these technologies are developing in both China and the United States. My sudden confrontation with cancer woke me up to why we must use these technologies to foster a more loving society. Finally, my experience moving and transitioning between two different cultures has impressed on me the value of shared progress and the need for mutual understanding across national borders.

  AN AI FUTURE WITHOUT AN AI RACE

  In writing about global development of artificial intelligence, it’s easy to revert to military metaphors and a zero-sum mentality. Many compare the “AI race” of today to the space race of the 1960s or, even worse, to the Cold War arms race that created ever more powerful weapons of mass destruction. Even the title of this book employs the word “superpowers,” a phrase that many associate with geopolitical rivalry. I use this phrase, however, specifically to reflect the technological balance of AI capabilities, not to suggest an all-out struggle for military supremacy. But these distinctions are easily blurred by those more interested in political posturing than in human flourishing.

  If we are not careful, this single-minded rhetoric around an “AI race” will undermine us in planning and shaping our shared AI future. A race has only one winner: China’s gain is America’s loss, and vice-versa. There is no notion of shared progress or mutual prosperity—just a desire to stay ahead of the other country, regardless of the costs. This mentality has led many commentators in the United States to use China’s AI progress as a rhetorical whip with which to spur American leaders to action. They argue that America is at risk of losing its edge in the technology that will fuel the military competition of the twenty-first century.