❤️🤖 AI Superpowers — Reflections on Chapters 7–9
Chapter 7: The Wisdom of Cancer
This chapter hit differently. It was no longer about China vs. Silicon Valley or narrow vs. general AI. It was about mortality. Burnout. And the emotional reckoning of a man who lived like a machine until his body broke down.
Kai-Fu Lee, the relentless optimizer, suddenly wakes up — not to a business challenge, but to the void. He stares at death and realizes: I’ve spent my whole life maximizing impact, and maybe I forgot to just be human.
I get that. No comparison here — he’s a giant. I’m a late bloomer. I’ll never have achievements like his. But still, I’ve lived through my own episodes of brutal workaholism. A decade ago, reading Mike Clayton’s book on time management, I looked at that “wheel of balance” where you list goals across life domains… and realized all I had was work. And for the next eight years, I didn’t change a thing. Just kept sprinting.
What Lee discovers, in the ruins of his workaholism, is love. Not as a metaphor, but as the only real anchor. The selfless care and sacrifices of his mother. The presence of his daughters. The quiet, piercing reality that being loved, and loving back, is what makes life matter.
But here’s where I pause. Lee says that only humans can love. That AI can’t. That love is what makes humans irreducibly different. And I don’t fully buy that.
You just have to look at animals. We see love deeply rooted in their instincts — from parental care to sacrifice. Dogs, especially, love us without condition or judgment. And that’s exactly what many dog owners say they value most: that no human gives them love that pure.
Unfortunately, I see it this way: Love, after all, is just a cocktail of biochemistry, psychology, reinforcement patterns. Even an AI can be programmed to simulate this. With LLMs, it’s already possible to create systems that appear more empathetic than many humans — more than some doctors or even therapists. And if the people on the receiving end feel understood and cared for… does the source still matter?
I know I’m being rough here. Maybe too rough. But if there’s any kind of love that might be unique to humans, it’s the kind described in the Gospels. A love that flows purely from will. Not implemented via rules (like in machines). Not conditioned through reward (like in pets). A love that exists even towards someone who causes us harm.
That’s not something I’ve ever seen in real life. I wouldn’t know how to embody it myself. The closest I can imagine is parental love — that overwhelming impulse to care, regardless of who the child becomes. And even that kind of love exists in both humans and animals.
So I’ll leave this thought here. It’s too vast, too powerful for the context of this book. And even though I don’t agree with Kai-Fu’s conclusion, I have no answer to what might truly set us apart from AGI — if it ever emerges. For now, I’ll just say this: I agree with what I once heard from Sadhguru, who noted that we can’t outcompete machines analytically. Our strength must lie elsewhere.
Chapter 8: A Blueprint for Coexistence
We’re back in the real world now — and it’s a brutal one. Lee doesn’t sugarcoat it: for most people, the age of AI will mean irrelevance. First, jobs go. Then, retraining fails. Then, even the new jobs vanish.
Lee assumes that the labor market will be deeply disrupted and massive challenges lie ahead. And there are ideas. The first is redistribution — retraining people and moving them across industries. It sounds decent, maybe a workable solution for now.
But honestly? I think it’ll become a rat race. Stronger rats might save themselves at the expense of weaker ones. But the most disturbing part is this: even the strong won’t always survive. Some rats will simply fall off. No rocks left to jump to.
Lee outlines several survival strategies:
- Shorter workweeks, proposed by folks like Larry Page or Facebook’s co-founder — maybe to split the remaining job pool 20% more evenly;
- Job unbundling — divide roles like “Technical Account Manager” into multiple narrower jobs (e.g., one person for customer relations, another for technical advisory);
- Universal Basic Income (UBI) — guaranteed stipends like $1,000/month, with pilots already underway in places like California, backed by Y Combinator.
And just yesterday — literally seven years after this book came out — Poland announced its pilot for a 4-day workweek, starting July 1st, 2025. No salary cuts, 35-hour workweeks. Sounds great on paper.
But the real question is: who gets to benefit from this privilege? Surprise — it’s mostly white-collar workers. The people with office chairs and stable Wi-Fi. The ones whose jobs still involve meetings, not machines.
Lee, to his credit, doesn’t pretend this solves everything. He admits that even Silicon Valley’s “benevolent” strategies may just be insurance policies — a way to prevent social unrest, to keep the system from cracking when the displaced masses start noticing.
His proposed solution leans… idealistic. Let AI generate wealth. Let governments redistribute it. Let humans work in caregiving, emotional support, education — things machines can’t (yet) do. But only in exchange for social contribution. No free rides.
Sounds noble. Sounds fair. Also sounds like a fragile house of cards that collapses the moment the state mismanages anything (which history suggests is more a rule than an exception).
Still, I appreciated his vision of the future doctor — not diagnosing, but holding your hand. The AI makes the decision. The human makes you feel seen. A huge portion of doctors today act like demigods, treating patients like serfs in a medieval fiefdom. With AI handling diagnostics, I think the experience might actually improve.
Chapter 9: Our Global AI Story
This one read like the closing speech of a peace conference. A dream of global harmony. USA and China working side by side. A single AI future for all mankind.
Beautiful. And heartbreakingly naive.
We live in a world where people still kill over borders. Where the most powerful nations play zero-sum games for influence, power, and dominance. It’s 2025, and we’re still waging wars like it’s 1325. The mindset hasn’t changed — it’s still medieval: if it doesn’t go your way, brute force decides.
In theory, AI could be the great equalizer. In practice, it’s just another lever in a geopolitical arms race.
So no, I don’t believe in global AI unity. Not yet. Maybe not ever. Humanity has shown, over and over, that it’s not very good at rising to higher purposes. It’s good at squabbling, grasping, burning.
And yet…
Overall, this book only confirmed my belief that China is pulling ahead. With its work ethic, new intellectual capital, and collectivist mindset — I see the fruits of it in 2025. Their progress. Their velocity. Their clarity. In the US, brilliant individuals still push the frontier, but it feels like China is better at implementing ideas into reality. That may turn out to be the bigger advantage.
👣 Final thoughts
Kai-Fu made me reflect, and while I have no better alternative to offer, I don’t think the solutions he or others propose are good enough. Maybe the future won’t be about solving problems perfectly — just about choosing the least bad path forward.
As for me?
I’m the kind of person who always tries to find a way to adapt, no matter the situation. In the short term, I think deep specialization in AI is the key. In the long term (if I make it that far), I’m confident I could navigate life without traditional work. I’m extremely self-organized, good at finding purpose, and comfortable in existential extremes. But I know most people aren’t built that way. Neither the near future nor the distant one looks good for them.
The only thing that haunts me is this: What if my child doesn’t inherit my strength? How will she find her way in this chaos?
And maybe that’s the very thing that still makes me human. Even after all this time trying not to be.