Unlike rote, low-level clerical work, cognitive labor of this sort is more likely to be augmented by decision-support information afforded by AI than displaced by intelligent machines.

By contrast, “inexpert” tasks, such as those performed by retirement home orderlies, child-care providers, security guards, janitors or food service workers, will be poorly remunerated even as they remain socially valuable. Since these jobs cannot be automated or enhanced by further knowledge, those who labor in them are a “bottleneck” to improved productivity that would lead to higher wages. Since there will be a vast pool of people without skills who can take those jobs, the value of their labor will be driven down even further.

This is problematic from the perspective of economic disparity because four out of every five jobs created in the U.S. are in this service sector.

So, when looking to the future of the labor market in an AI economy, we can’t talk about “job loss vs. gains” in any general sense. The key issue is not the quantity of jobs, but the value of labor, which really means the value of human expertise and the extent to which AI can enhance it, or not.

I discussed this and other issues with Autor at a recent gathering at the Vatican’s Pontifical Academy in Rome, convened to help address Pope Leo XIV’s concern over the fate of labor in the age of AI. We spoke amid the splendor of the Vatican gardens behind St. Peter’s Basilica.

The populist movements that have risen to power across the West today, particularly in the U.S., did so largely on the coattails of the backlash against globalization. Over the course of the U.S.-led free-trade policies during the post-Cold War decades, the rise of China as a cheap-labor manufacturing power with export access to the markets of advanced economies hollowed out the industrial base across large swaths of America and Europe — and the jobs it provided.

Some worry the AI shock will be even more devastating. Autor sees the similarity and the distinctions. What makes them the same is “it’s a big change that can happen quickly,” he says. But there are three ways in which they are different.

First, “the China trade shock was very localized. It was in manufacturing-intensive communities that made labor-intensive products such as furniture, textiles, clothing, plastic dolls and assembly of low-end hardware.”

AI’s effects will be much more geographically diffuse. “We’ve already lost millions of clerical worker jobs, but no one talks about ‘clerical shock.’ There is no clerical capital of America to see it disappear.”

Second, “the China trade shock didn’t just eliminate certain types of jobs. It eliminated entire industries all at once.” AI will shift the nature of jobs and tasks and change the way people work, but it “will not put industries out of business. … It will open new things and will close others, but it will not be an existential elimination, a great extinction.”

Third, “unless you were a very big multinational, what was experienced by U.S. firms during globalization was basically a shock to competition. All of a sudden, prices fell to a lower level than you could afford to produce.”

AI will be more of a productivity change that will be positive for many businesses. “That doesn’t mean it’s good for workers necessarily, because a lot of workers could be displaced. But business won’t be like, ‘Oh God, the AI shock. We hate this.’ They’ll be, like, ‘Oh great. We can do our stuff with fewer inputs.” In short, tech-driven productivity is the route to great profitability.

As we have often discussed in Noema, it is precisely this dynamic where productivity growth and wealth creation are being divorced from jobs and income that is the central social challenge. Increasingly, the gains will flow to capital — those who own the robots — and decreasingly to labor. The gap will inexorably grow, even with those who can earn higher wages and salaries through work augmented by AI.

Is the idea of “universal basic capital” (UBC), in which everyone has an ownership share in the AI economy through investment of their savings, a promising response?

Autor believes that what UBC offers is a “hedge” against the displacement or demotion of labor. Most of us are “unhedged,” he says, because “human capital is all we have and we are out of luck if that becomes devalued. So at least we would have a balanced portfolio.”

If the government seeds a UBC account, such as “baby bonds,” at the outset, Autor notes, it will grow in value over time through compounded investment returns. The problem with the alternative idea of “universal basic income” is that you are “creating a continual system of transfers where you are basically saying ‘Hey, you rich people over there, you pay for the leisure of everybody else over here.’ And that is not politically viable. ‘How do they get the right to our stuff?’”

Autor compares the idea of “universal basic income” (UBI) to the “resource curse” of unstable countries with vast oil and mineral resources, where it appears that “money is just coming out of a hole in the ground.”

The related reason that UBC is important for Autor is that “the people who have a voice in democracies are those who are seen as economic contributors. If the ownership of capital is more diffuse, then everyone is a contributor,” and everyone has a greater voice, which they will use since they have a stake in the system.

The closer we get to widespread integration of AI into the broader economy, the clearer the patterns Autor describes will become. On that basis, responsible policymakers can formulate remedial responses that fit the new economic times we have entered, rather than relying on outmoded policies geared to conditions that no longer exist.

The post How The ‘AI Job Shock’ Will Differ From The ‘China Trade Shock’ appeared first on NOEMA.

In this circumstance, there is not so much a vacuum as a cloud of uncertainty. Everything is up in the air. Expectations, assumptions and intentions are scrambled. Fearing lost advantage in the face of these unknowns, worst-case scenarios drive the build-out of capabilities. Acting in the breach is a wild guess, the possible outcomes of which cannot be assuredly weighed.

That is the situation we are in today as we witness the nascent revival of Great Power spheres of influence being tested out in Venezuela, Ukraine and Taiwan.

Among the more shocking turns of the Trump administration is the unabashed throwback to the Monroe Doctrine, enforced by gunboat diplomacy in Latin America, replete with the remarkable claim that the national patrimony of Venezuela’s oil resources is rightly the province of U.S. oil companies.

As Trump himself put it over the weekend after Maduro’s audacious capture, “We built Venezuela’s oil industry with American talent, drive and skill, and the socialist regime stole it from us …This constituted one of the largest thefts of American property in the history of our country.”

It remains to be seen how that rationale for intervention squares with U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s claim that, under the restored tutelage of U.S. companies, the oil industry will be “run for the benefit of the people.”

Whether the plan now is to “run the country,” as Trump put it, or Rubio’s scheme of coercing the remnants of the regime to bend to U.S. will, both run entirely counter to the MAGA base’s aversion to global meddling, regime change and “forever wars.” What appeals to that constituency is the special military operation against drug cartels, though the robust demand to get high on the home front, which so lucratively drives supply, is rarely mentioned.

To be sure, Maduro was a bad seed. No love was lost for the repressive caudillo in Caracas among most of the other countries in the region. But few, especially Mexico, will forswear the nationalist identity that legitimizes their rule by welcoming the return of imperial imposition from the North.

After the Japanese prime minister said in November that an attack on Taiwan would be a national security threat to her nation and an end-of-year $11 billion U.S. arms sale to fortify Taiwan as a defensible “porcupine,” China conducted the closest and most aggressive war games ever in the seas surrounding the island democracy. It was meant to demonstrate the locked-and-loaded capabilities for achieving its oft-pronounced intent of bringing Taiwan back into the national fold by force if necessary.

Despite urgent and ongoing peace talks over Ukraine, it is hard to imagine that Russian President Vladimir Putin will ever negotiate away his vision of a reunified “spiritual Rus.” His response to U.S. and European proposals so far has been to feign interest while doubling down with vicious military attacks on civilians and energy infrastructure in the dead of winter.

Absent European resolve and ready military capacity as U.S. commitment wanes, why would Putin do anything other than dig in and wait things out while doing as much damage as possible until he gets his way?

When The Dominoes Fall

The outcome of these struggles will determine the nature of the next world order as it reverts to Great Power spheres of influence.

As it stands now, the norm of inviolable national sovereignty sanctified by the post-World War II order hangs by a tenuous thread that is further frayed daily by the unilateral transgressions of the world’s major players. When one moves, as Russia already has with the invasion of Ukraine and the U.S. has now with its ousting of Maduro, the falling dominoes of the old order are set in motion elsewhere. Is Taiwan the next in line?

If each gets its own way with impunity, how will the others respond?

Russia and China will surely see America’s intervention in Venezuela as permission, and even justification, to do as they similarly wish in their own domains. While Mexico’s dependence on U.S. markets will constrain its margins of maneuver, other large powers in Latin America, such as Brazil, will inevitably seek to strengthen ties with China as a buffer against the return of the old imperialism, making the continent another proxy battleground as during the Cold War.

When push comes to shove, will the U.S. really risk going to war with a rejuvenated, high-tech and nuclear-armed Middle Kingdom over Taiwan, or simply relent in the name of a pragmatic peace?

Will the U.S. finally tire of Europe’s carping dependence on American resources to defend Ukraine and just give in to Putin’s single-minded persistence as a fait accompli?

When all that is said and done, the logic of hemispheric hegemony will deem the annexation of Greenland and the Panama Canal as necessary on national security grounds because of Russia’s reach into the Arctic and China’s global assertiveness.

This unraveling string of eventualities over the coming years will cement the contours of what comes next.

Of course, successful resistance by the outgunned is always a possibility. In Ukraine, a prolonged armistice, as in a divided Korea, cannot be ruled out. But the “correlation of forces,” as the Soviets used to say, seems aligned against the fortunes of lesser powers who, in the end, may have little choice but to accommodate the might of the most powerful.

The post A Test Of Great Power Spheres Of Influence appeared first on NOEMA.

Like others who think differently and come from outside the insider establishment, he rebelled against the custodians of proper and hallowed ways.

This was most evident in his early days through the deconstruction of his own staid Dutch colonial-style home in Santa Monica, whose façade he disrupted with jutting angles of glass, corrugated metal, plywood and chain-link fence. It was not pretty. But, as fellow architect Thom Mayne has commented, the use of inexpensive everyday materials in a city where properties easily go for $20 million was a critical statement about the house as a status symbol. Mayne thought the house was “very aggressive politically … using chain link is saying fuck you to marble.”

Living in Los Angeles, I crossed paths with Gehry several times over the years, including in some formal conversations for New Perspectives Quarterly, the journal I edited. We met for lunch once in the late 1990s to discuss the formidable roadblocks to getting the Disney Hall built.

Gehry drew one of his famous scribbled sketches on a restaurant napkin and told me his original idea was to sheath the building in stone, not metal, which created construction impediments. He railed against the aesthetic judgment of some members of the board overseeing the design, who were threatening to block funding. He seemed so convinced the project would never see the light of day that I threw away what would now be an immensely valuable sketch!

I last saw the famed architect for a video interview at his studio in L.A. in 2018 to discuss how the backlash against globalization was affecting cities, which Gehry happily saw as chaotic “collisions of thought like democracy.”

The most intellectually memorable conversation, though, was in 2014, when we drilled down on his creative vision and where it comes from:

Nathan Gardels: You once commented on your fascination with a dancing Shiva sculpture that belonged to the Norton Simon Museum. And you seem to have tried to capture this “frozen motion,” as you put it, in your buildings in Bilbao and at the Disney Hall in Los Angeles.

Interestingly, your attempts to capture this “frozen motion” in architecture correspond to the scientific pursuits of Ilya Prigogine, the chaos theory physicist who won the Nobel Prize in 1977.

“If the clock was the symbol of classical science,” Prigogine has said, “sculpture is more the symbol for today. Sculpture is time put into matter. In some of the most beautiful manifestations of sculpture, be it the dancing Shiva or in the miniature temples of Guerrero, there appears very clearly the search for a junction between stillness and motion, time arrested and time passing. It is this confrontation — a hidden unity just like dark and light — that will give our era its uniqueness.” A sculpture like the dancing Shiva is the symbol of the new work being done in physics because it “embodies some elements that conform to given rules and other elements that arise unexpectedly through the process of creation.”

Though your buildings look as if you’ve thrown together disconnected fragments, isn’t there really a synthesis, a hidden unity, as Prigogine suggests, in your designs?

Frank Gehry: You are absolutely right. I am amazed to hear this quote from Prigogine. That too is what I am seeking, though guided by intuition and not so consciously by intellect. It is all about a sense of movement. When I look outside the door, what do I see? An airplane flying over, a car passing by. Everything is moving. That is our environment. Architecture should deal with that.

For example, the best way to look at the building I did in Bad Oeynhausen, Germany, is to go across the road to the bar and just sit there and look out. Big trucks are whooshing by. When they come along the road, they fit into the form of the building. The movement of the trucks doesn’t conflict with the motionless building but integrates with it.

I didn’t do this on purpose, but intuitively. Such a building strikes me as very much like the dancing Shiva. I used to sit there and just look at Norton Simon’s dancing Shiva. It was a remarkable sculpture. I swear it was moving. How did they do that?

I had a similar feeling when I saw the Elgin Marbles. The shield of the warriors seemed to be thrusting out. You could just feel the movement. These observations affected my work very much. When I would go out to the suburbs and see these huge tracts of housing under development, I was fascinated. You would see row after row of wood frames going up with piles of wood stacked all around. It was really vibrant. It looked far better than when the houses were actually finished.

I used to fantasize: What would it look like if you just threw all those piles of wood into the air and just froze them there in mid-air? It would be magnificent. Indeed, the great organ in the new Disney Hall has some of that sense to it.

Gardels: In Los Angeles, there is neither utopia nor ruins — the downtown has been completely eradicated four times in the last 100 years. Creating architecture here is like building in a “pure space.” This corresponds to something the poet Octavio Paz said — that we live in the permanently temporary present of “pure time” without a past, and, since all utopias have failed, with an undetermined future.

One might even say that your Disney Concert Hall is a more perfect symbol of Los Angeles than its sponsors imagined. Pure time meets pure space in the frozen motion of those metallic waves. That is our reality today.

Gehry: I suspect there is some truth here, that I have tapped into something that is going on, that my buildings represent a certain way of seeing. At a personal level, though, it is hard to claim such things.

I’m not a theorist, but a vacuum cleaner. I listen. I look. And then I represent with my tools. As for the pure space of the present, there are a lot of constraints. Why do our leaders and the public at large want to live so much in the past? It seems the less faith they have in the future, the more they want to anchor their identity in the past. But the past is gone. It is a fiction of our insecurity. To anchor architecture in the past is to build nostalgic parks. It is to make ersatz out of heritage. And it is denial.

Authentic Theme Parks

Gardels: Arata Isozaki, the Japanese architect who built the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, says he likes to build in America because there is no irony. Relative to old societies like Japan, there is no ancestral territory, and thus little if any distance between the context and whatever new it is you want to create. There is no conflict with history in America, which, as [the French philosopher] Jean Baudrillard has put it, is essentially “space plus a spirit of fiction” — in other words, pure space.

Isozaki contrasted this with his concert hall in Kyoto, where the traditionalists fought against his design as unfitting for Japan’s ancient spiritual center. Isozaki argued back that Kyoto was little more than a theme park where tourist buses unload groups of Japanese looking into a past that has no reality for them today.

“They might as well be wearing Mickey Mouse ears,” Isozaki told the enraged traditionalists.” With the arrival of pure space, the authentic becomes inauthentic and vice versa.

Gehry: As far as it goes, I have to agree. At the same time, though, there is, of course, something that is different. Kyoto grew out of a refined culture over the centuries. It evolved a method of building and an aesthetic that meant something. It was fashioned in a crucible of time, feeling and culture that was related to a spiritual connection with nature. When I took my kids there, it became an important part of their experience.

Disney World isn’t that. It is a ride. It is a fantasy. It is a built movie. Kyoto wasn’t. It may be abused as a theme park now, as Isozaki says. But its origins are real. And it is valuable to see Kyoto just as it is valuable to see a Picasso.

Asia & The Generic City

Gardels: Rem Koolhaas, the Dutch architect, has declared that the city as we have known it is gone. We have arrived in the age of “the generic city,” liberated from “the captivity of the center” — and the personality, identity and constraints associated with that. Connected in cyberspace, we will all live in the floating, unanchored periphery. Should we leave our vague regrets behind and just embrace this open future?

Gehry: That is freedom. I suppose it is the pure space you’ve been talking about. And Rem is probably right that this form will cover most of the planet.

Gardels: What is your favorite city?

Gehry: Tokyo is my favorite city visually. It is partly the density that I like, but also the transitional quality. They have the history, but they didn’t stop because of it. On one street you will find a temple next to an eight-story building from the 1950s next to a 30-story building constructed in the 1970s. Then they plastered neon signs all over and stuck a roadway in the middle of it all, going off into space. It is dynamic, like those erector sets we used to play with as kids. Along the freeways and down at the Tokyo Bay, they build these Godzilla-size convention centers. But they are tasteful, more invested with architecture than you might find in America. They are clearly plugged in to a style sense.

Then they will build those wacko indoor ski resorts that look like the Eiffel Tower. It is weird, but beautiful. I see in Tokyo today what I see in my favorite writer, Salman Rushdie. He’s like James Joyce, his novels are episodic and open-ended — they go all over the place, in seven directions at once. The characters have layers of identity — plural identities.

Now, when they go the next step — as they already are in the Shinjuku area of Tokyo — there are only 50-story buildings, and it looks like 6th Avenue in New York. Then they lose it. When they get that big, they need more land. And that is when they overpower everything else.

Gardels: What is your image of the future city? For Koolhaas, the old cities of Asia will give way to the Generic City as they are obliterated with megastructures to accommodate the demographic deluge. That will happen either in an ordered way, as in Singapore, or in a more dystopian way, as in Blade Runner. Simply, as Koolhaas puts it, “the past is too small to inhabit.”

Gehry: I don’t know if we’re capable of speculating about the future. We know bits and pieces, but we can’t know what the aggregate is going to look like. I don’t have any hopes that it will be much to be excited about, though. Today, there are pockets of sanity that are of a scale where they are still visible in the chaos. In the future, the pockets of sanity will become tiny. Perhaps then the buildings I’m doing that look like they are moving will ultimately dematerialize into ether. The mega-scale will overpower all else. In rapidly growing Asia, they are interested in building, not architecture. I’ve been invited to China, but I’ve turned them down because I know the people building on a large scale there are Donald Trumps. Chinese Donald Trumps. As a friend of mine says, it is already over in China for architecture.

The post The Creative Intuition Of Frank Gehry appeared first on NOEMA.

In the last Noema roundup, we focused on how the benefits of productivity growth and wealth creation fostered by AI can be spread widely through the idea of universal basic capital, where everyone, not just the top 10%, has a share in “owning the robots.” The aim is not just to constrain the concentration of wealth at the top, but to build it from below.

The corollary in political life is to balance the power of special interests with the time, money and organizational capacity to dominate electoral democracy at the expense of the average person. This can be done by inviting the broader civil society into governance through new mediating institutions that empower citizen engagement from below as a complement to representative government.

Indeed, as politics at the national level are paralyzed by zero-sum partisan combat or even moving in an authoritarian direction, engaged citizens across the democratic world, in cities, provinces and states, are coming together to forge solutions to the issues that matter most to them, closest to home.

In Jim Fishkin’s new book, “Can Deliberation Cure The Ills of Democracy?,” the pioneering practitioner of deliberative polling surveys the whole array of such practices from citizens’ assemblies to policy juries and independent citizen reviews of ballot measures that are taking place from Brazil to Europe to the U.S. state of Oregon.

The aim in each endeavor is to convene a gathering of citizens that is indicative of the body politic as a whole to consider issues outside the fever of the electoral arena. In those nonpartisan “islands of goodwill,” knowledgeable experts provide verified information. Pro and con positions are presented, as in a jury trial. On that informed basis, citizens deliberate choices and seek consensus to guide policymakers. Fishkin’s experience over 30 years consistently demonstrates how the polarization sparked by the partisan rancor of electoral competition dissipates and how common ground is found through structured deliberation.

The limitation of most of these efforts is that they are advisory and not binding on the powers that be. In recent years, that is beginning to change as citizen-driven deliberative practices are being integrated into political systems through institutions that foster “government with the people,” which directly impacts policy choices.

For example, in Mongolia, of all places, the law requires a deliberative poll by citizens before any proposed change in the constitution can take place.

While Europe is often castigated as being behind in economic innovation, it is often ahead in innovations of democratic governance.

In Ostbelgien, the German-speaking part of Belgium, a permanent citizens’ assembly with rotating participation has been established that convenes to address a particular issue of general public concern. Fifteen hundred residents are invited annually to join through a process of random solicitation, from which 30 are chosen. Meeting on weekends over several months, their recommendations are forwarded to the parliament, which is required to consider how to enact them. This process has led to binding policies such as banning cell phones in middle schools and the provision of government funding to recruit young people into the nursing profession, where there is a shortage.

Increasingly, digital tools are enabling deliberations at scale.

One compelling example is Decidim Barcelona. Launched in 2015, it is the official open-source digital platform for citizen participation in the Catalan capital that allows residents to propose, debate and vote on city-related issues. Over the last decade, it has matured into what is essentially the “soft infrastructure” of “smart city” governance.

On the Decidim platform, citizens can weigh in on city government proposals, including strategic plans involving traffic, tourism, housing and infrastructure, as well as submit their own proposals. If those proposals attain a designated threshold of support by others on the platform, they will become a deliberative case. When citizens recommend actionable items arising from that process, city officials must provide an answer of acceptance, amendment or rejection, along with the reason for that decision. The platform has a self-monitoring function that reports on the follow-through implementation of policy decisions.

From now until 2027, the Decidim process will determine how and in which districts, and for which projects, 30 million euros ($34 million) of the city budget will be spent.

On the other side of the world, in Taiwan, another participatory platform for citizen engagement, vTaiwan, was also set up in 2015. Launched by the island’s first Digital Minister, Audrey Tang, it is an online platform that enables thousands of participants to simultaneously discuss an issue and reach a rough consensus.

An AI sorting tool visually tracks the migration of divergent views toward convergence during deliberative sessions when participants are fully informed and exposed to others’ views. Topics tackled have ranged from whether Uber should operate in Taipei to same-sex marriage. So far, the platform has facilitated deliberations on 26 national issues, with more than 80% leading to government action.

The latest iteration of such AI-assisted deliberation is the introduction of Engaged California (EC), which we wrote about in Noema when it launched in February. The Berggruen Institute was closely involved in moving it forward. Set up within the state’s Office of Data and Innovation, it is a three-way tool with a three-step process.

EC enables policymakers and administrators to listen at scale to average citizens outside of election cycles and respond; it invites citizens to directly voice their concerns and proposals on an ongoing basis; and it is a platform for Californians from all walks of life to interact with each other to find common ground.

The engagement process first invites a wide range of citizens to sign up for deliberation on a given issue and offer proposals that set the agenda for addressing the problem. AI will then sort through those thousands of comments and organize them thematically into discussion areas. The online participants, with access to expert advice and relevant information, then weigh the proposals among each other, refining and ranking actionable items for the government to enact. The AI tool visually displays, in the form of data points, where consensus views congregate.

Just last week, the first use case of EC, focusing on recovery from the firestorms earlier this year in Altadena and Pacific Palisades, was completed.

The process whittled down thousands of comments from the affected residents into 19 categories, from which participants prioritized their top five actionable items, which included burying power lines underground, urgently revamping the water supply infrastructure in potential burn areas and streamlining emergency communications. Coordinated by the Governor’s office, the relevant agencies at the state, county and city levels then specified the immediate and long-range remedial government action being taken in response to each of the citizens’ recommendations.

Having proven itself, the Engaged California project is now in the process of being institutionalized as a regular feature of governance in the state alongside elections and the direct democracy of the citizens’ ballot initiative, the recall and the referendum.

As these practices proliferate, a new governing ecosystem is evolving in which the new mediating institutions serve as a counterweight to what the political scientist Robert Dahl called the competitive “polyarchy” of political elites who predominantly hold sway in electoral contests.

The post A New Governing Ecosystem Is Evolving appeared first on NOEMA.

Ready to jump on this turn of events as a path forward for a moribund party, progressive Democrats are reverting to the standard reflex in their policy toolbox: Tax the rich and redistribute income to the less well-off through government programs. As appealing, or even compelling, as that may be as an interim fix, it does not address the long-term structural dynamic that’s behind the accelerating economic disparity heading into the AI era.

In the end, the affordability challenge can’t be remedied in any enduring way by policies that just depend on hitting up the richest. It can only be met by spreading the wealth of ownership more broadly in the first place in an economy where the top 10% own 93% of all equities in financial markets.

That means, instead of relying solely on redistributing other people’s income, forward-looking policies should foster the “pre-distribution” of wealth through forms of “universal basic capital” (UBC) wherein everyone gets richer by owning a slice of an ever-enlarging pie driven by AI-generated productivity growth. That ought to be a rallying cry of the emergent “coalition of the precariat,” which encompasses all those who labor for a living when intelligent machines are coming for their livelihood.

The fairness Americans are looking for in today’s churning political economy is not only about constraining concentration of wealth at the top, but also about building it from below.

This agenda could provide common ground for populists in the Trump orbit — notably conservative Catholics like Vice-President J.D. Vance and Steve Bannon, who champion the left-behind working middle class — and the new generation of Democrats who want to restore the inclusive American Dream to an extractive economy that benefits the few at the expense of the many.

Where To Start

OpenAI’s Sam Altman has proposed a redistributive universal basic income (UBI) scheme as a safety net for displaced workers to be funded through the establishment of an “American Equity Fund.” It would be capitalized by taxing companies above a certain valuation at 2.5% of their market value each year, payable in shares. Proceeds from those earnings would be doled out as regular minimum payments to those whose income falls below a certain level.

Aware that this is only a stopgap income transfer that doesn’t change the pattern of wealth distribution, he has more recently shifted away from UBI and toward the idea of UBC, or what he calls “universal basic wealth.”

“What I would want is, like an ownership share in whatever the AI creates — that I feel like I’m participating in this thing that’s going to compound and get more valuable over time,” he has said.

These ideas could be married to extant policy.

The place to start is with an embryonic form of universal basic capital already established by the Republican-dominated U.S. Congress through its MAGA program: Money Accounts for Growth and Advancement.

Beginning in July, the MAGA program will initiate, by auto-enrollment, a $1,000 account for every child under 8 who is an American citizen. That initial deposit will be invested across the market by professional managers in a pool with all others. The funds will grow with compounded returns over the years until the account holder reaches 18. Families can add up to $5,000 per year to the account. All income from investment returns will be tax-advantaged upon withdrawal and can be used for education, starting a small business, helping purchase a home or in other ways.

The MAGA program is funded at roughly $30 billion per year only through 2028. The Trump administration has so far sought to use tariff revenues to pay for it. But rather than tax consumers in this way to keep the funds flowing after 2028, why not place a “productivity and wealth-sharing levy” of, say, 1% of their market value each year on the highly concentrated wealth of Big Tech with their skyrocketing (albeit fluctuating) valuations? This could seed the MAGA investment accounts into 2029 and beyond. Per Altman, such a levy could also be paid in shares.

As AI is integrated further throughout the entire economy in the coming decades, one could envision reducing and expanding that annual levy, making it 0.5% on all businesses worth more than, let’s say, $5 billion, up to an assessment of 5% of their total equity. Once new enterprises reach this valuation threshold, they would also be subject to the same rules.

The MAGA accounts, just like investments by the richest Americans, promise to boom when productivity gains are realized as AI diffuses through all economic sectors over time. In this way, “ownership of the robots” will be broadened so upcoming generations can share in the wealth creation of generative AI that’s fueled, after all, by the raw material of their (and our) data.

Critically, the UBC idea is also not statist, but individualist. The proceeds of those levies would not go to the government, but only through the state as a collection agency directly into personal and family accounts. Since the state does not become the owner of wealth that remains private, the idea does not qualify as “socialist.” On the contrary, it makes everyone a capitalist.

A New Orientation

Sustaining the MAGA accounts in and of themselves, of course, is not a silver bullet that will slay an inequality chasm that has been building for decades. But it would signal a new orientation in the way we think systemically about how wealth is created and shared fairly in the AI economy of the future — an orientation that can guide other innovative ways to more widely implement the UBC concept across the entire population.

One such idea emerged in a brainstorming session with some of the more socially aware Big Tech titans of Silicon Valley. In this plan, all publicly traded companies with a valuation above a certain threshold could be required to contribute 2% of their value in shares each year to a sovereign wealth fund that supplements Social Security. From those holdings, every adult American — on the condition that they actively vote in elections — would receive a synthetic security, essentially an account indexed across the stock market, that must be vested for at least 20 years to allow the compounded returns to grow. Capital gains would be tax-exempt upon withdrawal.

The idea is to provide citizens with a literal stake and responsibility in the future of the system, both in terms of its economic fortunes and political stability.

Another proposal to get a jump-start on future AI job shock is to build up assets in the intermediate term when employment patterns still hold. This could be done by following the model of Australia’s superannuation fund,  which we have often mentioned in Noema. The combination of the fund’s scale of participation, continual inflow of savings from employer/employee contributions into investments and the longevity to term earns compounded returns that have made the fund, started in 1991, worth $4.2 trillion today — more than the nation’s GDP. As a result, the average wealth per adult in Australia is among the highest in the world at $550,000.

The old paradigm of the Industrial Age, which relied on the bargaining power of labor to capture its fair share, just no longer works when intelligent machines capable of doing what most humans do are knocking at every door. As the value of labor diminishes, capital income from wealth ownership will become a significant hedge against diminishing or disappearing wages.

The usual argument against such a levy in a globalized economy has been that companies will leave for better pastures. But, given the enormous investments and political will to make the U.S. the dominant AI player, companies that succeed on that basis are not about to bolt for either anti-tech Europe or America’s strategic rival, China.

Economic Inclusiveness Is On The Right Side Of History

The recent arguments for lessening over-regulatory obstacles that stand in the way of achieving “abundance” are not wrong as far as they go. But abundance does not distribute itself fairly. This is what the idea of UBC proposes.

Sharing the abundant wealth of an AI economy that is socially generated through the use of our data is so sensible a concept that it would, in time, become as normal and accepted a condition of doing business as paying into Social Security and Medicare.

Historically, as the work for which economist Daren Acemoglu was awarded the Nobel Prize in 2024 has shown, those societies that maintain inclusive social and economic institutions have prospered while those where wealth and power are concentrated at the top have ultimately splintered and failed. This is also the theme of Henry Wismayer’s recent essay in Noema on why once successful societies collapse.

Adopting policies that foster universal basic capital for the AI era would place America’s off-track trajectory once again on the right side of history.

The post Address ‘Affordability’ By Spreading AI Wealth Around appeared first on NOEMA.

In this pursuit, he argues in a Futurology podcast, AI should not be regarded as a threat to the distinctive human capacity to organize our reality or imagine alternative worlds through storytelling. On the contrary, the technology should be seen as an entirely new way to access that elusive realm beneath the surface and deepen our self-knowledge.

As a window into the interiority of others, and indeed, of ourselves, Liu believes the communal mirror of large language models opens the horizons of how we experience and situate our presence in the world.

“It’s fascinating to me to think about AI as a potential new artistic medium in the same way that the camera was a new artistic medium,” he muses. What the roving aperture enabled was the cinematic art form of capturing motion, “so you can splice movement around … and can break all kinds of rules about narrative art that used to be true.

“In the dramatic arts, it was just assumed that because you had to perform in front of an audience on the stage, that you had to follow certain unities to make your story comprehensible. The unity of action, of place, of time. You can’t just randomly jump around, or the audience wouldn’t be able to follow you.

But with this motion-capturing machine, you can in fact do that. That’s why an actual movie is very different from a play.

You can do the reaction shots, you can do the montages, you can do the cuts, you can do the swipes, you can do all sorts of things in the language of cinema.

You can put audiences in perspectives that they normally can never be in. So it’s such a transformation of the understanding of presence, of how a subject can be present in a dramatic narrative story.”

He continues: “Rather than thinking about AI as a cheap way to replace filmmakers, to replace writers, to replace artists, think of [it] as a new kind of machine that captures something and plays back something. What is the thing that it captures and plays back? The content of thought, or subjectivity.”

The ancient Greeks called the content, or object of a person’s thought, “noema,” which is why this publication bears that name.

Liu thus invents the term “Noematograph” as analogous to “the cinematograph not for motion, but for thought … AI is really a subjectivity capturing machine, because by being trained on the products of human thinking, it has captured the subjectivities, the consciousnesses, that were involved in the creation of those things.”

An Interactive Art Form Where The Consumer Is Also The Creator

Liu sees value in what some regard as the worst qualities of generative AI.

“This is a machine that allows people to play with subjectivities and to craft their own fictions, to engage in their own narrative self-construction in the process of working with an AI,” he observes. “The fact that AI is sycophantic and shapeable by you is the point. It’s not another human being. It’s a simulation. It’s a construction. It’s a fictional thing.

You can ask the AI to explain, to interpret. You can role-play with AI. You can explore a world that you construct together.

You can also share these things with other humans. One of the great, fun trends on the internet involving using AI, in fact, is about people crafting their own versions of prompts with models and then sharing the results with other humans.

And then a large group, a large community, comes together to collaboratively play with AI. So I think it’s the playfulness, it’s that interactivity, that I think is going to be really, really determinative of the future of AI as an art form.”

So, what will the product of this new art form look like?

“As a medium for art, what will come out of it won’t look anything like movies or novels …They’re going to be much more like conversations with friends. They’re going to be more like a meal you share with people. They are much more ephemeral in the moment. They’re about the participation. They’re about the consumer being also the creator.

They’re much more personalized. They’re about you looking into the strange mirror and sort of examining your own subjectivity.”

AI Makes Us Visible To Ourselves

Much of what Liu posits echoes the views of the philosopher of technology, Tobias Rees, in a previous conversation with Noema.

As Rees describes it, “AI has much more information available than we do, and it can access and work through this information faster than we can. It also can discover logical structures in data — patterns — where we see nothing.

AI can literally give us access to spaces that we, on our own, qua human, cannot discover and cannot access.”

He goes on: “Imagine an AI model … that has access to all your data. Your emails, your messages, your documents, your voice memos, your photos, your songs, etc.

Such an AI system can make me visible to myself … it literally can lift me above me. It can show me myself from outside of myself, show me the patterns of thoughts and behaviors that have come to define me. It can help me understand these patterns, and it can discuss with me whether they are constraining me, and if so, then how. What is more, it can help me work on those patterns and, where appropriate, enable me to break from them and be set free.”

Philosophically put, says Rees, invoking the meaning of “noema” as Liu does, “AI can help me transform myself into an ‘object of thought’ to which I can relate and on which I can work.

“The work of the self on the self has formed the core of what Greek philosophers called meletē and Roman philosophers meditatio. And the kind of AI system I evoke here would be a philosopher’s dream. It could make us humans visible to ourselves from outside of us.”

Liu’s insight as a writer of science fiction realism is to see what Rees describes in the social context of interactive connectivity.

Art’s Vocation

The arrival of new technologies is always disruptive to familiar ways of seeing that were cultivated from within established capacities. Letting go of those comforting narratives that guide our inner world is existentially disorienting. It is here that art’s vocation comes into play as the medium that helps move the human condition along. To see technology as an art form, as Liu does, is to capture the epochal moment of transformation that we are presently living through.

The post From Cinema To The Noematograph appeared first on NOEMA.

Even as so many nations appear to be going their own way, embroiled in historically familiar trade wars and military conflicts, the simultaneous emergence of AI-driven planetary-scale computation is disclosing the imperative of forging a common future.

The material basis of this evolving consciousness is the technological exoskeleton of satellites, sensors and cloud computation, which is expanding the heretofore limited scope of human understanding of the world and repositioning our place in the natural order. The climate crisis this apparatus has unveiled is a window into the realization that we are neither above nor apart from nature, but part and parcel of one interdependent organism comprised of multiple intelligences striving for sustainable equilibrium.

The unprecedented capacity for insight into the interface with Earth systems, made possible by frontier technologies, promises to enable our species and others not only to survive, but also to flourish on the only planet we know of with a livable biosphere. In the near term, it will also empower us to predict threats resulting from Anthropocene overreach and design adaptive responses.

‘Earth AI’ & ‘Aurora’

Two recent developments from Google and Microsoft are embryonic stepping-stones in this direction.

Last month, Google launched its “Earth AI” platform. As described in an explanatory paper, “Geospatial data offers immense potential for understanding our planet. However, the sheer volume and diversity of this data along with its varied resolutions, timescales and sparsity pose significant challenges for thorough analysis and interpretation … Earth AI, a family of geospatial AI models and agentic reasoning, enables significant advances in our ability to unlock novel and profound insights into our planet. This approach is built upon foundation models across three key domains — Planet-scale Imagery, Population, and Environment — and an intelligent Gemini-powered reasoning engine.”

The paper continued: “When used together, they provide complementary value for geospatial inference and their synergies unlock superior predictive capabilities. To handle complex, multi-step queries, we developed a Gemini-powered agent that jointly reasons over our multiple foundation models along with large geospatial data sources and tools. On a new benchmark of real-world crisis scenarios, our agent demonstrates the ability to deliver critical and timely insights, effectively bridging the gap between raw geospatial data and actionable understanding.”

As the Berggruen Institute’s Nils Gilman further explains, citing the paper: “The ultimate goal of Earth AI is to help users answer complex, real-world questions that require multifaceted reasoning across diverse models and data sources. Such queries can be categorized into a hierarchy of increasing complexity:

1. “Descriptive and retrieval queries involving fact-finding (e.g., “What was the highest recorded temperature in New York in August 2020?”).
2. Analytical and relational queries seeking to uncover patterns between different data sources (e.g., “How many hospitals were located in areas experiencing severe storm conditions in the state of Louisiana when Hurricane Katrina came ashore?”).
3. Predictive or inferential queries involving forecasting new information (e.g., “Which Indian cities have the most vulnerable populations at high risk of being impacted by flooding by Nov. 25, 2027?”).”

In May, Microsoft scientists unveiled Aurora, a large-scale foundation model trained on more than one million hours of diverse geophysical data. As described in a paper published in Nature, “Aurora outperforms operational forecasts in predicting air quality, ocean waves, tropical cyclone tracks and high-resolution weather, all at orders of magnitude lower computational cost. With the ability to be fine-tuned for diverse applications at modest expense, Aurora represents a notable step toward democratizing accurate and efficient Earth system predictions. These results highlight the transformative potential of AI in environmental forecasting and pave the way for broader accessibility to high-quality climate and weather information.”

These developments are taking place in tandem with other exciting leaps, most notably Google’s new “Suncatcher” plan for “space-based computing” that will draw the vast energy needs of data centers from low-orbit clusters of solar panels, thus enabling compute to scale without further depleting Earth’s resources.

From Disequilibrium To Planetary Homeostasis

The incipient capacities of Earth AI and Aurora hold out the evolutionary prospect that human, machine and Earth intelligences might one day merge into what Gilman calls “planetary sapience”, wherein a maturing technosphere restores and maintains a homeostatic planetary balance rather than fosters a “disequilibrated or disruptive” relationship with the biosphere.

If we manage to make it through our present Age of Upheaval, what settles on the other side of the Anthropocene will be a sensibility far more in sync with the ecology of existence.

As we have written often in Noema, this conceptual reorientation will, in turn, entail a redefinition of what realism means in geopolitics as we have known it. The new condition calls not for the exhausted “realpolitik” that seeks to secure the interests of nations or blocs against each other, but for a new planetary realism, or “Gaiapolitik,” aimed at securing a livable biosphere for all.

It is a paradox of the long trajectory of human endeavor that technological progress will, in the end, not have distanced us from natural systems but further embedded and entangled us in them.

The post The Infrastructure Of Planetary Sapience appeared first on NOEMA.

As he despairingly saw it, the integral nature of Being would be extinguished through a system of feedback loops that self-reinforce calculating reason to the exclusion of any spiritual dimension or philosophical frame to elevate or govern it. What he called the “technicity” of instrumental means with no substantive end would inexorably prevail over the diminished soul.

In a famous last interview in Der Spiegel in 1966, Heidegger declared, “Only God can save us,” because the planetary domination of modern technology had deprived humanity of the wherewithal to change course and rescue itself. All our civilization could now do was prepare not only “for the appearance of a God,” but also “for the absence of a God in his decline, for the fact that we fall before the absent God.” In short, he feared what the lethal brew of nihilism and technological prowess might bring.

These thoughts came sharply to mind last week as I participated in a gathering at the Vatican’s Pontifical Academy of Social Sciences in Rome, convened to contemplate the “responsible, ethical, and human-centered use of artificial intelligence” — cybernetics on computational steroids.

Like Pope Francis before him, who cautioned against becoming “rich in technology, but poor in humanity,” Pope Leo XIV has sought to remain open to the marvelous advances promised by AI but worries that it will subvert Christian humanism, which grounds the inviolable dignity of every person in their likeness to God.

“Artificial intelligence, biotechnologies, data economy and social media are profoundly transforming our perception and our experience of life,” he said in a speech to Italian bishops in June. “In this scenario, human dignity risks becoming diminished or forgotten, substituted by functions, automatism, simulations. But the person is not a system of algorithms: he or she is a creature, relationship, mystery.”

The Pope is concerned that “the digital world will follow its own path and we will become pawns, or be brushed aside.” He has gone so far as saying that it is going to be “very difficult to discover the presence of God in AI.”

Alarmed that the tech race between China and Silicon Valley is getting out of control, the new pontiff has broadened Pope Francis’ call for the “audacity of disarmament” on nuclear weapons to now include the competitive proliferation of AI.

Neither Techno-Utopia Nor Techno-Apocalypse

Coming from California, where hundreds of billions of dollars are being fervently invested in the no-holds-barred development of frontier models of superintelligence, I could not shake the sense that all the pleas at my Vatican discussions for the preservation of the noblest human values — dignity, autonomy, solidarity, equity — sounded almost quaint. Like all nostalgic yearnings, such sentiments only arise when their time appears about to pass.

In my mind’s eye, I could see some Silicon Valley titan dismissively asking, “How much compute does the Pope have?” — just as Stalin once dismissed the Church for having no military divisions and thus lacking the power to make a difference in the direction of history.

Most participants in the Vatican seminar strove to avoid looking like naïve Luddites rejecting the wonders of technology, seeking instead a path to square the circle by “thinking outside the opaque box of algorithms” for a way AI could augment, empower and amplify human agency rather than displace it.

This approach rejects the binaries of “techno-utopia” or “techno-apocalypse,” recognizing that technology is not alien to humanity but is part and parcel of what makes us human. Rather than regretting the future, it embraces the evolutionary potential of a symbiotic companionship between human and inorganic intelligence. Such “integral human development” — to put it in the terms of religious discourse — describes a relationship of mutuality in which each shapes the other.

The hope in Rome was that this new ground could be found through what Pope Leo XIV calls “an ethical AI framework” that keeps the new species of intelligent machines — a “what not a who” — within the bounds of human control.

Rage Against The Race To Superintelligence

A wave of appeals against unchecked AI accelerationism is mounting daily. Regulation is also beginning to bite.

In September, a group of thinkers that included Yuval Noah Harari, the Vatican’s own AI expert, Paolo Benanti, and foundational AI scientists Stuart Russell, Yoshua Bengio and Gregory Hinton met at the Vatican to chart out the principles that should guide the development of superintelligence. Their appeal was addressed to the Pope and world leaders.

These principles include:

• AI must never be developed or used in ways that threaten, diminish or disqualify human life, dignity or fundamental rights. Human intelligence — our capacity for wisdom, moral reasoning and orientation toward truth and beauty — must never be devalued by artificial processing;

• AI must remain under human control. Building uncontrollable systems or over-delegating decisions is morally unacceptable and must be legally prohibited;

• Only humans have moral and legal agency. AI systems are and must remain legal objects, never subjects;

• AI systems must never be allowed to make life or death decisions, especially in military applications during armed conflict or peacetime, in law enforcement, border control, healthcare or judicial decisions;

• Developers must design AI with safety, transparency and ethics at its core, not as an afterthought. AI should be designed and independently evaluated to avoid unintentional and catastrophic effects on humans and society, for example through design giving rise to deception, delusion, addiction or loss of autonomy.

As previously discussed in Noema, the European Union has led the precautionary efforts. Its latest set of guardrails, the “AI Regulation Act,” took effect at the beginning of August.

In September, California Gov. Gavin Newsom signed into law the most consequential regulation on AI to date in the U.S. Called the “Transparency in Frontier Artificial Intelligence Act,” it aims to “balance innovation and safety.” Significantly, it was negotiated directly with the state’s Big Tech companies, such as Meta and Google.

The new law includes the following:

• Requires large frontier developers to write, implement, comply with and publish on their websites a ‘frontier AI framework’ to manage, assess and mitigate catastrophic risks, incorporating national and international standards as well as industry consensus on best practices;

• Establishes a new consortium within the state’s Government Operations Agency to develop a framework for creating a public computing cluster. The consortium, called CalCompute, will advance the development and deployment of artificial intelligence that is safe, ethical, equitable, and sustainable by fostering research and innovation;

•  Creates a new mechanism for frontier AI companies and the public to report potential critical safety incidents to California’s Office of Emergency Services;

•  Protects whistleblowers who disclose significant health and safety risks posed by frontier models, and creates a civil penalty for noncompliance, enforceable by the Attorney General’s office.

More recently, an open letter coordinated by the Future of Life Institute called for “a prohibition on the development of superintelligence, not lifted before there is (a) broad scientific consensus that it will be done safely and controllably, and (b) strong public buy-in.”

It was endorsed by a broad array of signatories ranging from the Hollywood actor and producer Joseph Gordon-Levitt to Britain’s Prince Harry to Obama-era national security official Susan Rice to Trump guru Steve Bannon and Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, among many others.

The AI pioneers who drafted the Papal appeal also signed on. From that group, Russell added a comment to his signature: “This is not a ban or even a moratorium in the usual sense. It’s simply a proposal to require adequate safety measures for a technology that, according to its developers, has a significant chance to cause human extinction. Is that too much to ask?”

Even to the extent this pushback against the AI juggernaut is in some ways more alarmist than warranted, it nonetheless provides necessary ballast against the heretofore asymmetric contest between precaution and accelerationist momentum.

The Abiding Resonance Of Humanism

The contemporary German philosopher, Jürgen Habermas, has argued that the core values of secular modern democracies, such as human rights and dignity, remain nourished to this day by the religious sources of their origins.

This abiding resonance may lack the hard power of “compute” in the same sense that the Church lacked military divisions during the Cold War. But we should remember it was the soft power of faith behind the Solidarity movement in Poland that, in the end, triumphed over the armed Soviet bloc.

Whether this suggests that the God Heidegger invoked might still save us, or whether Western civilization is, after all, mustering the wherewithal within to save itself through the legacy of Christian humanism, is a distinction without a difference.

The post ‘Only God Can Save Us’ appeared first on NOEMA.

This is precisely what Hui Huang has done brilliantly in a Noema essay that analogizes today’s global disruption from AI and synthetic biology to geopolitics with the transition from the waning stability of the Spring and Autumn period in ancient China to the tumultuous period of the Warring States, which realigned that world according to new realities. It was a period of destruction, but also of unprecedented innovation and creation.

Writing from Shanghai, Huang starts with the systemic shock of President Trump’s unilateral imposition of tariffs, the first move of his “warring states mindset.”

“Donald Trump announced sweeping tariffs on America’s major trading partners. For critics, it was a reckless act of economic warfare. For Trump and his allies, it was a long-overdue rejection of a naïve world order.

“In a striking historical parallel, in the Spring and Autumn period of ancient China, Duke Xiang of Song famously refused to attack an enemy before they had properly arrayed their troops, adhering to the codes of ritualized warfare. Predictably, he lost. Today, a similar accusation is hurled at the United States: that it has restrained itself with outdated moral expectations, while rivals such as China and Russia maneuver freely, unburdened by idealism. Trumpism, and the worldview of figures like J.D. Vance, represent a sharp rejection of the so-called benevolence of Xiang. Their message is simple: America must adapt to a world where restraint is no longer a universal virtue.”

Huang continues: “This is not merely a moment of disruption. It marks a paradigmatic shift in global logic. The world is moving from a system of mediated stability toward one of open rivalry.

“To understand this moment, China’s own history offers a useful analogy. In the Spring and Autumn period (770 to 476 BCE), warfare was ritualized, legitimacy symbolically upheld by the Zhou king. But as the old order weakened, the Warring States period (475 to 221 BCE) emerged, a time of intense competition, innovation and systemic transformation.

“Trumpism does not merely reject global liberalism; it reimagines the architecture of American power. Its core instinct is not isolationist or nihilistic, but fundamentally opposed to established diplomatic norms and rituals, a deliberate departure from the old ways of seeking consensus. In this worldview, legitimacy comes not from international approval but from output: industrial strength, cultural cohesion and strategic clarity. Rituals are not something to be respected, but to be bypassed.”

For Huang, this mindset did not emerge in a vacuum. “For much of the postwar era, the U.S.-led international order resembled China’s Spring and Autumn period — a fragile yet enduring balance, upheld by norms, rituals and symbolic legitimacy. Henry Kissinger, the era’s foremost architect, believed in ambiguity, restraint and equilibrium. Institutions like the United Nations played the role of a Zhou king, lacking hard power but commanding deference. Even amid Cold War tension, the world remained rule-bound. Red lines held, backchannels worked, deterrence was mutual.

“But the Zhou world is gone. Trumpism marks not an aberration but an inflection point, a recognition that fewer actors obey the old rites, and those who still do risk irrelevance. Like the Zhou order before it, today’s international system is fading not because of ideological rebellion but because its underlying conditions no longer hold. From Trump’s perspective, tariff wars were a response to these changing conditions. Institutions like the WTO, he argued, no longer ensured reciprocity, and growing trade imbalances reflected how the liberal economic order had failed to protect national interests.”

What is underway today, much like the transition from the Spring and Autumn period to the Warring States period, is about far more than a change in political climate. As Huang writes, that transition in China marked one of the most profound systemic shifts in its history, involving “a fundamental transformation that reshaped modes of production, social hierarchies and the very basis of legitimacy over centuries. It represented a deep pivot driven by new material and strategic realities that rendered the old Zhou rituals obsolete. This historical lens suggests that today’s global shift is not merely about changing alliances or rhetoric, but about a deeper, structural and potentially epochal turn.”

A Globally Synchronized Rethink

A wise student of the past, Huang does not regret the future. “What we are entering may not be a collapse, but a modeling epoch: a new Warring States world, chaotic and cruel, but also luminous. For those who think in systems and build in code, this is not the end of history. It is its recommencement.

“The Warring States era was not only an age of war. It was an age of brilliance. During the political upheaval of that period, Chinese civilization produced some of its greatest minds: Mencius, Zhuangzi, Han Feizi, and Mozi, whose frameworks still shape political and moral reasoning today. Karl Jaspers called this broader phenomenon the Axial Age, when societies across China, India, Persia, Judea and Greece simultaneously reinvented what it meant to be human. Philosophy, justice and law did not arise from peace, but from rupture.

“More than two millennia after the Axial Age, we may be entering another globally synchronized rethink. With no shared ideology and dwindling trust in inherited institutions, humanity is being forced back to first principles. What is justice? What deserves to endure? Questions of AI ethics, political legitimacy and governance are no longer academic. They are civilizational. The true contest ahead is between systems that adapt and systems that ossify.”

Huang concludes: “This is not a dark age. It is a time worthy of living.”

AI Helps Out

One note about Hui Huang’s essay “Welcome To The New Warring States” in Noema. Noema is transparent about the use of AI in any of its pieces. We publish original human-generated ideas but allow authorized, disclosed use of AI in certain cases. The initial submitted draft of this piece utilized ChatGPT as an editorial assistant and translator to help convey Chinese concepts more clearly in English, so as to express the author’s original, human-generated ideas more effectively.

Specifically, it was used to generate section headings, suggest transitions and reduce repetition, as well as for line edits to improve clarity and flow in the initial draft. It was not used to originate facts; all claims and examples are drawn from the author’s own notes and publicly available sources, and were reviewed and edited by the author himself first. This draft has since received multiple human edits. Noema verified the author’s identity and the piece’s conceptual originality using various scanners and review processes and conducted a detailed human fact-check. See our AI policy here.

The post Creative Disruption In The Order Of The World appeared first on NOEMA.

This could only be achieved, as he saw it, if his nation firmly anchored itself in “the West” through a liberal democratic constitution in a Federal Republic cemented by Atlanticist ties to America.

For Habermas, the way to detach allegiance from association with the ethnic nation and Volk was what he called “constitutional patriotism.” In other words, loyalty to democratic institutions and norms over and above any nativist appeal to the authoritarian tribal politics of us versus them. Though Habermas understood democracy could be improved through more deliberative practices, this baseline was for him what would make Germany “truly Western.”

It is therefore no small irony that, on the 35th anniversary celebration of the post-Cold War unification of Germany last week in Saarbrücken, the present chancellor, Friedrich Merz, was compelled to defend liberal democracy “as a way of life,” not least against the threat emanating from America these days.

In effect, the tables have turned: Once prodigal Germany now hopes America will remain anchored in the West as it steadily lurches toward illiberal democracy at home and wobbles on defending Ukraine and the rest of Europe from Russian aggression.

“The centers of power in the world are shifting to an extent not seen since the end of the Cold War,” Merz observed. “An axis of autocratic states that challenges the liberal order around the world is directly challenging Western democracies. That is why we must regain the ability to defend our freedom. … The radiance of what we in the West call liberal democracy is noticeably diminishing. It is no longer a given that the world will orient itself toward us, that it will follow our values of liberal democracy.”

Though obviously referring to Russia and China, previous comments by Merz leave little doubt that he also had America in mind. The U.S “has changed so fundamentally over the last few years, perhaps decades, that rules are no longer being followed, parliamentary democracy is under pressure, freedom of expression is being called into question, and the independence of the judiciary is being repressed,” he told a business conference in Berlin in September.

The Dark Enlightenment

French President Emmanuel Macron followed up Merz’s remarks in Saarbrücken with equal alarm about “the degeneration of democracy” across the West.

Beyond threats from the outside, he warned, “on the inside we are turning on ourselves; we doubt our own democracy. We see everywhere that something is happening to our democratic fabric. Democratic debate is turning into a debate of hatred.”

He continued: “We’ve been incredibly naïve, handing over our public democratic space to social networks owned by big American entrepreneurs and Chinese firms whose interests are not at all the survival and the good functioning of our democracy.”

Macron even raised the specter of “the return of the Dark Enlightenment” of authoritarianism. In the present-day context, the “Dark Enlightenment” refers to a movement that promotes an alliance of autocrats and Silicon Valley AI accelerationists to more efficiently run societies like corporations, with a decisive authoritarian CEO, algorithms that replace democratic deliberation and a belief in technological solutions to all of humanity’s problems.

The French president called on Europeans to mount a “resurgence” to “rebuild a 21st-century democracy” if “we want science, culture, education and learning to be at the heart of the public space.” Otherwise, he said, “we risk becoming a continent, like many others, of conspiracy theorists, extremes, noise, and fury.”

Patriotism In Diverse Societies

Habermas formulated his theory of “constitutional patriotism” as a historical response to an authoritarian ideology of racial superiority in what was then a largely homogenous society. It was conceived as a brake against any temptation to succumb once again to the siren call of the Volksgeist transmuted into aggressive nationalism.

Yet, the idea of constitutional patriotism that Habermas believed would make his nation “truly Western” could also serve today as a guiding political philosophy and rallying cry of the oppositional forces to the relentless creep of illiberalism in the most diverse of all nations: America.

If allegiance to individual rights, due process under the rule of law, the separation of powers, judicial independence and free expression are what constitute the West and distinguish it from the axis of authoritarianism, then defending constitutional rule is the most patriotic stance Americans from all walks of life can take.

That it is has fallen to Germans to remind America of what the West is all about suggests we have come full circle to a point where the most ardent pupils of democracy must now tutor their mentors who seem to have forgotten the lessons they once taught so well.

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