TheAltWorld At the AI Race’s Finishing Line: A World of Abundance or Automated Dominance?
As artificial intelligence (AI) continues to advance, an important but unnoticed debate is taking place within the halls of Western power and among a handful of billionaire business leaders and investors regarding the shape of the world to come as this technology permeates every aspect of modern civilization.
Western-based optimists insist that AI will bring about a utopian world of abundance, eliminating poverty, illness, and violence, and insist that the US must win an intensifying AI race with China to do so.
Paradoxically, it is the US that has, in the past several decades — including throughout the entirety of the 21st century — perpetuated and even compounded existing poverty, illness, and violence stretching from Latin America to Central Asia and everywhere in between. The US has, in the past 26 years alone, invaded and destroyed entire nations, killing millions and displacing tens of millions fleeing from the poverty, illness, and violence stemming from US-led war.
Even within US borders, these same interests have ravaged the American population through predatory economic practices prioritizing profit and power over any semblance of societal or civilizational purpose. This has manifested itself as rotting infrastructure, inaccessible healthcare, unaffordable education, and the growing dearth of opportunities emerging from a society systematically exploited and neglected rather than built up and invested in.
For a Western-based billionaire, this reality may not be apparent because of the cocoon of luxury, comfort, and security immense wealth affords anyone, anywhere — but it is reality nonetheless.
China, on the other hand, has already spent the last several decades lifting hundreds of millions of its own people out of poverty, improving healthcare, and eradicating violent crime within its borders long before AI became a practical reality.
China Pursues Abundance, Cooperation, and Coexistence
Throughout the 21st century, China has not invaded a single nation nor participated in the sort of unilateral economic sanctions the US and its partners have used to target scores of nations around the globe with the explicit purpose of crushing economies and dividing and destroying populations to in turn induce “regime change.”
Instead, China has continued to rapidly build out its own infrastructure while partnering with nations around the globe, long neglected under decades of Western domination, to build desperately needed modern infrastructure, creating what China refers to as the “Belt and Road Initiative” (BRI).
Nations like Laos in Southeast Asia — upon which the US dropped more bombs during the Vietnam War than the nation’s total population — received its first and only modern rail route thanks to China’s BRI — a high-speed rail line that has transformed the landlocked, impoverished nation into a logistics and tourism corridor between China and the rest of Southeast Asia.
Neighboring Thailand has also greatly benefited from the rise of China in profound ways decades of “major non-NATO ally” status with the US failed to provide, including expanding trade, tourism, manufacturing, infrastructure expansion, and technology transfers, rapidly modernizing Thailand at a pace US proxies in the region like the Philippines will likely never experience in the near or intermediate future.
Consumer costs for cars, computers, smartphones, and all other types of consumer and industrial electronics and equipment have plummeted across nations in Asia trading with China — empowering individuals, small businesses, and large enterprises alike to do more, more quickly, and with fewer resources.
A visit to anywhere across Asia where Chinese-driven development has escaped US efforts to sabotage, stagnate, or reverse, reveals stunning progress at all levels of society, not just for a handful of billionaires.
Within China itself, government policy has focused on investing in the best interests of society even at the cost of maximizing profits. China’s network of high-speed rail lines is a perfect example of this. While the overall network turns a profit, there are entire lines that do not. These lines are maintained at a loss to contribute to the overall benefit of society and the economy in ways Western-style profit-driven market economics cannot and will not.
Chinese policies like the “Healthy China 2030” initiative seeks to invest in healthcare to deliberately extend the “health-span” of its citizens through biotechnology and active anti-aging research — mirroring the ambitions of Western-based billionaire AI optimists — but in ways Western governance and profit-driven market economics will never pursue because of the immense profits that exist for preying on and exploiting human health problems rather than permanently solving them.
Ironically, optimistic, abundance-seeking billionaires in the West cheering for a US victory in the ongoing AI race appear to have missed years of the US accusing China of “overcapacity,” which should more honestly and accurately be called abundance — abundance the US has taken active measures to try to sabotage, stagnate, and even reverse.
Wall Street and Washington See Abundance as an Obstacle, Not an Objective
Toward this end, the US has pursued geopolitical policies aimed at encircling and containing China politically, economically, and even militarily.
The US maintains tens of thousands of troops closer to China than to America’s own shores and has used its political capture, domination, and even military occupation of nations like Japan and the Philippines as a means of projecting military power both directly and by proxy against China within Chinese territory and along essential sealanes required for Chinese commerce.
US policy papers explicitly lay out plans for maritime blockades, attacking the Chinese BRI, including through military strikes, and mitigating Russia’s ability to supply energy to China across their long, shared border — all as a means of economically strangling China.
Since (and even long before) such papers were published, the US has actively executed these policies, including by reorganizing the US Marine Corps specifically into an anti-shipping force for implementing a maritime blockade in the Asia-Pacific region, by arming and backing militants both in Myanmar and Pakistan to physically attack Chinese BRI projects and to maim or kill both the Chinese engineers working on them and local security forces trying to protect them.
Regarding Russia’s long shared border with China and the immense and growing amount of energy exports crossing over into China, the US has admittedly been conducting long-range drone strikes on Russian energy production deep inside Russian territory as well as maritime drone strikes on Russian energy exports — all as part of crippling Russia’s ability to sustain its own economic stability and that of importers dependent on its energy production and exports — especially China.
Spanning multiple US presidential administrations regardless of political party affiliation, concerted efforts have been made to constrain Chinese technological development, including through import bans on Chinese technology to cripple companies like Huawei and through export bans on semiconductors and equipment used to manufacture them, both as a means of hobbling Chinese technological development overall but specifically to hinder China amid the current US-China AI race.
And much more obvious than all of these actions are the words of the US government itself — in its own 2025, “America’s AI Action Plan,” the very first page declares the US must win the AI race to, “achieve and maintain unquestioned and unchallenged global technological dominance.”
This is the very same “unchallenged global technological dominance” the US has squandered and exploited, cutting its swath of death and destruction from Latin America to Central Asia and everywhere in between throughout this 21st century alone — in stark contrast to China, which has instead chosen to cooperate, construct, and coexist with the world around it.
The US has, in both words and actions, demonstrated that it pursues AI as a means of enhancing its already demonstrated desire for domination over the planet — a desire that sees abundance for all as an obstacle rather than an objective.
China has already committed to a national and global model of abundance and is tangibly leveraging AI to enhance this model — so much so that the US has openly targeted Chinese-driven abundance as “overcapacity” that needs to be stamped out.
Western Optimism and Cognitive Bias
For Western-based billionaire optimists insisting the US must win the AI race based on US talking points about Chinese “authoritarianism” and the Chinese “surveillance state,” in between praising the advent of cameras on American university campuses for driving down crime, or eagerly awaiting upcoming Apple products like its “AI pin” that records every conversation, they demonstrate profound cognitive bias.
It is not that these optimists have operated from first principles to arrive at their conclusions objectively, but instead have applied their cognitive bias to a desired outcome that reflects them. They are Westerners; therefore, the West should “win” the AI race — even if it comes at the expense of advocating for a system that uses emerging AI technology to maintain a crumbling status quo over one that is clearly using it as the scaffolding for a highly efficient, rapidly developing society.
For those who objectively seek a future of abundance and the use of rapidly developing AI to shape it, they must align themselves with those who have been and are currently — and very deliberately — pursuing abundance now.
Investing in and supporting those who are openly and aggressively trying to vilify and stamp out abundance in the hope that — upon arriving at artificial superintelligence — their sentiments suddenly shift toward utilizing it for universal abundance rather than establishing a future of automated domination — is perhaps the greatest example of how wealth and influence do not translate into intelligence or good judgment.
For the rest of the world, it is important to understand that AI is here, is rapidly advancing, and is not going to be “paused,” “uninvented,” or waved away by denying it exists. The only question that remains is in whose hands will this tremendous power fall and what will be done with it.
If we desire a future of universal abundance over one of automated domination, we need to see how the AI race fits into the greater struggle unfolding between Wall Street and Washington’s pursuit of a unipolar world order and its war on the emerging multipolar world and how it seeks to use AI as a “force multiplier” to do so.
Only time will tell how this race ends —but experts on all sides agree that time is short and that this matter will be settled in a matter of years, not decades. If this is true, every day counts, and that the time to debate and determine the future of AI and the world it will create must begin today.
0 thoughts on “At the AI Race’s Finishing Line: A World of Abundance or Automated Dominance?”