A Savage Servility: The Scourge of Zero-Sum Thinking

America faces one of those rare, historic moments when government, business, schools, and families could be working together to meet a truly generational challenge: winning the AI race. So far, we’re blowing it.

―Jim VandeHei, CEO, Axios

The above quote comes from an important new piece by Axios CEO Jim VandeHei in The Wall Street Journal. I’d add to it by noting that on our 250^th anniversary, the United States has been captured by too much zero-sum thinking—technologically, economically, and geopolitically. Today’s American mindset tends toward a limited, linear view of the world that also happens to inform the narrative around everything from the job market to the contact center ecosystem, the BPO space, and beyond.

We need an attitude adjustment.

"Fairly Depressed"

Americans are being bombarded with the relentless linear musings of some big-name figures in tech and finance insisting we should be afraid, very afraid, as if the great AI machine is about to consume the American workplace instead of energizing it. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei tells us that up to half of all entry-level white-collar jobs will dissolve within the next five years. Microsoft AI chief executive Mustafa Suleyman says that most white-collar work will be fully automated by an AI within the next 12 to 18 months. Citadel CEO Ken Griffin adds that after watching AI agents autonomously complete work in days rather than the months it would take highly-compensated finance PhDs, he was “fairly depressed.”

For such prognosticators, mass unemployment looms. “Confidence in the labor market,” insists a recent article in The New York Times, “has already collapsed, including among highly educated people: Just one-fifth of college-educated workers said now was a good time to find a quality job, according to recent Gallup polling.”

To his credit, Jim VandeHei of Axios suggests we take a step back—“Right now, AI companies are in an investment phase” but it’s also important to emphasize there is “little evidence of substantial job loss wholly attributable to AI.” Or as IBM CEO Arvind Krishna puts it about his company’s ongoing reinvention, “If people lose their jobs as a result, I get to redeploy them, to do something else of more value.”

The Relational Sector

Alas, during this time of disruption, things are not always what they seem. “The AI leaders,” says Ezra Klein of The New York Times, “might understand neural nets better than they understand labor markets—or they might have bought too deeply into their own marketing materials.” Who can forget when Emad Mostaque, co-founder of Stability AI, went on Peter Diamandis’ “Moonshots” podcast last year and proclaimed that AI would more or less eliminate the BPO industry in the Philippines by the end of 2025?

To the contrary, a new report from Google researchers finds that so far, AI is mainly being used as an aid to workers. “It is a finding that, if it holds true as AI continues to develop, could point to a future where the demand for highly skilled workers is accentuated rather than diminished.” Indeed, “Automation can put people out of work, but collaborative technologies leverage workers’ expertise, making them even more valuable.“

It’s why big companies are starting to hire again, defying predictions of an AI wipeout. More human beings are needed to work alongside AI. “Part of the change in hiring also reflects a recalibration among employers about what AI can do, said Sarah Franklin, CEO of the human-resources platform Lattice. Many companies stopped hiring entry-level employees, thinking AI agents could pick up the slack. They have since realized that humans are necessary to work alongside AI.” According to a new Forrester survey, 55 percent of employers regret having made tech-driven staff cuts and “half of AI-attributed layoffs [will] be quietly reversed.”

Nobody denies the disruption that’s afoot, but as we race along the exponential curve, we should be preparing for the new rather than regretting the loss of the old. Erik Brynjolfsson, director of Stanford University’s Digital Economy Lab, puts it well. “There’s going to be millions of jobs destroyed, millions of jobs created,” he says. “That’s going to be very difficult. Even if new jobs are created, they’re not the same jobs.” Ezra Klein presses on that idea. “People are looking at the economy as it exists and asking which tasks AI can do,” he points out, “they should be asking which jobs people won’t want AI doing, or which services AI will make us want more of.” In other words—

Here is a poetic finding from econometrics: As the rich get richer, they want more from other humans, not less. They ‘shift their spending toward goods and services where the human element, the experience or the social meaning matters more’…. They seek out clothing with a story, food with a provenance, doctors who make house calls, therapists who make them feel seen, tutors who know their children and personal trainers who work around their injuries. This… is ‘the relational sector’ of the economy, and it will explode. Instead of so many human beings working with computers, they will work with other human beings.’

BPO’s Nonlinear Future

The concept of a relational sector was on my mind during TP’s “Immersive Experience 2026” event in Scottsdale, Arizona this May. During one late night conversation, a group of us discussed that day’s sessions and the future of the data-driven “Intelligent Enterprise.” Interestingly, I’d just recently read Carl Jung’s Memories, Dreams, Reflections and as the conversation developed it occurred to me that the relational economy and the intelligence explosion it represents bears a weird resemblance to Jung’s notion of synchronicity in the sense that both spark meaningful connections through patterns that are not purely linear or mechanistic (chance connections, emotional resonance, unexpected encounters, creative sparks, serendipitous insights, trust formation).

In other words, I wondered, what if the AI Revolution together with the ongoing process of digitilization features a similar pattern as Jung’s notions of synchronicity? Under this scenario, as the world of massive interconnection expands, “acausal” connections proliferate (see systems theory, specifically, “complex,” "dynamic,” or “active” systems). This framing hints at something the “AI replaces labor” (zero-sum) analyses miss―as interconnected systems become more complex, interactions grow faster than automation can manage. Or as mentioned during one panel at the TP event, “Intelligent nudges… move moments forward” at an accelerating rate.

Put another way, in highly interconnected adaptive systems, increasing complexity tends to generate more feedback loops, more trust requirements, more coordination needs, more exceptions, more “edge cases” where the Intelligent Enterprise is essential. And as systems become more interconnected, more nonlinear relationships emerge.

Complexity creates more interfaces, not less. Systems theory suggests new layers of complexity generate new categories of human interaction. From a Jungian/synchronicity perspective, this seems almost inevitable―the denser the web of interconnection, the more consequential the unexpected human encounters should be.

The Human-AI Feedback Loop

Truly, what better sector is there to glimpse the possibilities of our nonlinear, multi-nodal future than the BPO space? At the TP event, executives Jojo Pacis and Himadri Sarkar described an operating model that is an orchestrated fabric of AI and human beings. Ideally, it's a computing flywheel, a “Human-AI feedback loop” within which “each pillar of the operating model makes the next one better."

But executive Miranda Collard also emphasized that redesigning operations is not about wrapping AI around existing infrastructure. AI must be embedded into operations in such a way as to generate and sustain the feedback dynamic. It was a reminder of what IBM CEO Arvind Krishna believes. “To enable AI to scale across the enterprise,” he says,” processes need to be redesigned end-to-end.” Successfully deploying AI applications means that business processes need to be recalibrated. Operating models change in turn.

Above all, TP’s new CEO Jorge Amar emphasized moving from “efficient AI” to “opportunity AI.” This too is nonlinear thinking rather than zero-sum. Creativity and adaptability should be encouraged. As such, change management will be key in a world where tech races ahead exponentially and operations order the confoundingly complex.

A Changing Narrative

It should be said that our Chaotic Now also happens to feature frequently savage financial markets. As Peter Ryan and Jim Farnsworth discussed on a recent CX Files podcast, the economics of AI are less clear than that which came before, and over the years the share prices of many publicly traded BPO stocks have fallen as a result. Confusion abounds. But one thing is becoming clear—in the new world emerging, BPOs must position and deliver customer outcomes through the right combination of AI, automation, analytics, and human expertise. As an AI-generated summary of the podcast provided by Mark Hillary puts it, “The opportunity is therefore not simply to automate existing outsourced work. It is to help enterprises redesign their entire customer operation—and potentially take responsibility for the smaller, more specialised human workforce that remains after automation.”

This is particularly true in light of the rapid development of agentic AI. The AI Journal puts it this way―“A common misconception is that agentic AI’s primary value lies in total autonomy. While autonomous execution is a powerful goal, the immediate enterprise benefit is the drastic reduction of operational friction across complex, human-in-the-loop processes…. The technology handles the messy coordination layer of business, transforming employees from manual data coordinators into high-value decision-makers.”

The narrative is shifting. BPO as we long knew it is morphing into something altogether new. Adaptation and reinvention will be everything. We’d do well to remember what Ralph Waldo Emerson said when encouraging Americans to keep innovating. “A foolish consistency,” said the sage from Concord, “is the hobgoblin of little minds.”

Workforce Redesign in the Contact Center

Clearly, reinvention is accelerating across the contact center ecosystem. According to a recent Gartner survey, “Among service and support leaders, 85% are expanding human agent responsibilities…. Meanwhile, 31% have implemented or are planning layoffs due to AI through the first quarter of 2027.” As Kathy Ross, VP analyst in Gartner customer service and support practice, notes, “They are far more likely to be pursuing workforce redesign rather than role elimination.” 

Yet the American zero-sum storyline persists with all the drama of a scene from The Last of the Mohicans. Behold The Los Angeles Times penning a storyline about an awful massacre where “Thousands of Customer Service Workers Face the Ax as AI Takes Over.” Apparently, savages are storming across the frontier and “AI’s decimation of call center jobs has begun.” Alas, “Companies including the Commonwealth Bank of Australia, Microsoft Corp., Uber Technologies Inc. and Hyatt Hotels Corp. are using automated chat and phone systems to handle work that previously required humans,” says the Times, before wielding more dramatic language to hammer the point home—“In some cases, they’ve already wiped-out sizable chunks of their customer service operations, together representing thousands of workers.”

Speaking of Uber, another recent headline insists that, “Uber Cuts 10% of Customer Service Team as it Embraces AI.” Of course it’s a more complicated story than one might initially assume. Gartner’s Kathy Ross points out that, “This is part of a broader pattern. We often see job reductions reported as driven by AI, when the story is more nuanced.” Uber is moving to simplify its organization so as to better utilize AI, and it knows it cannot scale frontier technology on top of fragmented processes. As Kathy Ross says, “It’s important to decouple Uber’s headcount reduction and current AI success: This seems more like a business restructuring decision to set themselves up for future AI success. Uber is not alone in their need to get ready.”

American Reinvention: Whipsawed by Complexity

Clearly, now is the time to adapt and iterate the Experience Economy forward. And as noted above (and as I described recently in “The Scramble to Transform: from BPO to DefenseTech),” the accelerating process of transformation that’s spreading across the American economy during the AI buildout can often be disorienting in its complexity.

Consider the case of IBM and its pursuit of enterprise-wide AI deployment for clients. CEO Arvind Krishna points out that organizational transformation is about much more than simply adopting new technology. It requires deep collaboration between business and technology teams. It requires a fundamental restructuring of business workflows and demands a complete recalibration of business processes across the firm.

As solutions are built and deployed, rigorous AI governance should integrate things like bias testing, transparency, and explainability so that they perform ethically and within enterprise guidelines. “Consequently,” points out The AI Journal, “organizations are increasingly prioritizing agentic AI implementation services alongside platform selection. Success depends on understanding business processes, identifying automation opportunities, establishing governance frameworks, integrating systems, and continuously optimizing workflows after deployment.” In the words of one IBM insurance client, “Only by connecting such end-to-end workflows can a company streamline operations, eliminate bottlenecks, and see the full realization of AI investments.”

According to Krishna, “In the next year or two, the enterprise world will sort into two camps: companies where AI runs their business, and companies where AI is still a project.” The line between those companies that make broader use of AI and those that don’t won’t simply come down to technology. “It will be their operating model.”

Value is shifting to orchestration and data layers, which requires modernized data pipelines. As such, IBM’s platform streams data continuously between databases, data lakes, and AI systems. Krishna sees IBM as a deliverer of democratized tech that improves how companies run and governments operate. A massive heterogeneous mix of open-weight models, some from places like China, will help connect the physical and digital worlds.

Or as The AI Journal puts it, “The most successful organizations are moving beyond technical vanity metrics to focus on hard operational performance. They measure what really moves the needle, like reductions in manual effort, improvements in cycle times, exponential gains in employee productivity, and measurable spikes in customer satisfaction. Ultimately, they evaluate AI by a single, unyielding metric: total process efficiency.”

And yet, there’s no avoiding the whims of today’s financial markets. IBM’s stock has been on a wild ride. In June, IBM shares hit an all-time high over $330, but on July 14, the stock suddenly lost 25% of its value, its worst decline on record. “Even as IBM helps its customers adapt to the AI age,” noted The Wall Street Journal, “it was caught flat-footed by it.” The Chaotic Now, disorienting indeed. But what of it? Volatility is the cost of admission to today's intelligence explosion.

From Orchestrated BPO… to Open-Source AI

But while leaders such as Arvind Krishna at IBM embrace the possibilities of open-weight AI models, the specter of China looms. The American mind reels (see what I did there?). As if the AI Revolution weren’t disorienting enough, the U.S. appears to have been caught off guard in the AI race. For Axios’s Jim VandeHei, “The awesome technological advances of world-leading American engineers at Anthropic, OpenAI and elsewhere, could be zipping the country further ahead of China. Instead, it’s locked in a panicked and confused paralysis across government, business, campuses, and the workforce.”

China, on the other hand, is demonstrating strategic depth. It sees open-sourced AI as a force to animate the economy and its workers. As such, China’s “War of 100 Models” plays out across a vast open-sourced plain. Last month, Beijing-based Zhipu AI’s released its GLM-5.2 model. Soon enough, “software developers and start-ups in Silicon Valley quickly adopted the model, largely because it was much cheaper than the leading American systems. It arrived just as U.S. businesses realized they had to find ways to cut down their AI spending.”

On July 9, Junjie Yan, founder and CEO of Chinese AI developer MiniMax, announced he will forgo his salary until the company achieves artificial general intelligence (AGI). He also promised to allocate some of his personal shares toward employee incentives and said he will use 1% of his share holdings to create a fund for supporting open-source communities and the AI ecosystem.

And then in mid-July came the release of Moonshot AI’s Kimi K3 model, which is "sending shockwaves through the global AI industry because of its frontier-level coding capabilities on some benchmarks." Kimi K3 “accelerates the momentum of China’s open-source AI models, which are expanding rapidly by offering increasingly strong performance at much lower prices compared to U.S. proprietary models from Anthropic and OpenAI.”

Days later, Alibaba Group unveiled a preview version of its latest and most powerful model, Qwen3.8 Max, claiming its performance is comparable to that of top U.S. models. “Alibaba is changing its strategy with the new model release. Previously, it always offered the largest, most powerful Max versions of its LLMs—such as Qwen3 Max, Qwen3.5 Max and Qwen3.7 Max—as proprietary models, while open-sourcing many other smaller versions. But this time, the company is open-sourcing Qwen3.8 Max, in a move that could further intensify the competition between U.S. frontier ones and their increasingly capable Chinese open-source alternatives.”

Tim Sweeney, the founder of Epic Games looks at all of this and offers an observation—“This emerging industry is doing what software companies are supposed to do: compete and improve products rapidly. My view is, we should treat this as normal human progress and avoid moral, regulatory, and geopolitical panics over AI.”

Geopolitical Panic

Unfortunately, America’s current zero-sum mindset is producing the geopolitical panic Sweeney cautions against. As Axios notes, “The release of Kimi K3 by Beijing-based Moonshot AI has triggered the most intense bout of AI panic since DeepSeek rattled financial markets in January 2025.” According to The Information, one former Trump official says there is “confusion and incoherence” in the administration around the topic of open-source AI. The Americans appear to be dropping the ball on the kind of resourcefulness and reinvention the AI Revolution demands.

The baffled Americans are running the AI race as if through a perplexing hall of mirrors. Even The New York Times Editorial Board seems panicked. ”At a time of national self-doubt, Americans can feel pride about our world-leading semiconductors,” the Board insists, even as it calls for more export controls against China. “Today,” says a student at Yale Law School living in a zero-sum Manichean world, “China is winning a vital soft-power competition by providing transformative AI to the world…. This is a battle for the world’s mind, and the United States must win it.”

Enter Nvidia’s Jensen Huang to urge calm. Huang makes the case that Wall Street and Washington are misunderstanding the implications of what Moonshot, DeepSeek, Zhipu AI, and Alibaba are doing. The Americans have everything exactly wrong. "The market misunderstood the impact of DeepSeek the first time,” says Huang. And Wall Street has "misunderstood the impact of Kimi again this time.” For Huang, cheaper, open models will bring AI to more people and businesses, increasing demand for the chips, data centers and computing power Nvidia sells. Open models expand the market. "Free AI should be great for hardware," he said. "Free AI should be great for chips. Free AI should be great for data centers."

This is the kind of exponential thinking most appropriate for today’s kaleidoscopic, multi-nodal world order. It’s not unrelated to the point being raised in the contact center realm by Patrick Dennis, the CEO at Avaya. “When you look at the macro data,” says Dennis, “and tell the market that lowering unit costs doesn’t shrink an industry, but actually expands the aggregate (contact center) market from $330B today to $580B by 2030, leaders pay attention. Contrarian I know but it is what we see on the ground.” There is a universe of latent demand. As Dennis says, “Cheap, low-latency AI interactions allow enterprises to open touchpoints they used to intentionally deflect. You unlock a massive backlog of unserved customer need.”

The Big Picture: America’s Geopolitical Zero-Sum Thinking

Alas, however, Americans keep being bombarded with warnings that the pie of possibility is limited and we must fight to seize what we can, from AI to natural resources. Our zero-sum American mindset is locked and loaded, from the Chip War to an ongoing Trade War to the Iran War. No wonder a new Pew Research Center survey points out that, “Global opinion of the United States had already been suffering a steady decline over recent years…. But this year’s survey shows a precipitous drop-off.” The poll found that China was favored over the United States in 25 out of 36 countries. “The result reflects, in part, a concerted effort by China to expand its soft power, with cultural and economic influence campaigns in Africa, the Americas, and beyond.”

Through the art of diplomacy, China appears to be showcasing a strategic depth the United States lacks. Recently in Shanghai, the Chinese government-hosted a “World Artificial Intelligence Conference” where Xi Jinping called for “open-source and open collaboration” in global AI development. “We should encourage inclusiveness and promote mutual learning among civilizations,” Xi said, adding that countries should work together “to build a just and equitable global AI governance system.” For Xi, “Artificial Intelligence should be a trustworthy tool for humanity.” Xi is leading a global open-source revolution.

For reporter Cade Metz of The New York Times, “It was a remarkable moment in which a world leader appeared to be taking a side in a decades-long tech industry debate.” One chief executive of an AI company puzzled over what’s happening—“The most authoritarian government is producing the most egalitarian models, and what should be the most democratic government is breeding companies that are the most authoritarian.”

Indeed, American incoherance starts at the top, where there’s a clear lack of coordination on AI policy, which is fostering disagreements among officials over how to divvy up AI policymaking. ”Inside the White House… turf battles, clashing views, staff turnover and hollowed-out offices have contributed to a chaotic environment for policymaking on AI, according to people close to the administration, former officials, policy experts and lobbyists.” From AI to the situation in Iran, the White House appears to have no coherent theory of victory or even what “victory” means. The U.S. resembles a disorganized firm with no responsible operating model or theory of governance. There is no vision.

Resisting a Multi-nodal World Order

Sadly, the Cautionary Tale I warned about in the Epilogue to The Widening Turn has come to pass, at least in part; escalation in the Iran War is now compounding the escalation in the Ukraine War. The United States persists in going abroad to slay monsters. But if we’re honest, we’ve been on this linear march for some time, from the plains of Iraq, Libya, and Syria, to the mountains of Afghanistan and beyond. “The New Silk Roads” continue to beguile the American mind.

As Christopher Caldwell put it recently in The New York Times, these “anachronistic military adventures reflect the musical-chairs logic of the moment,” wherein we’re engaged in “a game of geostrategic musical chairs and the music is about to stop.” Within this zero-sum logic, it’s our last chance to reshape things “in America’s favor.” The Americans persist in trying to ram through one-off, zero-sum “deals” in U.S. foreign policy rather than thinking spherically and pursuing the hard work of long-term strategic agreements that build trust as well as the wealth of nations.

In fact, these days, we can’t even seem to get a map of Africa right at a global conference in Brazil. Who’s to blame? AI? The State Department? Who knows.

Either way, while the U.S. wages war on multipolarism by attempting to contain any technological, military, and economic rivals, China advocates for a multipolar world. China pursues the War of 100 Models in AI with a clear logic of multi-nodal victory while the United States pursues another kinetic war lacking any such logic.

A Savage Servility

As America loses itself charging across the New Silk Roads, issues metastasize back home. “The problems that could have been anticipated two years ago,” says Jim VandeHei of Axios, “are now arriving in real time: data center backlash, energy strain, some workforce dislocation, cybersecurity vulnerabilities, the early contours of biosecurity risk. Dealing with them reactively is harder, more expensive, and more politically toxic than dealing with them proactively would have been and will be. But most of the playbook… is still executable.”

In order to dive deeper into VandeHei’s concerns, I recently headed to the historic Shaw neighborhood of Washington, D.C. for an event at Axios House called “Building America’s Competitive Advantage.” I came away even more convinced that we need to embrace a non-linear, spherical view of the world that rejects zero-sum thinking. And a more responsible state must steer the American experiment forward by bringing us together rather than tearing us apart. Or as Jim VandeHei puts it, “It’s easy to blame tech companies or politics for our blurry vision. But arguably the fault lies more in our collective imagination and our shared inability to think of societywide issues and efforts.” That’s exactly right.

Something else struck me while visiting Axios House. The Shaw neighborhood brought to mind that neighborhood’s namesake, the American Civil War officer Robert Gould Shaw, which in turn reminded me of American poet Robert Lowell’s “For the Union Dead,” a seminal 1964 poem that features Colonel Shaw and describes the rapid technological, commercial, and societal changes impacting the United States in the Sixties. YouTube features a particularly poignant version read by Lowell himself and set to the music of Philip Glass.

In this strange poem, Lowell watches as the forces of capital in the form of “yellow dinosaur steamshovels” dig up the Boston Common for the sake of a new “underworld garage” amidst urban renewal. The earthquake of change rattles the foundations of the State House on Beacon Hill and, just across the street, the famous monument to Colonel Shaw and the men of the 54^th Massachusetts Regiment.

When Axios’ Jim VandeHei writes that in 2026, “Society has slowly surrendered… as it has retreated into tribes, bubbles, and screens,” he’s echoing Lowell’s prescient poem, in which confused modern day Bostonians move about as if trapped inside a giant tank of surrendered ideals and small thinking. It’s a place where anxious people drift through life like apprehensive fish. Lowell longs to burst the bubble. He recalls childhood visits to the South Boston Aquarium, where “my nose crawled like a snail on the glass; my hand tingled/ to burst the bubbles/ drifting from the noses of the cowed, compliant fish.”

It’s a poem of contrasts. The monument to the abolitionist Colonel Shaw and his men evokes a more heroic age, when a sense of noblesse oblige drove the 54^th regiment to sacrifice everything for the Republic. A century later, Lowell sees a directionless America that has abandoned its pursuit of the public good—ideals have given way to a kind of anomie inside a zero-sum, increasingly automated ecosystem. “Everywhere,/ giant finned cars nose forward like fish;/ a savage servility/ slides by on grease.”

America’s Potential: A Vast Imaginarium

In 2026, we have an historic opportunity to replace Robert Lowell’s abandoned wreck of an Aquarium in “For the Union Dead” with a vast, innovative “Imaginarium” as proposed by economist Edmund Phelps. In his 2013 book, Mass Flourishing, Phelps calls for an “Economics of Creativity and Innovation,” which is “an entirely new way to think about economics.” Phelps argued that periods of extraordinary economic growth, “cannot be explained by monetary or fiscal policy, scientific discovery, entrepreneurship, or any of the standard categories of economic research. Instead, exceptional growth stems from the willingness of the whole of society to adopt innovation, take risks, and embrace uncertainty.” That's the kind of attitude adjustment we need.

It’s an economy animated by a deep desire to imagine and create, to drive forward and change things. It’s fueled by idealism. This is the societywide effort and enthusiasm Axios’ Jim VandeHei longs for. Its public spiritedness would burst the bubble of Silicon Valley elitism. Phelps is an example of a thinker offering “guidance on how to throw off the shackles of stale thinking.” As Phelps himself puts it—

A modern economy turns all sorts of people into ‘idea-men.’ It is a vast Imaginarium—a space for imagining new products and methods, imaging how they might be made, imagining how they might be used. Its innovation process draws on human capabilities not utilized by a pre-modern economy. This view is radically different from Schumpeter’s 1912 thesis that innovation draws on the capacities of entrepreneurs to organize the projects made possible by outside discoveries.

Truly, there’s an opportunity to lift the entire country to new levels of prosperity. A year ago, in “Our Multi-nodal Hall of Mirrors,” I proposed that we’re living in a kaleidoscopic multi-nodal world order, an increasingly networked world featuring intriguing partnerships and alliances. A multi-nodal world is a world of opportunity through collaboration, both geopolitically and between firms. Its vision is wide, not zero-sum. Its logic is spherical, not flat earth. It envisions an expanding opportunity set rather than a limited one.

American Odysseus

As we take on AI’s generational challenge, Christopher Nolan’s new film “The Odyssey” is well timed. The United States should, like Odysseus, return home from overseas adventures, better manage the decades-long tides of financialization that have swamped the working and middle class, and seize control of a process of accelerating change with strategic vision. “Starting next year,” says Jim VandeHei of Axios, “AI companies in the U.S. will spend roughly the same in one year as the Manhattan Project, the Apollo moon landings, the Interstate Highway System and the Human Genome Project combined—about $1 trillion.”

Or listen to Eric Schmidt and Selina Xu, who insist that, “This is our century’s biggest survival challenge”—

The real challenge, then, isn’t whether the United States or China will build an overwhelming, insurmountable advantage over the other. It’s whether either can figure out how to realize the benefits of AI without ripping apart its social fabric…. But there is still no clear consensus on how the United States should move forward. We know big disruptions are coming, and they’re coming fast as AI capabilities advance faster than policy response. We need bigger ideas to fix what may soon break.

Now is the time to steer that ongoing process with wisdom and foresight. Having returned home, the American state needs to reclaim its spot at the table and make sense of the savage servility of a society that’s just sliding by, from the cost of housing to the cost of healthcare.

Constructing America’s City on a Hill is still possible. To heal the social fabric we need a more coherent macroeconomic system that, while recognizing the innovative genius of the United States, guides the structural models, business decisions, and operational ethics of corporations reinventing themselves during the AI Revolution. Somehow, Silicon Valley will need to be compelled to align its corporate policies, service delivery, and platform upgrades with the general welfare of American society. Otherwise, the American experiment risks coming apart. Deepening social divisions cannot be ignored much longer.

Our Moonshot

Ultimately, we should frame today’s challenge as another moonshot. “Think,” adds Jim VandeHei, “of our mobilization after the Great Depression and in World War II. Or the Marshall Plan to rebuild after. Or those fleeting months post Sept. 11. This could lead to a shared national project with a clearly defined goal (win), a clear competitor to beat (China) and a clear benefit to the country if we win and spread the benefit broadly (shared prosperity).”

The one point I’d push back on is the need to beat China. I’d suggest that renewed diplomatic engagement and increased collaboration would offer a much better way forward for America and the world. As Nvidia’s Jensen Huang points out, "The world doesn’t realize how dependent the AI industry is on brilliant Chinese students and scientists. Around 50% of the world’s AI researchers are from China. The world is unaware of how deeply dependent the United States and China are on each other. The idea that the United States can decouple from China is flawed."

America’s Widening Turn into the future can be an expansive sweep that features the rise of a vast Imaginarium of innovative products and services across a more collaborative world. We can make the United States into a place that would have made Robert Lowell proud. The alternative is a head-on, savage collision with the implacable East. Indeed, Lowell’s invocation of Hiroshima in “For the Union Dead” is more relevant than ever. On January 27, 2026, the Doomsday Clock was set at 85 minutes to midnight, the closest the Clock has ever been to midnight in its history.

Time grows short. Spherical thinkers, unite.

Image credit: Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Gould_Shaw_Memorial)