The Rise of A.I., Shifting Economies, and Corporate Consciousness Will Define the Future.| Big Think

When we looked at our book, we wrote it with something in mind, which was to defy what the great philosopher Hegel said. He said, "That if there's one thing history teaches us, it's that history doesn't teach us anything. People don't learn from history." So we decided we'd try and learn from history, from China a hundred years before the common era.

But then when we finished the book, we said, "Well, there is actually something about the future." We'd like to think about three trends that are really important for corporations to think through, and in particular, how their relationship with society is going to work.

The first was the ever-increasing possibility that artificial intelligence will change the way in which labor works. How do we communicate with companies? What actually do they do? Can they do things more perfectly, or will they become less human? We started the discussion by speaking to Tim Berners-Lee. And Tim, rather surprisingly, said to me, "Well, John, the thing about artificial intelligence is that corporations are already robots. They're ready robots, so there's nothing new here. They behave robotically, and maybe they shouldn't."

So I said, "Well, I contend that they absolutely shouldn't because they are part of the human fabric of society." So that was the first thing we talked about.

The second we worried about was the change in the economic center of gravity in the world. If we go back to the first year after the common era, 1 A.D., you'd find that the center of economic gravity in the world was somewhere in the Middle East. Over the last couple of thousand years, it's moved from there to the middle of the Atlantic, and now it's moving back to somewhere in the East.

So it moves as countries become more comparatively advantaged, more educated, and things move. Therefore, values—the way in which companies work—move again. We wanted to make the point that our book is not about pure moral values; it's about practical attempts to include people into this great endeavor, which is business, which makes the world better. Because it actually makes people more prosperous; it brings people out of poverty and so forth. So we wanted to do that.

The third thing we said was that business actually doesn't have a right to be in the world, but it has to solve some of the very big problems that are facing the world: obesity and the ingestion of too much sugar; climate change; diseases—chronic diseases that exist; water shortage; pollution. The list goes on.

We gave a dozen examples of where we thought, in order to have the right to be a company, businesses should be focused on, at least in some part of their brain, solving some of these problems for the future. It just may be that artificial intelligence, the ability to think more broadly, to gain access to more data, to understand more about it, might just lead us to a better solution to some of these extraordinary problems that have been around a long time.

It's just that we now see them with greater clarity, and indeed, they are becoming more and more dangerous—climate change being a prime example of something becoming more dangerous...