As artificial intelligence (AI) surpasses human capability, the societies best positioned to steer superintelligence will not be the most technologically advanced but the most culturally prepared. China, with its Confucian-Daoist substrate, meets this criterion better than most.
Scaled up, state-coordinated and informed by a living tradition that values long-term collective flourishing, China, together with Confucian East Asia, is well-placed to drive the development of AI and transform its purpose.
The moment when AI surpasses human performance in nearly every cognitive and physical domain, two epochal shifts will occur almost simultaneously. As SpaceX founder Elon Musk predicted recently, compulsory human labour, both mental and manual, will become optional.
That civilizational pivot from “how” to “why” also implies a symbolic dethroning of science and technology. In their place will be questions about purpose, value and ultimate direction.
This is not just a techno-economic forecast; it is a civilizational inflection point foreseen, in strikingly prescient form, a quarter-century before ChatGPT by the little-known American futurist Lawrence H Taub in his book “The Spiritual Imperative.”
Taub’s central contention rests on three interlinking macro-historical models: age, sex, and caste. They are derived in part from Hindu cyclic philosophy but are given a linear, spiral trajectory.
In Taub’s “Caste Model,” human history unfolds through five great ages, each dominated successively by spiritual leaders, warriors, merchants, workers, and, finally, spiritual leaders once again.
In Taub’s model, we are currently in the late stage of the Worker Age – roughly from the early 20th century to the mid-21st century, an era of bureaucratic-technocratic organization, mass production and the apotheosis of scientific materialism.
Taub refers to the next age as the new Spiritual-Religious Age. Economics and science recede from the center of human concern. They will be replaced by a collective search for meaning, wisdom and direct spiritual experience.
Taub didn’t need AI to arrive at this conclusion. He foresaw an end to necessary work through automation combined with appropriate technology, renewable energy, voluntary simplicity, and a shift in culture away from the materialistic “worker-caste” worldview.
“Machines, robots and computers,” Taub wrote, “will take over most physical and mental work, while humans… will confront lives of enforced leisure.”
Yet Taub adds a geopolitical and cultural dimension that is largely absent in the contemporary AI discourse. His model holds that the so-called Worker Age reaches its global peak in a China-led Confucian East Asia – a region that is going to be the most powerful economic and organizational force on Earth for the coming decades.
East Asia, despite its frequent clashes, is a cultural-economic sphere whose devotion to work, teamwork spirit, long-term planning and technocratic competence will outpace the aging “merchant caste” oriented nations of the West. East Asia, Taub predicted, will perfect the very technologies that will make human labor redundant.
In the 21st century, the same Confucian teamwork discipline that built the miracle economies of the late 20th century will deploy superintelligent systems with a new level of rigor and scale. The more individualistic West — despite its strengths in innovation, pluralism and values debates — may struggle to match that.
The control problem
The contours of things to come are already visible. China now produces more AI research papers than any other country, and in key subfields such as computer vision and natural language processing, it is already a peer competitor to the United States.
Chinese firms have also taken the lead in applying AI for governance, manufacturing optimization. Its Confucian sisters, Japan and South Korea, are world leaders in industrial robotics and scaling foundation models tailored to East Asian languages and datasets.
When those systems reach a condition of general superiority, the “control problem” will be framed in Confucian rather than Lockean terms: not “How do we preserve individual freedom against the machine?” but “How do we ensure the machine serves the long-term flourishing of the whole?”
Taub’s insight is to realize that this framing may actually be a fortunate preparation for the deeper question. The Confucian tradition already contains a built-in telos beyond material accumulation: self-cultivation, harmony with the Way (Dao), and the moral perfectibility of both the person and society.
When work becomes optional, a civilization that has spent two millennia asking “What is a human being for?” is likely to make the transition with far greater grace. In the West, the sudden obsolescence of compulsory labor risks a crisis of meaning. In Confucian East Asia, the question of human purpose was never fully outsourced to the workplace to begin with.
The danger, of course, is its opposite: that an exhausted worker-caste elite, far from relinquishing control, tries to extend its relevance by fusing man and machine into a permanent hierarchy of augmented bureaucrats – an Orwellian stagnation dressed in neo-Confucian rhetoric.
On the latter point, cultural studies scholar and Taub expert William Kelly is more skeptical. When compulsory work ends, he argues, East Asia faces the same spiritual void as the Protestant West. Both must achieve a spiritual breakthrough from the wreckage of the excessively materialistic Worker Age. The question is who first transcends the shared impoverishment of the current age.
While a valid point, China, as a leading industrial nation, is best positioned to give shape to the technology that will lead to the post-work era. A recent report from the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI)’s Critical Technology Tracker finds that China leads in 57 out of 64 “critical technologies” in the period 2019–2023 — up from only 3 out of 64 in 2003–2007.
Those 64 technologies include areas widely regarded as “future-defining”: AI and robotics, advanced computing, advanced materials, energy, biotech, quantum and communications, space, batteries, electric vehicles, solar and renewable-energy manufacturing, battery/supply-chain infrastructure and advanced manufacturing.
Science and purpose
What then becomes of science and technology themselves? Taub is unequivocal: in the new era, they will lose their sacred status.
When an AI can produce a theory of everything – or many competing theories – faster than any human collaboration, the prestige of discovery collapses. Science continues, but as a specialized subroutine of superintelligence rather than the defining adventure of the species.
Next will be engineering, medicine and the law. The best minds of humanity will no longer compete on the machines’ terms but will be at liberty and even compelled to compete on distinctly human terms: art, ethics, mysticism, relationships and contemplation.
Historian Yuval Noah Harari, author of “Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow” (2016), has argued that advancements in AI and data science pose an existential threat to liberal humanism, the dominant modern ideology in the West that elevates individual free and human autonomy as the ultimate sources of meaning, morality and authority.
Philosopher Nick Bostrom, in his 2014 book “Superintelligence: Paths, Dangers, Strategies,” introduced the superintelligence control problem (sometimes called the “value alignment problem”).
His core warning: “If we solve the intelligence explosion first and the goal-alignment second, we are likely to get a superintelligence whose objectives are indifferent or actively hostile to human flourishing — and we will have no second chance.”
Where thinkers like Harari and Bostrom frame the AI question in terms of liberalism and alignment, Taub frames it in terms of civilizational purpose. He saw a spiritual-evolutionary route that operates independently of any particular technology.
Once the “how” has been settled by machines, what remains is the only frontier no algorithm can settle for us: the “why.”
Dark factories, bright futures
East Asia, in bringing us to that frontier first and most decisively, stands to have an outsized role in determining whether the post-work world is a new dark age of control, a playground of hedonistic distraction or the seedbed of a genuine spiritual renaissance.
Taub died in 2018, just as the deep-learning revolution was gathering irreversible momentum. He did not live to see the arrival of chatbots, nor China’s robotized “dark factories” devoid of human workers, which vindicate his post-work predictions with eerie precision.
But his larger message remains: the machines are not coming to destroy us, but to lift from humanity the historical burden that defined modernity. When they do, the central question will no longer be technical. It will be the oldest question of all: what is a meaningful life?
The civilization that asks this question first will not merely inherit the future. It will define what “human” still means once science and technology have completed the work of answering the “how.”
