I beg to differ. AI made it possible for human to pursue critical thinking. Overwhelmed by the basic facts and routine works, limited by bandwidth and 8 hours a day, we hardly have the luxury to think above and beyond. That's when you hire consulting firms to stuff the content, the ocean of information, the type of work now potentially suitable for AI.
It is time for human to move up the game and focus on the critical thinking, even only the critical thinking while the AI is still unable to perform the critical thinking. Eventually there is the hope that AI would be able to handle the critical thinking, but it remains a hope at the current state of art.
You're in a pipe dream. All the money accrued can and always will feed the ever bigger oligarchs and spreading their power around the world, effectively why the west are more like china in the question. It's already made sure systemically there will never be a "bourgeoisie" united strong enough in china, not in another 500 years. And soon not in the west either.
Well, yes, money always feeds oligarchs along with the regular business owners.
The key thing to notice is that, in realpolitik terms, an "oligarch" is only aristocracy — rather than haute bourgeoisie — if they have a collegial relationship with the state. I.e. if their interests inherently align with the state's interests (or they can personally negotiate such alignment) such that that they have no reason to act against the state.
But if you have enough oligarchs who don't have such relationships with the state — disenfranchised oligarchs — then they will inevitably plot to manipulate the petite bourgeoisie and proletariat together into organizing a revolt; and will then — critically — sit back and collectively withhold their support from the state for implementing any suppression of said revolt.
(Look at what's happening in Russia right now. You think they'd have such shitty military equipment if the oligarch owners of their defense contractors believed in Putin and wanted him to stay in power?)
Every successful "populist" revolt/revolution in political history, has had an underlying set of disenfranchised oligarchs, who could have aided in the suppression of the revolt, but instead chose to stand by (or "work to rule") and let it happen, because the revolution would inevitably put them in a better, more powerful position.
Why does every politically-stable country — whether democracy, constitutional monarchy, etc. — have a senate? Because a senate is a body made up of (representatives of) oligarchs whose interests don't inherently align with the state, where the job of everyone in the room is to negotiate a group equilibrium between state interests and industrial interests that both the state and the oligarchs can be happy-enough with that the oligarchs will stop undermining state power.
China has a legislature (the NPC), but insofar as it is only a rubber-stamp — it cannot control the Party – seats there are worthless as an "enfranchisement" for oligarchs. They want a real hand in power.
China, obviously, makes friends with oligarchs whenever it can. But certain oligarchs' power bases are just inherently misaligned with Chinese state interests — in a way that a real senate body would solve, but which cannot otherwise be resolved peacefully.
For example: why did China push both Jack Ma out of ownership of Alibaba Group, and Colin Huang out of his chairman position of Pinduoduo, at around the same time? Well, both of these companies now own petit borgeoisie wealth-creation engines — AliExpress and Temu. But Temu didn't exist yet when Huang was ousted. And AliExpress (via Alibaba Group) is majority foreign-owned, while PDD is a domestic private company (and thereby likely implicitly highly state-invested.)
My interpretation of those facts: the state wanted to replace AliExpress — a company proven to both support foreign interference and the empowerment of local petit-bourgeoisie interests (that could eventually lead to destabilization of power) — with another company the state could control indefinitely: one that seemingly serves the same market function, but with tricks (profit-margin caps, distributor-set sale prices) that mean that Temu is not an engine of wealth-creation for the middle class in practice. (It tricks you into thinking that it is, and continues that illusion for the first few months, "going easy" on new sellers to get them to quit other channels, before coming down on you.)
Ma wouldn't stand for just giving up on the forward momentum of an entire business venture, so he was ousted. Huang wasn't interested in his B2B agrobusiness company being pivoted to focus on replacing AliExpress — so he was ousted too. China's replacement board seats of Alibaba acted to cut off new investment into AliExpress; while China's replacement board seats of PDD Holdings acted to get the company going toward building Temu.
Yes, you could describe this as 'making sure systemically there will never be a "bourgeoisie" united strong enough in china'. But you can also describe it as disenfranchising some very rich people. Dumb move, tbh.
Or consider: every blockchain/cryptocurrency company in China. Again often foreign-funded, again usually highly successful — but at something that China just can't square with (enabling capital flight out of China, minimizing the state's economic hold over other oligarchs.) In a functioning/long-term-stable China, the Chinese cryptocurrency industry would form an industry body with a lobby, get that lobby represented in the senate, and then that lobby's interests would get carefully negotiated against state interests. In the China we have, these companies are just quashed... despite each shutdown generating new disenfranchised oligarchs by the dozens.
The same can be said about a cell phone, a car or electric. It's just a matter of time before the globalization and modern way of life hit everybody. But it's always subject to individual who's decided to go offgrid, one can always say No to English and happily ever after. It's a choice with hefty consequences, that's all one needs to know.
Norse people are pretty amazing when it comes to English speaking, next comes German and Dutch. It seems EU people are generally potent in multilingual. Granted English may be like a dialect to them.
Nonetheless, it's the primary reason people are called to back to office, the in person face time is valued much more than remote chat/email. It's not a coincidence all leaders favor face time, hiring is done via the process of "interview", literally asking the "view". Need more proof?
Sure you did, all animal do. Without language, human would live just fine, evidently all animal live this way, deaf people can live, can reason, can triage, may not be sophisticated but they all the underlying reality in their heads, probably gained from try and fail, experiences.
You may not have said it directly but implied, for example if we said A to B, and B to C, the model would have learned the relation and tell you A will go to C, doesn't mean all the sudden it can reason. It's all already in the language and when it has learned enough of numerous forms of A to B, B to C, the relation it's built makes it to give A to C. Yet A to C may very well be some epiphany that we have never thought about. One advantage is the model never get sloppy, it remembers everything, it may overreact/overthink hence hallucination, but it doesn't overlook things or bias like human do (until alignment of course). This is why we're often surprised by the model, but we probably knew it too jut being blind about certain things sometimes so never made the connection.
GPT's model may be limited to language based, but the vast volume of knowledge it has accessed despite language only, is way beyond any individual human can possibly acquire in a life time. That fact alone makes the GPT world model, or whatever it might be, not to be underestimated. This partially explained why we don't feel GPT's answer is not terribly off mark, even brilliant sometimes.
It is time for human to move up the game and focus on the critical thinking, even only the critical thinking while the AI is still unable to perform the critical thinking. Eventually there is the hope that AI would be able to handle the critical thinking, but it remains a hope at the current state of art.