Emerging Superpower Quotes

For when a nation founded on the belief in racial hierarchy truly rejects that belief then and only then will we have discovered a new world. That is our destiny. To make it manifest, we must challenge ourselves to live our lives in solidarity across color, origin, and class. We must demand changes to the rules in order to disrupt the very notion that those who have more money are worth more in our democracy and our economy. Since this country’s founding, we have not allowed our diversity to be our superpower and the result is that the United States is not more than the sum of its disparate parts. But it could be. And if it were, all of us would prosper. In short, we must emerge from this crisis in our republic with a new birth of freedom. Rooted in the knowledge that we are so much more, when the we in we the people is not some of us, but all of us. We are greater than and greater for the sum of us.

Of the hundreds of companies pouring resources into AI research, let’s return to the seven that have emerged as the new giants of corporate AI research—Google, Facebook, Amazon, Microsoft, Baidu, Alibaba, and Tencent.

I was told—by the same people who had long assured me of China’s interest in only a modest leadership role within an emerging multipolar world—that the Communist Party is realizing its long-term goal of restoring China to its “proper” place in the world. In effect, they were telling me that they had deceived me and the American government. With perhaps a hint of understated pride, they were revealing the most systematic, significant, and dangerous intelligence failure in American history. And because we have no idea the Marathon is even under way, America is losing.

China today has the economy of a twenty-first-century economic superpower with a political regime little changed since the 1950s. Is this slow evolution in political institutions down to the concentration or the dispersion of power?

CHINA SYNDROME China is great. China is BIG. China is FUN. And it's hugely frustrating to know that even if I dedicated the rest of my life to the project, I'd never see all of it. There's little question in my mind that as China continues to emerge as an economic superpower, and as we find ourselves increasingly dependent on its manufacturing—and its credit line—that it will eventually pretty much rule the world. To which I say, "Welcome to our future masters!" With China as our landlord, we will, at least, be eating a hell of a lot better.

For one thousand years, the peoples of Europe had taken for granted that whatever the fluctuations in the balance of power, its constituent elements resided in Europe. The world of the emerging Cold War sought its balances in the conduct and armament of two superpowers: the United States across the Atlantic and the Soviet Union at the geographic fringes of Europe.

I was among those encouraged to visit China to witness the emergence of “democratic” elections in a village near the industrial town of Dongguan. While visiting, I had a chance to talk in Mandarin with the candidates and see how the elections actually worked. The unwritten rules of the game soon became clear: the candidates were allowed no public assemblies, no television ads, and no campaign posters. They were not allowed to criticize any policy implemented by the Communist Party, nor were they free to criticize their opponents on any issue.

The enthusiastic response to the growing interest in quantum computing is exemplified by Shraddha Aangiras, a 12th grade student who founded Quetzal, an e-learning company aimed at making quantum computing accessible across India. Aangiras is dedicated to educating high school and undergraduate students, thereby contributing to India’s national quantum mission and its goal of becoming a leader in quantum computing. Her initiative simplifies the complex subject for younger students, driven by her ambition for India to emerge as a quantum computing superpower. Her goal, “I want India to become a superpower in quantum computing.

The Germans were eventually beaten only when the liberal countries allied themselves with the Soviet Union, which bore the brunt of the conflict and paid a much higher price: 25 million Soviet citizens died in the war, compared to half a million Britons and half a million Americans. Much of the credit for defeating Nazism should be given to communism. And at least in the short term, communism was also the great beneficiary of the war. The Soviet Union entered the war as an isolated communist pariah. It emerged as one of the two global superpowers, and the leader of an expanding international bloc. By 1949 eastern Europe became a Soviet satellite, the Chinese Communist Party won the Chinese Civil War, and the United States was gripped by anti-communist hysteria. Revolutionary and anti-colonial movements throughout the world looked longingly towards Moscow and Beijing, while liberalism became identified with the racist European empires. As these empires collapsed, they were usually replaced by either military dictatorships or socialist regimes, not liberal democracies. In 1956 the Soviet premier, Nikita Khrushchev, confidently told the liberal West that ‘Whether you like it or not, history is on our side. We will bury you!

The US traded its manufacturing sector’s health for its entertainment industry, hoping that Police Academy sequels could take the place of the rustbelt. The US bet wrong. But like a losing gambler who keeps on doubling down, the US doesn’t know when to quit. It keeps meeting with its entertainment giants, asking how US foreign and domestic policy can preserve its business-model. Criminalize 70 million American file-sharers? Check. Turn the world’s copyright laws upside down? Check. Cream the IT industry by criminalizing attempted infringement? Check. It’ll never work. It can never work. There will always be an entertainment industry, but not one based on excluding access to published digital works. Once it’s in the world, it’ll be copied. This is why I give away digital copies of my books and make money on the printed editions: I’m not going to stop people from copying the electronic editions, so I might as well treat them as an enticement to buy the printed objects. But there is an information economy. You don’t even need a computer to participate. My barber, an avowed technophobe who rebuilds antique motorcycles and doesn’t own a PC, benefited from the information economy when I found him by googling for barbershops in my neighborhood. Teachers benefit from the information economy when they share lesson plans with their colleagues around the world by email. Doctors benefit from the information economy when they move their patient files to efficient digital formats. Insurance companies benefit from the information economy through better access to fresh data used in the preparation of actuarial tables. Marinas benefit from the information economy when office-slaves look up the weekend’s weather online and decide to skip out on Friday for a weekend’s sailing. Families of migrant workers benefit from the information economy when their sons and daughters wire cash home from a convenience store Western Union terminal. This stuff generates wealth for those who practice it. It enriches the country and improves our lives. And it can peacefully co-exist with movies, music and microcode, but not if Hollywood gets to call the shots. Where IT managers are expected to police their networks and systems for unauthorized copying – no matter what that does to productivity – they cannot co-exist. Where our operating systems are rendered inoperable by “copy protection,” they cannot co-exist. Where our educational institutions are turned into conscript enforcers for the record industry, they cannot co-exist. The information economy is all around us. The countries that embrace it will emerge as global economic superpowers. The countries that stubbornly hold to the simplistic idea that the information economy is about selling information will end up at the bottom of the pile. What country do you want to live in?

Chinese and American companies have already kick-started this process, leaping out to massive leads over the rest of the world. Canada, the United Kingdom, France, and a few other countries play host to top-notch talent and research labs, but they often lack the other ingredients needed to become true AI superpowers: a large base of users and a vibrant entrepreneurial and venture-capital ecosystem. Other than London’s DeepMind, we have yet to see groundbreaking AI companies emerge from these countries. All of the seven AI giants and an overwhelming portion of the best AI engineers are already concentrated in the United States and China. They are building huge stores of data that are feeding into a variety of different product verticals, such as self-driving cars, language translation, autonomous drones, facial recognition, natural-language processing, and much more. The more data these companies accumulate, the harder it will be for companies in any other countries to ever compete.

In his memoirs of the late 1940s and 50s, published after his death following the famous ‘umbrella assassination’ in London in 1978, the Bulgarian dissident writer Georgi Markov told a story that is emblematic of the postwar period – not only in his own country, but in Europe as a whole. It involved a conversation between one of his friends, who had been arrested for challenging a Communist official who had jumped the bread queue, and an officer of the Bulgarian Communist militia: ‘And now tell me who your enemies are?’ the militia chief demanded. K. thought for a while and replied: ‘I don’t really know, I don’t think I have any enemies.’ ‘No enemies!’ The chief raised his voice. ‘Do you mean to say that you hate nobody and nobody hates you?’ ‘As far as I know, nobody.’ ‘You are lying,’ shouted the Lieutenant-Colonel suddenly, rising from his chair. ‘What kind of a man are you not to have any enemies? You clearly do not belong to our youth, you cannot be one of our citizens, if you have no enemies! … And if you really do not know how to hate, we shall teach you! We shall teach you very quickly!’1 In a sense, the militia chief in this story is right – it was virtually impossible to emerge from the Second World War without enemies. There can hardly be a better demonstration than this of the moral and human legacy of the war. After the desolation of entire regions; after the butchery of over 35 million people; after countless massacres in the name of nationality, race, religion, class or personal prejudice, virtually every person on the continent had suffered some kind of loss or injustice. Even countries which had seen little direct fighting, such as Bulgaria, had been subject to political turmoil, violent squabbles with their neighbours, coercion from the Nazis and eventually invasion by one of the world’s new superpowers. Amidst all these events, to hate one’s rivals had become entirely natural. Indeed, the leaders and propagandists of all sides had spent six long years promoting hatred as an essential weapon in the quest for victory. By the time this Bulgarian militia chief was terrorizing young students at Sofia University, hatred was no longer a mere by-product of the war – in the Communist mindset it had been elevated to a duty.

These world-class performers don’t have superpowers. The rules they’ve crafted for themselves allow the bending of reality to such an extent that it may seem that way, but they’ve learned how to do this, and so can you. These “rules” are often uncommon habits and bigger questions. In a surprising number of cases, the power is in the absurd. The more absurd, the more “impossible” the question, the more profound the answers. Take, for instance, a question that serial billionaire Peter Thiel likes to ask himself and others: “If you have a 10-year plan of how to get [somewhere], you should ask: Why can’t you do this in 6 months?” For purposes of illustration here, I might reword that to: “What might you do to accomplish your 10-year goals in the next 6 months, if you had a gun against your head?” Now, let’s pause. Do I expect you to take 10 seconds to ponder this and then magically accomplish 10 years’ worth of dreams in the next few months? No, I don’t. But I do expect that the question will productively break your mind, like a butterfly shattering a chrysalis to emerge with new capabilities. The “normal” systems you have in place, the social rules you’ve forced upon yourself, the standard frameworks—they don’t work when answering a question like this. You are forced to shed artificial constraints, like shedding a skin, to realize that you had the ability to renegotiate your reality all along. It just takes practice. My suggestion is that you spend real time with the questions you find most ridiculous in this book. Thirty minutes of stream-of-consciousness journaling (page 224) could change your life. On top of that, while the world is a gold mine, you need to go digging in other people’s heads to unearth riches. Questions are your pickaxes and competitive advantage. This book will give you an arsenal to choose from.

The climate emergency is the biggest challenge of our time, and we all have a unique role to play. Everyone is needed, and everyone is welcome. Come as you are. Start here. Start now. Discover and apply your Service Superpower. Let's be part of the solution, together.

When Jia Jiang graduated with an MBA from Duke, he wanted to be an entrepreneur. Like so many of us, however, his fear of hearing no was holding him back. To face this fear head-on, he started a video blog called 100 Days of Rejection Therapy. His endearing, perplexing, and absurd videos document what happened as he approached complete strangers, day after day, with off-the-wall requests: to speak over Costco’s intercom, to become a live mannequin at Abercrombie and Fitch, or to borrow a dog from the Humane Society. I love his rejections so much that I challenge my students to replicate them. Jia’s tolerance for rejection and vulnerability reveal the delight and playfulness that can emerge out of the most awkward situations.

In 2005, IBM sold its PC business to Lenovo. A five forces analysis makes clear immediately why the business had become so unattractive that even one of its marquee players decided to throw in the towel. Its two superpower suppliers, Microsoft and Intel, captured almost all of the value the industry created. And as the industry matured, the PC itself had become a commodity, giving customers more power. Since one beige box was as good as another, customers could easily switch brands in order to get a good price. Rivalry among PC makers was intensifying, with more price pressure coming from emerging Asian producers. To top it off, a new generation of potential substitutes was taking off—a range of mobile devices that had some of the same functionality as PCs.

Thus, instead, they chose to rely on a newly emerged superpower,

A dangerous implication of this emerges when China expects the United States to behave like an aggressive hegemon eager to retain its dominant position; when the Americans instead promote détente, the UN Charter, and democracy and human rights for all, China gets suspicious. What are the Americans really up to? Perhaps some among China’s moderates and reformists understand America’s good intentions. The hawks, however, see only American deception.

From the time she opened her doors to the modern world in 1867, Japan has been consistently underrated by westerners, despite her successful defeats of China and then Russia in 1894 and 1905, respectively; despite Pearl Harbor; and despite her sudden emergence as an economic superpower and the toughest competitor in the world market of the 1970s and 1980s. A major reason, perhaps the major one, is the prevailing belief that innovation has to do with things and is based on science or technology. And the Japanese, so the common belief has held (in Japan as well as in the West, by the way), are not innovators but imitators. For the Japanese have not, by and large, produced outstanding technical or scientific innovations. Their success is based on social innovation.

In the next few years, there will be a staggering turn in world events! A giant Asian superpower, with a modernized Russia and China at the helm, will dramatically affect the course of history. This emerging power bloc—a conglomerate of peoples which comprise one fourth of the world’s population—will be deeply involved in the tumultuous tide of events that will lead to the conclusion of mankind’s 6,000 years of self-rule! How can we know this?

The end of superpower patronage to client movements worldwide created a power vacuum whose inevitable results included the spread of violence and the emergence of disparate groups, ostensibly fighting in the name of ideology, religion or ethnicity, but now seeking their finance through local taxes, plunder and pillage.

Here's a strange world. It's not post-American, in the sense that the countries that were supposed to have "emerged" by now are mired in their own unhappiness. Does any serious person still think—as the serious people at the Economist did back in 2008—that Brazil is the economic superpower of the future? Or that Turkey is on the cusp of neo-Ottoman splendor, a point argued by former U.S. diplomat Nicholas Burns as recently as 2012? Or that the European Union is the world's de facto second superpower? Or that the Chinese economy is going to power right through a burst housing bubble?

Others, however, perhaps overwhelmed by what they read, say Africa should be written off, that it’s beyond repair. My experiences so far say we should put it in perspective. For instance, a new nation that has just won its independence from a colonial power struggles with internal graft and corruption, civil war and economic turbulence—more developed nations see it as a basket-case. Yet 200+ years later it emerges as the world’s sole superpower. Yes, America.

Scarlett …” The alarming voice of Nickolas sounded from behind her. This girl was looking for her own execution. As much as he dreaded admitting it they had lost. The rebellion failed many and young people sacrificed their lives for this failure. Scarlett was a victim he was not willing to sacrifice. She only turned to him without saying a word. Her gaze was invincible. He saw literal flames burning in her blue eyes. He recognized the emotion immediately. Scarlett’s eyes were burning with rage! Was he seeing things, or were these actual flames? “It’s time for this bastard to pay for being such a treacherous ass!” she spoke. With every word, it was as if the fire in her eyes whirled around her pupils like a vortex. She felt her whole body start to burn. The blood in her veins was boiling like never before. Smoke began to emerge from her skin. It hurt her, she felt as if her whole body had set itself on fire. The pain could not be compared to the first time it happened with her palms. She was fighting the urge to scream as loud as she could, but could not afford even the slightest distraction. Nickolas’s life, as well as Chris’, depended on her. The men around her looked stunned at what was happening. Pratcher realized that nothing had played with his sanity when the soldiers, along with Hammerdell, took a step back after the girl’s body had begun emitting smoke. It was all very real indeed. What the hell was going on? “Get away from her! She will set herself on fire!” Christopher grabbed the man’s shoulders and pulled him back. He knew what was going to happen. He had seen Scarlett burn her palms, but never her whole body. He was afraid for her! The telekinesis with the jeep was a step away from killing her, and with that burning, her death could be inevitable. There was not enough energy in her body to escape without consequences. Scarlett did not stop focusing on her anger. She had to maintain it if she wanted to achieve the desired result. The pain was taking over her, she felt exhausted and gave out smoke. Her eyes did not go down from Hammerdell. At first, her hands were ablaze, and fire spread all over her body as if it had been covered with gas. Her clothes became ash. Scarlett remained naked under the tongues of the red flames. She fell to her knees on the pebble track - the fire swirled, and the pain was growing even more intolerable. “Shoot!” The mayor screamed in a voice full of fear. He had never seen such a thing. What was that hat girl? Definitely not an ordinary person! Seconds before they pulled the trigger, the guns jumped off from the hands of the soldiers all by themselves. A cone of fire separated from Scarlett and flew towards them, enclosing them in a perfect circle. She sacrificed her last drop of strength to create a fiery dome above them, which trapped her enemies and became a lid from which they could not get away. They burned alive with the last shrieking screams of panic, fear, and despair. It was over. Hammerdell had earned his merit. Now, the rebels could finally rest easy. In pain and exhaustion, she left herself get swallowed by the darkness.

Like in business, the emergence of new players necessarily changes the way the game must be played. Blockbuster—the sole superpower in the movie rental business—failed to appreciate that a small company like Netflix and an emerging technology like the internet required them to reexamine their entire business model. Big publishers doubled down on old models when Amazon showed up instead of asking how they could update and upgrade their models in the face of a new digital age. And instead of asking themselves, “What do we need to do to change with the times,” taxi companies chose to sue the ridesharing companies to protect their business models instead of learning how to adapt and provide a better taxi service. Sears got so big and so rich from sending out paper catalogues for so many decades that they were too slow to adapt to the rise of big-box stores like Walmart and ecommerce. And believing itself without Rival, the behemoth that was Myspace didn’t even see Facebook coming.

My emergent superpower, an increasing fluency in Western Canon, brought exhilaration and comfort because if you’re fluent in a language, there’s a place you belong.

As a venture-capital investor, I see a particularly strong role for a new kind of impact investing. I foresee a venture ecosystem emerging that views the creation of humanistic service-sector jobs as a good in and of itself. It will steer money into human-focused service projects that can scale up and hire large numbers of people: lactation consultants for postnatal care, trained coaches for youth sports, gatherers of family oral histories, nature guides at national parks, or conversation partners for the elderly. Jobs like these can be meaningful on both a societal and personal level, and many of them have the potential to generate real revenue—just not the 10,000 percent returns that come from investing in a unicorn technology startup.

The purity discourse that emerged from Southern white evangelicalism is not separable from the racialized discourse of sexuality and purity that these same Christians have shaped for the whole of American history. The regulation of sexuality by white Christians in the United States has always been about the propagation of a socially acceptable and pristine nuclear family worthy of having the American dream, a family that was heterosexual, middle class, and white.

AI will bring that same monopolistic tendency to dozens of industries, eroding the competitive mechanisms of markets in the process. We could see the rapid emergence of a new corporate oligarchy, a class of AI-powered industry champions whose data edge over the competition feeds on itself until they are entirely untouchable. American antitrust laws are often difficult to enforce in this situation, because of the requirement in U.S. law that plaintiffs prove the monopoly is actually harming consumers. AI monopolists, by contrast, would likely be delivering better and better services at cheaper prices to consumers, a move made possible by the incredible productivity and efficiency gains of the technology.

Hawa! It’s my family!” Camellia’s smile was brighter than a star as she waved at them. “Kirikiri, Iris, Lilian, Kevin-kyun! Hullo!” “Um, hello, Camellia,” Kevin muttered, warily eying the soldiers, who were looking at them stupidly. “My Lady, are… are you well? You’re not hurt, are you?” Kirihime asked, her fingers twitching, clearly longing to reach for the daggers under her dress. “Um!” Camellia nodded joyfully. “These nice people kept me company.” The “nice people” that Camellia mentioned snapped out of their fugue. They looked from the group of kitsune to Camellia, then back to the kitsune. Camellia again. Then the kitsune one more time. For good measure. “So, wait, these are the people you’re looking for?” one of the soldiers asked. “Yes!” Camellia’s sunny smile hadn’t changed in the slightest. She was completely unaware of the heavy tension pervading the atmosphere. “Those two are my daughters, and that’s Kevin-kyun, and that one is Kirikiri.” “Daughters,” one of the men muttered, eyes straying to the tails writhing behind the backs of the three kitsune. “Your daughters are kitsune.” “Of course,” Camellia said as if the answer should have been obvious. “I’m a kitsune, too.” As she spoke, five tails emerged from underneath her magical girl skirt, and her ears sprouted fur and became long and pointed. The group of spandex-clad men eyed each other. Anxiety was written all over their faces. They looked at Camellia’s still smiling face, then at the other four people. Kirihime had now taken out her knives, Lilian had several orbs of light orbiting her, and Iris had summoned some void fire, which hovered over her tails. Kevin didn’t have a weapon, or superpowers, but that didn’t stop him from preparing for combat. “We’re screwed, aren’t we?” asked one of the men. Everyone sans Camellia nodded. “Thought so.” ***

The focus on terrorism elevated fear into a public presence, creating a new atmospherics that could be appealed to and exploited.16 Miraculously, out of the rubble and phoenixlike emerged a stronger state, a “superpower” or “empire.

The emergence of Superpower and its joint imperium of state and corporation have resulted in the institutionalization and normalization of corruption. The doctored accounts, the public misrepresentations, and illegal transactions that have become a commonplace of corporate behavior in recent years have been transmitted to party politics,

Back then, I had no idea that I’d ever feel unsafe in America or be preparing for disaster myself. We seemed to stand monolithic and invulnerable at the center of the political, cultural, and moral universe, unchallenged as the world’s lone superpower. For

There are assuredly people who voted for Obama in 2008 and then voted for Trump in 2016. This is because their support for Obama was predicated on him emerging as some sort of Magical Black Jesus figure.

In Asia and some parts of Africa, people saw their European colonizers humiliated by the Japanese and the Germans, opening up the possibility that they might rule themselves, a first step to the “end of empire.” The war underlined the decline of Europe as a major world player and accelerated the emergence of the US and the USSR as the world’s two great superpowers.