The conversation had been sketching a bleak picture of what AI might become. In his interview on The Diary of a CEO, Professor Jiang argued that if global supply chains break down, AI will be repurposed as a control grid instead of developing the intelligence to reduce scarcity or solve medicine's hardest problems. He pointed at the city they were sitting in: there are cameras everywhere in New York, he said, but they are "just a little bit dumb" — "they don't really talk to each other." Connect them, and they can.
So the host put the obvious question: is that your big concern with AI? Is it surveillance?
"That's not the big risk I see," Jiang answered. "The big risk I see is how AI can cheapen the human experience, how AI is almost dehumanizing."
The argument: capability is not purpose
Jiang's objection is not that the technology will fail. He named Elon Musk and Peter Thiel among the figures telling the public that "computers are so much smarter than us", and he conceded a great deal of the ground. It could be true, he said, that AI will eventually do mathematics and medical diagnostics far more efficiently than people do.
His point is that none of that describes what a human life is for. "Ultimately, we as humans, we're here to love, imagine, and be kind to other people," he said. "And that is what the human experience is." If we focus too much on AI, he argued, it diverts and distracts us from what he called our true mission: spiritual growth.
Earlier in the conversation he had stated the idea as a kind of formula. If you have too much wealth, too much fame and too much power, he said, it becomes impossible to truly have imagination, empathy and love. The worry about AI sits inside that wider suspicion of material accumulation rather than replacing it.
Where the argument comes from
Jiang grounded the position in his own history rather than in research. He described himself as "a product of the meritocracy" who received "the best education in the world" — and said that education teaches you the world is materialistic and God does not exist. The consequence, by his account, was three decades of unhappiness: in his twenties, thirties and forties he was "a deeply angry, depressed, frustrated person", because if God does not exist there is no order or structure to events, only chaos, and there can be "no hope or light in chaos".
What changed, he said, was his family. He married a woman he considers an angel and has three children, and from that he came to believe there is a plan and a structure and a reason to the world. Pressed on how long he had held the belief, he was precise about its newness: "It's only been the past two years when I have a true belief in God."
The host tested where that leads. Does it mean everything will be all right? Yes, Jiang said — but you need to believe in God and focus on your family. Does it mean staying away from protests and elections? Here he pushed back. Belief does not mean you "sit back and hide in my room and play computer games all day". If there is a plan, he argued, you have to participate in the world, "because why else would God create you?" He said he lives by one principle, speak the truth, and offered his own recent schedule as the example: the reason he had spent the past month appearing on podcasts was that it matters for people to know the truth. Asked what good it would do, his answer was that it does not matter — faith compels the speaking regardless of the effect.
Suffering, and the children
The host asked why God would allow the wars and conflicts now visible around the world. Jiang answered with a question of his own: what is the path to wisdom? Struggle, pain, failure. Could we not have the wisdom without them, the host asked. "Well, could you?" Jiang replied. A truly spiritual person, he said, is thankful for this time, because the struggle allows people to transcend themselves. Crisis forces everyone to look deep down and ask what is truly important, what gives them happiness, what their purpose is — and the answer he expects everyone to arrive at is love for the people around them. That, he said, is the great spiritual awakening that could redeem humanity.
His hope, he said, comes from his children. Without them he doubts he would have been this successful, for lack of purpose and meaning; he also thinks that had fame arrived without children, he would have been corrupted very fast, chasing money and attention through his fifteen minutes. Now he thinks about building a legacy for them and setting a good example.
The host closed the circle by pointing at the contradiction. Jiang had spent the interview describing a world he expects to break; Chris, his child, is in that world. Was he not concerned about his future?
"I'm not at all concerned," Jiang said. He and his wife have loved Chris to the best of their ability, and that love, he said, gives the child the confidence to live his life to the fullest. They see him every day as a gift from God. As for the collapsing world, his reason was the same one he had given for the wars: "we are here in order to have a spiritual awakening" — and in his telling, the crises are what bring people to it.