I did not enter this problem from abstract theory. I entered it by repeatedly watching technology change the world while institutions failed to keep pace.
In spring 2018, in Shanghai, Siri misheard the name of a historic park — Zuibai Chi, a place whose name evokes the Tang dynasty poet Bai Juyi — and rendered it as "The Biggest Idiot Park." The two names sound nearly identical in Mandarin. The error lasted a second. But the question it left did not go away: what happens when AI makes mistakes that are not about park names?
I wrote an essay about this, beginning a public conversation that continues to this day. Over these years, my writings on the Chinese platform Meipian have accumulated more than two million views. I sensed the pulse of an era: the anxiety is universal, but we still lack a shared language for discussing intelligent civilization.
I have worked across medicine, research, trade, manufacturing, and investment for forty years. In the course of this long practice, I came to see clearly: any industry's deepest contradictions are ultimately institutional problems; and AI is making those institutional problems more urgent and harder to avoid.
This forty-year front-line experience spanning medicine, cross-border trade, digital infrastructure, and healthcare constitutes the fundamental character that distinguishes ThreeCo theory from purely academic thinking: it comes from direct observation of how institutions fail and regenerate in reality, not from the deductive reasoning of existing theory.
In 2022, months confined at home in Shanghai became the occasion for me to systematically organize the fragmentary thinking of these years. I read extensively, reread classics, and for the first time became very clearly aware: artificial intelligence is not a new tool but a "structural technology" that is rewriting power structures and modes of resource ownership.
That gave rise to The ThreeCo Principles for Intelligent Civilization, and the unfolding ThreeCo series that followed.