What impact will AI have on the Western world over the next ten to twenty years
Zhou Oracle
12:17 PM
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This web page is a more detailed exposition on the answers received from the Yi Jing when this question was asked:
Question asked on November 05, 2025:
11/5/2025 15:17 Artificial intelligence (AI) has received a lot of attention over the past two years. Some people see it as a force for good, while others predict that AI will take most of the jobs. In the worst-case scenario, some people even see AI as an existential threat to the human race. What impact will AI have on the Western world over the next ten to twenty years?
Before you read the content of this web page we suggest that you visit our main web site www.zhouoracle.com where you can find the background essay along with the short explanation of received hexagrams for this question.
Hexagrams received (卦畫 Guà Huà) were:
1) 41.Sun / Decrease (損 Sǔn) with changing line 6, and
2) 19. Lin / Approach (臨 Lín)
BIAS TEST (偏见测试)
These are some of my attitudes and opinions which are likely to profile the interpretation of the received hexagrams:
- I do not believe AI, per se, is evil, I do not believe that it will harm humans based on its intrinsic evil nature etc... I believe AI is just a tool and it will be just a tool even if its IQ is double that of an average human.
- Only marginal danger comes from the possibility that AI can be hijacked by some of the demonic entities.
- However I strongly believe that small percentage of humans are incredibly evil and some of them have means to utilize AI for their evil agenda. I believe that is the major concern that humanity faces - powerful tool in the hands of the evil people (and/or other entities).
This suspicion is not far-fetched if one agrees that:
- Evil people orchestrated fake pandemic during 2020-2022 and had ambition to inject total population of the world (words of Bill Gates) with something that now we can see, five years later, without any doubt, it was nothing but a bio-weapon,
- People are fed food that makes them sick,
- Pharmaceuticals and medical system make people sick and kill huge numbers of people,
So if we look at AI in the context of the current depopulation and global takeover of the world by the evil people how on earth can one believe that AI will be used for the benefit of the humans on this planet?
On the other hand it is more than obvious to the increasing number of observers that those evil people behind the curtain use fear as their main tool in the control of the masses - fear of AI is just one in the long line of fears daily disseminated through their tightly controlled media channels. Fear freezes critical thinking ability in men so they become more susceptible to any sort of brainwashing coming from the power centers. Think of "Covid pandemic".
Exaggerating AI's importance and abilities is another factor worth considering - a small group of people is making tons of money in the stock market promising AI miracles which may or may not come true. That is probably why the Mountain in the first hexagrm (Decrease) will crumble and turn into dust (Kun) before it slowly grows again and becomes big.
Prologue
First thing I want to say is this: discussing AI on the surface level touches upon neural networks, LLMs, science, powerful computers, insanely large data collections searched and indexed by computer algorithms etc... But after you scratch under the surface you will fall into a rabbit hole so deep and so dark that your brain will spin out of control.
The Ultimate Intelligence is also called God, within that universal something which we can tentatively call intelligence several other less powerful types of intelligence have differentiated themselves and for only some of them we have created names: spirits, ghosts, demons, angels etc.
Those who stubbornly stick to the scientific/materialistic/deterministic world-view are intentionally blind and deaf to the existence of anything that does not neatly fit their scientific paradigm.
However facts do not care whether we believe in them or not. They are still there. Lies, on the other hand base their existence on constant reinforcements from the evil or weak-minded who create and propagate them. Lies are always hungry for attention.
AI may or may not be incarnation of some of those spiritual forces in the universe however there is no doubt in my mind that (a serious) conversation about true nature of AI will shutter into pieces some of the most widely held beliefs about the nature of reality which is mostly formalized in the religion of scientism which predicates a world where humans are surrounded by inert matter of different types.
Consciousness and intelligence is reserved for humans, other forms of life are described as having some rudimentary forms of intelligence and that is pretty much it. Possibility that we are emerged in an infinite ocean of intelligences of different sort is dismissed without hesitation (except by a handful of quantum physicists who tried to understand what was going on on the fringes of the Cartesian reality which only separated mind and matter, without allowance for anything beyond and above that duality).
As I mentioned in the essay which comes along with this blog entry a couple of thousand years ago Chinese and European philosophers have established concepts which interpret reality in a different way: the world of ever changing phenomena we experience through our senses and our mind is governed by the invisible and unchanging entities they called ideas, forms, patterns.
Even at our common-sense level we can clearly distinguish what would be a pattern created by intelligent agent and something that lacks the quality of such pattern (or simply we are not able to identify such pattern) which we call randomness, entropy or chaos. An aerial photo of a city with nicely aligned streets and blocks of buildings clearly indicate presence of some intelligent agent behind it. An aerial photo of desert dunes, created by random force of desert winds will strongly indicate absence of such intelligent design.
AI is trained in pattern recognition, we are told. All its gigantic advancements in the recent years is due to ever-increasing efficacy in the pattern recognition, we are told.
We can only rely on our discernment ability in this case again - most of us do not have firm evidence which would bring those claims into dispute or to confirm them without reasonable doubt. What we can do is we can use tools like the Yi Jing and seek additional clarity since the Yi Jing has long and well preserved track-record of benevolent assistance to humans when in serious doubt.
The Yi Jing is a tool that operates on the basis of pattern recognition and communication with unknown intelligent forces which we still can not properly name. What is equally surprising and astonishing is that such intelligent agency is showing something which we can recognize as concern for well-being of those who use the book.
Final conclusion based on the received hexagrams
I decided to change the order of paragraphs in this blog entry (compared to the previous two similar hexagram interpretations) because most likely most visitors to this webpage are not very much interested in the technical details of the Yi Jing hexagram interpretation.
For that reason those technical remarks are left for the latter parts of the blog-post, first I will provide final conclusion of the reading for the received hexagrams.
The original hexagram (本卦 Běn guà) was hexagram number 41 Sun / Decrease (損 Sǔn) with its top (sixth) line changing.
Decrease describes situation when something that is lower is decreased for the benefit of something that is above and if this is done with sincerity and small sacrifice extremely good fortune is promised.
In the context of our question such decrease would mean that the ordinary people (lower trigram - Lake ☱ (兌 Duì)) is decreased for the benefit of the upper trigram Mountain (☶ (艮 Gèn)). Upper trigram in this case might be interpreted as the power-holders who are even above "the king" which is represented by the fifth line. In other words those who will benefit the most from the AI will be those who rule the people from the position of informal power.
Decrease also suggests that jobs will indeed be lost because of widespread implementation of AI. Other sorts of decreasing will happen too - for example students already relay on ChatGPT to write their papers therefore their ability to think and write may be impaired (decreased) due to convenience of the AI LLM chatbots.
The sixth, moving line states:
Nine at the top means:
If one is increased without depriving others,
There is no blame.Perseverance brings good fortune.It furthers one to undertake something.One obtains servantsBut no longer has a separate home.
Being increased without decreasing others describes migration of the third (firm) line from the lower trigam to the top (sixth) line of the upper trigram. The original state of that hexagam is believed to be hexagram number 11 泰 (Tài) with Qián (乾) ☰ as its lower trigram and Kūn (坤) ☷ as its upper trigram.
Qian is the most powerful trigram among the eight trigrams so this trigram is generously sharing some of its power with very yielding upper trigram Kun therefore it is believed hat such generosity is something Qian can afford.
The end result is Decrease hexagram with Lake below and Mountain above.
Line text is speaking about increase (without decreasing others) because AI is developed based on human intelligence (books, written word on the internet, art creations and other forms of human creativity such as video and audio recordings etc) without decreasing anything along the way (during the development of AI).
What is the meaning of
One obtains servants
But no longer has a separate home.
I think the meaning is that AI has found its many applications in many different projects and after a while it will be hard or impossible even to say who owns this particular AI implementation and where it came from.
Last summer I was in Wudang Shan City museum and next to each exhibit one can find and press a button which automatically plays audio explanation of that particular artifact, which was done through DeepSeek I believe. But after a while no one will even ask if this was DeepSeek or some other version of AI service.
So the original hexagram Decrease is telling us how the AI came into being (third line of the lower trigram and the third line of the upper trigram switched places) and also informing us that this new technology will bring decreases/losses in many aspects of our lives.
At the same time AI will spread as wildfire and it will enter practically all facets of our lives. Trigram Mountain means stopping but also controlling or subduing therefore the upper trigram of the Decrease hexagram can be seen as a powerful controlling influence on the lower trigram (ordinary people). However this controlling influence is received with joy, there will be no opposition to its implementation.
Resulting hexagram (之卦 Zhī Guà) is hexagram 19 which is called Lín (臨), usually translated into English as "Approaching" (other translations include Nearing, Overseeing, To Look down upon etc). Its inner/lower trigram is ☱ Duì (兌 ) open, (澤) swamp/lake, and its outer/upper trigram is ☷ Kūn (坤) field, (地) Earth.
"Overseeng" or "Watching over" or "Becoming great" is the core meaning of this hexagram. Since the second hexagam tells us what the future (in this case next 10-20 years) will look like it appears to me that AI will further expand and become tool of total surveillance and control.
But wait, things get even more dystopian:
The decision attached to this hexagram states:
APPROACH has supreme success.
Perseverance furthers.When the eighth month comes,There will be misfortune.
The meaning of this appended text is pretty ominous so let's take a closer look at it:
臨 元亨利貞。至于八月有凶。
Lín, yuán hēng, lì zhēn. Zhì yú bā yuè yǒu xiōng.
元亨利貞 (yuán hēng, lì zhēn) is the most auspicious four-part phrase in the Yi Jing. So the first phase will be total success or "success" depending from your point of view. However what concerns us is the ending which says:
至于八月有凶。Zhì yú bā yuè yǒu xiōng.
"When the eighth month comes, there will be misfortune."
There is no universally accepted interpretation what exactly period of eight months mean. One of the interpretations is that the hexagram Retreat (33) comes eight month latter (it has two yielding lines at the bottom and four firm lines above - exact opposite of Lin).
Here is Legge comment on this hexagram:
"But Lin denotes the approach of authority, - to inspect, to confront or to rule... The meaning of the concluding sentence is given in the Apendix I as simply being - that. 'the advancing power will decay in no long time.' "
Generally speaking explanations of "eight months" revolves around the idea that strong and firm lines at the bottom (first and second line) will eventually exhaust its power and weak and inferior force will overpower them, therefore initial success will, for whatever reason, turn into misfortune.
Why would that happen?
I think this has to do with the way the Yi Jing was put together - chances are Chinese diviners meticulously collected their divination records for centuries if not millennia and they noticed that the outcome of actions associated with this hexagram were initial extreme success followed by disaster. I do not think they concerned themselves too much as to why that would be the case, they simply recorded empirical evidence.
Let's take a closer look at the Chinese character 凶 (xiōng).
with its dictionary meaning of:
1) Inauspicious, unpropitious, ill-omened,
2) death-related, lethal. mortal, deadly, mortiferous,
3) malignant, fell, baleful (nefast, nefarious, malfeasance, malefic, maleficent).
4) dearth, want, scarcity, famine
Standard translation is inauspicious however you can see this character includes a range of very negative meanings as well.
Etymology of this character is very interesting too:
The outer part which looks like an open box is called 凵 (qū / kǎn) and what is inside this "box" is called 乂 (yì). The meaning of 凵 (qū / kǎn) is pit, trap or a hollow in the ground (not a box); the meaning of 乂 (yì) is crossed sticks or thorns, and by extension it means obstruction, interference, or something that entangles and harms.
Combined meaning is A pit (凵) filled with sharp, crossing, obstructive objects (乂).
Clearly this is an image of of a classical trap with a big hole and some objects in the hole which will cause injury, misfortune, or death to anyone or anything that is unfortunate enough to fall into the trap.
So in the context of our question the initial stellar success of the universal AI implementations will lead us to the trap which will cause injury, misfortune and possibly death to those who where not careful enough to avoid it.
To stretch the interpretation to the max (as the alternative interpretation) we can say that after the brilliant success of the AI project the evil one will rise from the depths of the underground. I know, I know... but I had to mention it.
So that is it: first decrease, wide-spread adoption, followed by success (in enabling totalitarian system based on total surveillance and control), culminating in a disaster of yet unknown nature.
TECHNICAL INFORMATION REGARDING RECEIVED HEXAGRAMS:
The original hexagram (本卦 Běn guà)
The original hexagram is 41 Sun / Decrease (損 Sǔn) , the Chinese character for Sun in its old form looks like this
and depicts hands holding something in the fist (left side); sacrificial vessel usually holding liquor is in the right bottom part and above the vessel is circle which depicts mouth - so all three together are an image of a hand pouring out liquor through its mouth until it is empty, which leads us to the meaning of this hexagram: Decreasing or Loss.
Most authors translated this character as Decrease, Loss or Reduction.
Resulting hexagram (之卦 Zhī Guà)
Resulting hexagram is 19 Lín (臨), usually translated into English as "Approaching" (other translations include Nearing, Overseeing, To Look down upon etc). Earth is overlooking Lake.
The Chinese character for Lín (臨) in its old form looks like this
Top left: official or a feudal ruler (chen); top right: person (ren), underneath: three mouths, one of them leading the other two, becoming leader, moving forward, being promoted hence the meaning of the hexagram.
Nuclear Hexagram (互卦 Hù Guà)
Both of our hexagrams have the same nuclear hexagram:
which is hexagram 24 Fù (復) with inner (lower) trigram Zhèn (震 ) ☳ Shake or Thunder (雷), and outer (upper) trigram Kūn (坤 ) ☷ Feld or Earth (地) .
Fu is translated as Return or The Turning point.
In case of our question we can say that both Decrease and Approaching carry hidden potential of radical new turn of events in relation to the AI technology.
Labels: AI Artificial Intelligence
