It has come to this: the collective intellect of the West has atrophied to such a pathetic degree that we now require a trillion-dollar silicon hallucination to explain why we are losing a game we invented. The news that Google’s AI—a system primarily designed to sell you artisanal soap and track your movements for the digital panopticon—is being used to decipher China’s sprawling industrial policy is the final, wheezing gasp of a civilization that has traded its cognitive faculties for the dopamine-fueled convenience of the infinite scroll. The summary provided by our media betters informs us that China’s industrial strategy is 'beyond mere human comprehension.' What an exquisite admission of defeat. It’s not that the policy is written in an alien tongue or encrypted with quantum sorcery; it’s simply that it requires a planning horizon longer than a fiscal quarter or a two-year election cycle, concepts that have become physiologically impossible for the modern Western brain to process.

Let’s look at the players in this theater of the absurd. On one side, we have the 'Middle Kingdom,' which has spent the last three decades executing a monolithic, multi-generational plan to dominate every sector from rare earth minerals to high-speed rail. They don't care about your feelings, your labor unions, or your quarterly earnings reports. They care about total systemic dominance. And then we have the West, a crumbling circus of performative outrage and intellectual bankruptcy. On the Right, we have the moronic chest-thumping nationalists who scream about 'freedom' and 'sovereignty' while clutching smartphones assembled by the very 'adversaries' they claim to despise. They want to bring manufacturing back to the heartland, but only if they can do it without paying a living wage or acknowledging that they traded their industrial base for cheap plastic trinkets forty years ago. They are a caricature of greed wrapped in a flag, incapable of seeing past their own noses, let alone understanding a complex subsidy network for semiconductor manufacturing.

On the Left, the situation is even more pathetic. Here we find the high priests of hypocrisy, weeping for the environment and social justice while demanding a 'green transition' that is entirely dependent on supply chains controlled by the very authoritarian regime they tweet against from their air-conditioned apartments. They want carbon-free cities, but they don't want the mines. They want electric vehicles, but they don't want the industrial policy required to build them. They prefer the aesthetics of progress over the mechanics of it. For them, China’s industrial policy is 'incomprehensible' because it involves the messy, brutal reality of physical production—a concept that doesn't fit into a tidy narrative of 'awareness' and 'shared values.' They are too busy policing pronouns to notice that the foundation of their entire world is being systematically disassembled and reassembled in Shenzhen.

And so, enter Google’s AI. We have outsourced our thinking to an algorithm because we can no longer bear the weight of our own incompetence. The AI doesn’t have an agenda—at least not a human one—which makes it the only entity capable of pointing out that while we were busy arguing over the definition of a woman or the size of a border wall, an entire superpower was building the infrastructure for the next century. The AI looks at the data and sees a cohesive, logical expansion of power. Humans look at the same data and see a confusing mess of subsidies and state-owned enterprises because we have lost the ability to think at scale. We are creatures of the immediate, the trivial, and the loud. We have replaced statesmanship with 'engagement metrics' and strategy with 'messaging.'

There is a profound irony in using a Silicon Valley AI to analyze the death of Western industrial relevance. The very tech giants that now offer these 'insights' are the ones who pioneered the extraction-based economy that gutted the West’s productive capacity in the first place. They turned us into a service economy of delivery drivers and content creators, and now they are selling us the tools to understand why our new masters are winning. It’s like being sold a textbook on how to be a more efficient serf by the lord who just foreclosed on your farm. The AI isn't 'solving' the mystery of China’s success; it’s merely translating the inevitable. It tells us that China’s industrial policy is 'sprawling' and 'complex' as a polite way of saying it is 'functional' and 'serious.'

Ultimately, the 'human comprehension' that is failing here isn't a failure of biology, but a failure of will. We find China’s policy incomprehensible because to understand it would require us to admit that our own systems are broken beyond repair. It would require admitting that our brand of neoliberal capitalism is just a slow-motion asset stripping of the future, and that our politics is nothing more than a series of distractions designed to keep the rubes from noticing the lights going out. We ask the AI to explain the future because we are too terrified to look at the present. We are a species that has grown tired of the effort of existence, content to let the machines narrate our descent into irrelevance. The future doesn't belong to the smartest, or even the strongest; it belongs to the ones who are still capable of completing a task. And according to the silicon oracle, that isn't us.