Founder of the ThreeCo Theory

About the Author

Wayne Y. Tsien
钱原
M.D. DBA
Cross-domain practitioner
Deep thinker
Researcher in intelligent civilization
Founder of the ThreeCo theory
I. The Starting Point

I did not enter this problem from abstract theory. I entered it from reality, watching repeatedly: technology is changing the world, but institutions are not keeping up.

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 displayed it on screen as "The Biggest Idiot Park." The two names sound nearly identical in Mandarin. The error lasted only a second. But the question it left behind did not go away: what happens when AI makes mistakes that are not about park names?

I wrote an article about it and began a public conversation that has continued to this day. My cumulative readership on Chinese social media has exceeded two million. I took the pulse of the age and found that the anxiety is universal—but we still lack a shared language for discussing intelligent civilization together.

The ThreeCo Principles are my attempt to build that shared language for this age.
II. Forty Years Across Domains

I have worked in academia and industry for forty years, across medicine, scientific research, international trade, manufacturing, and investment. In that long practice, I came to see clearly: the deep contradictions of any industry are ultimately institutional problems. And AI is making those institutional problems more urgent and harder to avoid.

This forty-year experience across medicine, international trade, digital infrastructure, and healthcare forms the fundamental character that distinguishes the ThreeCo theory from purely academic thinking: it comes from firsthand observation of how institutions fail and regenerate in reality, not from deductive reasoning about existing theory.

III. The Systematic Work of 2022

In 2022, the months confined to my home in Shanghai during the lockdown became the opportunity to systematically organize years of fragmented thinking. I read widely, reread the 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 the ways in which resources are controlled and owned.

That gave rise to The ThreeCo Principles for Intelligent Civilization, and the series of books that followed.

Why ThreeCo had to be proposed
The question is not only what technology can do, but what institutions humanity should use to re-understand itself when technology changes the foundation of civilization.

When labor is no longer the center of civilization, who owns, who governs, who shares will determine whose civilization this ultimately becomes. If we wait until the problems are fully visible before asking the questions, the available institutional space will have already been substantially narrowed.

Look back from a century hence—the ThreeCo Principles will make far more sense. Not because they have predicted everything, but because they drove a few stakes into the ground for institutional construction while the window was still open.