It’s been a while since my last update. It’s the end of the year, so I need to find some excuses for myself and take the opportunity to vent a little.
To be honest, I’m a bit puzzled: we can now converse with knowledgeable and incredibly smart AI anytime, anywhere. Who still needs to read public accounts? After a tiring day at work, isn’t it better to watch short videos?
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Shortly after ChatGPT emerged, I excitedly wrote a piece called “Blue Fox Island” and used ChatGPT to translate it into English. How did things develop afterward? It was similar to what I expected, yet far from what I hoped.
I knew back then that the tech world was bound to be turned upside down. And indeed, it was. Money, the smartest entity in the world, poured trillions of dollars into stocks like NVIDIA because the logic of this revolution was so straightforward: computers can finally understand you, see you, and guide you, and from then on, everything would be different.
But what surprised me was that two years later, most people in the world seemed unaffected. The daily users of large language models are still limited to a small group of so-called avant-garde individuals.
People continue their routine of daily bricklaying and video watching, students still learn outdated knowledge and tackle endless exercises. The world’s quarrels and wars are getting more intense, with both sides firmly believing in the sanctity of what they defend, whether it’s ancient gods or modern-day national leaders.
When faced with new things they can’t fully understand, humans tend to simplify their cognition by labeling, which is one reason why AI cannot be truly understood.
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Speaking of this, I remember writing a short piece a long time ago called “The Evil of Labeling,” which was harshly criticized. The gist of that article was that labeling companies as “comprador” or “lacking core technology” is very one-sided. Looking back now, I realize I was too young then.
Years later, I’ve found that labeling others is nothing compared to labeling oneself, which is a mental prison. After all, we all live under the shadow of various labels, and no one can escape.
If you’re from Shanghai and he’s from Jixi, the probability of normal communication between you two is low. When he hears you’re from Jixi, he can’t wrap his head around it, thinking that place is at the easternmost part of the rooster-shaped map, but in reality, everyone is from “Ji Dong.”
Once labeled as “citizens of the Middle Kingdom,” you instantly feel “vast and resource-rich, with a strong nation,” and outsiders can’t take an inch of our land.
You suddenly feel a surge of pride, thinking the territories are yours, the seas are yours, the forests are yours, and the deserts are yours. Then you pay social security and buy a house. But magically, foreigners can also buy, and they can visit more places in your country without a visa than you can.
You’re proud of our brilliant ancient civilization, heartbroken over foreigners taking our national treasures, and even resentful of foreigners making money from games based on the Three Kingdoms. Then, you get free access to the math and science knowledge developed by foreigners, which helps you find a job, but these studies were the most painful part of your adolescence. You can’t figure it out, and then your mind is on the verge of splitting.
Since the label of “nation” is so heavy, let’s just label ourselves as “Homo sapiens,” so we can be proud of all human achievements. But that’s not easy either, because we have to admit that we and those generational enemy countries and poor neighbors are all brothers and sisters who walked out of Africa. The labels on us make it hard to let go of hatred and contempt.
Speaking of label-removing masters, you won’t hear Musk say, “I will always love South Africa, and the Boerewors made by Zhang Ergou from our village is ten thousand times better than your city’s roast duck pizza.” You thought he was just Iron Man, but he turned out to be a king alongside a word.
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After AI arrived, we suddenly realized that the so-called thousands of years of human civilization, with its vast array of cultures and sciences, could be compressed by AI into just a few hundred gigabytes and recited backward. Then, emmm, it found nothing more to learn.
Humans, after all, are creatures with limited brain capacity. The labels we give ourselves, whether it’s job titles, education, residency, “academic underachiever,” “middle class,” “sports fan,” are merely attempts to simplify cognition and find like-minded individuals, ultimately achieving safety and satisfaction.
In terms of cognition, labels are a simplification of understanding. This logic is no different from AlphaGo playing Go; people think they have many “awesome” patterns (label-like success rules), but most are marked as “stupid” by AI.
Most MBA cases explain entrepreneurship or business battles through labeling, and in 99% of cases, following them won’t lead to success.
Now, a bunch of scholars are flipping through history or repeatedly talking about cycles, which are also label-based understandings and are basically useless. Sometimes they guess right and add another “xx expert” label to themselves, and when they’re wrong, they just don’t mention it.
In the AI era, ordinary people can finally turn the tables and no longer rely entirely on labels to understand things.
Universities will gradually become like Go institutes, places where you pay to prove you’re dumber than a computer.
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From the simplification of cognition to the compression of resources, human thinking and social structures are filled with similar logic.
So-called wealth is nothing more than what is created by the majority of laborers and ultimately flows to a few people. This is also a form of compression; the large pile of bricks you move is compressed thousands of times into gold, paper money, or even the simplest string of numbers or letters (cryptocurrency private keys or mnemonic phrases) and placed in someone else’s bank or pocket.
Those who achieve the most in wealth are mostly those who are particularly good at driving others to move bricks, not those who are particularly good at moving bricks themselves. Ren Zhengfei, Steve Jobs, Elon Musk, and even the current hotshot Jensen Huang are all like this.
So-called connections are the ability to mobilize as many people or high-quality talents as possible. If that’s not possible, then just honestly move bricks, which isn’t so bad. Envy and jealousy are particularly toxic emotions: once you catch them, life becomes an endless internal struggle.
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Of course, there’s also a wealth path known as “money makes money,” but clearly, the amount your few thousand can generate is not on the same scale as what someone with billions can. When someone earns in one night what you make in a lifetime, it’s obviously not value created by their own “brick-moving” efforts. It’s inevitably the result of countless others’ bricks being taken away by them in one night. You might argue that they sometimes lose too? Yes, but most likely not to you, but to another person who earns your lifetime’s worth in one night.
You might think that buying a house in Beijing, Shanghai, or Shenzhen a few years ago and making millions was a win, but in reality, you just borrowed money from the bank and won a gamble, taking away the bricks moved by migrant worker brothers or later homebuyers.
In most cases, AI can only help you understand your situation and choices, but it can’t provide you with social resources. Once you know the truth, you might label yourself as a “working horse,” diligently seeking a “V50” to enjoy a KFC meal every week.
Don’t be ungrateful and blindly worship historical greats or elite heroes; they are all caricatured figures. If you fall into that obsession, historical figures who killed less than a thousand won’t catch your eye, while those who harmed people with your label will be hated for a lifetime, leading to emotional imbalance and poor health.
If you can truly shed the labels you place on yourself, you become a rare hero, capable of compressing others’ bricks into your pocket, commanding AI to work for you before most people awaken. Investing in 2024 is quite easy to make money, but if your mind only has a big “A,” you won’t compare to those with many letters in their minds.
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The flow of wealth seems predestined, but the feeling of happiness often hides in these seemingly insignificant daily moments.
Moments of happiness often come from seemingly trivial things. For instance, when you return home late at night after working overtime, and your wife serves a bowl of hot noodle soup, and there are leftover edamame and beer in the fridge; or when you find a long-coveted power bank online at a 40% discount, glowing blue like a small brick. At these times, you feel the world isn’t so bad, and life seems to be secretly taking care of you.
Even if the essence of life is compressed into cold indifference, the seeds of happiness can still quietly sprout in some corner. This is the Buddhist-style happiness, where most of us find small joys in exchanging a brick for a cup of milk tea.
Happiness is the balance individuals find within limited resources, a self-comfort humans create in a cold world. You can choose to complain about insufficient ancestral blessings or unfair resource distribution, but you can also choose to cover and forget these issues through a cup of hot tea, a barbecue meal, or even a few AI-recommended short videos. Ultimately, happiness is an attitude of active choice, not a result granted by labels.
Perhaps, breaking free from label-thinking and obsession with wealth distribution is a proactive choice worth sticking to in the AI era. As for laziness and lying flat? Enjoying them occasionally is also our little happiness.