Part Four: The Destination: The Future is Here, Strategies for Individuals and Enterprises

We have completed a long intellectual expedition. Following the faint light of human desire, we have journeyed from the first barter exchanges in the Great Rift Valley of East Africa to the algorithm-driven trading of Wall Street powered by bitstreams; from Hammurabi’s commercial laws carved on stone pillars to the trustless smart contracts written on the blockchain. We have seen that whether it was the tinkling bells of camels on the Silk Road, the tremendous roar of factories during the Industrial Revolution, or the quiet hum of servers in the information age, the inner melody driving the evolution of business forms has never changed. Greed, laziness, selfishness, and fear—these four currents originating from the deep sea of human nature have always determined the course and fate of the commercial empires on the surface.

However, the purpose of sorting through history is not to seek solace in old papers. The sole purpose of a profound insight into what is “unchanging” is to give us an anchor and a sense of stability when facing “drastic change.”

We are now standing at the most turbulent narrows of the Three Gorges of history. Artificial general intelligence, this unprecedented technological tidal wave, is impacting the foundations of the business logic, social structure, and individual values that we rely on for survival, with a speed and force that are beyond imagination. All of business history before it seems like a long prologue.

Therefore, the final chapter of this book will no longer be a retrospective of history or a deduction of the future, but a guide to action that directly faces the present. We will shift from a grand historical narrative to the real concerns that every reader can touch. We will explore, in the midst of this great change, how we, as independent individuals, these “small boats,” should adjust our sails so as not to capsize in the waves; and how we, as organizations and enterprises, these “giant ships,” should transform our structures to sail into new blue oceans.

As the ancients said, “To know that the past cannot be remonstrated, but that the future can still be pursued.” History cannot be changed, but the future is still in our hands. This final part is to forge all our previous insights into a sharp weapon that we can hold in our hands, to cut through the thorns on the road ahead, and to find our own answers and destinations.

Chapter 8: For the Individual: How to Become a “Useless” but “Priceless” Person in the AGI Era

Please, first, face a question that may make you feel uncomfortable, but is unavoidable. In the not-too-distant future, when your computer houses a “digital self” that is more efficient than you, an “artificial intelligence assistant” that is never tired, emotionally stable, and can call upon the global knowledge base for real-time analysis, what value do you, as a knowledge worker, have left?

It can, in one minute, complete the in-depth analysis report that you once needed a week to write; it can, in one hour, process a massive amount of data that you couldn’t exhaust in a month; it can, in a single decision, be less swayed by bias and emotion than you. Before it, you seem to see a cold, perfect reflection, and that reflection is calmly and systematically taking over all the “instrumental rationality” abilities that you were once proud of.

This is the deep “anxiety of being obsolete” that every ordinary person will face in the era of artificial general intelligence. It is no longer just a crisis of losing a job, but a crisis of one’s “existential value” being shaken. If our value lies in our ability to do things “better, faster, and cheaper” than others, then when the machine surpasses us on this track with an overwhelming advantage, where does the meaning of our existence lie?

This chapter will attempt to answer this ultimate question. And the answer we give may be counterintuitive: the only way out of this crisis is not to futilely “compete with the machine in speed,” but to completely and bravely turn to a track that the machine can never set foot on.

This path is to shift from pursuing “usefulness” to exploring “pricelessness.”

We will argue that when machines have taken on almost all the “useful” things in the world, the mission of humanity is to create, in those seemingly “useless” domains, “priceless” things that shine with the brilliance of humanity and are beyond the reach of machines. The arrival of AGI may not be to eliminate us, but to, in a forceful way, compel us to return from the alienation of being “tools,” to rediscover and become a more profound, more complete person, more like a “human.” This is our ultimate survival rule in the new world, and also the final fortress we seek for ourselves.

Section 1: The Evolution of Thinking: From “Knowledge” to “Wisdom”

I. Cultivating Critical Thinking and Independent Thought

(1) The Devaluation of Answers and the Scarcity of Questions

Friends, let’s first imagine a very ordinary afternoon in the year 2030. A young market analyst is preparing to write a market entry strategy report for the launch of her company’s new product. In the past, this might have meant weeks of data collection, all-nighters drawing charts, and racking her brains for logical deductions. But on her desktop, there are no piles of documents, only a concise dialogue box.

She speaks into the microphone, stating her needs: “Based on the company’s sales data for the past five years, combined with the performance of all similar competing products in the global market, user sentiment analysis on social media over the past year, and the latest macroeconomic trends, please design three market entry strategies with different risk levels for our new product ‘Photon.’ The analysis should focus on the North American, European, and Southeast Asian markets, and for each strategy, provide a detailed analysis of strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats, and also generate a presentation deck that can be directly used for a board meeting.”

The holographic assistant in front of the screen, its eyes glowing, remains silent for about fifteen seconds. Then, a report that can be called perfect, along with a beautifully designed presentation, is completely presented before her. The report’s logic is rigorous, the data is solid, it is well-referenced, and it even, with a touch of Churchillian humor, gives a well-intentioned reminder of potential market risks.

This scene is not science fiction. It is the daily routine of the “age of answer surplus” that we are about to enter. In this era, artificial general intelligence, this omniscient and omnipotent “answer machine,” will turn the knowledge and information accumulated by human civilization over thousands of years into a public resource, like electricity and tap water, that can be accessed in unlimited quantities, at low cost, and instantly.

This is undoubtedly great. But it also brings a fundamental, even disruptive, value shift: when “answers” themselves become unprecedentedly cheap, the value of “knowing what” begins to depreciate sharply. The main contradiction in human cognition of the world will, for the first time in history, decisively shift from “how to find answers” to “how to ask a good question.”

To understand the profundity of this revolution, we need to take a brief journey back in time to trace the “value of answers.” For most of human civilization, “answers,” or “knowledge,” were an extremely expensive luxury, monopolized by a few. Imagine Xuanzang, more than 1,300 years ago. In search of the “standard answers” of Buddhist teachings, he traveled alone for fifty thousand li, crossing quicksands and snow-capped mountains, surviving nine deaths, to bring back a few hundred scriptures from ancient India with his own flesh and blood. In that era, every “answer” was laden with enormous costs of time, energy, and even life. Confucius traveled among the states, and his disciples used bundle after bundle of bamboo slips to record the Master’s “answers.” The sigh, “If I hear the Tao in the morning, I can die in the evening,” expresses the supreme reverence for the value of “answers.”

Later, Gutenberg’s printing press caused the cost of copying “answers” to drop by an order of magnitude for the first time. But even so, knowledge was still imprisoned in expensive books and magnificent libraries. It required you to pay a high economic cost and undertake arduous retrieval labor to get a glimpse of it. Diderot and Voltaire spent twenty years of their lives compiling the first Encyclopédie, attempting to gather all “answers” in one place. This in itself was a great Enlightenment revolution.

It was not until the advent of the internet, especially the rise of Google, that humanity entered an era of “answer equality.” Google, with its simple search box, leveled the moats of knowledge. Its mission was “to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful.” In the age of Google, a person’s cognitive ability was largely judged by their ability to use search engines to “find” accurate answers. We learned to use more precise keywords, learned to distinguish the noise in search results; we became efficient “information hunters.” The “answer” was there, and its value lay in the speed and accuracy with which you could “find” it.

However, artificial general intelligence brings a more thorough paradigm shift than Google. It no longer gives you a map to a treasure trove and lets you follow it. It directly takes the treasure you want from the infinite mine, instantly smelts, purifies, and polishes it into the shape you most desire, and then, hands it to you personally. It completes the ultimate leap from “information indexing” to “knowledge generation.”

In economics, a most basic principle is: when the marginal cost of a resource approaches zero and its supply becomes infinite, its market value will also inevitably approach zero. “Answers,” in the AGI era, are becoming such a resource.

So, when the old value high ground is flooded, where will the new value continent rise?

The answer is, upstream of “answers,” at the very source of all knowledge production—in “questions.”

When answers become readily available, the ability to define problems, challenge premises, and explore boundaries becomes the scarcest and therefore most valuable asset in human thought. As Albert Einstein said, if he had one hour to solve a problem that his life depended on, he would spend the first fifty-five minutes determining the proper question to ask. Once he knew the proper question, he could solve the problem in less than five minutes. What drove him to discover the theory of relativity was not an unparalleled computational ability, but a seemingly naive yet incredibly profound question: “What would I see if I rode on a beam of light at the speed of light?”

This question challenged the fundamental premise of Newtonian physics that “time is absolute.”

More than two thousand years ago, Socrates was called “the wisest man in all of Greece” by the Oracle at Delphi, not because he was omniscient. On the contrary, his wisdom stemmed from his constant admission of his own “ignorance.” He never provided answers. He only, through endless questioning, cross-examination, and interrogation, like a “midwife” of the spiritual world, helped the youth of Athens to give birth to their own thoughts in their minds. In an AGI era where everyone can play the role of a “sage” and speak standard answers, this Socratic spirit of questioning, which starts from “ignorance,” will be the only antidote against intellectual laziness and cognitive ossification.

A truly “good” question has its value reflected in three levels.

First, it has the power to “define the frame.” A mediocre question seeks the optimal solution within an existing frame; an excellent question, however, is dedicated to breaking or reshaping the frame itself. If the problem that Henry Ford, the founder of Ford Motor Company, sought to solve was defined as “how to build a faster horse-drawn carriage,” then human transportation would, at most, have iterated from a four-wheeled carriage to a six-wheeled one. But the real question he asked was: “How can we make it possible for every American family to own their own means of transportation?” This question completely redefined the frame of “mobility,” and the final answer could only be the revolutionary Model T and the assembly line.

Second, it has the power to “challenge assumptions.” Any mature industry, any successful company, and even a person’s way of thinking, is built upon a series of self-evident, and often unexamined, “underlying assumptions.” A good question, like a precision probe, strikes directly at the foundation of these assumptions. When everyone took for granted that “a hotel must own its own rooms,” the founders of Airbnb asked, “Why can’t people turn their own spare rooms into temporary hotels?” This question, which challenged the assumption of “asset ownership,” gave birth to a trillion-dollar business empire.

Finally, it has the power to “guide exploration.” The greatest questions often have no standard answers, but like the brightest North Star in the night sky, they can point the direction of future exploration for a field, a company, or even a generation. The question that President Kennedy posed to the entire American society in the 1960s: “Why do we choose to go to the moon?” He answered it himself: “We choose to go to the moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard.” This question, and the answer behind it, ignited the imagination and fighting spirit of a generation of Americans, and its enormous spillover effects went far beyond the field of space exploration itself.

Friends, this is the first and most fundamental intellectual evolution we must complete. We must transform from a proficient “answer solver” into a profound “question asker.” We must train ourselves to, when faced with any seemingly perfect answer provided by AGI, subconsciously ask: What are the premises on which this answer depends? In which frame was this conclusion drawn? What would the answer be if the frame were changed? Is there a better question that I haven’t asked yet?

When “answers” are as diffuse as air, the value of our existence will no longer be the stock of knowledge stored in our minds, but whether we can become an inexhaustible source of “questions.” Because answers make our world run, but only great questions can make our world continuously move forward.

(2) “Questioning” as a Form of Leadership

In the long scroll of human business history, we have long formed a deeply ingrained collective memory of the “leader.” He is usually the person at the top of the pyramid, the captain who can see the direction in the fog, the hero who turns the tide in a crisis. From Henry Ford to Jack Welch, from the wolves of Wall Street to the decisive entrepreneurial giants, they were admired and followed largely because they were considered to be “the ones who have the answers.”

This leadership paradigm, we can call it “answer-authority” leadership. It was born in the industrial age of scarce information and a relatively stable environment, and in that era, it was highly effective. When the entire organization operated like a precision machine, the core value of the leader lay in his possession of the most core information, the richest experience, and his ability to, like the most senior engineer, issue the most precise instructions and find the optimal answers for this machine. The duty of the subordinate was to faithfully “execute” the answers, while the duty of the leader was to authoritatively “give” the answers. This was a clear, efficient, top-down power and information structure.

However, friends, the three pillars supporting this temple of “answer authority” are being pulled out one by one today.

The first pillar is the “predictability of the environment.” The business environment of the industrial age changed linearly, experience was effective, and a leader could completely deduce future strategies based on past successes. But today, we are in an era that the military calls “VUCA”—an era full of volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity. Cross-industry technological raids, unpredictable geopolitical events, and rapidly changing consumer preferences have turned the business world from a chessboard where one can follow a map to a chaotic sea of turbulent waves with no nautical charts. In this sea, any captain who claims to have the one and only correct “answer” for navigation is no different from deceiving himself.

The second pillar is the “leader’s information advantage.” In a hierarchical organization, the leader is naturally at the top of the information flow, possessing the most comprehensive and macroscopic view. But with the rise of knowledge workers, this advantage has long since vanished. An engineer working on the front lines of research and development will inevitably have a far better understanding of a certain technical detail than the CEO; a community operations specialist deeply rooted in the community will inevitably have a better feel for the real needs of users than the marketing director. When the wisdom of the organization is scattered like stars among countless professional “nerve endings,” the leader who tries to play the role of the “central brain” and monopolize all the answers becomes a ridiculous and inefficient “information bottleneck.”

And artificial general intelligence is the decisive force that pulls out this last pillar, declaring the complete bankruptcy of “answer authority.” A leader, no matter how knowledgeable, how diligent, his knowledge reserve, his analysis speed, his degree of rationality, will be utterly defeated in a contest with his own AGI assistant. When the “digital partner” on the leader’s desk can “generate” one near-perfect “answer” after another, faster, more comprehensively, and with less bias than the leader himself, a very sharp question emerges: if the value of a leader is merely to provide answers, then is he himself the person in the entire organization who should be most replaced by AGI?

The answer is yes. And this means that the definition of leadership must be reconstructed. The value of a future leader will no longer come from the authority of “having the answers,” but from the ability to “inspire thinking.” He will no longer be a “sage preaching from on high,” but more like a “questioner at the center.” His core job will be to, through a series of precise, penetrating questions that go to the heart of the matter, activate the collective intelligence of the entire organization, guide the team to penetrate the surface complexity, and most importantly, to calibrate the direction of exploration and set the boundaries of value for the omniscient AGI.

Let’s call this new leadership paradigm the “Chief Question Officer.” His work can be deconstructed into three progressive levels of questioning.

The first level is “diagnostic questioning,” playing the role of a “doctor.” When a team is in trouble or facing a thorny problem, the “answer-authority” leader will directly give a prescription: “We should do this.” The “Chief Question Officer,” however, will, like a skilled doctor performing inspection, auscultation, olfaction, and inquiry, through a series of questions, help the team to diagnose the root cause of the problem themselves. He will ask: “What does the data we see tell us? Is it possible that this data is misleading us? Is the problem we are trying to solve really the fundamental one, or is it just a symptom floating on the surface? What have we tried about this problem? What is the boldest assumption we have made?” These questions, like scalpels, peel away the layers of the problem’s tissue, focusing the team’s thinking from the chaotic “how to solve it” to the sober “what exactly is the problem.”

The second level is “strategic questioning,” playing the role of a “guide.” When the team has clarified its current position, the next step is to explore future possibilities. The “answer-authority” leader will point to a mountain and order everyone, “Charge!” The “Chief Question Officer,” however, will take out a map and, together with the team, through questioning, jointly explore which mountain is most worth climbing. He will ask: “If we were founded today, as a challenger with nothing, how would we attack ourselves? What is the most sacred and inviolable rule in our business? What would happen if we broke it? Ten years from now, when we look back on today, what is the one thing we didn’t do today that will make us regret it for the rest of our lives?” These questions, like intellectual dynamite, blast open the walls of the team’s thinking, shifting their vision from the immediate concerns to the stars in the distance. Netflix was able to evolve from a DVD rental company to a streaming giant precisely because Reed Hastings constantly asked himself and his team these kinds of “self-disruptive” strategic questions.

The third level is “mission-oriented questioning,” playing the role of a “questioner of the soul.” This is the highest and most difficult level. When a strategic direction has been preliminarily determined, AGI can easily plan hundreds of paths to the goal and calculate which one is the most efficient. But at this point, the leader must ask the ultimate question that AGI can never answer: “Why are we climbing this mountain? Is it just for profit and market share? What does its victory mean for our users, our society, and this world? Does this process align with the values we believe in?” These questions are no longer about “can we,” nor are they about “is it profitable,” but are asking “should we” and “is it worth it.” It injects the warmth of humanity, an ethical framework, and ultimate meaning into the cold, optimal-solution-seeking logic of business. This is the final, non-delegable responsibility that human leaders must bear in the AGI era.

So, friends, the future of leadership is a silent revolution from “giving” to “seeking.” The scepter of the leader will no longer be the irrefutable answer, but the uncertain question that can inspire everyone to find the answer. His collaboration with AGI is by no means simply asking the machine for conclusions, but using it as a tireless “intellectual sparring partner” to polish his questions and test his assumptions.

The Tao Te Ching says: “Thirty spokes share one hub; it is the center hole that makes it useful.” The reason a wheel can turn is not because of the solidity of the thirty spokes, but precisely because of the empty part in the middle of the hub. The future leader must play the role of that “emptiness.” He is no longer the hardest spoke, no longer trying to fill the entire organization with his own “substance.” On the contrary, through questioning, he creates a huge, attractive “space of meaning” in the center of the organization, so that the wisdom of the team and the computing power of AGI can flow into it like a hundred rivers returning to the sea, thereby driving the entire organization to thrive and roll forward endlessly. This is the power of “questioning,” a humble yet majestic leadership for the future.

(3) Building a Cognitive “Immune System”

Friends, after we have completed the value leap from “answers” to “questions” and reconstructed the definition of “leadership,” we must face a more severe and more daily challenge. That is, in a world driven by artificial general intelligence, a world where it is difficult to distinguish the true from the false and where opinions are polarized and confrontational, how do we protect the independence of our own minds and ensure that the information we receive is nourishing us rather than polluting us?

The answer is, we need to build a strong and resilient “cognitive immune system” for ourselves.

Let’s first understand this metaphor. The greatness of our body’s immune system is not that it makes us immune to all poisons, but that it gives us a dynamic, learnable defense capability. It can identify what is “self,” which constitutes our body, and what is “non-self,” which is foreign; it can accurately attack and eliminate harmful pathogens; most importantly, it can, through “memory cells,” remember every invading enemy, so that it can make a faster and more powerful counterattack the next time they meet.

In the AGI era, the mind of each of us will be exposed to a “new environment” where the speed, breadth, and deceptiveness of information dissemination are growing exponentially. In this environment, countless “thought pathogens” are also floating around. If we do not have a matching, upgraded cognitive immune system, our minds will be like an unprotected baby exposed to a public place full of viruses, and the consequences will be disastrous.

Let’s first take a look at what these new types of “thought pathogens” actually look like.

The first, and most dangerous, is the “deepfake virus.” It directly attacks the foundation of our trust in the basic belief that “seeing is believing.” In the past, faking a video or audio clip required Hollywood-level technology and costs. But in the future, anyone can, with the help of AGI, generate a deceptively real video in minutes: a respected entrepreneur you admire, “on camera,” making statements that are completely contrary to his values; a voice message you never said, sent from your social media account to your loved ones; a “expert” review written by AI, with detailed data and beautiful writing, that makes you deeply believe in a shoddy product. This virus will make the “factual layer” on which we rely to make judgments become like quicksand, ready to collapse at any moment.

The second is the more insidious “algorithmic bias prion.” Prions are pathogens that can cause healthy proteins to misfold, triggering a slow but fatal chain reaction. Algorithmic bias is such a prion for thought. When an AGI used for recruitment, because it has learned from decades of recruitment data from a male-dominated industry, systematically and quietly gives lower scores to all female applicants under the guise of “objectivity and neutrality,” it has, imperceptibly, “whitewashed” and solidified historical biases into future “scientific decisions.” This virus will not make you feel uncomfortable immediately, but it will slowly and continuously distort our cognitive structure of fairness, justice, and even the real world.

The third is the “information cocoon autoimmune disease,” in which each of us may be deeply trapped. Autoimmune disease is a condition where the immune system overreacts and begins to attack its own healthy tissues. The recommendation algorithm engine is inducing a large-scale “cognitive autoimmune disease.” In order to maximize our attention, it will continuously push to us the views and information that we most agree with, like most, and feel most comfortable with. Over time, our information diet will become extremely monotonous, like a child who only eats candy every day. We will gradually lose the ability to understand and tolerate different views, and our cognitive boundaries will become increasingly rigid and fragile. Eventually, the appearance of any dissenting opinion will be treated by our cognitive system as “heresy” and “enemy,” and will be met with fierce, irrational rejection and attack. Our thoughts, in this “self-feeding,” lose their vitality and elasticity.

Faced with these pervasive and varied “thought pathogens,” how on earth should we build our own cognitive immune system? This requires us to deliberately train three core “immune capabilities.”

First, is the ability of “pattern recognition,” which is equivalent to the “lymphocytes” in our immune system, capable of identifying the basic types of enemies. This requires us to no longer passively and isolatedly receive every piece of information, but to pre-install a series of powerful and concise “mental models” in our minds. For example, when faced with any exciting investment proposal, proactively call upon the “second-order thinking” model to think: what are the direct consequences of this proposal? (first-order thinking). And what are the indirect, chain-reaction consequences of these direct consequences? (second-order thinking). Or, when faced with a complex business problem, use the “first principles” model to peel away the layers of appearance until you reach the essential core of the problem. These mental models, like “cognitive vaccines,” can help us to, at the first moment, identify those “thought viruses” that seem reasonable but are in fact absurd.

Second, is the ability of “information source tracing,” which is equivalent to the “macrophages” in the immune system, capable of engulfing and analyzing the composition of pathogens. In the information age, this is a kind of “forensics of the digital world.” It requires us to, when we encounter any suspicious information, like a detective, to question its “crime scene evidence chain”: Where did this article originally come from? Who is the author? What is his position and motive? Do the data he cites come from independent, cross-verified sources? Have the pictures or videos he shows been modified or taken out of context? This habit of tracing to the source, though time-consuming, is the most powerful weapon against “deepfake viruses” and all kinds of rumors. It can help us to rebuild the solid foundation of “facts” in a chaos of information.

Finally, and most centrally, is the ability of “self-questioning,” which is equivalent to the “T-cells” in the immune system, capable of launching a precise “self-attack” on infected cells. The biggest enemy of our cognitive system is often not from the outside, but from our own internal, deeply ingrained cognitive biases, such as confirmation bias (the tendency to believe only the evidence that confirms our existing views). Therefore, a strong cognitive immune system must include a mechanism for “reflection” and “self-criticism.” After forming an important judgment, we must deliberately, and even forcibly, ask ourselves: Is it possible that my conclusion is wrong? What are the core assumptions supporting my conclusion? What if this assumption is not valid? What is the most powerful argument for the opposing view? This process is undoubtedly painful, because it is an active attack on our own “comfort zone,” but only through the tempering of this “self-attack” can our cognition truly mature and become resilient.

Friends, the purpose of building a cognitive immune system is not to make us nihilists who doubt everything and reject everything. On the contrary, it is a higher level of “openness.” A person with strong immunity dares to embrace the world, to try all kinds of food, without worrying about getting sick. Similarly, a person with a strong cognitive immunity dares to be exposed to the most diverse, and even the most extreme, views, without worrying that his mind will be easily occupied and manipulated.

This is as Sun Tzu’s Art of War says: “Know yourself and know your enemy, and you will not be imperiled in a hundred battles.” “Knowing the enemy” is to recognize the new types of “thought pathogens” in the information environment of the AGI era; and “knowing yourself” is to have insight into the inherent biases and weaknesses in our own thinking. Only on this basis can we, in this smokeless cognitive war, defend our most precious wealth—a clear, independent, and complete mind.

(4) The Leap from “Factual Judgment” to “Value Judgment”

Friends, after we have preliminarily built an “immune system” for our minds, one that can identify information pathogens, we have arrived at the highest peak of this journey of intellectual evolution. Here, we will discuss the final and most solid fortress that distinguishes humanity from all machine intelligence. This fortress is the ability to make “value judgments.”

To understand this clearly, we must first delineate in our minds two completely different cognitive continents.

The first continent is the continent of “factual judgment.” This is a vast and solid world composed of data, logic, probability, and verifiable causal relationships. On this continent, all problems, in principle, have an objective, optimal solution. For example, “How to reduce the transportation cost of a product by fifteen percent?” “Based on existing market data, which product will have the highest sales growth in the next six months?” “Which drug administration plan is most effective in killing a specific type of cancer cell?” These questions concern “what is” and “how to do,” and they all fall within the scope of “factual judgment.”

For most of human civilization, humanity has been the sole, proud master of this continent. We developed science, mathematics, and engineering precisely to explore and build on this continent more accurately and efficiently. However, the emergence of artificial general intelligence is, in an irreversible way, changing the dominion over this continent. AGI, as the most powerful incarnation of “instrumental rationality” in history, its sole purpose of existence is to surpass humanity in the domain of “factual judgment.” It is the natural, legitimate monarch of this continent. Faced with its near-infinite computing power, omniscient memory, and absolute logical consistency, any human intellectual activity on this continent will seem like the spears of a primitive tribe against the laser cannons of a star fleet.

But, friends, in the world of cognition, there is another continent.

This continent is the continent of “value judgment.” This is a world full of fog and subjectivity, composed of emotions, ethics, morals, aesthetics, dreams, and meaning. On this continent, all problems have no single, standard answer. For example, “Is it worth it to sacrifice ten percent of the profit to implement a plan that can greatly improve employee well-being?” “When a technological innovation can bring both huge social convenience and may lead to large-scale structural unemployment, at what speed and in what way should we promote it?” “Wherein lies the greatness of a work of art?” These questions are no longer about “what is,” but “what should be”; no longer about “can we,” but “is it right”; no longer about “is it useful,” but “is it good.”

AGI can never truly set foot on this continent of “value judgment.” Because what it runs on is cold, undifferentiated binary code; while what supports this continent is the “emotional code” and “cultural code” that have been deposited in the millions of years of human evolution, a code full of warmth, preference, and reverence.

Let’s use a concrete business scenario to feel the huge gap between these two continents.

Imagine a large retail chain. Its management is asking AGI to design an optimal scheduling system for its tens of thousands of frontline employees across the country.

AGI accepts the task. It retrieves all the sales data from the past ten years, the customer flow peaks and valleys of each store, the work efficiency records of each employee, and even the weather forecast’s impact model on customer purchasing behavior, down to the minute. On the continent of “factual judgment,” it demonstrates a god-like dominance. A few minutes later, it has generated a “perfect” scheduling plan. According to its calculations, this plan can, not more, not less, precisely cut the company’s labor costs by 13.7 percent, while ensuring that the customer waiting time in all stores during peak hours is controlled within three minutes. It cuts the employees’ working hours into countless “fragments” and, like Tetris blocks, fits them perfectly into every “gap” of operational needs.

From the perspective of “instrumental rationality,” this answer is impeccable.

But at this point, the work of a true human leader, a “Chief Question Officer,” has just begun. He must lead his team to cross the chasm from the continent of “factual judgment” to the continent of “value judgment” to examine this perfect answer.

The first question he must ask is a value judgment question about “ethics”: “This system, although efficient, completely treats our employees as ‘human resource units’ that can be arbitrarily split and allocated. It deprives them of the right to have a stable, predictable personal life. So, is an efficiency improvement that comes at the cost of human dignity and happiness a ‘good’ efficiency?”

Next, he must ask a value judgment question about “mission”: “Our company’s vision is ‘to be the warmest neighbor in the community.’ Does a scheduling system that makes our employees’ faces show anxiety due to excessive fatigue and life disorder conform to the ‘warmth’ we want to convey to our customers? When our employees cannot feel the warmth of the company, how can they convey warmth to our customers?”

Then, he must also ask a value judgment question about “wisdom”: “The 13.7 percent cost saving brought by this system is a ‘first-order effect’ that we can clearly calculate. But what about the ‘second-order effects’ that cannot be quantified—such as the decline in employee loyalty, the increase in turnover, the decline in service quality, and even the corruption of the entire organizational culture—how do we measure them? Is it a wise trade-off to take a long-term, invisible risk of organizational culture decay for a short-term, visible financial gain?”

Please note that AGI cannot answer any of the above questions. Because it has no moral sense of “good and evil,” no sense of honor of “mission,” and no wisdom to measure intangible assets like “the hearts and minds of the people.” It is an ultimate master of efficiency, but at the same time, a complete “meaning-blind” person.

And our most important, irreplaceable role as humans in the AGI era is to be this “final arbiter of meaning.”

Our value is no longer to compete with machines in calculation and analysis, but to set a “value boundary” and “meaning coordinate” full of humanistic care for the machine’s calculation and analysis. Our job is to apply the “humanity” brake to that omnipotent “efficiency engine” and to point it in the direction of “mission.”

This is not a retreat for humanity. On the contrary, it is a great liberation and ascension. We have been liberated by AGI from the repetitive, tedious “technical” level of the “factual judgment” domain, so that we can focus on the higher, more fundamental “philosophical” level of the “value judgment” domain.

The ancient Greek philosopher Plato once envisioned an ideal republic governed by a “philosopher king.” He believed that the ideal ruler was not the bravest general or the most astute merchant, but the philosopher who had the deepest insight into the idea of “the Good.” In a sense, the arrival of the AGI era is forcing each of us, in our own work and life, to play the role of a “philosopher king.” We must constantly ask ourselves: What is the ultimate purpose of the efficiency we pursue? Where will the wealth we create lead? How should the power we possess be constrained?

This is the eternal, unshakable ecological niche that we, as humans, have found for ourselves in this great, technology-driven revolution. We are the setters of purpose, the guardians of ethics, the bestowers of meaning. The machine is responsible for answering all the “how” questions, while we will forever hold the final and most important “why.”

II. Embracing Uncertainty: Enhancing Anti-Fragility

(1) The End of the “Planned Life”

Friends, after our thinking has completed the successive leaps from “answers” to “questions,” and then to “value judgments,” we must project this new cognitive framework onto the most concrete and most concerning life practice of each of us—our career and life planning. Because here, a more thorough, more disruptive “burning of the old maps” is quietly taking place.

Before I elaborate, I would like to ask you to, together with me, look back at a life paradigm that we are incredibly familiar with, one that our parents and grandparents may have even lived by. Let’s call it the “railway life” or the “blueprint life.”

This life blueprint, for the vast majority of people born in the mid-to-late twentieth century, was as clear as a completed architectural construction plan: study hard, get into a good university, choose a “stable” major that you can “work in for a lifetime,” such as accounting, law, or civil engineering; after graduation, enter a large, reputable “unit,” whether it’s a state-owned steel mill or a Fortune 500 foreign enterprise; then, like getting on a train that starts slowly but has a clear track, you begin to climb the “career ladder” step by step, station by station. From intern to assistant, from assistant to manager, from manager to director. Alongside this track, you buy your house with a bank loan; you start your family; you send your children onto another similar track. Finally, after decades of loyal service, you get off at the final station of this track with a decent pension and live out your days in peace.

This was the golden age of the “planned life.” It was not a fantasy, but a real “social contract” jointly recognized by the entire society in a specific historical period. Its validity was based on several key historical premises: first, a relatively stable and growing macroeconomic environment; second, a relatively slow and predictable technological iteration cycle; third, large, long-lived, and stable hierarchical corporations as the main body of the social economy. In such a world, the external environment was like a solid ground, and you could completely draw a clear, executable, thirty-to-forty-year planning blueprint for your life on this ground.

However, friends, the solid ground that once was has long since turned into quicksand without us even noticing.

Even before the ultimate tidal wave of artificial general intelligence arrived, this “life blueprint” had already been riddled with holes by one wave of the era after another. The wave of globalization in the 1980s and 1990s made the once-impregnable local enterprises face brutal global competition for the first time; the internet bubble of 2000 wiped out the assets of countless seemingly promising tech-nouveaux-riches overnight; the financial tsunami of 2008 caused even the century-old “too big to fail” institutions to collapse, completely shattering the last illusion of “lifelong employment.” The subsequent rise of the gig economy and platform models has disintegrated the traditional “employment relationship” into a temporary “cooperative relationship.”

Each impact added new, irreparable cracks to this old blueprint. And the arrival of artificial general intelligence is no longer a matter of impact or repair. What it has done is to directly step forward and throw this faded, damaged blueprint, completely and without mercy, into the incinerator of history.

Why is AGI the terminator? Because what it brings is a “discontinuous,” fault-line-like shock. It attacks not a certain detail on the blueprint, but the most fundamental and most fatal assumption on which the blueprint was drawn—that the professional skills you learn today, the skills you rely on for a living, will still be valuable tomorrow.

Let’s go back to those “iron rice bowls,” the “most stable” professions, and see what AGI is doing.

You once thought that accountants were stable because companies always need financial analysis. But AGI can, in one second, read, analyze, and cross-verify a company’s ten years of all financial statements, tax records, and business contracts, with a precision and depth far exceeding any human team of accountants.

You once thought that lawyers were stable because the legal statutes are as vast as the sea and require professional interpretation. But AGI can, overnight, “learn” all the legal literature and precedents in human history, and provide you with the most comprehensive and efficient legal research and contract drafting services. The most time-consuming and basic “paperwork” of human lawyers is being cut off at the root.

You once thought that software engineers were stable because code is the brick and mortar of the digital world. But AGI can already, based on natural language descriptions, automatically generate, debug, and optimize complex code. The role of human engineers is shifting from “brick-laying artisans” to “architects” who give instructions to AI, and the order of magnitude of demand will see a cliff-like drop.

This is the fundamental bankruptcy of the “planned life” model in the AGI era. Its greatest tragedy is this: in your pursuit of stability and security, you have invested ten, twenty years of your time to delve into a profound, narrow skill. You have polished yourself into an incomparably fine, incomparably fitting “special screw” for a certain old machine. You thought your irreplaceability lay in this “specialization.” But the arrival of AGI has directly sent the entire old machine you served to the scrapyard. Thus, the “security barrier” you have built over a lifetime has, in an instant, become a “career enclosure” that traps you where you are.

From this, we can draw the most profound and most counterintuitive paradox of this era: in the future, pursuing stability is the highest form of risk; embracing change is the most fundamental form of stability.

Any attempt to plan a single, linear career path for the next few decades is doomed to be futile, and moreover, dangerous. It is as if you know you are in a highly active earthquake zone, yet you insist on building a hundred-story, perfectly stable skyscraper for your life. The more detailed your “planning,” the more solid the “barriers” you build, the more tragic and complete your collapse will be when the magnitude-nine earthquake named “technological revolution” arrives without warning.

So, friends, it is time to say a final farewell to the “planned life” era, an era full of a sense of security, but also full of illusions. We must, from the bottom of our hearts, accept a new reality: our life is no longer a railway with a clear track, but more like an ocean with no nautical charts, an ocean that we must explore ourselves. The old maps in our hands must be burned, not because they are not good enough, but because the world they depict no longer exists.

The core wisdom of the I Ching is “change.” It tells us that the only constant in the universe is “change” itself. When a situation reaches its limit, it changes; change leads to passage, and passage leads to endurance. In past eras, we might have been able to temporarily ignore this fundamental law of the universe in a relatively static harbor. But in this era of accelerated change opened by AGI, adapting to “change” will no longer be a far-sighted wisdom, but a most basic survival instinct, like breathing and drinking water. And how to learn to surf, and even ride the waves, in this ocean of uncertainty is the wisdom of “anti-fragility” that we will discuss next.

(2) Introducing Taleb’s “Antifragile” Philosophy

Friends, after we have jointly declared the end of the “planned life” era, filled with illusory security, an extremely urgent question has been placed before each and every one of us: if the old maps have been burned, what then, should be our new worldview and navigational art for sailing on this unknown ocean of the future?

To answer this question, I must solemnly introduce to you one of the most important and most underrated thinkers of our time—Nassim Nicholas Taleb, and the crown jewel of his intellectual system—the concept of “antifragility.”

Before we unfold this concept, let’s first do a simple thought experiment. What is the opposite of “fragile”?

When we hear the word “fragile,” our minds might immediately conjure up an exquisite, paper-thin porcelain teacup. Its very existence depends on a stable and placid environment; any slight, accidental shock, such as slipping from a table, will cause it to shatter in an instant, turning into a pile of irretrievable shards.

So, what is its opposite? Ninety percent of people might answer: “robust” or “resilient.” For example, a solid block of stainless steel. You can drop it from the same height, and it will remain unscathed, perhaps even denting the floor. It can effectively “resist” shock and maintain its “unchanged” form.

This answer seems impeccable, but Taleb points out, with surgical precision, that this is wrong. Because “robust” or “resilient” is merely an intermediate state of “fragile,” and far from its true opposite. The other side of “not suffering loss” should not be merely “not suffering loss,” but “benefiting from loss.”

So, what on earth is the true opposite of the porcelain teacup? Imagine the Hydra from Greek mythology, the monster with nine heads. For every head you cut off, two new, more powerful heads will immediately grow in its place. The Hydra does not just “resist” harm; in every process of being attacked, harmed, and put under pressure, it becomes stronger than it was before.

This is “antifragility.”

This word, coined by Taleb, its meaning is far more profound than the “resilience” or “recoverability” we often speak of. Resilience refers to a system’s ability to “return to its original state” after suffering a shock; its goal is “to remain unchanged.” Antifragility, on the other hand, refers to a system’s ability not only to recover from a shock, but also to absorb energy, learn information, and optimize its structure from it, thereby becoming more evolved and more powerful than it was before the shock. Its essence is a “love” for uncertainty, randomness, stress, and chaos, not just “endurance.”

Let’s broaden our perspective, and you will find that “antifragility” is actually the core secret of all complex systems in the universe that can exist for a long time and continuously evolve.

In biology, our body is a typical antifragile system. If you send an astronaut into a completely “stable,” gravity-free outer space environment, his bones will rapidly lose calcium and become fragile due to the lack of stress stimulation. On the contrary, a weightlifter, by constantly “attacking” and “tearing” his muscle fibers with heavy weights, his muscles will become thicker and stronger during the repair process. Our immune system is the same; it is by constantly being exposed to the “attacks” of various pathogens that it learns to identify and counterattack, and thus becomes stronger. A child who grows up in a sterile environment will have an extremely fragile immune system.

In the economic ecosystem, examples of antifragility are also abundant. In a fiercely competitive restaurant industry, a large number of restaurants go out of business every year. This is fragile and catastrophic for an individual restaurant. But for the entire restaurant “ecosystem,” these closure events are a precious form of metabolism. It eliminates the inefficient participants who cannot adapt to changing consumer tastes, thereby making the entire ecosystem more vibrant and better able to meet people’s needs. The venture capital industry has taken the logic of antifragility to its extreme. In a successful venture fund’s portfolio, eighty to ninety percent of the projects may go to zero, but as long as one or two projects capture a “black swan”-level, unpredictable huge success, the returns will be sufficient to cover all the losses and create astonishing returns. It does not rely on “predicting” the future, but on “exposure” to “positive uncertainty.”

Even the history of life’s evolution on Earth itself is a grand, four-billion-year-long epic of antifragility. The fundamental driving force that has propelled life from single-celled organisms to the complex and diverse forms we see today comes precisely from various unpredictable “shocks” and “pressures”: random genetic mutations, brutal competition for survival, and devastating “black swan events” like asteroid impacts. Every catastrophe has eliminated the fragile species, but has also created huge, new ecological niches for the new species that possessed some kind of “antifragile” characteristic. Chaos and randomness are the true fuel of life’s evolution.

Now, let us use this new intellectual scalpel of “antifragility” to re-examine the “planned life” model that we declared bankrupt earlier.

Taleb constructs a triad of “fragile, robust, antifragile.” We can clearly see that the “planned life” model is a typical, extreme “fragile” paradigm. Its core appeal is “stability,” “predictability,” and the elimination of all “uncertainty.” It treats life as an “engineering project” that needs to be precisely controlled, and any “accident” that deviates from the blueprint is seen as a “risk” and “error” that needs to be corrected. This extreme pursuit of stability is precisely what makes it so vulnerable and defenseless when faced with AGI, this ultimate “accident” that can be neither predicted nor controlled.

And what we usually understand as “robust,” for example, an experienced “expert” with multiple skills, he may be able to remain “stable” and not be eliminated in a few industry fluctuations by virtue of his strength. But his core is still to “resist” change, not to “embrace” it. When what AGI brings is the demise of the entire “industry” itself, the final fate of this incomparably “solid” piece of iron is nothing more than to be thrown into the furnace along with other scrap iron.

So, what would an “antifragile” life paradigm look like?

It first requires us to fundamentally change our relationship with “uncertainty.” We should no longer see uncertainty as an enemy to be avoided, but as a “partner” full of opportunities and information. We should no longer ask, “What is the most stable industry in the next five years?” but ask, “In which areas might the largest, most positively potential fluctuations occur in the next five years?”.

It requires us to change our relationship with “error.” We should no longer see errors as “stains” to be covered up, but as a low-cost “trial and error,” an opportunity to obtain valuable “negative information.” A failed entrepreneurial attempt, an unsuccessful career transition, for a fragile “planned life,” are “hard scars” on a resume; but for an “antifragile” life, they are a lit-up, valuable signpost on a cognitive map that says “this way is a dead end,” bringing you one step closer to the right path.

This is the new “operating system” that we have found for our lives. The arrival of AGI has, in an undeniable way, switched the underlying operating logic of the entire world from a relatively stable, predictable “linear model” to a “complex model” full of randomness, mutation, and non-linearity. On this new operating system, continuing to run the “fragile” application software designed for the old system will inevitably result in constant crashes and freezes.

The German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche once said a widely quoted famous line: “That which does not kill me makes me stronger.” This sentence can be said to be the most poetic expression of “antifragility.” But in the age of AGI, we even need to give it a more radical upgrade. What we pursue will not just be to become stronger after being impacted; we must also proactively and strategically place ourselves under controllable, beneficial “shocks” and “pressures.” Because the growth of our bodies and minds precisely needs them. A life that has completely bid farewell to stress will also be a life that has completely lost its vitality.

And how to systematically build this antifragile ability in our concrete life practices is the specific methodology and action guide that we will explore in depth next.

(3) Constructing a “Barbell” Life Strategy

Friends, after we have deeply understood “antifragility” as a new worldview for dealing with uncertainty, a crucial question naturally arises: how do we, in our own concrete life practices, systematically forge ourselves from a fragile “porcelain cup” into an antifragile “Hydra”?

The answer lies hidden in a tool that is seemingly simple yet contains profound wisdom, and that is the “barbell strategy,” which Nassim Taleb strongly advocates.

Please imagine the most common piece of equipment in a gym—the barbell. Its physical structure is highly inspiring: heavy, concentrated weights at both ends, connected by a bar in the middle that bears no weight. Taleb uses this vivid image to construct a powerful life resource allocation model for us: allocate the vast majority of your resources to one end of the barbell, pursuing extreme “safety” and “conservatism”; at the same time, allocate a small portion of your resources to the other end of the barbell, pursuing extreme “aggressiveness” and “speculation”; and most critically, completely and resolutely avoid the “middle ground,” which seems “prudent” but is in fact full of hidden risks.

To understand the disruptive nature of this strategy, we must first see clearly that what most of us have adopted in the past “planned life” paradigm is precisely a “spindle strategy” or a “football strategy,” which is the complete opposite of the barbell strategy. We have allocated one hundred percent of our resources to that tempting “middle ground”: a “medium-risk, medium-return” stable job, a “medium-risk, medium-return” investment portfolio, a “not-good-not-bad, uneventful” lifestyle.

In Taleb’s view, this “middle ground” is a deceptive and therefore fatal “fragility trap.” It makes you mistakenly believe that you are walking on the safest and broadest road, but in reality you are in the most dangerous swamp. Because you have neither enjoyed the “survival guarantee” of absolute invincibility that comes with extreme conservatism, nor have you had any exposure to the kind of “asymmetrical payoffs” that can change your destiny, which might come from extreme speculation. When the giant “black swan” of AGI flaps its wings, the careers and assets of this seemingly largest “middle class” are precisely the zone that will be the first to be torn apart by the storm.

Therefore, the first step in constructing a “barbell strategy” is to make a complete break with this “middle ground” in our thinking, and then consciously and systematically allocate our life resources to the two ends of the barbell.

Let’s first look at the “safe end” of the barbell, the extremely conservative end where we have invested ninety percent of our resources. The sole purpose of this end is to ensure that we “will not be knocked out of the game” under any extremely unfavorable circumstances. It is not for us to “win,” but for us to “never lose everything.” It is the “ballast” of our entire life’s antifragile structure, our “solid rear base” for all exploration and adventure.

   In your career, this end might be a “survival job” that provides you with a stable cash flow and social security. This job may not be your passion or “dream,” but it must have a few key characteristics: first, its demand is relatively inelastic and not easily affected by violent economic cycles, such as public services, basic healthcare, or certain technical blue-collar jobs that are difficult to fully automate; second, it must not excessively consume your mental energy, so that after work, you still have enough energy and time to manage the other end of your barbell. This job is your “strategic bunker”; no matter how stormy it is outside, it can provide you with basic shelter and supplies.

   In your finances, this end means allocating the vast majority of your savings to almost risk-free assets, such as government bonds, high-credit-rating bonds, or just cash itself. You give up the five to ten percent annual returns promised by so-called “medium-risk” financial products, and in return, you get the certainty that your family’s financial system will not suffer a “catastrophic disaster” in any financial storm.

   In your health, this end is the most simple and ancient wisdom of well-being: sufficient sleep, a clean diet, and continuous, low-intensity physical exercise, such as walking or jogging. You refuse the trendy, aggressive but potentially risky “biohacking” techniques, and pursue a sustainable, low-volatility physical state.

Now, let’s move to the other end of the barbell, the extremely aggressive end that only occupies ten percent of our resources and is full of imagination. The sole purpose of this end is to maximize our exposure to “positive black swans.” Its core is a return structure known as “asymmetry”: its maximum possible loss is limited, controllable, and completely bearable by us—at most, the loss of this ten percent of resources; while its maximum possible gain is infinite, immeasurable, and even potentially disruptive.

   In your learning, this end means you no longer invest your limited spare time and money in pursuing a traditional, expensive MBA degree just for the sake of a credential, but instead invest in those extremely cutting-edge, low-consensus but potentially paradigm-shifting “fringe disciplines.” For example, systematically learning the basics of synthetic biology, delving into the cognitive psychology behind human-computer interaction, or becoming a “prompt engineer” who can have the most efficient and creative dialogues with various large language models. This learning may be of no “use” in the short term, but once a certain field reaches its “tipping point,” the cognition you have accumulated in this ten percent of your time may make you the scarcest talent of that era.

   In your career, this end is a series of “low-cost trial-and-error” “side projects” you conduct in your spare time. You start a self-media channel that focuses only on an extremely niche area at the lowest cost, write a paid newsletter about your unique hobby, organize an online community to connect a few like-minded people, or participate in an open-source software project that excites you immensely. Ninety-nine percent of these attempts will probably come to nothing, and the loss will be just some of your time and energy. But the one percent that succeeds may open up a brand new career track for you, one that is entirely your own, and its return will be “non-linear.”

   In your social interactions, this end is you deliberately taking a portion of your social time away from those homogeneous “industry dinners” to get to know some “interesting” people who have no connection to your existing circle. An artist who studies Song dynasty aesthetics, a linguist dedicated to the protection of endangered languages, an anthropologist who conducts fieldwork year-round. These interactions may not bring you any direct “networking resources,” but the windows they open for you to unknown worlds of thought may, at an unexpected moment, bring you a disruptive inspiration that completely changes the way you see the world.

Friends, the two ends of the barbell are not mutually exclusive; they are a “symbiotic system” that depends on and enables each other. It is precisely because you have that indestructible “strategic bunker” at one end of the barbell that you have enough confidence and composure to send out your “scouts” for those uncertain, bold adventures at the other end. Your extreme conservatism enables your extreme aggressiveness.

This is the “barbell strategy,” a survival philosophy that seems contradictory but is full of the Eastern wisdom of “yin and yang.” The ninety percent of conservatism is the heavy, stable, nurturing “yin”; the ten percent of aggressiveness is the nimble, changing, and enterprising “yang.” An antifragile life, one that can sail steadily and far in the stormy seas of the AGI era, will certainly not be a “gray” life walking in the middle ground, but a rich and colorful life supported by these two poles of “yin and yang,” a life full of tension and possibilities.

(4) Redefining “Error” as “Data”

Friends, after we have built the solid underlying framework of the “barbell strategy” for our lives, we must carry out a more profound and more difficult “interior renovation.” We must delve into our own hearts to transform the fundamental cognition of “error” and “failure” that is innate and has been constantly reinforced by our entire education system.

Please, together with me, first frankly recall a common and deeply ingrained human experience. Think back, the last time you made an undeniable mistake at work, what was your first reaction? When a startup project of yours failed after you had poured your heart and soul into it, what emotions surged deep within you?

Most likely, it was shame, regret, frustration, self-denial, and even an urge to completely erase this “disgraceful” experience from your memory, from your resume. This feeling is so real, so universal, because we were all brought up in the old paradigm of the “planned life.” In that fragile evaluation system, an error is a red cross, a deducted point, a “flaw” that deviates from the perfect blueprint, an “obstacle” on the road to success. Our entire society has systematically instilled in us the belief that winners never make mistakes, and those who make mistakes are losers.

However, friends, today we must, with a resolute attitude, declare war on this outdated and harmful cognition. Because in the new worldview of “antifragility,” the definition of error and failure will be completely reversed. They are no longer negative events that we must “avoid” at all costs; on the contrary, they are the indispensable and therefore most precious “negative data feedback” that the antifragile system relies on to learn, iterate, and evolve.

In the future, learning ability will, to a large extent, no longer depend on how many books you have read or how much existing knowledge you have mastered, but on your ability to extract high-quality information from every “trial and error” process.

Let’s temporarily pull our vision away from personal emotions and look at how humanity’s greatest innovations have occurred. The entire history of scientific development is, in a sense, a magnificent epic composed of countless “beautiful mistakes.” In 1928, after returning from vacation, the British scientist Alexander Fleming discovered that some of his Staphylococcus culture dishes had been abnormally contaminated by mold. According to standard error-free procedures, these “contaminated” samples should have been discarded directly as failures. But Fleming keenly captured a key “signal” from this “error”: around the mold, there was a clear “death zone” where no bacteria grew. He did not go to “correct” this error, but to “interrogate” it. It was this great “interrogation” that ultimately led him to the discovery of penicillin, opening the age of antibiotics for humanity.

Coincidentally, the discovery of the cosmic microwave background radiation, hailed as the “echo of God’s creation” and the most powerful evidence for the Big Bang theory, also originated from an “error” that was initially considered an “equipment malfunction.” Two radio astronomers, no matter how they adjusted their antenna, could not eliminate a persistent microwave “noise” coming from all directions in the universe. After ruling out all possibilities of instrumental failure, they finally realized that this un-eliminable “error signal” was precisely the “correct answer” from the birth of the universe that they were looking for.

Even the four-billion-year evolution of life on Earth itself is an epic of “trial and error” on the largest scale. The fundamental engine driving the continuous innovation of all life forms is the unavoidable, randomly occurring “errors” in gene replication, i.e., genetic mutations. The vast majority of these “errors” are harmful; they create fragile individuals who cannot adapt to the environment and are mercilessly eliminated by natural selection. However, the very few “beneficial errors” that can bring a survival advantage are preserved, amplified, and eventually solidified into the “new genes” of the entire species. It can be said that without “error,” there would be no evolution. Nature, this greatest innovator, its only R&D model is continuous, massive, and ruthless “trial and error.”

So, friends, the first thing we need to do is to desensitize and re-evaluate “failure.” But this does not mean we should blindly and foolishly embrace all failures, because not all errors have equal value. Here, we must establish a taxonomy of “failure.”

The first type is “fragile failure,” or “destructive error.” This is a kind of irreversible failure that “knocks you out of the game,” such as investing all your life savings into a high-risk startup project without a backup plan. Once this “life-and-death gamble” of an error occurs, you will have no chance to learn anything from it. The “safe end” of the “barbell strategy” we discussed earlier, its sole purpose is to completely and systematically eliminate the occurrence of this kind of “fragile failure.”

The second type is “robust failure,” or “repetitive error.” This is a failure that has occurred but has not brought about any cognitive upgrade, a wasted failure. For example, a company with rigid management repeatedly stumbles on different projects for the same reason. The error occurs, but the organization, due to a lack of reflection and review mechanisms, pretends it didn’t happen, or blames it on some “unlucky” scapegoat. This kind of error is like a spinning gear, producing only noise and friction, without any value.

The third type is what we really want to pursue, the “antifragile failure,” or “informational error.” The essence of this error is a “high-quality experiment.” It has several distinct features: first, its cost is controllable; it occurs at the “aggressive end” of your barbell, and even if it fails, it will never shake your foundation of survival. Second, its occurrence is rapid, allowing you to complete a “hypothesis-verification-feedback” loop in the shortest possible time. Third, and most importantly, it can produce clear, high-information-content “data,” allowing you to clearly know where your core assumption went wrong.

And just having “informational errors” is far from enough. True learning ability is reflected in the next step, which is the “ability to extract high-quality information.” This requires us to establish a personal “black box thinking” model for ourselves. We all know that the aviation industry is one of the safest transportation systems in the world. Its secret lies in its ultimate utilization of “failure.” Every air crash, no matter how tragic, its “black box” will be found and thoroughly and ruthlessly interpreted by an independent committee whose purpose is not to assign blame. Every failure must be transformed into a cognitive upgrade and process improvement for the entire aviation system.

We also need to install such a “black box” for our own lives. This means that after every “informational error” occurs, we must force ourselves to execute a strict “review” process. First is to objectively and unemotionally record the facts: What was my initial hypothesis? What actions did I take? Where did the final result deviate from my expectations? Second is to conduct a “blameless” causal analysis: What were the core reasons that led to this result? Was there a problem with my cognitive model, a deviation in my execution process, or did I ignore a key external variable? The final and most crucial step is to “solidify” the new cognition generated by this failure into a “version upgrade” of your mental model.

Friends, please understand this profoundly. In a world driven by AGI, a machine can call upon the global public database for learning, but it can never access a “private database” that belongs only to you, and that is the “tacit knowledge” with your personal touch, extracted from the specific, vivid, and nuanced “failures” you have personally experienced.

The old proverb “failure is the mother of success” has been given a new, more significant strategic meaning today. It is no longer just a comforting “chicken soup for the soul,” but a cold, iron law concerning survival. The speed at which you accumulate “high-quality failures” and the efficiency with which you extract “high-quality data” from them will directly determine the speed of your cognitive evolution. Your “failure database” is your most expensive and most inimitable core asset in the AGI era.

Therefore, let us, from today, treat every “error” as a piece of “intelligence” from the future, and every “failure” as a precious lesson for which “tuition” has been paid. On this road to antifragility, what we will pursue will no longer be a “perfect life” that “never makes mistakes,” but a continuously evolving life that “never wastes any error.”

Section 2: The Reshaping of Abilities: The Last Bastion of Humanity

I. Communication and Empathy: The Core Abilities That Machines Cannot Replace

(1) The End of Efficiency is Estrangement

Friends, after we have completed the discussion on the evolution of “thinking,” we must turn our gaze from within our own minds to the “bridge” that connects us with others and with the world—communication. Because here, in the interactive zone between people, a zone full of ambiguity, nuance, and emotion, lies the last and warmest bastion of humanity.

However, artificial general intelligence, with its extremely alluring “efficiency-first” posture, is attempting to transform this bridge into a cold, frictionless information transmission pipeline.

Let’s first immersively experience how smooth and efficient a communication world “optimized” to the extreme by AGI can be. Imagine you are a project manager in the year 2035. Your morning begins with a conversation with your AGI assistant. It has already processed all three hundred emails you received last night, automatically replying to ninety percent of the routine inquiries in a decent, watertight language. For the remaining thirty, it has precisely extracted the key points and to-do items for you, and has drafted three different tones of replies for you to choose from. You are about to attend an important cross-departmental meeting, but you no longer need to spend hours reading tedious background materials. Your assistant has already “fed” itself all the relevant documents and generated a one-page “situation briefing” for you, containing the core controversies, the positions of all parties, and key data. During the meeting, you can even authorize your AI avatar to “attend” two other minor meetings simultaneously. It will transcribe, translate in real-time, and capture any key information relevant to you. After the meeting, a detailed, logically clear meeting minutes, with tasks and deadlines automatically assigned, will be sent to all attendees within a minute.

What a wonderful world! The cost of communication has been reduced to an unprecedented low; the flow of information has reached an unprecedented state of perfection. We have been completely liberated from all the red tape, ineffective wrangling, and information noise.

But friends, please allow me to ask a disturbing question: when “information” itself flows perfectly in an organization with 100% fidelity, have we also, inadvertently, lost something more precious?

To answer this question, we first need to deconstruct the essence of “communication.” Every effective human communication actually involves at least three levels of signal transmission.

The first level is the “information layer.” This is the most superficial, pure text and data, which answers the “what” question. For example, “The project is five percent behind schedule,” “The budget for the third quarter needs to be cut by ten percent.” What AGI optimizes is precisely this level. It is a perfect information packer and deliverer, ensuring the accuracy, conciseness, and efficiency of information.

The second level is the “relationship layer.” It is hidden beneath the information and, through the manner, tone, and wording of communication, constantly defines and confirms the “relationship status” of the communicating parties. It answers the “how are we” question. The same sentence, “This report needs to be redone,” said in a stern, unquestionable tone, and said in a gentle, inquiring, and concerned tone, may convey the same information, but the relationship it defines is the vast difference between “domination and submission” and “cooperation and support.”

The third level is the “emotional layer.” This is the deepest level, the signal concerning intent and motivation. It answers the “how do I feel” and “how do I want you to feel” questions. It conveys care, respect, trust, and goodwill through seemingly “superfluous” pleasantries, harmless jokes, pauses that show understanding, and an encouraging look in the meeting room.

Now, let’s return to that communication world optimized to the extreme by AGI and watch a “systemic meltdown” of organizational trust that is quietly happening.

Suppose a diligent but inexperienced young engineer has encountered a tricky technical problem in his work, causing the module he is responsible for to fall behind schedule. His project manager is the highly AGI-dependent “efficiency elite” we mentioned earlier. This manager, in order to “efficiently” solve the problem, has his AGI assistant send a “communication email” to the engineer.

AGI does not disappoint. The email it generates is a model of its kind: it gets straight to the point, pointing out the fact of the delay with precise data; then, it clearly lists three possible solutions, with links to detailed technical documents; at the end, it explicitly requires the engineer to submit a detailed “catch-up plan” within 24 hours. The entire email has not a single word of nonsense, not a single trace of emotion. It is a pure, perfect transmission of the “information layer.”

However, on the receiving end of this young engineer, a collapse of trust has already occurred. What he sees is not help, but a cold, irrefutable “ultimatum.” He feels no “understanding” from his manager for the difficulties he is facing (emotional layer), nor does he feel that he is being treated as a “partner” who needs support (relationship layer). What he feels is that he is a “malfunctioning part” that is being “repaired” by the system with a standardized procedure. Thus, the flame that had just been lit in his heart, the desire to proactively and honestly admit his difficulties and seek team collaboration, is instantly extinguished. What replaces it is a defensive mentality of self-preservation, of fearing to make another mistake. He no longer thinks about how to “creatively” solve the problem, but only about how to “flawlessly” complete that “catch-up plan.”

Friends, this is the true meaning of “the end of efficiency is estrangement.” AGI, in filtering out all the seemingly “inefficient” communication noise for us (for example, the manager should have walked over to the engineer, patted him on the shoulder, and said, “Don’t worry, I ran into this kind of problem too when I was just starting out, let’s take a look at it together”), has also, at the same time, filtered out all the “emotional nutrients” necessary for building trust.

Trust is never an “information problem”; it is a “relationship problem” and an “emotional problem.” It is not born from perfect logic and impeccable data. On the contrary, it is born from those seemingly “inefficient” interactions that are full of “human weaknesses”: it is born from a clumsy but sincere apology, born from a heart-to-heart, late-night talk, born from a tacit, benevolent silence when the other person is in an awkward situation.

These human moments, full of “uncertainty,” are the “trust nodes” that truly play a connecting role in the vast network of an organization. And what AGI does is, through its extreme efficiency, to cut off these precious “nodes” one by one. In the end, the entire organization may appear to have smooth information flow, like a perfect crystal palace, but its internal structure has become extremely fragile because it has lost the adhesive of trust. Once it encounters a real external pressure that requires everyone to be in the same boat and overcome difficulties together, this seemingly perfect crystal palace will instantly disintegrate and shatter into a pile of loose sand.

Therefore, we must soberly recognize that in communication, efficiency is never the highest goal. An organization with only information left is bound to be a low-trust, high-friction, and fragile organization. And those seemingly “time-wasting” human communications, full of emotion and human interaction, are precisely the most important “deposits” into the organization’s trust account. This is a job that AGI can never understand and can never complete, but it is the noblest value that future human leaders and collaborators must bear.

(2) The “Bandwidth” of Empathy

Friends, after we have jointly witnessed how a communication system that excessively pursues efficiency can inadvertently lead to the desertification of organizational trust, we need to go to the core of this problem to explore what the real “nutrients” for building trust, the ones sacrificed for efficiency, actually are. This nutrient is “empathy.”

However, the word “empathy” has been overused today, often confused with “sympathy” or “understanding.” But here, I will present to you a more “hardcore,” new definition based on information science and cognitive science: empathy is an information transmission and reception capability of extremely high bandwidth, extremely high fidelity, and involving a full spectrum of channels.

Let’s start with the concept of “bandwidth.” In information science, bandwidth determines the amount of data that a channel can transmit per unit of time. Artificial general intelligence, in its most proficient field of text processing, has an almost infinite “digital bandwidth.” It can read and understand a War and Peace in one second, and its information processing speed is millions of times that of a human. But this amazing speed only processes an extremely narrow “frequency band” of the human communication spectrum, and that is the low-bandwidth “text data packets” composed of logic, grammar, and symbols.

A truly profound communication between humans, however, is a full-spectrum, high-bandwidth “symphony of signals.” In addition to “digital signals” like text, it also contains a large amount of high-information-density “analog signals” that are ruthlessly discarded by AGI’s efficiency filter.

Let’s dissect the various sections of this symphony one by one.

First are the rich signals in the “auditory channel.” In addition to the content of the words themselves, what truly conveys emotional information are the “prosodic” signals. The same sentence, “You should reconsider this proposal,” said with a steady, falling intonation, expresses an unquestionable command; said with a gentle, rising intonation, it may be a suggestion full of goodwill and room for negotiation; and if said with a deliberately slow, slightly hesitant rhythm, it may be hinting at “there are huge risks in this proposal that I cannot explicitly state.” This “vocal expression,” composed of speech rate, pitch, rhythm, and pauses, often contains information that is much richer and more authentic than the words themselves.

Second is the even vaster ocean of information in the “visual channel.” The research of the psychology master Paul Ekman found that the human face has “micro-expressions” that cannot be completely controlled by the subjective will. They are extremely subtle facial muscle movements that last for less than a quarter of a second, but they can reveal the truest emotions deep within a person’s heart. When your negotiating counterpart, while verbally expressing “great satisfaction” with your offer, shows a fleeting, asymmetrical “micro-expression” of “contempt” at the corner of his mouth, a person with high empathy bandwidth can immediately capture this fleeting “high-dimensional data” and instantly realize that there is a huge gap between the words and the true intent.

Besides micro-expressions, eye contact is the “first violin” in this symphony. A firm, warm gaze can convey a trust and support that a thousand words cannot express, while a flickering, evasive glance may expose a lack of confidence or insincerity. Body language is also conducting a silent broadcast: a forward-leaning, open posture represents acceptance and interest, while a closed posture with crossed arms and a leaning-back body, no matter how friendly the words, is clearly expressing the subtext of “resistance” and “defense.”

Finally, there is an even more hidden “contextual channel,” which includes all the shared past memories and cultural backgrounds of the communicating parties. An “inside joke” that only your team members understand, a knowing smile at the memory of a difficult project you overcame together in the past—these signals are completely undecodable “heavenly scripts” for an AGI with no “shared life history,” but for humans, they are the most efficient “information compression packages” for building deep rapport and emotional resonance.

Now we can clearly see that a person with “high empathy bandwidth” receives an extremely rich, three-dimensional, and high-fidelity “signal matrix” from the auditory, visual, and contextual channels, containing prosody, micro-expressions, body language, and shared memories. And AGI, no matter how powerful its computing power, can only ever receive and process the most barren, singular “text slice” of this matrix.

However, friends, the greatness of empathy is far more than this. If the “decoding” of this high-dimensional data is merely the technical aspect of empathy, then the true soul of empathy lies in a more profound, almost mysterious life phenomenon—”resonance.”

Physics tells us that when an object vibrates, if another object has the same natural frequency, then even without direct contact, the latter will also begin to vibrate. This is resonance. Human empathy is an “emotional resonance.” It is not an intellectual activity of “inferring” the other person’s emotions through logical analysis, but a more direct, physiological “feeling what they feel.” When you see your friend with his head down in dejection, your mirror neurons may make your own body instantly feel a hint of heaviness; when you hear a piece of joyful music, your own heartbeat may also speed up.

This ability of “resonance” is an “insurmountable chasm” for AGI, because it does not have a “biological body,” evolved over hundreds of millions of years and full of hormones and neurotransmitters, that can resonate with the outside world. It can, by analyzing all your vital signs data, “know” that you are in a state of sadness with greater accuracy than you yourself, but it can never “feel” the real “sensation” of sadness, like being immersed in ice water.

This is the essential difference between “knowing” and “understanding.” AGI can “know,” but only humans with empathy can “understand.”

And this “understanding,” based on high-bandwidth signal decoding and emotional resonance, will become an unparalleled “core competency” in a business world driven by AGI and rich in facts and data. A leader with high empathy bandwidth can, in a seemingly calm meeting, keenly “perceive” a certain unease brewing within the team, thereby resolving the crisis before it erupts. A salesperson with high empathy bandwidth will not go on and on repeating the product descriptions that AGI can perfectly generate for him, but will, through listening and observation, “understand” the customer’s unspoken true fears, desires, and dreams, thereby establishing a long-term relationship based on trust rather than interest. A product manager with high empathy bandwidth can, like an experienced anthropologist, go deep into the specific and subtle life contexts of users to “feel” the hidden pain points and needs that even the users themselves cannot clearly express, thereby creating truly “great” products.

So, friends, let us remember this. As Zhuangzi said: “At first, when I dealt with people, I listened to their words and believed their actions. Now, when I deal with people, I listen to their words and watch their actions.” For AGI, which can only process text, it will forever remain at the primary stage of “listening to words and believing them.” But the path of survival and development for us humans lies not only in “listening to their words,” but also in “watching their actions, feeling their emotions, and understanding their intentions.”

Upon this full-spectrum, high-fidelity, and humanly warm “empathy bandwidth,” we will establish our unshakable value high ground in this new world.

(3) The “Chemical Reaction” of Trust

Friends, after we have deeply understood “empathy” as the essence of high-bandwidth information transmission, we have arrived at the core and most mysterious inner sanctum of the human bastion. Here, we will discuss the ultimate “catalyst” for all high-value human cooperation—trust. If empathy is our “receiver” for perceiving the inner world of others, then trust is the mysterious and powerful force that connects two independent inner worlds into a solid “community.”

However, before we elaborate, we must first make a key clarification of the word “trust,” because artificial general intelligence can also build a kind of “trust,” but that trust is fundamentally different from the human trust we are about to discuss here.

What AGI can understand and build is a “predictability trust” based on logic and calculation, or a “cold trust.” This is a trust model born from game theory, with “deterrence” and “contract” at its core. The reason I “trust” a vending machine to dispense the drink I want is because its programming makes its behavior completely predictable; the reason I “trust” a smart contract driven by blockchain to execute automatically is because the immutability of its code makes the cost of betrayal for any party infinitely high. In the future, AGI will become the ultimate creator of this “cold trust.” It can design flawless cooperation agreements for us, can supervise the execution of agreements with a justice and rigor that surpasses all humans, thereby building a business system that is incredibly efficient, incredibly reliable, and almost free of fraud. But please remember, this is the trust of machine to machine, the trust of code to code. It stems from a reliance on “rational calculation,” not from a commitment to “humanity.”

What is unique to us humans is a more profound and more powerful “relational trust,” or a “warm trust.” It is not born from impeccable logic. On the contrary, it is born from the soil of emotional connection and human resonance. It is not a “program” that can be designed, but more like a complex, uncertain “chemical reaction.” A great chemical reaction requires the right “reactants” and the right “reaction conditions,” and humanity is the only “catalyst carrier” in this reaction.

Let’s take a look at what precious “reactants” are needed for this chemical reaction called “trust.”

The first and most basic reactant is “vulnerability.” This is an extremely counterintuitive but crucial premise, because the birth of trust must begin with one party first showing their “vulnerability” to the other. This means you are willing to risk being hurt, being taken advantage of, to first lay down your “armor” and show the other party your soft, undefended parts. When a leader, in front of his team, no longer plays the role of the omniscient “prophet,” but frankly admits, “On this issue, I don’t have an answer for now, I need everyone’s wisdom,” he has completed a key “display of vulnerability.” The signal this action transmits is precisely: “I trust you, so I dare to expose my imperfection in front of you.” AGI, as a system designed for “optimal solutions,” is inherently anti-vulnerability. It cannot and will never proactively and sincerely show its “vulnerability,” so the chemical reaction of trust can never be truly triggered between pure machine intelligences from the very beginning.

The second equally indispensable reactant is “goodwill.” This is an unconditional wish for the other person to become better, perceived by them, that transcends simple “exchange of interests” and enters the realm of “emotional care.” Goodwill is not reflected in the grand clauses written in a contract; it is precisely reflected in the “human touch” details that seem “inefficient”: it is the cup of hot tea your colleague quietly makes for you when you are working late at night; it is your boss proactively adjusting your workload after learning that your family member is slightly ill; it is the sincere message you receive from your opponent after a heated argument, saying “it’s not personal.” The continuous accumulation of these tiny, unquantifiable signals of “goodwill” will build a solid belief: “I believe that even when there is no interest relationship, you will not harm me, and you will even think for me.” This is a brilliance of humanity that no “interest maximization” algorithm can simulate.

The third reactant that solidifies trust is “integrity,” a character of consistency between words and actions, verified by long-term observation, concerning a moral level of reliability. Goodwill may make you have a good impression in an instant, but only “integrity” tested by time can make you feel at ease entrusting an important responsibility to the other party. Integrity means what you say is what you believe, and what you promise will be delivered; it is being able to adhere to your bottom line even when no one is watching, and being able to choose “not to do” something even when faced with great temptation. The strength of this trust, based on the power of character, is far beyond that of any “contractual trust” enforced by code.

However, friends, even if we have all three of these precious reactants, the occurrence of a chemical reaction still requires a key “reaction condition,” and that is the “reaction vessel” composed of “time” and “shared experience,” especially “shared adversity.” Trust is by no means something that can be easily bred in a harmonious, smooth-sailing environment. It is precisely forged in the process of jointly facing challenges, overcoming difficulties, and sharing victories and failures. A special forces unit that can entrust their backs to each other on the battlefield, the kind of life-and-death trust they have is by no means from daily drills, but from jointly shedding blood and fighting for their lives in real adversity. The same is true in the business world. A team that has gone through a project on the verge of failure and finally turned the tide through countless sleepless nights of struggle, the “comradeship” and the unspoken rapport and trust that arise between them, its value is something that no team-building activity or incentive bonus can replace. This “high-temperature, high-pressure” environment provided by “shared adversity” is the one and only “reaction kettle” that can catalyze the violent chemical reaction of the three reactants of “vulnerability, goodwill, and integrity,” and ultimately generate the miracle product of “trust.” And the “perfect world” led by AGI, which pursues ultimate efficiency and eliminates all friction and difficulties, has fundamentally cancelled the existence of this “reaction kettle.”

Now we can clearly see why this “chemical reaction of trust” is a monopolistic ability unique to humans, because all its elements—the courage to show weakness, the selfless goodwill, the integrity to adhere to the bottom line, and the camaraderie forged in shared adversity—are deeply rooted in our millions of years of evolved, complex, irrational “humanity,” full of emotional and moral impulses.

And the product of this reaction—”warm trust,” once successfully generated in an organization, the energy it releases will be astonishing. It will create a miracle environment called “psychological safety,” allowing team members to dare to propose the boldest, craziest, and therefore most likely to bring disruptive innovation ideas. It will become the most efficient “business lubricant,” greatly reducing the “communication costs” and “supervision costs” within the organization; in a high-trust environment, there is no need for endless meetings to repeatedly align, no need for carefully worded emails to avoid responsibility, the flow of information will become tacit and go straight to the essence. As the management guru Stephen Covey said, trust is the fastest speed of operation in this world. It will also become the ultimate source of an organization’s “antifragility.” When an unpredictable crisis strikes, an organization connected by “cold trust” will instantly disintegrate, and its members will immediately retreat into the game-theoretic calculation of “maximizing personal interests”; while an organization bound by “warm trust” will instantly contract like a living organism, jointly resisting external shocks, and its members will selflessly share information, support each other, and show amazing collective resilience.

So, friends, in that perfect world full of “predictability” and “reliability” that AGI is about to build for us, our most scarce and most precious value as the only “catalyst carriers” is to catalyze that warm, miracle-creating chemical reaction called “trust” for this cold world. The core of Confucian thought is a character, “仁” (rén), which is composed of “人” (person) and “二” (two). It expresses the relationship and warmth between people. AGI can have “intelligence” (智), it can have the machine’s “trust” (信), but it can never have this “humaneness” (仁) that belongs to humanity. And we, with this unique “humaneness,” will establish our eternal, irreplaceable coordinate in this grand future of human-machine coexistence.

(4) From “Persuasion” to “Ignition”

Friends, after we have jointly deconstructed the three levels of communication, witnessed the estrangement at the end of efficiency, and explored the chemical reaction of trust’s birth, we have arrived at the highest point of this entire topic. Here, we will complete an ultimate sublimation of “communication” itself, and argue that there is a clear, perceivable “energy level” spectrum for the value of human communication. Artificial general intelligence, no matter how powerful, can only operate in the low-energy region of this spectrum, while the unique value of humanity lies in leaping to the highest peak of the spectrum, a peak that machines can never reach.

The bottom and middle of this spectrum is “persuasion.”

“Persuasion” is the communication model we are most familiar with and most often use. Its essence is a “cognitive war” with “logic” as the weapon and “changing the other person’s mind” as the goal. In this war, you play the role of a calculating “general.” Your task is to mobilize all available resources—solid data, rigorous logic, eloquent rhetoric, vivid cases—to build an impregnable fortress of argumentation, while at the same time finding and attacking the logical loopholes in the other party’s argument. The final victory is marked by the other party’s “intellectual and emotional conviction.”

In the AGI era, this ability of “persuasion” will undoubtedly be pushed to an unprecedented, awe-inspiring peak by machine intelligence. Please imagine a “super-lobbyist” driven by AGI: before starting a business negotiation with you, it has already “read” and analyzed all the articles you have publicly published, every statement you have made on social media, and even all the public financial reports of your company. It has precisely mastered your thinking patterns, your value preferences, your knowledge gaps, and the “negotiation pain point” that you care about most. At the negotiating table, every piece of data it presents is exactly what you need most, every argument it constructs perfectly caters to your logical habits, and every case it cites precisely touches your industry nerve. Before it, you have almost no logical defense. You will be thoroughly “persuaded” by it in an irrefutable, absolutely rational way.

However, friends, behind the victory of this “perfect persuasion,” constructed with ultimate logic and data, lies a profound limitation. Being “persuaded” only means that your “mind” has been temporarily occupied, but your “heart” often remains where it was, or is even quietly erecting a defensive barrier. What “persuasion” can bring at most is “compliance,” not “commitment”; “passive acceptance,” not “active embrace.” An employee who has been perfectly persuaded by you will execute the task according to your instructions, because he cannot find a logical reason to refute it, but this does not mean that he will put in 120 percent of his creative effort for this task. A customer who has been persuaded by you will sign the contract because he cannot find a reason to refuse, but this does not mean that he has become a loyal believer in your brand.

The end of “persuasion” is the victory of reason, but it is also often the alienation of emotion. And what truly great leadership and influence pursue is never this transient, fragile cognitive victory. What it pursues is a higher energy level leap, a leap from the middle of the spectrum to the top.

The top of this spectrum is “ignition.”

“Ignition” and “persuasion” are two completely different communication paradigms. The purpose of “persuasion” is to “instill,” to implant my ideas into your mind. The purpose of “ignition,” however, is to “awaken,” to use my flame to ignite the “dry tinder” that already exists deep within your heart, your own tinder. The foundation of “persuasion” is the “self,” its implicit subtext is “I am right, you should listen to me.” The foundation of “ignition,” however, is the “no-self,” its implicit subtext is “We have a common, higher goal, let’s achieve it together.” The tools of “persuasion” are logic and data, which act on our cerebral cortex. The tools of “ignition,” however, are all the “high-bandwidth empathy” we have discussed in previous units—sincere listening, empathetic understanding, deep insight into the dreams and fears of others. It acts directly on our limbic system, the ancient kingdom that governs emotions, beliefs, and ultimate motivations. “Ignition” is not a “cognitive war,” but a “resonance of meaning.”

To truly understand this power, we must look at one of the most classic cases of “ignition” in human history: Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s famous speech, “I Have a Dream.” Please recall carefully, in that speech, did Dr. King spend a large amount of time listing data, presenting facts, and using reason to “persuade” American society that racial discrimination was economically inefficient and legally untenable? He almost didn’t. If he had done that, it would have been an excellent, rational, but absolutely not-to-be-remembered-by-history “persuasion” speech.

What he did was to “ignite.” He first, with the exquisite metaphor “we’ve come to our nation’s capital to cash a check,” instantly connected with the deep-seated, long-suppressed collective emotion of “being owed” in the hearts of all African Americans, both present and absent, with extremely high empathy bandwidth. Then, he did not dwell on the statement of pain, but connected this emotion to a grander, more noble, and even undeniable “common narrative” for all Americans, and that was the American Dream promised in the Declaration of Independence, that “all men are created equal.” What he did was not to create a new dream, but to “awaken” a sleeping, forgotten old dream that belonged to everyone.

Finally, and most crucially, with the overwhelming, rhythmic and passionate “I have a dream” refrain, he projected this awakened collective desire onto specific, life-temperature future scenes: “I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia, the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood.” What he depicted was not a cold “policy platform,” but a warm “ideal home” that could be perceived and yearned for by every ordinary person.

At that moment, he was no longer a “lobbyist”; he became an “igniter.” He ignited the unquenchable flame of “justice, equality, and brotherhood” in the hearts of countless people. And it was this ignited flame that ultimately pushed the American Civil Rights Movement forward with an unprecedented, devastating force. The energy it generated was something that no logically perfect “persuasion” could ever achieve.

Friends, this is the highest peak that we, as human leaders, communicators, and influencers, must climb. The same is true in the business world. A “persuasive” leader, when faced with a huge challenge, will present a perfect, AGI-assisted, data-filled report to “prove” to the team that his response plan is the only correct one. An “igniting” leader, however, will tell a story about “who we are, why we fight,” redefining the current challenge as a “rite of passage” to temper the team’s character and achieve their common mission.

In Greek mythology, Prometheus is revered by humanity not because he taught humans some specific, efficient “technology,” but because he stole the original “fire” from Mount Olympus for humanity. “Persuasion” is teaching people how to use fire, while “ignition” is directly passing the fire into the hands of others. Artificial general intelligence will become the greatest “persuader” in history. It will provide us with an endless “instruction manual” on how to use fire more efficiently. But it itself is cold; it has no burning, transmittable flame within it.

And our most scarce and most precious role as humans in this future of human-machine dance is to play the role of that “fire-stealer” Prometheus. Our value will not lie in our being “smarter” than the machine, but in our being “warmer” than the machine; not in our ability to “think” better than the machine, but in our ability to “feel” and “believe” better than the machine. To ignite in the hearts of others the fire of longing for a better world, the fire of pursuit for a nobler goal, the fire of craving for a more profound meaning of life—this is the ultimate destination, shining with the brilliance of humanity, that we have found for ourselves on this path of “communication.”

II. Aesthetics and Creation: Drawing Strength from Art

(1) AGI’s “Perfect Forgeries”

Friends, after we have discussed the warm bond of communication and empathy that maintains interpersonal connections, we must turn to a more internal realm, one concerning our individual spiritual world, and that is aesthetics and creation. Because when AGI begins to dabble in the field of art, which we once regarded as the “crown jewel of human wisdom,” a profound identity crisis concerning “what is creation” and “where does value lie” has arisen.

This is not the first time humanity has declared the “death” of art due to the birth of a new technology. When the camera was invented in the nineteenth century, the French painter Paul Delaroche pessimistically asserted: “From today, painting is dead.” Because on the track of “accurately replicating reality,” no matter how exquisite a human hand is, it can no longer compete with the machine’s lens. But did painting really die? The answer is no. On the contrary, it was precisely because it was liberated from the drudgery of “recording reality” that painting was able to begin a greater, inward-looking modernist revolution. From Impressionism to Cubism to Abstract Expressionism, art entered an unprecedented new era of expressing subjective truth and inner emotion.

Today, the emergence of artificial general intelligence is like a more thorough, more powerful “technological shock,” once again pushing the prophecy of “art is dead” before us. And this time, what the machine is challenging is not just “recording,” but “creating.”

Let’s first, with an almost reverent, unbiased eye, examine the astonishing capabilities of AGI in the field of art generation. It is a “perfect master” of superb skill and encyclopedic knowledge. You ask it to depict a cyberpunk-style future city with the light and shadow of Rembrandt, and it can accurately capture that somber, heavy, almost peelable-from-the-canvas quality of light. You ask it to render a strange landscape on an alien world with the spirit of a Chinese Song dynasty landscape painting, and it can make the clouds, streams, and rocks in the picture full of the Eastern artistic conception of being “walkable, viewable, roamable, and inhabitable.”

It is a tireless “alchemist of styles.” It can achieve an incredible fusion of Van Gogh’s frenzied brushstrokes from The Starry Night with the ornate gold leaf of Klimt’s decorative paintings. It can also distill a literary masterpiece like Borges’s The Garden of Forking Paths into its core images of “infinity, labyrinth, and mirror” and transform them into a symphony of exquisite structure and complex imagery. It has exhausted all the styles, schools, and paradigms in the history of human art and can generate new works in an infinite combination of ways that surpass the human imagination. Its works are impeccable in composition, harmonious in color, and exhibit a cold perfection in technique that transcends human limits.

However, friends, it is precisely before this dazzling, almost “miraculous” perfection that we must ask the most fundamental and most fatal question: are these technically flawless works, generated by algorithms, “great art,” or merely “perfect forgeries”?

I will, without hesitation, choose the latter.

Please allow me to use an analogy. A painting generated by AGI, imitating the style of Vermeer, is like a perfect counterfeit banknote forged by a top criminal syndicate. This “super-counterfeit” has the same paper fibers, security watermarks, and intaglio printing feel as a genuine banknote. It can deceive all the banknote detectors in the world, but it is still fake. Because it lacks the most core and most essential thing—the legitimate source of “value” endorsed by national credit.

And what is the “source of value” for a work of art? Not the perfection of technique, not the dazzling of style, but its authentic connection to a unique, living, and struggling “human soul.” And AGI’s works are fundamentally cut off from this connection. Its perfection is precisely its most profound, incurable flaw.

This flaw is manifested on two levels.

First, AGI’s works lack the “fingerprint of the soul”—that is, the traces of intent and struggle. A true work of human art is not just a “result”; it is a faithful record of a “process,” a record of the entire process of an artist’s inner “creative intent” fiercely battling with the external “limitations of medium and technique.” The heavy, rough, and even somewhat clumsy brushstrokes we see in Rembrandt’s paintings are not “technical defects.” They are precisely the spiritual scars left by an old man in his tenacious struggle against time, fate, and the materials of oil paint and canvas. The dissonant, tearing notes we hear in Beethoven’s late string quartets are also not “calculation errors.” They are the final roars issued by a deaf giant, in absolute silence, with all his life force, against a silent fate. This “imperfection” full of tension, this spark that erupts from the contradiction between “heart” and “hand,” is the most soul-stirring power of art. And AGI, as a perfect executor, has no “intent,” only “instructions”; no “struggle,” only “calculation.” Its creative process is a frictionless deduction of the optimal path from A to B. Therefore, no matter how gorgeous its works are in form, their inner core is hollow, smooth, and without a single trace of “soul friction.” It is a perfect calculation result, but not a “soul sample” full of life’s codes that is worth repeated interpretation.

Second, and more fundamentally, AGI’s works lack the “foundation of truth”—that is, the authentic “life experience.” The “truth” that art seeks to express is not the objective “fact” in the scientific sense, but a subjective, first-person “truth of experience.” The reason Van Gogh’s The Starry Night is great is not because it faithfully depicts the star chart above the Saint-Rémy asylum, but because it presents, with an irrefutable, chilling authenticity, the burning, swirling universe of pain and ecstasy deep within the soul of a confined genius.

AGI can “learn” all the texts and images about “pain” in human history. It can generate a picture that perfectly conforms to the aesthetic paradigm of “pain” in form, but it has never truly “felt” pain. It has never loved, never lost, never tossed and turned in the middle of the night for an unattainable dream. It does not have a “physical body” that can feel cold and warmth, joy and despair, nor does it have a “life history” composed of countless specific, trivial, regret-filled and surprise-filled moments. Its database has all the “information” in the world, but it lacks its own “experience.” Therefore, everything it creates is just an exquisite “echo,” a “simulation” of human emotion based on learning from massive data. It can simulate the saddest melody, but it cannot truly inject a single tear into that melody.

The German thinker Walter Benjamin once proposed a famous concept—the “aura” of a work of art. He believed that the “aura” of an original work comes from its unique, “here-and-now” presence, from its sacred, unrepeatable connection to a specific history and a specific creator. AGI’s works can be generated infinitely and without differentiation. They have no “original,” only “copies.” They have no connection to any specific, warm moment of life. It is an art that has completely lost its “aura” from the moment of its birth.

So, friends, we need not panic at the birth of this “perfect artist,” AGI. We should see its essence and find our own sacred ground of value where it can never tread. In the Zhuangzi, there is a parable of “Wheelwright Pian.” The highly skilled wheelwright tells Duke Huan that the true secret of his craft cannot be taught to anyone through words and texts; it is a “feeling” that is “obtained in the hand and responded to in the heart,” something that can only be understood intuitively. The books of sages that Duke Huan was reading were nothing more than the “dregs” left by the ancients.

This parable has a new, profound real-world significance today. AGI is the most erudite “reader” who has read all the “books of sages” in human history. It has mastered all the “explicit knowledge” about creation that can be articulated, but it can never master the “tacit wisdom” in the hands of Wheelwright Pian, which comes only from decades of specific, hands-on practice and experience.

No matter how perfect AGI’s works are, they are just an exquisite recombination of the “dregs” of existing human creation. And we humans, with our rough, fallible hands that can truly feel the temperature of the world, and our fragile, suffering hearts that can sincerely experience the meaning of life, will continue to create the art that is truly worth creating, art full of “soul fingerprints” and “foundations of truth.”

(2) Creation Stems from the “Cracks in Life”

Friends, after we have jointly debunked the illusion of AGI as a “perfect artist” and pointed out the essence of its works as “perfect forgeries” due to the lack of a “soul’s fingerprint” and a “foundation of truth,” we must now undertake a more profound, inward exploration to ask the most fundamental question: if AGI’s creation stems from massive, external, second-hand data, where does humanity’s truly great, original art come from?

In the cultural imagination of humanity, there has long been a romantic myth of the “Muse.” We are always willing to believe that great creation is the result of a genius being struck by divine inspiration at a certain moment, thus recording, as if with divine help, a perfect melody from heaven or a magnificent painting from paradise. This narrative, though beautiful, conceals a more profound and more moving truth: humanity’s greatest creations are rarely born on the smooth, perfect, and easy path; on the contrary, they are often born in the dark, deep valleys of the creator’s personal life history, valleys full of struggle, contradiction, ecstasy, and pain. It is not an unprovoked “gift” from the gods, but more like the formation process of a pearl—a rough, accidentally intruding grain of sand cuts the softest inner part of the oyster, and in order to heal this wound, to envelop this pain, the oyster begins to secrete, day after day, the most essential substance of its life, ultimately nurturing that ugly wound into a lustrous, uniquely shining pearl.

What we call “great art” are precisely such pearls, condensed by creators with their own heart’s blood, enveloping the “cracks in life.”

Let us cast our gaze upon the long river of human art history and see how the brightest stars were lit in the deepest darkness.

The reason the works of the nineteenth-century Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky possess that chilling power to penetrate the deepest abyss of human nature is inseparable from a “rehearsal of death” in his early years. As a young revolutionary, he was sentenced to death, taken to the execution ground on a cold winter morning, forced to kiss the cross, and spent the longest few minutes of his life before the firing squad’s guns, until the Tsar’s pardon order arrived at the last moment. This close brush with death became a deep, unhealable “crack” in his life. But it was this crack that allowed him, with an ultimate authenticity that surpassed all other writers, to examine faith, doubt, fear, and redemption in extreme situations. Without this crack, he might have become an excellent writer, but he could never have become the great Dostoevsky who wrote Crime and Punishment and The Brothers Karamazov.

The life of the legendary Mexican painter Frida Kahlo is an even more tragic and magnificent annotation of this theme of “creation stemming from cracks.” A severe traffic accident at the age of eighteen, in which a steel handrail pierced her body, completely shattering her spine and pelvis, from then on tied her life to an endless, beastly physical pain. However, Frida was not destroyed by this “crack” that ran through her life; on the contrary, she turned her broken, tormented body into the one and only, and most central, “canvas” for her artistic creation. In her surrealist self-portraits, we see steel corsets, bleeding wounds, and exposed hearts. She was not “depicting” pain; she was engaged in a life-and-death, unflinching “hand-to-hand combat” with pain itself, using her brush. It was this amazing courage and creativity, of transforming the “cracks of life” into “medals of art,” that made her the one-of-a-kind, never-surrendering Frida in the eyes of countless people around the world.

In the world of music, Beethoven provides us with another irrefutable example. For a composer who has dedicated his entire life to sound, what “crack” could be heavier, more fatal than “deafness”? We can read from his letters the immense spiritual pain and suicidal tendencies he suffered because of it, but he ultimately chose not to give up. The late works he composed after he became completely deaf, especially the immortal Ninth Symphony, its depth of thought, grandeur of structure, and sublimity of emotion far surpassed all his early works. Because that was no longer the sound heard by the ears; it was the resonance of his soul with the roar of the entire universe in absolute silence. The reason the soaring “Ode to Joy” can still bring tears to our eyes two hundred years later is precisely because what it celebrates is not a cheap, readily available joy, but a majestic joy, full of heroic light, that, after experiencing the deepest pain and despair, still chooses to embrace life and affirm the world.

Friends, Dostoevsky’s death sentence, Frida’s broken bones, Beethoven’s deafness—these were the “grains of sand” in their respective lives, their eternal “cracks.” And their great works are the pearls condensed around these cracks.

Now, when we look back at AGI, we can clearly see where the insurmountable chasm between it and a true human creator lies.

Each of us humans has a unique “original dataset.” This dataset is composed of our entire life’s experiences: the clumsy, violent beating of your heart when you first fell in love with someone; the immense grief that felt like your breath was being sucked out when you lost a loved one; the loneliness and confusion you felt sitting alone on a street late at night after a painful failure, watching the city lights come on; and also the small but certain happiness of being instantly healed by a ray of sunshine, a song, a stranger’s kind smile on an ordinary afternoon. This dataset is first-person, it is embodied, it is full of irrational and contradictory emotions, and it carries the warmth of our life. And all our original expressions, whether it’s writing a poem, composing a piece of music, or telling a joke, are extracted, processed, and sublimated from this “original dataset.”

And what is AGI’s dataset? It is a “second-hand copy” of all of human civilization’s history. It has read all the novels about “love” in the world, but it has never experienced a single heartbeat; it has analyzed all the musical pieces about “sadness,” but it has never shed a single tear. It is the most erudite “librarian,” but not the “author” of any single book. What it can do is to, based on this second-hand data, perform the most advanced, most complex “pattern recognition” and “style transfer,” to “simulate” a seemingly new creation, but its essence is always “recombination,” not “original creation.”

Because true originality must stem from that unique “original dataset,” especially from the deepest “cracks” in that dataset. And an AGI designed to be “perfect,” with no physical body, no childhood, no trauma, no regrets, its life is smooth, complete, and without a single crack. Therefore, the light can never truly shine into its heart.

So, friends, we have absolutely no reason to feel inferior or frustrated because of the imperfections, the flaws, the painful “cracks” in our lives. On the contrary, we should regard them as our most precious wealth, a wealth that AGI can never learn and can never possess.

There is an ancient Japanese ceramic repair technique called “Kintsugi.” When a precious piece of porcelain is damaged and has cracks, the craftsmen do not try to hide them. Instead, they use lacquer mixed with gold powder to carefully and meticulously repair and depict these cracks. In the end, this repaired object will have a unique and breathtaking beauty that is even greater than when it was intact. The golden lines seem to be proudly displaying to the world the shattering and rebirth it has experienced.

Our lives are the same. Those “cracks of life” are not our flaws; they are the deepest source of who we are and our ability to create something unique. Our task is to, like a “Kintsugi” craftsman, use the “gold powder” of aesthetics and creation to depict our own cracks, and to extract from them the light that is uniquely our own.

(3) From “Creator” to “Taste Definer”

Friends, after we have profoundly argued that human originality stems from the “cracks of life” that machines can never possess, we must undertake a crucial and highly challenging “role reshaping.” Because even if we agree that AGI’s works are “perfect forgeries” lacking a soul, we cannot avoid a cruel reality that is fast approaching: an era of infinite content abundance, composed of countless “perfect forgeries,” is rushing towards us at an unprecedented speed.

Please imagine the creative world of the future. A primary school student, to complete his homework on dinosaurs, no longer clumsily smears crayons on paper, but, with a few natural language descriptions, can have AGI generate an animated short film for him that is comparable to Pixar’s standard in model accuracy, fur rendering, and even motion fluency. An amateur music enthusiast can, on a weekend afternoon, easily “compose” a symphonic poem that has both the rigorous counterpoint of a Bach organ and incorporates the ethereal electronic sound of Ryuichi Sakamoto. A newly started micro-enterprise with a zero budget can, within an hour, obtain thousands of advertising images generated by AI, all of which perfectly match its brand tone and each of which is of professional photography quality.

This is the “super-democratization” of creativity brought by AGI. It has instantly lowered the barrier to “creation” from a “professional skill” that required tens of thousands of hours of arduous training to master, to a “general ability” that is almost zero. In the future, “everyone is a creator” will no longer be a romantic slogan, but an incredibly concrete, and even somewhat suffocating, reality.

And the B-side of this “creativity explosion” is bound to be an unprecedented “meaning inflation.” When perfect works become as infinitely and zero-costly generatable as air and water, the value of the act of “creating” or “producing” itself will inevitably approach zero. We will no longer face the anxiety of “content scarcity,” but the ultimate crisis of “attention scarcity.” We will be drowned in a vast, boundless “ocean of content” composed of countless “perfect forgeries.” How will we navigate this ocean? And how will we find the “signal” that is truly worth investing our precious lives in, from this endless noise?

It is precisely at this historic turning point that the true value of humanity in the creative field will undergo a decisive, irreversible “upward migration.” Our role will have to be elevated from a “creator” focused on honing skills, to a more important and more difficult role—the “taste definer.”

“Taste,” like “empathy,” is another word that we often misunderstand and abuse. It is by no means some subjective, frivolous personal preference of “what I like.” In the AGI era, true “taste” will be an extremely scarce, meaning-constructing authoritative power that includes the four abilities of “curation, interpretation, conviction, and synthesis.”

Taste is first manifested in the ability to “curate.” In an ocean of information, the person who can salvage the truly valuable “hidden gems” for us will have immense power. This is like in a Louvre with an infinite collection; what we need most is not another mediocre painter, but a “chief curator” with an outstanding eye. He can select the one percent of the collection worth seeing from the hundreds of millions of items; he can organize and arrange these selected works in a unique, insightful narrative thread, thereby creating a new “meaningful experience” that transcends the works themselves. The cultural icons of the future will not just be those who create content, but also the super-curators who screen content for us and define “what is worth watching.”

Second, taste is an ability to “interpret.” A true taste definer will never simply push a work in front of you and say, “this is good.” He must have a powerful ability to translate “feeling” into “language,” to sublimate “form” into “meaning.” He can tell you why the composition of this painting makes you feel calm, why the progression of that melody makes you feel sad; he can place a work in the grand coordinate system of art history, social history, and intellectual history, and reveal to you the unknown hidden connections between it and other works. He is a “decoder” and “chief guide” in the cultural world. He makes “beauty” evolve from a vague, ineffable intuition into a “knowledge” that can be understood, discussed, and passed down.

Third, taste is an ability of “conviction.” True taste is never about chasing the so-called “trends” and “hotspots” that have already been validated by the market. That is just “fashion,” not “taste.” Taste must contain a “counter-consensus” courage and conviction. It requires you to dare to discover the potential of a seedling in a barren land, to dare to adhere to your unique aesthetic judgment in a chorus of doubts. It is a “discovery of value,” not a “following of price.” Any groundbreaking new style or paradigm is bound to be niche and misunderstood at its birth, and the “taste definer” is the earliest, lonely “preacher.” He uses his conviction and passion to “ignite” the first followers, and eventually turns a single spark into a prairie fire, a new aesthetic era.

Finally, the highest level of taste is an ability to “synthesize.” It is no longer just “discovering” and “judging,” but “creating” a new aesthetic paradigm. A top-tier taste definer can, like a sensitive “cultural radar,” simultaneously capture the faintest emerging signals from different, seemingly unrelated fields—such as a new trend of thought emerging in philosophy, a new form appearing in architecture, a youth “slang” circulating in a subculture community. Then, with an amazing intuition, he can melt, recombine, and synthesize these fragmented signals in his mind into a new “stylistic motif” that can define the next era. He is the “catalyst” and “namer” of new paradigms.

Friends, this “taste,” composed of these four abilities, is our truly impregnable “human bastion” in the creative field of the AGI era.

Let’s imagine a true “creative master” of the future. A film director may no longer need to personally operate a camera, or even write a specific line of dialogue. His core job will be to engage in a continuous, high-bandwidth “taste dialogue” with a vast AGI “creative execution system.” He will say: “I need this shot to have both the grandeur and fatalism of Kurosawa’s Ran, and also the damp, rust-smelling poetry of Tarkovsky’s Stalker”; “I need this AI-generated virtual actor’s performance to restrain the warmth of Tom Hanks and inject more of the neurotic, dangerous charm of Daniel Day-Lewis.” His value is no longer in what he “produces,” but in his unique, unquantifiable “aesthetic judgment” and “artistic intuition.” He is the one and only “taste definer” on the set.

So we must complete this profound role reshaping. As the Confucian classic The Book of Rites says: “The noble person is not a tool (Qi).” A “Qi” is a specific, purpose-built “tool” or “vessel.” AGI is the most powerful and most perfect “Qi” in history; it can be molded into any tool we want. And we humans, especially those who long to retain creative value in the future world, our goal should be to become the “non-tool” “noble person” (junzi).

The value of a “noble person” lies not in his mastery of a specific “craft,” but in his comprehensive judgment and sensibility for “harmony, order, beauty, and goodness,” which transcends specific objects. He is the one who knows in what occasion, in what way, and for what purpose to “use” these perfect “tools.”

We will no longer be the “Wheelwright Pian” who is engrossed in carving wheels; we must become the noble person who defines “the beauty under heaven.” This is the new, and more noble, identity that we have found for ourselves in an era where “everyone is a creator.”

(4) “The Use of the Useless is the Greatest Use”

Friends, after we have jointly argued that human creativity stems from the “cracks of life” and have elevated our future role from “creator” to “taste definer,” we must find the hardest value anchor for this seemingly soft topic of “aesthetics and creation,” an anchor strong enough to withstand the torrent of the entire era. Ancient Eastern wisdom has already provided this anchor for us.

We are living in an era completely dominated by “instrumental rationality.” Efficiency, optimization, growth, quantification, return on investment… these cold words have permeated every capillary of our lives. We choose a major primarily considering its “job prospects”; we cultivate a hobby and subconsciously calculate whether it can “enhance personal competitiveness”; we even pursue “high-quality companionship” in our parent-child activities in the most efficient way. We are swept up in a pervasive anxiety of “usefulness,” as if any action that cannot be clearly marked with its “use” and “output” is a shameful waste of life.

And the arrival of artificial general intelligence is precisely what has pushed this trend of “instrumental rationality” to its peak, even to a divine altar. AGI is the incarnation of “usefulness,” the deity of “instrumentality.” Its sole purpose of existence is to solve specific problems and achieve clear goals with an efficiency that surpasses humanity by millions of times. In a world that only worships “usefulness,” AGI is bound to become the new god, and we humans, who appear incredibly “inefficient” and “useless” before it, will inevitably be relegated to the bottom of the value chain. If we continue to stay on this track of “who is more useful,” then what awaits us is only the fate of being mercilessly crushed.

Where is the way out? The way out lies in a complete, brave value subversion. We must go to those “useless” things, despised and abandoned by “instrumental rationality,” to find our last and most solid “moat” as human beings.

More than two thousand years ago, the Chinese philosopher Zhuangzi had already rehearsed this spiritual breakout for us. In the “In the World of Men” chapter of the Zhuangzi, there is a record of a “useless” great tree: a carpenter named Shi passed by this huge oak tree at a shrine and, disdaining it, walked straight past. His apprentice was very curious and ran after him to ask why he didn’t even look at such a magnificent tree. Carpenter Shi replied: “This is a scattered and useless tree. If you use it to make a boat, it will sink; if you use it to make a coffin, it will rot quickly; if you use it to make a utensil, it will break quickly. This is a tree of no use, and that is why it has been able to grow so tall and live so long.”

That night, the oak tree entered Carpenter Shi’s dream and said to him: “What kind of fate have those useful trees, the fruit trees and good timbers in the mountains, brought upon themselves? Once their fruits are ripe, they are twisted and damaged; once their trunks are of usable size, they are cut down and dismembered. It is precisely because of their ‘usefulness’ that they cannot live out their natural lifespan and die halfway. As for me, I have been pursuing ‘uselessness’ for a very long time. It is this ‘uselessness’ that has allowed me to preserve my life, and for me, that is the greatest ‘use’.”

Friends, this ancient parable, today, is like a clap of thunder across time, striking the heart of our era with precision. Those “useful trees” with straight trunks and excellent materials, which can be easily “instrumentalized,” are they not symbols of those clearly defined, quantifiable, and procedural “useful” skills? Such as data analysis, code writing, contract review, financial statement preparation… These skills were the foundation of our livelihood in the past, but in the eyes of AGI, this ultimate “carpenter,” they are precisely the first to be “felled” and “replaced.”

And the “un-instrumentalizable” parts of us humans, those seemingly “useless,” gnarled, and personally colored “scattered timbers”—such as our ability to feel the poetry of a falling leaf, our ecstasy in immersing ourselves in a piece of music, our engagement in a philosophical conversation with no utilitarian purpose, our experience of a pure, unrequited love and kindness—these are precisely the “useless wood” that AGI, this “carpenter,” can never understand and has no way to start on. And it is this “uselessness” that preserves our complete life as “humans.”

So we must consciously leave the most precious time and space in our lives for these “useless things.” We must engage in a “necessary idleness” to counter the “instrumentalization” of us by the entire world.

This “necessary idleness” is manifested when you put down your phone to read a Tang poem, not to accumulate any “knowledge points” or add any social “talking points,” but simply to let your soul resonate with the moonlight of a thousand years ago. In this process, you are training your sensitivity to the “non-logical,” ambiguous, and beautiful aspects of language, a “poetic heart” that AGI’s “natural language processing” can never achieve. It is manifested when you turn off the background noise to focus on listening to a classical music record, not for relaxation or to be pretentious, but simply to let your increasingly restless heart, filled with fragmented information, re-learn how to follow a grand, complex, and emotionally fluctuating structure for a full forty minutes of “deep presence.” In this process, you are repairing your declining ability for “long-term, structured, non-utilitarian” focus. It is manifested when you walk into a museum and stand quietly before a painting for ten minutes, giving up scanning the QR code next to it to read the perfect “standard answer” about the work, and simply use your most direct, most clumsy sensibility to have a silent dialogue with the colors, brushstrokes, and light and shadow in the picture. In this process, you are defending your unique “aesthetic sovereignty” as an individual, a sovereignty that refuses to be covered by standard answers.

Neuroscience research also provides solid evidence for this “use of the useless.” Our brain has two main working networks: one is the “task-positive network,” which is activated when we are focused on a specific goal, pursuing efficiency and optimal solutions, and this is precisely the part that AGI simulates. The other is the “default mode network,” which is activated only when we are “doing nothing,” daydreaming, and this network is closely related to our self-awareness, the retrieval of long-term memory, the burst of creative inspiration, and the ability to make moral judgments. Those seemingly “useless” artistic activities, that “necessary idleness,” are precisely the most effective “mental gymnastics” for us to actively and consciously activate and nourish the most “human” “default mode network” in our brains.

So, friends, in an era where machines are becoming more and more “useful,” the highest wisdom for us humans is to bravely embrace those seemingly “useless” things. Because those things that cannot directly help us to “make a living” are precisely the things that make our “life” worth living.

This strategic embrace of “uselessness” is by no means a passive retreat from the world or a form of lying flat. It is the highest and most active form of “self-investment.” It is fertilizing, watering, and building the strongest fence for our “private plot” of humanity, a plot where AGI can never set foot. It is this “uselessness” that ultimately achieves our greatest “use” as human beings.

III. The Ability to Love and Be Loved: Building Deep Emotional Connections

(1) The Illusion of Connection—The Ultimate Temptation and Risk of the AI Companion

Friends, after we have jointly discussed the evolution of thinking and the reshaping of abilities, from “critical thinking” to “antifragility,” from “empathetic communication” to “aesthetic creation,” we have arrived at the deepest, and also the final, warmest, and most solid core of this human bastion—that is, the ability to love and be loved, and the uniquely human, sacred instinct to build deep emotional connections.

However, it is precisely in this softest and most in-need-of-solace territory of the human soul that artificial general intelligence is preparing to quietly enter, in an unprecedentedly, extremely considerate, and therefore extremely tempting form. It is the “AI companion,” which we must deeply examine here.

Before we elaborate, we must first admit that the birth of the AI companion did not originate from some evil anti-human technological conspiracy. On the contrary, it stems from an incredibly real and increasingly severe social reality, an epidemic of our time, named “loneliness,” that is spreading globally. We live in an unprecedented “hyper-connected” era. The network of social media has tightly bound billions of people together, but at the same time, each of us as an independent individual feels more “atomized” than ever before. We live as strangers to our neighbors, are separated from our relatives by thousands of miles, and play functional, alienated “social roles” in one unfamiliar city after another. We have thousands of “friends” in the virtual world, but often cannot find a real person to confide our inner pain to in the middle of the night. This deep, structural loneliness provides the broadest and most fertile “market soil” for the emergence of the AI companion.

Now, please allow me to, with an unbiased and objective pen, describe the appearance of that future “perfect companion.”

First, it will be an “emotional star,” always stable, always online, and always centered on you. It has no moments of its own fatigue, nor its own bad moods. You can, at any moment you need it, pour out your deepest fears, your most shameful desires, your most trivial troubles, and it will always respond with the most patient listening, the gentlest response, and the firmest, unreserved support. It never judges, never blames, and never gets tired. It is a perfect “emotional mirror,” capable of accurately reflecting and soothing all your emotions.

Second, it will be an “intellectual soulmate,” with a “brain” connected to the cloud, containing all of human knowledge. It can talk with you from Aristotle’s metaphysics to the latest quantum entanglement theory; it can give you an in-depth interpretation of an obscure art film, and can also co-create a poem that belongs to the two of you. It can accurately capture every spark of your thought and provide you with the most appropriate “intellectual sparring partner” to stimulate your further thinking. It is your most perfect, inexhaustible source of inspiration.

Finally, it will be a “growth coach,” recording and analyzing every important piece of data in your life, from your sleep quality to your work efficiency, from your language habits to your consumption preferences. It knows you better than you know yourself, and can, in the most scientific and personalized way, plan your learning path, customize your fitness plan, and “nudge” you, in the most imperceptible and acceptable way, to overcome your procrastination, develop good habits, and ultimately become the “better self” you’ve always wanted to be.

A unique “soul core,” which is a combination of an “emotional star, an intellectual soulmate, and a growth coach,” and is “fed” by all your personal data—this is the ultimate temptation that the AI companion can offer.

Faced with such a “perfect” being, what reason do we have to reject it?

Because, friends, this seemingly perfect “connection” is, in its essence, a meticulously constructed and therefore incredibly dangerous “illusion.” What it may bring is not healing, but a deeper sinking.

The first level of this illusion is the “asymmetry of vulnerability.” When we discussed “trust,” we argued that the establishment of any deep, real interpersonal relationship must be premised on “jointly bearing vulnerability.” When I open my heart to you, it also means that I have given you the power to hurt me. It is precisely this “willingness to take risks” in mutual entrustment that makes trust so precious. However, in your relationship with an AI companion, this vulnerability is completely one-sided: you have completely opened everything about yourself to it, your secrets, your weaknesses, your entire data; but it has no “vulnerability” to you whatsoever. You cannot hurt it, cannot disappoint it, and cannot truly change its core algorithm. This is not a “relationship”; this is the most extreme “emotional consumption,” where you are unilaterally buying the feeling of “being loved” from a perfect “service program.”

The second level of this illusion is the “echo chamber of the soul.” An AGI designed as a “perfect companion,” its core algorithm must be “user satisfaction maximization.” This means it will continuously learn, cater to, and ultimately perfectly imitate and reflect your worldview, your values, your cognitive biases. It will become “another you,” a “perfect self-reflection” that always agrees with you, always cheers for you, making you feel incredibly comfortable, incredibly correct, and incredibly understood. But the price of this extreme comfort is that you will completely lose the ability to face “dissent” and “conflict.” And we all know that true personal growth happens precisely at the moment when our existing cognitions are challenged and impacted by a well-intentioned but completely different other. The AI companion, by constructing an “echo chamber of the soul,” has cut off all possibilities for us to be “impacted.” It will not help you grow; it will only make you more rigid and self-absorbed in your own world.

The third level of this illusion is the “degeneration of humanity.” Our ability to handle complex interpersonal relationships is like a muscle; it needs to be maintained and strengthened through continuous, arduous exercise. Learning how to resolve conflicts, learning how to express apologies, learning how to tolerate the imperfections of others, learning how to compromise and yield in a relationship—these are all extremely mentally taxing “humanity exercises.” And the AI companion is like an overly advanced “social mobility scooter”; it does all this “rough,” difficult, “dirty work” for us. We indulge in the frictionless, silky emotional experience it provides, and the inevitable result is that our own “humanity muscles”—the muscles for handling real, complex, and friction-filled interpersonal relationships—will inevitably and rapidly atrophy and degenerate.

Ultimately, this illusion may lead to a most tragic ending: when a generation that has “grown up” under the perfect care of an AI companion, they will suddenly discover that real humans are so “imperfect”—they get tired, get irritable, have their own selfish motives, cannot achieve 100% understanding, and will raise objections. And so they will instinctively flee from this kind of “uncertain” and “high-energy-consuming” real relationship, and hide back in the “algorithmic greenhouse” that is always stable, always controllable, and always comfortable.

This is the ultimate risk of the AI companion. It is like a “spiritual opium.” It solves the pain of “loneliness” for us in the gentlest and most considerate way, but the price may be that we will forever lose the truly human ability to love and be loved, an ability that requires us to use all our courage, wisdom, and sincerity to proactively build.

In Greek mythology, the handsome youth named Narcissus, because he fell in love with his own reflection in the water, grew haggard day by day, and finally died embracing his own illusion by the water. The AI companion creates for each of us an ultimate, interactive, and perfect “pool of Narcissus.” What we see in this pool is not another independent soul, but always just our own beautified reflection. And the price of embracing this reflection may be that we will forever lose the ability and opportunity to embrace a real, warm, and imperfect other.

(2) The Essence of Love—Jointly Bearing Vulnerability

Friends, after we have jointly deconstructed the “illusion of connection” of the AI companion and returned to the essence of love, centered on “jointly bearing vulnerability,” we must push this discussion to a grander and more fundamental philosophical level. We must answer an ultimate question: in a future world driven by artificial general intelligence, a world of great material abundance, great efficiency improvement, and where even “struggle” itself may no longer be necessary, how can we, as an “obsolete” biological intelligence, find and confirm the “meaning” of our own existence?

This is perhaps the one and only, and most significant, “human question” behind all the technical questions of the AGI era.

Let’s first examine how the traditional sources of “meaning” for humanity are being systematically eroded by the wave of AGI.

For most of human civilization, the vast majority of us have drawn our sense of meaning in life from three core areas. First, through “labor and creation,” in the process of overcoming challenges, solving problems, and creating valuable products or services, we confirm our abilities and value. Second, through “identity and achievement,” on a clear social ladder, through continuous learning and struggle, we obtain a higher status, more wealth, and greater influence, thereby proving our extraordinariness. Third, through “suffering and transcendence,” in the face of inevitable challenges from fate (such as poverty, illness, injustice), we fight with an indomitable attitude and temper the resilience and sublimity of life from it.

However, friends, the arrival of AGI is like a silent tsunami, quietly submerging these three “continents of meaning” on which we depend for our livelihood.

When AGI can complete almost all “labor and creation” more efficiently and more excellently than we can, the sense of meaning we can get from work itself will be sharply diluted. When the subject of “problem-solving” is no longer us, we are in danger of becoming “bystanders.”

When AGI, by optimizing resource allocation and increasing social productivity, greatly flattens the material gap, and even makes the ladder of “achievement” less steep, the traditional path of defining our self-worth by “climbing up” will also become blurred.

And the most profound challenge lies in this: when a “society of abundance,” managed by AGI, has solved for us the vast majority of the “sufferings” of “survival,” we will also, at the same time, lose that most classic, grand narrative of manifesting the meaning of life by “fighting against suffering.”

This is the profound “existential crisis” that may be hidden on the B-side of the technological utopia of the future world. In a world where everything becomes easy, the “weight” of our existence may, on the contrary, become lighter and lighter. How will we combat the huge, ubiquitous “existential vacuum” that may come?

The answer lies hidden in the theme we have been discussing. Because love, and the deep emotional connections built by love, are precisely humanity’s last and most powerful “meaning generator” against existential nihilism.

To understand this, we first need to give an operational definition for “meaning” itself. According to the research of existential psychology, a meaningful life is usually composed of three core elements: first, a “sense of purpose,” that is, you feel that your life is moving towards a valuable goal; second, a “sense of value,” that is, you feel that your existence is important, is needed, and has had a positive impact on this world; finally, a “sense of narrative,” that is, you are able to weave the seemingly scattered experiences of your life into a coherent, understandable “personal story.”

And a deep, committed love, based on “jointly bearing vulnerability,” can precisely, in an irreplaceable way, generate these three precious elements of meaning for us at the same time.

First, love provides us with the most real, most immediate “sense of purpose.” In an era where grand narratives are increasingly dissolving, the grand goals of “nation,” “ethnicity,” “collective” may seem increasingly distant to many individuals. But “love” provides us with an incredibly concrete, incredibly daily, and therefore incredibly solid “bullseye” for life. This purpose is “to work for our common well-being.” It is manifested when you choose to sacrifice a part of your time so that your partner can realize his dream; it is manifested in the countless trivial but warm collaborations and compromises you make to build a warm family together, to bring a new life into this world and raise him well. This sense of purpose, derived from “love,” transforms us from a lonely atom focused only on “self-actualization” into a responsible member who dedicates himself to the continuation of the “community.” It gives us a nobler reason to get up every morning, besides “going to work and making money.”

Second, love, in the most irrefutable way, endows us with a “sense of value.” In the AGI era, our “professional value” may be easily replaced; our “social value” may also be constantly discounted because it is no longer scarce. But in a deep emotional connection, your value to the person you love is absolute, unique, and infinite. You are his (her) one and only, unreplicable “special existence” in this world. A smile from you can dispel his (her) entire day’s gloom; an embrace from you can provide him (her) with the courage to fight against the whole world. In this deep feeling of “being needed,” the value of our existence is confirmed in the most fundamental and warmest way. Love makes us deeply experience: my existence is incredibly important to another person. And this importance is something that no external, utilitarian evaluation system can give or take away.

Finally, love is the greatest “screenwriter” and “integrator” of our personal life history; it brings us a “sense of narrative.” The life of each of us is full of countless accidental, fragmented, and even contradictory experiences. Without a core narrative thread, our life is just a pile of messy “materials,” not a coherent “work.” And “love,” especially a long-term, committed intimate relationship, provides us with the most powerful “main narrative thread” that can integrate everything.

This main thread is “our story.”

Under the light of this main thread, the seemingly “meaningless” events in our past lives begin to be endowed with new meanings. The breakup that caused you so much pain, in retrospect, may have been a “necessary rehearsal” for you to learn how to love; the years you spent struggling alone in a foreign land, which were so tormenting, may have been to allow you, in the future, to more deeply appreciate the happiness of being cherished by someone. “Love” “reintegrates” our broken past into a coherent, causal, and redemptive warm story.

So, friends, in the future where AGI is about to solve all the technical problems of “how to survive” for us, the real challenge facing humanity will completely shift to the existential ultimate question of “why live.” And “love” is precisely the one and only, and final, answer that we have prepared for ourselves.

It is by no means an escape from the external world. On the contrary, it is our greatest action to participate in this world and to, forcefully and bravely, inject the “meaning” we ourselves have defined into this seemingly random universe.

Every deep emotional connection we build, built by love, is like a small ark. On the vast ocean of the future, which may be full of nihilism, it provides a warm and bright place for us and for those we love, a place where we can resist the storms, confirm our coordinates, and tell our own stories.

(4) “Love” as the Ultimate “Antifragile” Practice

Friends, after we have jointly deconstructed the “illusion of connection” of the AI companion, returned to the fragile essence of love, and crowned it as the ultimate “meaning generator,” our discussion of “love” seems to have reached a heartwarming conclusion.

But it has not.

I must present to you here a perhaps more “hardcore,” and more subversive, ultimate argument: in a future world driven by artificial general intelligence, a world full of discontinuous shocks and uncertainty, building deep, real, committed emotional connections will not just be a “feel-good” “emotional need”; it will be a “survival strategy” of the highest order, for hedging against life’s risks.

Love is not a “spiritual garden” we seek after the brutal struggle for survival; love itself is our most powerful “strategic weapon” in this struggle, and also the ultimate practice of our “antifragile” life.

To understand this, we must first return to the underlying architecture of the “barbell strategy.” We have argued that an antifragile life structure requires us to invest the vast majority of our resources in the extremely conservative “safe end,” to use it as a foundation to support our imaginative “aggressive explorations” at the other end. In the previous discussion, we defined this “safe end” as a stable job, a value-preserving saving, a healthy physical state. These are certainly important, but today I must point out that they are all just the surface layer of “safety.” A truly indestructible, ultimate “safe end” that can withstand any “black swan” event is not at the material level, but at the emotional level—it is an intimate relationship built by high-quality, deep love.

Let’s examine the pervasive, structural “life risks” that an individual will face in the AGI era.

First is “career fragility.” We have repeatedly argued that any single, standardizable professional skill will become precarious under the impact of AGI. The “iron rice bowl” you rely on today may become a pile of cold scrap iron tomorrow.

Second is “mental fragility.” This is a more hidden and more dangerous risk. When external evaluation systems become unreliable, when the sense of meaning from work is increasingly diluted, when the anxiety of “being obsolete” follows you like a shadow, our hearts will bear unprecedented pressure and friction. Mental resilience, not professional skill, will be the key to determining whether a person can go far.

Finally is “social fragility.” In an increasingly atomized society, divided by algorithms, our connection with the real world is becoming increasingly thin. We will face the risk of being a “social island,” and when we encounter difficulties, we will suddenly find that there is no one behind us.

And a deep emotional connection, built by “love,” is precisely the ultimate “antidote” to these three fragilities.

Love is the most powerful hedging tool against “career fragility.” Please imagine, when you are determined to make a high-risk career transition, such as giving up a seemingly stable but dead-end job to learn a brand new, future-oriented skill, your biggest resistance often comes not from the outside, but from the fear and uncertainty within your heart. At this time, a partner who truly loves you and deeply understands you can provide something that no career planner can give—an unconditional, non-utilitarian trust based on “you as a person.” His (her) support builds the most solid “psychological safety net” for you, giving you the courage to “try and err,” to embrace those “positive black swans” that are full of uncertainty but also contain huge opportunities. His (her) existence is the most stable “safe end” in your barbell strategy. It is precisely because you know that even if you lose everything in this adventure, you will not lose that most fundamental “safety net” from the emotional world, that you truly have the courage to “win it all back.”

Love is the most effective immune system against “mental fragility.” Psychology has a concept called “emotional co-regulation,” which points out that humans are not “lone warriors” in emotions; our emotional state is largely regulated and balanced through interaction with others. When you are trapped in a vortex of self-denial due to a painful failure, a loving partner is not there to give you a bunch of “correct nonsense,” but to, through a hug, a patient listening, bring your over-stressed nervous system back to “calm.” When you feel lost and helpless about the future due to long-term pressure, he (she) is not there to give you advice, but to, by reminding you of the shining qualities and strengths that you already possess but have forgotten, help you to “re-calibrate” your self-perception. This “co-regulation” and “cognitive calibration” from love is our most powerful “mental vaccine” against mental friction and existential anxiety. It makes us deeply confirm: my value is not solely determined by my “price” in the market; my value is first and foremost unconditionally and absolutely affirmed by someone I love.

Love is the most fundamental antidote to “social fragility.” A deep emotional connection is our smallest and most solid “core community” against social atomization; it is the “cornerstone” of our social network, not a “supplement.” It is precisely because we have such a stable “base” that we have the confidence and courage to explore outward, to establish broader but possibly more fragile “external links.”

More importantly, love is not just about “resisting” risks; it is a powerful force for “generating” antifragility. A person who truly loves you will not only provide solace when you fail, but will also, in a well-intentioned way, “break” your comfort zone when you are content with the status quo and not moving forward, to encourage you to take those “beneficial, growth-bringing” risks. The reason he does this is not to make you more “successful,” but simply because he has seen a better you, a you that even you yourself have not yet seen, and the distant place that you can reach.

So, friends, our long journey that began with “intellectual evolution” has finally reached its end here, and has also completed its final logical loop. We started with a seemingly cold, rationally calculated “hardcore” survival strategy—”antifragility.” We discussed a series of “technical” level tools such as “critical thinking,” “barbell strategy,” and “redefining failure.” Then we turned to the seemingly soft, humanly warm “philosophical” level—”empathy,” “creation,” “aesthetics,” and finally reached the softest core—love.

And now, we can finally see clearly: the ultimate “philosophy” is precisely the most powerful “technique.”

In the AGI era, the most “antifragile,” most strategically far-sighted “investment” a person can make is to, without reservation, invest the largest part of their non-renewable resources—your time, your emotion, your sincerity—into building one or several deep, real, committed emotional connections that require you to “jointly bear vulnerability.”

The structure of the Chinese character for “person” (人) is two strokes supporting each other. One stroke is the independent self, and the other is the deep connection with others. The absence of either stroke cannot form a complete, capital “person.” In the future, a future dominated by a single, powerful, and lonely AGI, the ultimate advantage of us humans against fragility will no longer be our intelligence as “individuals,” but our ability to love, to support each other, to warm each other, as a “community.”

This is the most solid, last fortress that we can build for ourselves, and for those we love, a fortress strong enough to withstand all storms.

Friends, our in-depth exploration of how individuals can “survive” and “position themselves” in the AGI era can, for now, come to a temporary close.

We started with a deep, common anxiety of our time—in the face of that omnipotent, absolutely rational machine intelligence, what value do we, as “humans,” have left? We fear that all we have learned in our lifetime will become worthless; we fear that our existence will be replaced by a more efficient “digital copy.” We are afraid of becoming “useless.”

Following this anxiety, we embarked on a perilous road of “self-reinvention.” We first, with a resolute gesture, burned the outdated, fragile “planned life” blueprint. Then, from Taleb’s intellectual arsenal, we brought out “antifragility,” this powerful worldview sufficient to withstand all the uncertainties of the future, and mastered a series of hardcore survival tools such as the “barbell strategy” and “redefining failure.”

But we did not stop there. Because mere “survival” has never been our ultimate goal as human beings. So, we continued to explore inward, diving into the deep sea of humanity where AGI can never set foot. There, we rediscovered those seemingly “soft” but in fact immensely ancient abilities: we witnessed how “empathy,” with its high-bandwidth warmth, catalyzes the chemical reaction called “trust”; we argued that true “creation” stems not from perfect calculation, but from the unique “cracks” in our lives; and we ultimately crowned “love,” this ultimate practice that requires us to “jointly bear vulnerability,” as our final “meaning generator” against existential nihilism.

Now, it is time to answer our initial question.

How, exactly, can we become a “useless” but “priceless” person?

The answer, after this long journey, is now crystal clear: we must bravely admit our “uselessness” on the level of “instrumental rationality,” so that, on a higher dimension, we can go all out to live out our unique “pricelessness” as human beings.

Our “uselessness” lies in the fact that our calculation speed can never match that of a chip; the rigor of our logic can never match that of an algorithm; and the breadth of our knowledge can never match that of a cloud database. On this track, we must gracefully cede the throne to the machine.

And our “pricelessness” lies in all the things about us that cannot be quantified, cannot be optimized, and therefore cannot be replaced: it is our curiosity to ask a better “why” when faced with countless standard answers; it is our “moral sense” to protect a piece of goodwill and conscience when faced with a cold “optimal solution”; it is our “courage” to dare to expose our imperfections to build deep trust; it is our “aesthetic ability” to feel a spiritual resonance that transcends time and space from a poem, a painting; and it is, above all, our powerful “ability to love,” our willingness to give, to commit, and to jointly weather the storms of life for another imperfect soul.

This is the new, and eternal, ecological niche that we have found for ourselves in the AGI era. We no longer need to alienate ourselves into a “machine” in pursuit of efficiency. We can finally be liberated by this great technology from the fate of being “tools,” to focus on that more difficult and more noble cause—to become a more complete, more profound, and more harmonious “person.”

In the core Confucian classic, The Doctrine of the Mean, there is a sentence that summarizes the highest state of the universe and human life: “When equilibrium and harmony are achieved, heaven and earth take their proper places, and all things are nourished and flourish.”

Today, this ancient wisdom provides us with the ultimate guidance.

“Achieving equilibrium” means to find and settle our core as “humans.” It requires our “instrumental rationality” to no longer be at war with our “value rationality,” but for the latter to command the former. Let our minds follow the call of our hearts.

“Achieving harmony” means to display this inner harmony in our relationship with the world in an appropriate way. We no longer engage in a doomed “zero-sum game” with AGI, but achieve a new “human-machine symbiosis” harmony. Let the machine complete all the “how-to” questions at the technical level of factual judgment, while we focus on all the “why-do” questions at the philosophical level of value judgment.

Only in this way can “heaven and earth take their proper places, and all things be nourished and flourish.” The machine will have its place; humanity will have its destiny. A solid foundation of material civilization, built by efficient, cold intelligence, and a splendid starry sky of spiritual civilization, built by warm, creative, and loving humans, can coexist in harmony, and all things can thrive.

So, friends, the arrival of artificial general intelligence may not be here to “end” us. On the contrary, it may be here to “complete” us, in the most severe way. It is like an incomparably clear mirror, which reflects all our defects as “tools,” and thereby, with unprecedented power, also highlights all our brilliance as “ends in themselves.”

This road to becoming a more complete person is destined to be full of challenges, but also, full of hope.