What Will We Become?

I want to remind you that everything I've talked about until now happened in the past, almost two years ago, because the last interview, in Beijing, was conducted in 2024. And these last two years have been the most changeable years.

Especially with the boom in technology: neurotechnology, quantum computing, and above all, AI. I remember about a year ago, around this time, I was on an off-road trip with friends in Inner Mongolia. On that endless road, thoughts start to drift. We began talking about AI, and I said, logically, if AI and other technologies keep accelerating productivity, the employment structure will be shaken. Massive numbers of employees will be "released," working relations will become atomised, and people will be pushed into self-employment, like artists. And this is not easy for most people. It requires strong self-motivation and real autonomy. At the time, my friends laughed at me, saying my imagination was running wild.

A year later, just this month, at the World Economic Forum in Davos, the same question was finally raised clearly by business and technology leaders: if work no longer needs us, if Universal Basic Income or even Universal High Income becomes reality, then what is the meaning of waking up every day?

But are we really going to do nothing, even if work no longer needs us? Are we really working only to be paid? If so, what about everything we do that holds life together, unpaid, invisible, yet undeniably valuable? Do we do those things because we expect payment, or because creating, caring, and doing are part of human instinct?

When we say we're afraid of being replaced by AI, what are we actually afraid of? If we treat ourselves only as instruments of production, then we will be easily replaced by AI. But we are not. Thankfully, we are not. Otherwise we would have stopped running and competing in the Olympics once we could ride horses, drive cars, and take planes that move much faster than we do.

Our struggle and our fear reflect a hidden assumption: we equate "work" with paid labour, and paid labour with proof of personal value and merit. And this belief is built on supply-and-demand market logic. This is the distortion in our evaluation system: we still don't have a language, parameters, or a value system beyond utilitarianism, beyond the market's supply-and-demand logic.

But supply and demand only function under scarcity, when resources, products, and services are limited. If one day technological development massively increases productivity and material abundance becomes possible, then scarcity is no longer the foundation. Supply and demand as the organising logic begins to fail. And the reward-and-value system built on top of it becomes unstable.

Then how do we redefine what "work" is? Why do we work? How do we evaluate work, and how do we reward it? If our value is detached from work, what measures our value?

These questions don't become urgent only because of AI. We have been training ourselves to be machine-like long before we trained AI to be human-like. For decades, maybe even centuries, we've been moving in this direction by slowly delegitimising our own human nature. So the crisis is not about what AI will become. The crisis has always been what we will become.

We try to avoid emotions and conflict, and call it unprofessional. We try to avoid unproductive time, and call it lazy, a waste. We try to avoid redundancy, and call it inefficiency. We try to avoid spontaneity, and call it chaos and hazard.

We try to avoid all these human traits, and call them flaws. And precisely because we don't allow them, we create AI, and then set ourselves up to be replaced by AI. Because we've worshipped utility, professionalism, order, and efficiency as supreme values. No matter how far technology advances, human society is built on consensus. The day we hand over the power to define value to AI is the day we truly lose our humanity.

I remember one interviewee. She used to be a limited partner in private equity. She lived at machine speed, fuelled by information, logic, and strategy, valued by performance, by results, by optimisation. Until one day, she suddenly began to sense the water, the leaves, the colour of the sky. She described her shift almost as an awakening from numbness. And the joy she found surpassed everything: status, speed, being "the most". And when I asked her what matters most to her now, she answered without hesitation: love.

I couldn't help trembling when I heard it. Her answer hit the essence of what I had been arriving at. And yet I also felt almost embarrassed to stay with it, because "love" sounds too cheesy in most of our contemporary intellectual contexts. It's like an answer that belongs only to corny films and "new age" books, not to serious questions. It's true, but it feels powerless and useless in such a utilitarian society.

There's a line from the ancient Chinese philosopher Zhuangzi, written more than two thousand years ago: "What looks useless is often where the real value lives." This sentence suddenly reveals its wisdom and power, and lands as a brutally realistic question today: experiences, emotions, feelings, sincere and deep human connection. Are they just useless decorations around life, or are they the core values that define us and protect what is human, in the era of co-existence with AI and perhaps other forms of intelligence?

At the end of this four-year journey, standing at this crossing, torn between dehumanisation and the defence of humanity, where are we heading?