Forget class solidification, a new "great divergence" has arrived

Introduction: "Class solidification", "It's hard for poor families to produce noble sons", "The middle class is falling back into poverty"... These words permeate the Chinese air and have become a collective anxiety. We worry about the invisible but solid starting line and fear the powerlessness in the era of "competing with dads".

But what if I told you that we might be stockpiling the wrong ammunition for a war that has already ended? While people are still fiercely discussing the "classes" of the old world, an era of "great divergence" driven by AI, which is more thorough and cruel, has quietly begun.

This time, what measures a person's position is no longer wealth or background, but the dimensions of cognition, judgment and creativity.

Over the past decade, the most enduring topic on the Chinese Internet has been “class solidification.” Countless articles, discussions, and memes tell the same story: the ladder of social mobility is narrowing, and the value of personal struggle pales in comparison to the wealth and resources of the parents.

From "I struggled for eighteen years to sit down and drink coffee with you", to the discussion on "Runxue", to the lament about the "fragility of the middle class" under layoffs in large companies, this anxiety is real, and it stems from the deep pain of an era of resource stock game.

We all seem to have accepted a default premise: the structure of the world is relatively stable, like a pyramid that has already been built. All we can do is climb hard in the given grid and pray that we don’t fall. We calculate how many generations of accumulation it will take to gain a foothold in a first-tier city; we worry about how to pave the expensive track to elite education for the next generation.

However, we must be wary of a kind of cognitive inertia - using past maps to navigate a brand new world.Because while we are anxious about "solidification", an unprecedented technological force, like magma deep in the earth's crust, is accumulating enough energy to reshape the entire landscape. This force is artificial intelligence.

AI is not another “Internet+” or another round of technological innovation. It is a paradigm shift and a catalyst that can dissolve the old social structure. What it is doing is making the concept of “class” itself shaky.

The new big divergence is accelerating

Recently, Paul Graham, the godfather of Silicon Valley venture capital, posted a post: "For a period of time, artificial intelligence will widen the gap in job returns. It is now difficult for average programmers to even find a job, but top programmers earn more than ever before."

He added: “This trend has been going on since the Stone Age. Technological progress always widens the gap in rewards for work. The income of the bottom can go to zero, while technology allows the income of the top to continue to break through.”

Take a look at this chronology of the development of human technology.

It was almost horizontal for millions of years, then began to rise after the Industrial Revolution, and now in the "present" where we live, the red line has suddenly turned into a vertical cliff.Behind this cliff is the crazy acceleration of the speed of technological evolution - changes that once took a century to digest can now be completed in five years or even a year.

This exponential force is forged by the afterglow of Moore's Law and the dawn of the law of accelerating returns, making all attempts at "solidification" seem futile.

In such a drastically changing environment, those seemingly solid "class barriers" - whether based on capital, information gaps or moats built by specific licenses - may be washed away overnight. The business of a century-old bank may be subverted by a financial application built by a few talented programmers using AI; an education group that relies on a large number of teachers may be challenged by a platform that can provide personalized AI tutoring.

The advantages of the old world are rapidly depreciating. When AI can generate legal documents, business contracts, codes, and design drawings at almost zero cost, the traditional "middle-class" moats that rely on licenses and process knowledge are instantly filled.

In the past, wealth could be inherited, but in this era, the ability to understand and control AI cannot be directly inherited. A "rich second generation" who is numb and slow to the new world may be far less competitive than a small town test-taker who can skillfully use AI tools.

Therefore, the crux of the problem has changed. The core challenge we face is no longer how to climb up in the solidified class, but how to deal with this new huge diversion around "cognition" and "creation". To understand the rules of this diversion, we need to look back at history and listen to a tragic allegory about the value of human beings amid the roar of steam and steel.

Most people are running a losing race

Let's look at a classic story that takes place in the 1870s, after the American Civil War.

It was an era full of pioneering spirit and iron will. A huge railway network was spreading wildly across the North American continent, cutting through mountains and filling up canyons. In the mountains of West Virginia, a railway company needed to dig a mile-long big bend tunnel.

In that era, the work of cutting rocks was mainly done by manpower. The workers, mostly newly liberated African Americans, used heavy steel chisels and hammers to challenge the hard rock inch by inch. The strongest among them were known as "steel drivers."

John Henry was a legend among them. It was said that he was two meters tall and extremely strong. He could hold a 14-pound hammer in each hand and swing it alternately. His work efficiency and sense of rhythm were unmatched. His singing and hammering were the most inspiring symphony on the tunnel construction site.

However, the product of the Industrial Revolution, the steam drill, arrived at the construction site. This tireless steel monster devoured coal and water, made a deafening roar, and promised to drill holes at a speed far exceeding human power. The workers' survival was directly threatened.

In order to defend human dignity and value, John Henry challenged the machine. This competition between man and machine attracted everyone's attention. In the 35-minute competition, the steam drill drilled 9 feet deep, while John Henry, with his extraordinary physique and will, swung the hammer, sweating profusely, and drilled an astonishing depth of 14 feet.

The crowd cheered, John Henry won the race. But just as he put down the hammer, his heart burst and he died of exhaustion. He used his life to prove that humans can surpass machines in a certain period of time, but his death also became a cruel allegory: in a race track where efficiency is defined by machines, trying to surpass with flesh and blood is itself a tragedy doomed to failure.

The reason why John Henry's story has been passed down to this day is that it touches on an eternal theme: when the wave of technology comes, what is the value of ordinary workers?

John Henry’s mistake was that he tried to compete with the steam engine on the dimension of “strength and endurance,” which was precisely the core advantage of the machine. He won a battle but lost the war. Because history soon proved that the value of the future would not belong to the stronger “iron drivers” but to those who could design, build, maintain and operate the steam drill.

What really defined that era were not stronger workers like John Henry, but those who knew how to design, build, deploy and exploit steam drills - railroad tycoons, engineers, inventors. They did not "race" with the machine, but stood on the shoulder of the machine, gained unprecedented leverage and reshaped the world.

More than a century later, we are all standing at the same crossroads as John Henry. However, the "steam drill" we are facing is an invisible artificial intelligence. It no longer challenges our muscles, but our brains.

Now, please look around. Artificial intelligence is the "cognitive steam engine" of our time. It is and will soon demonstrate overwhelming superiority in the field of "medium-level" mental labor.

• When AI can generate 100 "qualified" marketing copies in one minute, an ordinary copywriter, if he only competes in "writing faster and more", will be the John Henry of the new era.
• When AI can analyze tens of thousands of cases and write legal briefs in an instant, a junior lawyer, if he only competes in "better memory and faster retrieval", will be the John Henry of the new era.
• When AI can generate countless "exquisite" designs based on instructions, an assembly line painter, if he only competes in "better skills", he is also the John Henry of the new era.

Competing with AI on "efficiency" and "standard output" is a dead end, because its progress in this field is exponential, while ours is not. The essence of this kind of competition is to "dehumanize" ourselves, to cater to the logic of the machine, and eventually be ruthlessly abandoned by the machine.

This is the cruel starting point of the "Great Divergence": are you becoming a "better" beast of burden or machine, or are you becoming a "more unique" person?

The cost of mediocrity has never been higher, but the rewards of excellence have never been higher

AI is turning “average” cognitive output into a commodity that can be infinitely replicated at near zero cost.

When an AI model can provide "70 points" translation, "75 points" design, and "80 points" code for free, the value of the "85 points" service provided by humans will shrink dramatically. The market no longer pays for "goodness" because it is almost free.

If your skills can be clearly described, quantitatively evaluated, and have a large number of successful cases for AI to learn from, then they are on the red line of being "commoditized." This not only means a reduction in salary, but also means that your value will be reduced to zero, which means that you may be replaced by an API interface at any time.

This is the most severe punishment for "average". In the past, being in the middle meant stability; in the future, the middle is collapsing.

However, while AI crushes "average", it also provides an unprecedented amplifier for true "excellence".To understand how AI is driving the Great Divergence, we must introduce another key social and economic theory:Power Law, also known as the Pareto distribution or the 80/20 rule.

In simple terms, the power law meansWinner-Take-AllIn a system that conforms to the power law distribution, a small number of top individuals occupy the vast majority of resources or returns. For example:

• A small number of best-selling authors account for most of the sales in the entire book market.
• A small number of top stars receive the vast majority of the income and attention in the entertainment industry.
• A few Internet giants (such as Google and Amazon) have captured the vast majority of profits in the market.

The emergence of AI is pushing the power law to its extreme, turning the gap between “winners” and “ordinary people” from a crack into a bottomless canyon. There are three reasons for this:

1. Extreme scalability: Industrial-era products, such as cars, are produced and sold under physical constraints. AI-driven software or services, on the other hand, have almost no marginal costs. The core cost of a top AI translation model serving 1,000 users versus 1 billion users increases minimally.

This means that as long as an AI product is 5% better than its competitors, it is likely to quickly occupy 95% or even 100% of the market by virtue of network effects and data flywheels. The survival space of the second and third place will be extremely compressed, or even disappear.

2. Huge leverage effect： AI is an unprecedented "capacity amplifier". In the past, the influence of a top architect was mainly limited to the projects he could personally design. Now, a top AI algorithm engineer can create an AI design tool that can increase the work efficiency of millions of junior designers around the world by ten times, or even directly replace them.

This engineer and his small team leveraged AI to leverage the value distribution of the entire industry. The huge value they created will be rewarded to them in a disproportionate way.

3. The complete devaluation of “average”: This is the cruelest side of the “great divergence”. The steam engine of John Henry’s time replaced repetitive physical labor. The previous wave of software and the Internet replaced repetitive, rule-based mental labor (such as calculations and data entry). Today’s generative AI is conquering “medium-level” cognitive tasks that require a certain degree of creativity at an unprecedented speed.

How to achieve excellence and amplify success in the era of AI

Excellence here does not mean being "better" than AI in a single dimension, but rather the top human capabilities that AI cannot match.

1. Ability to define problems and unique insights: AI is a powerful tool for solving problems, but it cannot find a good problem that is "worth solving" by itself. In the fields of business, scientific research, and art, the ability to penetrate the surface and see unmet needs, undiscovered laws, and unexpressed emotions is the source of all value creation. If you can ask a question that AI cannot answer but is crucial, your value is infinite.

2. Ultimate aesthetics, taste and creativity: AI can imitate Picasso, but it can never become Picasso. It cannot have Picasso's subversive artistic intuition and unique life experience. In content creation, product design, and brand building, the top taste that can lead the trend and define "beauty" and "style" will become the scarcest and most valuable asset. Your work becomes priceless because it is infused with your unique humanity, emotions, and worldview.

3. Cross-border integration and system thinking: AI has amazing deep learning capabilities in vertical fields, but it is still the core ability of human entrepreneurs to innovatively "connect" knowledge, resources, and talents in different fields to build a complex, new value system. Can you perfectly integrate technology, art, and business into a disruptive product like Steve Jobs did? This kind of systematic top-level design is difficult for AI to achieve.

4. True emotional connection and leadership: AI can simulate conversations, but it cannot build real trust or give genuine encouragement. Leading a team of top talents, inspiring their potential, and rallying people with a common vision, this kind of leadership based on deep empathy and the brilliance of humanity will become the core engine driving the organization forward in the future of human-machine collaboration.

People with these "exceptional" abilities can use AI, an unprecedented lever, to amplify their influence a million times. A creator with a unique artistic style can use AI tools to complete an animation project in a day that would have taken a team a year to complete. A researcher with a groundbreaking scientific idea can command an AI cluster toRun hundreds of millions of simulations to verify or disprove your theories faster than ever before.

This is the reward of "excellence": you are no longer just yourself, you become a super individual of "human + AI", and your thoughts can be directly transformed into the power to influence the world. This kind of reward will no longer be linear, but explosive.

Everything solid will crumble to dust. 

Let's go back to the original anxiety. Yes, "class solidification" is a real dilemma in the industrial age and the information age. But in the future when AI is about to take over all "routine tasks", this topic is rapidly becoming outdated.

The rules of the game in the old world are that where you are born largely determines how far you can go. The rules of the game in the new world are that how you think determines whether you fall or rise in the diversion.

This great divergence will ruthlessly punish the average and mediocre, and generously reward excellence and excellence; it will ruthlessly punish lazy thinking and outdated skills, and generously reward those who embrace change, lifelong learning, and are committed to cultivating their own unique "humanity." It gives everyone a chance to re-select the "starting line."

This new starting line does not lie in your parents’ bank account, the location of your school district housing, or even which prestigious school you graduated from. It is in your morning every day, when you turn on your phone or computer:

Do you choose to use AI to kill time and complete repetitive tasks, making yourself a more efficient "gear"? Or do you choose to use AI to learn new knowledge, explore the unknown, and create unprecedented things, making yourself the unique "engine"?

Forget about class stratification. The wall we once desperately wanted to climb over may be dissolved by the tide of the times. What really determines the future is the clearer and steeper fork in the road in front of you.

Will you continue to stare at the crumbling old wall and feel anxious, or will you turn around, face the stormy waves of AI, and start learning how to build an ark of your own? [Understand]

The article comes from the Internet:Forget class solidification, a new "great divergence" has arrived