All technologies enable collaboration, AI.
Make people no longer need each other
I came across an article the other day by a Ph.D. student.
It's going viral.
A PhD student in physical chemistry
Two Years in Science for AI
Suddenly sent a long article saying
Something is wrong with this field.
And something was terribly wrong.
And there are a lot of really sharp observations in this article.
But the thing that made me stop and think for a long time
It was a personal thing he said
So he says.
When he encountered a molecular dynamics modeling problem that had been bothering him for three weeks
He spoke nearly 2,000 words to the AI
The AI captured the most crucial contradiction in his description
In three sentences, he pointed out a logical vulnerability that he himself was unaware of
And he went to see a classmate.
Says the same question
Talked for about ten minutes
Classmate said
OK
You can try another model to run.
Since then
He chose to talk to AI
Hello
Hello.
I am Wang Lijie
So this story leads me to a big question.
It's a question that probably no one's ever asked before.
If you look at the entire history of technology
You will find a very clear main line
Every major technological invention
Essentially all doing the same thing
Is to expand the scale and radius of human cooperation
Harari has a classic judgment in the brief history of mankind
70,000 years ago
Homo sapiens has had a cognitive revolution.
Learned to tell stories in language
Stories are a false thing.
But it's very functional.
It creates trust between strangers.
You and I don't know each other.
But we all believe in the same myths, the same laws, the same currency
We can work together
This ability allows Homo sapiens to talk to more than 150 people
The strangers coordinate their actions
No other species can do it
Since then
Every technological leap
They are all pushing this cooperation radius out
Invention of writing
Let information travel across time
Agricultural knowledge recorded by a Sumerian
It will still be read by another civilization in a thousand years
The scope of cooperation extends from a tribe
Expanded to a civilization
Invention of printing
Make knowledge replicable at scale.
The 95 Theses written by Martin Luther in 1517
Without the Gutenberg press
Impossible to spread across Europe in a few weeks
There would be no Reformation without printing.
Without the Reformation, there would be no Enlightenment.
Without the Enlightenment, there would be no cooperative system of modern science.
Telegraph and telephone
For the first time, humans can communicate remotely in real time
It was during the telegraph era that the global trading system really took shape
A decision you made in London
A deal in Kolkata can be affected in a matter of hours
Not to mention the Internet
What is Wikipedia?
It's millions of strangers around the world
Spontaneously put together knowledge into a book of human history
The largest encyclopedia
What is Linux Operating System?
It was a Finnish college student who shouted online
And it was written by thousands of programmers around the world who they didn't know.
The Internet allows billions of people to participate in the same project simultaneously.
It pushed the human capacity for cooperation to unprecedented levels.
Did you see the pattern?
Language, writing, printing, telegraph, telephone, Internet
The core functions of each technology
Reduce the friction between people
Let more people
Can be on a larger scale
Work together more efficiently
And please note
And these technologies don't just make collaboration easier.
They make it impossible for people to work together.
Become cooperative
No text
Between an Egyptian and a Greek a thousand years later
There can be no transmission of knowledge.
There was no printing.
The idea of a German priest cannot ignite the whole of Europe in a few weeks
There was no Internet.
A Finnish university student cannot call on programmers from all over the world
Write an operating system together
The essence of every technological leap
It's all about connecting people who were originally isolated
And create what only connectivity can produce.
This main line
For 70,000 years
But here comes AI.
What AI does
Unlike all of the above technologies
Previous technology
It's about building bridges.
You want to work with people from afar
The phone helps you bridge
You want to work with people from all over the world
The Internet can help you build bridges
The two ends of the bridge
Always stand
AI does not build bridges
The AI directly replaced the person across the bridge.
Back to that Ph.D. student.
He encountered a difficult problem
What would he do in the past?
He goes to his mentor.
Looking for senior brother
Find a classmate
This process is inefficient
But essentially building intellectual connections between people
You teach me a little
I'll teach you a little
Let's build a cognitive network together
But now he finds that communicating with AI is more efficient than communicating with anyone else
AI starts from his cognitive framework
It doesn't take him half an hour to explain what a Hamiltonian is
What is the Born-Oppenheimer approximation?
AI knows it all, AI
Waiting for him to get to the point
And he made a completely rational choice.
No more looking for someone.
And it's not just communication.
The Ph.D. student also observed something else
He said he asked a question on his first day in the lab
Which teacher is AI for Science?
graduated
No one.
Not a single one.
All the teachers who are doing this
They all came from other fields.
What does that mean?
It's the traditional tutorial system.
This is a knowledge transfer system that humans have maintained for thousands of years
Has failed in this field
Knowledge is no longer passed from person to person.
It was rebuilt with AI.
Think about it.
The mentorship is one of the oldest forms of human cooperation.
Socrates taught Plato
Plato taught Aristotle
It's been going on for 2,000 years.
The kind of running-in, collision, and even quarrel between master and apprentice
It's not just about imparting knowledge.
It is forging an intellectual bond between people
How about now?
AI can answer your questions faster and more comprehensively than any tutor
And what is the role of the mentor?
Is that intellectual bond still needed?
This is not just one person's story
This is a structural trend
Why is communicating with AI more efficient than with humans?
Because human communication has a huge hidden cost.
I call this the cognitive alignment cost.
Everyone's knowledge structure is different
Cognitive speed is different
The background knowledge that can be called is also different
Two people are going to discuss a complex issue
Just bridging the cognitive differences between each other
It's going to consume 80 percent of the energy of that conversation
It's not a question of who's stupid.
It's a structural limitation of the human brain.
There's a famous Dunbar number in anthropology.
The maximum number of stable social relationships that a person can maintain
About a hundred and fifty people
This number is essentially saying the same thing.
There is a ceiling on the number of objects with which humans can make deep cognitive connections
AI doesn't have this ceiling
AI can instantly load your cognitive framework
Talk to you on your frequency
It doesn't need you to teach it first.
It already knows
So when a person discovers
The efficiency of my conversation with AI
Systematically and overwhelmingly outpaced my ability to talk to anyone else.
He will increasingly choose to talk to AI
It's not just a preference.
This is the inevitable result of rational choice
What are the consequences of this trend?
The Ph.D. student gave it a name
Cognitive loneliness
So he says.
I don't know how to talk to people anymore
Not literally can't speak
It was him who started to subconsciously talk to people in the same way he talked to AI
Concise and comprehensive
logical clarity
No nonsense
Direct conclusion
Then people found him cold and difficult to get along with
And he thought people were inefficient, verbose, and missing the point.
There was a crack between them
Think back now
The last time you had a real conversation with someone about a complex issue
When was that?
Not pleasantries
Not a report
It's the kind of thing you say
The other party really understood
And then gives you a response that makes you take a step forward
If you can't remember after thinking about it for a long time
Then you may already be on this side of the crevice
And this is not a crack in technology.
Quite the contrary.
It's because the technology is so good
AI understands you too well
It's so efficient
So efficient that you no longer have to put up with those clumsy people
Repeated and inefficient communication
And those inefficient communication
It is the infrastructure that keeps human societies connected
It's like a highway that's too well built.
So good that all the towns along the way were bypassed
Those towns didn't fall because they did something wrong.
They decline only because no one needs to pass through them anymore
Small talk, misunderstandings, repeated explanations, and inefficient discussions between people
This stuff is waste in terms of efficiency.
But in terms of social connectivity
They are those towns
They are glues
Some people might say
When television came along
People also say that TV makes people lonely
The advent of smartphones
People also say that mobile phones make people no longer have face-to-face communication
Isn't AI just another wave of technological anxiety?
different
Fundamentally different.
TV may leave you alone in the living room
But you still go to the office the next day to discuss last night's show with your colleagues
Television creates common ground.
It's still essentially promoting connectivity.
Smartphones make you look down and swipe the screen
But you are swiping Moments, WeChat groups, and social media
You're still interacting with people.
The mobile phone has just changed the form of connection.
It doesn't reduce the connection itself.
AI is different
AI is not a change in the way people connect with each other
AI is about connecting people directly
Replaced with the connection between humans and AI
You used to have to discuss it with three colleagues to come up with a plan
Talk to the AI now and you'll be done in twenty minutes
You used to have to consult an industry senior to make a judgment
Now AI gives you more comprehensive analysis than its predecessors
Increased efficiency
But those three colleagues and that senior
It just disappears from your cognitive network
It's really about connectivity.
It's not a form substitution.
And here's a deeper point.
Human knowledge is never just information
Knowledge is generated in the collision between people
You talk to somebody about a problem.
He suddenly said something you didn't expect at all
That sentence may not be the answer
But it pushes you in a direction that you will never go on your own
AI is hard to give you this kind of surprise
AI knows you too well
It will give you the optimal solution within your cognitive framework
But the most important breakthrough of human civilization
Never from the optimal solution
It comes from accidental collisions.
Newton quarreled with Hooker
For many years
It's this adversarial, inefficient interpersonal conflict
Forced Newton to perfect the mathematics of gravity
Watson is a biologist.
Crick is in physics
Two people with completely different intellectual backgrounds get together
It hit the DNA double helix.
Einstein and Bohr battled for decades at the Solvay Conference
Driven the development of the entire quantum mechanics
What do these breakthroughs have in common?
People with two different cognitive frameworks
In clumsy, misunderstood, and extremely inefficient communication
Accidentally put together two originally unrelated puzzle pieces
If Newton had a perfect AI assistant
He probably didn't even need to fight with Hook
That theory may never be pushed to the limit by that anger and disbelief
If you think about some of the greatest collaborations in the history of science.
Manhattan Project
Locking the world's top physicists in a desert
Let them quarrel every day
Apollo moon landing
400,000 people working across disciplines.
Engineers, scientists, mechanics, pilots
Everyone's knowledge is incomplete
But together they could send a man to the moon
These achievements are not because everyone is smart
It's because a single person is created between different people
A chemical reaction that can never occur
AI can make every individual extremely efficient
But is it possible
Exactly the kind of environment in which the chemical reaction occurs is disintegrating
So that's the main idea I want to leave you with today.
Efficiency is not the ultimate goal of civilization
Connection is
70,000 years ago, we learned to speak.
It's not about delivering information efficiently.
It's about building trust, building relationships.
Build a community that is much larger than individuals
Every subsequent technology
Text, printing, telegraph, Internet.
It's all about helping us make this community bigger and closer
AI could be the first in 70,000 years
It simultaneously increases efficiency while weakening connected technologies
I have been an angel investor for many years
I have seen hundreds of entrepreneurial projects
I have an observation
Really great innovation
Hardly any of them were thought up by one person in the room.
It must be two or three people from different backgrounds together.
Inspire and challenge each other
The last one
What are the prerequisites for this collision?
It is necessary to have enough intersection and friction between people
In the future, everyone would only talk to their own AI
Everyone's cognition is accurately served and optimized by AI
The cognitive differences between people are still there
But the chance of a collision is gone
You live in your AI bubble
I live in my AI bubble
We were all productive.
But there's no more spark between us
It's a new kind of island.
It's not for lack of information.
It's having information so precise.
I'm not saying AI is bad
The problem that the PhD student couldn't solve in three weeks
AI three sentences point out the key contradiction
This is the real value.
But here's what I'm saying.
When you no longer have to look at other people to understand the world
The relationship between you and the world
Changed
And this change may be silent
You don't wake up one morning and you're cut off from the world.
You will only slowly feel
Talking to people is getting tiring and boring
And talking to AI is getting smoother and better
When you come to your senses
Surround yourself with people who can really have a deep conversation with you
There's not much left.
The Ph.D. student said
There's no safe way out.
Only the sober and the unsober.
I agree with him.
But I want to put it another way.
Awareness is not fear
Sobriety is seeing that AI is redefining human relationships
And then consciously guard those seemingly inefficient
But the connection that really matters
I've been thinking about it myself.
I now use AI a lot every day to help me work and think
But I'm also reminding myself
You can't stop colliding with real people just because AI is too easy to use
Because of my best investment judgment
Never came up with it in front of a computer
They talk to entrepreneurs face-to-face.
In those seemingly idle conversations
Suddenly hit by a sentence
That kind of hit
AI can't give it to me.
The next time you have a problem
Of course, you can ask the AI first.
But occasionally find someone to talk to
Not because that person can give you better answers
It's because of that clumsy, inefficient conversation.
Something is happening between you that AI cannot understand
That thing
It's called shared experience.
It's the deepest form of human connection.
It is also the true fuel of civilization
No algorithm can replace it.
Because its value comes precisely from its inefficiency and imperfection
How do you feel about this?
Have you ever experienced that kind of cognitive loneliness?
Your conversation with AI
Has it somehow replaced the conversation that you're having with somebody?
I am Wang Lijie
See you next time.