【Editor's Note】Bidding farewell to 2021, the world has entered the post-epidemic era. What social and cultural heritage have we sent away this year, and what challenges and changes will we usher in? Interface News invites a number of thinkers from history, economics, sociology and other disciplines to share their insights and discoveries. The guest of honor in this issue is a professor at the China Foreign Affairs University.
Reporter: Yan Guihua
Shi Zhan, a professor at the China Foreign Affairs College, is a rare cross-border scholar with a profound political and historical background, and has authored "Hub", "Overflow" and "Breaking the Cocoon". His thinking is closely related to the pulse of the times, based on a grand logical system he has constructed. In recent years, he and his team have focused on the digital economy and digital order, and the recent hot concept of the metacosm has been used by him to form the latest plate in his theoretical system. His views may seem fanciful to some, but to others they are full of profound insights into the future of humanity.
In this issue of the "Question Thinker" series, he mentioned that in the future, with the large-scale replacement of traditional labor jobs by AI and robots, humans must produce data through various consumption activities in the digital world, so that consumption is equivalent to production, so that economic processes can be recycled. In the future, the metacosm may have the best chance of becoming the core link in the economy, because it may be the scene that generates the most data and is most differentiated.
But he predicts that for technical reasons, the true metaverse will emerge as early as twenty years later. At that time, the extremely high demand on computing power will change the current energy order, and this change will bring far-reaching impact and challenges to the future international order. Here's what he had to say.
Interface News: What project are you working on? Briefly talk about the significance and results of this research?
Shi Zhan: I am thinking in two directions at the same time, one is China's frontier corridor, and the other is the future digital order. Both studies are currently in the process of thinking and writing, so the results are not yet available.
In terms of significance, first of all, the study of the frontier corridor. China is actually a country of pluralism and integration between Han, Manchuria, Mongolia, and Tibet, but in the narrative of public opinion in our past, the history of China has become the history of the Han chinese nationality, and it is not a complete China that is discussed in such a way, and it is also very unfavorable to build a common spiritual homeland of the Chinese nation.
A complete history of China was developed by the Mutual Construction, Mutual Generation, and Mutual Conditioning of the Han-Manchu- Mongolian-Mongolian Hui-Tibet. Some of the problems we encounter in the frontier today are related to the one-dimensional Centrism of the Central Plains. A complete history of China needs to be told in order to theoretically respond to some of the problems encountered on the frontier.
I am trying to find a more complete narrative logic for a pluralistic China. From the Central Plains and grasslands to the Western Regions and Plateaus, the interface of multiple plates interacting with each other in history is commonly referred to as the corridor zone. I use the corridor as a core perspective to try to give a more complete account of the multifaceted and integrated chinese historical process.
Another direction of my thinking is the digital order of the future. My focus on the digital world also began a few years ago. At that time, my academic partners and I noticed that with the widespread use of artificial intelligence (AI) and robotics, the future employment structure of human beings is likely to change dramatically – more than half of the jobs will now be replaced by AI and robots, just as many jobs in the agricultural age have been replaced by machines in the industrial age. It is difficult for us to imagine that state at the moment, just as it is difficult for people in agricultural societies to imagine that in the industrial age it was enough for only a small number of people to engage in agriculture.
More than half of the traditional jobs no longer need people, and the question arises, where does the income of these people come from? Without income, there is no spending power; without consumption, what else do those who are still working produce? - The whole economic process cannot be recycled. If it is to be recycled, unless it is these people whose consumption activities are equivalent to production, and which is equivalent to production, it is most likely to be realized in the digital world. The process of consumption is the process of continuously generating data, and in the digital world, data is the most important factor of production.
Therefore, based on this discussion just now, I think one of the reflections in recent years is that with the large-scale replacement of traditional labor jobs by AI and robots, human beings must have enough opportunities in the digital world to produce data through various consumption activities in the digital world, so that consumption is equivalent to production. In the future, which scenario generates more data and the more differentiated the data, the more likely it is that which scenario will become the core link in the economy. At present, this scene is the metacosm.
(Reporter: So, such a world does not seem very attractive, right? That's because we're used to the current order. In the same way, people in the agricultural age will not find the industrial age attractive, because there are idyllic pastoral songs in the countryside, and in the factory it becomes a screw. Many people's imagination and discussion of the metaverse is somewhat similar to the spaniards standing on land and thinking about how the ocean is managed 500 years ago during the great geographical discovery. Now we stand in the traditional world to think about the digital world, and it is useless for you to think about the traditional world clearly, because the digital world is not a simple translation of the traditional world, just as the ocean world is not a simple translation of the terrestrial world.
Interface News: Covid-19 has made us rethink the relationship between people and nature. On topics such as global warming, new energy sources, and the relationship between viruses and humanity, can you choose one aspect to share your views and predict changes in the next three years?
Shi Zhan: There will be no substantial changes in the next three years, but in the next ten or twenty years, new energy may be a very important direction, because after the next ten years, the metacosm may be more large-scale reality.
I posted an article on the WeChat public account "Shi Zhan World" to discuss the metacosm is located on the first few layers of the digital world. I have divided the digital world into three levels, not based on the distinction between high and low, but on the distance from the traditional world. The first level is the equipment manufacturer, which is the interface between the digital world and the traditional world; the second level is the digital world constructed by digital giants that produce content distributed but are centrally managed; and the third level is the fully distributed digital world, based on blockchain technology. The current metaverse is mainly driven and constructed by digital giants in the second level, and the metacosm built by the giants is decentralized but the management is certainly still centralized. For example, if Facebook builds a metaverse, it can "pull the net" for users, which is unacceptable for users like Vitalik Butrin. Butering created Ethereum because (at least that's the story I've seen online) that he played a game, but when he played it to a very high level, the game company stopped the game's server, and the server stopped, which meant that everything he had created before was cleared, which was a huge harm to Butrin. He felt that the world should not be like this, but that users should really have what they created, so he tried to build a distributed world based on blockchain technology.
The current metaverse is still built by the digital giants, there is a "God" that can create or destroy the world, but the real metaverse should not have "God", even if there is "God", then this "God" can only be a group consensus. The group consensus itself is distributed generation and distributed operation. So in the next decade, the metaverse built by digital giants may take shape, and twenty years later, the truly distributed metacosm based on blockchain technology may emerge. The reason why in twenty years (of course, now is only imagination) is that the kind of blockchain-based metaverse, the requirements for bandwidth and computing power, compared to the centralized metaverse, will be an order of magnitude increase, and once there is such a strong demand for computing power, it means that it can be technically achieved at least twenty years later. With such a large computing power, the demand for energy will also be an order of magnitude climb. The large-scale demand for energy, relying on traditional energy is inedible, the climate will collapse, and it will definitely rely mainly on new energy to support it.
So what I just said about the metaversmus, the digital order, the digital world, it is a future for mankind, but to achieve it, it needs a series of infrastructure to support, and new energy is a crucial infrastructure. Without new energy, the world cannot function. There is a big difference between new energy and traditional energy, that is, traditional energy is a resource attribute, it relies on those fossil resources, and new energy such as wind power, photovoltaics, etc., is a manufacturing attribute. The change from resource attributes to manufacturing attributes means that the global energy geography will change dramatically: traditional energy resources with resource attributes rely on specific places, such as Russia and the Middle East; and new energy as a manufacturing attribute, in a high probability, China has the strongest productivity. So what logic will emerge from the future international order? It is not clear today, but it will certainly bring extremely far-reaching implications and challenges that deserve serious consideration.
Interface News: The ups and downs of the economy have made many people start to think about the relationship between economic efficiency and fairness and justice. What are your thoughts and predictions on how to make the cake bigger or distribute between countries, between different industries, between different classes, and between different generations?
Shi Zhan: From an economic point of view, one of the big problems now is that the digital economy has made many of the economic ethics that we used to and adapted to in the past untenable, because the digital economy has a super head effect. The large platform companies we see now, whether they are the world's largest companies by market capitalization or the largest companies in China by market capitalization, have been established for less than ten years and twenty years, and such a speed of wealth creation is unimaginable in the traditional era. For example, those head anchors, the speed at which they create wealth is also completely unimaginable in the traditional era.
In the era of traditional industrial economy, the economic ethics we follow is to work hard and reap one point, but in the digital age, because of the super head effect, this narrative has become unreasonable - those head anchors have exchanged ten points of hard work for 100%, thousands or even 10,000 points of harvest; while some other anchors may work as hard as they do, but they can only get one point or even zero points of harvest. The relationship between your harvest and your level of effort is no longer positively correlated, but more based on luck. At this time, we must look for a new economic ethic, otherwise the social ethical order may be subverted.
What could this new economic ethic be? To find this thing, you must first see the most basic economic logic of the digital age. There are currently no answers to these questions. These are all things that need to be brought up for serious consideration now, and this is what my friends and I have been focusing on recently.
Interface News: Talk about a movie, or TV series that recently impressed you? Talk about what reflections and questions it raises.
Shi Zhan: There is very little time to watch movies and TV series, and one of the most impressive dramas I have watched recently is "Squid Game". The Squid Game involves a lot of discussion of human nature. It sets a specific scenario, a specific rule. In extreme cases, what might happen when human nature is pushed to the extreme. But no matter how extreme, no Dostoevsky is more extreme about human nature, so for me, watching a TV series like this is to relax.
Interface News: Recommend a few of your favorite new media projects, such as public accounts, podcasts, or others, and tell us how good they are?
Shi Zhan: I'll just advertise myself. The topics mentioned above are discussed in my personal name "Shi Shi World" and our team of scholars' public name "Daguan Tianxiazhi". The phased results of our thinking will also be released on it. In addition, our "Daguan Tianxiazhi" team also made a podcast called "East Cavity and Western Tone", there will be more interesting scholars and interesting topics to discuss on it, and the current response is also very good.
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