AI is meant to serve humans, not replace them.
- Elon Musk
Liu Qiangdong, who has always wanted to recruit the head anchor, simply went live by himself.
However, it is not right to say that he "ended", because it was not the real Liu Qiangdong who started the live broadcast, but a "Liu Qiangdong" digital AI person.
In just 27 minutes, the broadcast of the official "fake Liu Qiangdong" exceeded 10 million, and the debut of JD Digital AI people was a huge success.
It seems that everything is beautiful, and it seems to indicate that China's live broadcast economy has entered a new era of full swing and dreams.
The premise is not to dig deep into everything that is going to happen.
Liu Qiangdong, in the past 20 years, has knocked down giants such as Gome and Suning with the fierce attitude of the king of e-commerce, breaking the model of professional chain stores on the ground, and once drew his sword and looked around at a loss.
However, China is changing too fast, and soon, Liu Qiangdong ushered in another big test of the times - the live broadcast world of the heroes, and the wave of AI with masters.
JD.com doesn't want to recruit big anchors to keep up with the wave.
When Yu Minhong's live broadcast of Dong Yuhui, a thousand-mile horse, appeared "abnormal", news spread on the rivers and lakes that Liu Qiangdong personally signed the "Calling Virtuous Book" on behalf of Jingdong and recruited Xiao Dong with a lot of money.
As everyone knows, Jingdong has been a big anchor for a long time, but unfortunately, Luohua is intentionally ruthless, and Jingdong's thick and big olive branch only raised the value of Dong Yuhui, forcing Sect Leader Yu to cut through the mess quickly in disguise, stripping Dong out of Dongfang Zhenxuan, and planning a personal big IP for him, and the mothers-in-law and mothers-in-law clapped their hands and walked with Hui.
With Liu Qiangdong's vision and skill, how can I not understand that what Jingdong really lacks is not a few head anchors like Dong Yuhui, Brother Xiaoyang, Luo Yonghao, and Simba, but the ticket to board the fast train in the new era.
JD.com started as a retailer, and in the past 20 years, the industry has been swept through several rounds of big waves, and how many bigwigs of the old era have fallen.
The times have turned the page, how cruel it is, a missed opportunity, and a catastrophe will never be recovered.
Fortunately, Jingdong has already foreshadowed.
Back in April 2018, the World Retail Congress in Madrid, Spain. At the meeting, Liu Qiangdong talked about the future path of Jingdong Group:
1. JD.com will use AI technology and robots in the future to achieve 100% unmanned operation;
2. In the next ten years, JD.com's employees will be reduced from the current 160,000 to 80,000.
In the same month that Liu Qiangdong said this, China's AI industry, which is still dormant, also ushered in a turmoil.
Lu Qi left Baidu gloomily.
Lu Qi, former vice president of Microsoft, known as the "world authority on AI technology" in Robin Li's mouth, is known as a workaholic, he joined Baidu in 2017, and tried his best to persuade Li Hongyan to concentrate all his strength in the future, gamble on AI, and fully copy Microsoft's future layout in the field of AI.
Many years later, looking back, Lu Qi's judgment is undoubtedly correct.
After ten years of layout, the global giants are officially launched in the field of artificial intelligence, driving a huge demand for computing power, and bringing the arms dealer behind it, Nvidia, which manufactures AI chips, to the sky, with profits and stock prices soaring.
Lu Qi's old club, Microsoft's OpenAi, became the first round winner and occupied the high ground, even if there is still a lack of heavyweight landing projects, but only with the drive of the stock price in the past two years, it is enough to recover all the technology investment.
If Baidu can really go all out in the field of AI, even if it can't catch up with Microsoft for a while, it can become the darling of the capital market and government support after the rise of the AI wave in 2023.
Robin Li, who prides himself on being conservative and cautious, missed this historic opportunity, which has also become a lesson for Liu Qiangdong to learn.
Since you have missed the outlet of live broadcasting, you will embrace AI to overtake in corners.
On the occasion of the fire, Jingdong Festival cashed 1 billion in cash and 1 billion in traffic, and Liu Qiangdong's doppelganger AI Liu Qiangdong went live on the live broadcast, and Liu Qiangdong's brothers all over the world cheered on him.
The ability of the Internet company to spend a lot of money is intertwined with Liu Qiangdong's big brother temperament and the heroism of the rivers and lakes.
I always have some respect for Liu Qiangdong.
Not only because he often talks about "brothers", and at the same time does a lot of practical things, but also because he is a rare entrepreneur who truly practices the unity of knowledge and action of "the first rich leads the latter to become rich".
Liu Qiangdong implemented "one rise and one drop" within JD.com, turned outsourced employees into self-owned employees, and set up a "housing security fund" for all logistics customer service employees of JD.com, and Liu Qiangdong himself took out another 100 million to expand the scale of the "Employee Children Relief Fund" together with the company's funds, which is the essence of "rising".
The so-called "reduction" refers to the fact that from January 2023, all executives of JD Group will reduce their salaries by 10%-20%, and the higher the position, the more they will be reduced.
"Tao Te Ching" has clouds, the way of heaven, more than loss and make up for the deficiency, the way of man, the loss of more than enough to make up for the surplus. It is rare to strengthen the body of a businessman who values profits and practice the heavenly way of "making up for the deficiency after the loss".
Looking at China, JD.com is the first company in the industry to sign a formal labor contract with logistics front-line employees and pay five insurances and one housing fund.
What is a real entrepreneur? Knowing the white, guarding the black, is the style of the world.
More than 100 years ago, American Ford led the assembly line production and the "eight-hour" workday, setting the benchmark for industrial relations in the industrial age, where entrepreneurs find ways to improve labor productivity, rather than always trying to squeeze workers' rest time.
Now, Liu Qiangdong has set an example for Chinese companies on how to treat grassroots employees, which is "for the world", but unfortunately, so far, there are few followers.
Liu Qiangdong, who graduated from the Chinese People's University, is more like a graduate of "Green Forest University" in his usual style, a glass of wine and pride, good drinking in rivers and lakes, open-mouthed brothers, closed-mouthed brothers, just like the good men in "Water Margin", is an "outlier" among businessmen.
We don't know if this is Liu Qiangdong's character design, or if he really has such pride in his heart, but there is a good saying: if a person can play a good brother for a lifetime, then he is a good brother.
We hope that Liu Qiangdong can continue to be good to his brothers, and there is no profound reason, they are all children of poor families, and they are just heart-to-heart.
However, the brotherhood between Liu Qiangdong and grassroots employees will eventually be tested, not because people's hearts are changeable, but because the times are changeable.
After all, according to his remarks at the Madrid conference, after the realization of unmanned operation of AI technology, it will be the time when the number of employees will be halved.
Will the emergence of AI Liu Qiangdong be the beginning of the prologue?
Human development so far, there is a hidden dark line.
The growth of national wealth is often inseparable from the struggle and sacrifice of laborers, but the development of technology often replaces some laborers.
At the time of the westward expansion of the United States, the government issued a horse-drawn carriage and a land mandate, allowing the vast number of immigrants to devote themselves to the "great development of the west", and the outcome of the westward expansion movement was the development of the railroad and the enclosure of land, the coachman was driven out of the historical stage, and the land along the railway line was expropriated.
The tremendous achievements of China's reform and opening up are inseparable from the struggle of a generation of migrant workers who have moved to the cities. However, today, China has become the largest market for industrial robots for ten years, and more than half of the world's robotic arms are installed on Chinese production lines, which are gradually replacing migrant workers in the past.
In Jiangsu, Zhejiang and Shanghai, there are "black light factories" everywhere, in the dead of night, when the black lights are blind, the factory is empty, and the machines are still producing as usual, roaring 24 hours a day.
In the field of automobile and IT manufacturing, automated production has occupied an absolute advantage, and the rise of the new energy vehicle industry in the past two years has made many Internet companies that lack industrial foundation also end up becoming new power car companies. This was unthinkable in the past, and it is the level of automation that has evolved over the years that has opened up completely new foundry possibilities.
At present, in China, the density of industrial robots has reached 392 industrial robots per 10,000 people, which is more than five times the world average.
Of course, in our opinion, even if the "black light factory" in Suzhou allows workers to be replaced by industrial robots, it is still a little better than moving factories to Southeast Asia and Africa.
If robots are gradually replacing manual workers, AI has begun to invade the work field of mental workers in the last two years.
When human beings enter the "AI era", will it lead to new changes, and the main body of labor will no longer be flesh and blood humans, but more and more mature "AI people" who can work 24 hours a day.
We don't want to exaggerate, the current application of AI is far from perfect, most of the work cannot be completed by AI, and the substitution effect on labor has not been rolled out.
But don't forget, AI is still a new thing, no one knows how far it will grow, and there are many people who have greatly reduced their workload through AI.
In order for JD.com to continue to lead its peers, or even simply to survive, Liu Qiangdong must embrace the "AI era" and apply AI technology to various fields.
However, further development of AI technology is highly likely to mean that many people will lose their jobs.
It is not the Jingdong family that is facing this problem, but the whole society is facing this problem, and many dispensable occupations will disappear in the great current of history like the "professional lamplighter" before the invention of electric light.
At that time, Liu Qiangdong will still be forced to sing Yangguan Sanjie with tears, and will he be separated from the brothers in tears?
After all, the "next ten years" that Liu Qiangdong said is now in its seventh year.
Liu Qiangdong at the Madrid conference said in an interview that Western consumers do not like change, they often only patronize one old store for decades, while Chinese are completely different, they do not like this model, as long as a new store opens, consumers will go to that new store.
Chinese's "liking the new and hating the old" is undoubtedly reflected in the embrace of new technology, and promotes the development of various technologies to bring new lifestyles in China, from online shopping, code scanning to the sharing economy, Chinese consumers are particularly quick to accept.
Today, it's AI's turn again.
Maybe not many people care about whether Internet celebrities with goods will be eliminated by AI, but many people are worried that the replacement of human power by technology is spreading to their own fields.
In China, although "Tsinghua Li Yizhou", who sells AI courses, has been ridiculed, on the other hand, it can also be seen that thousands of Chinese workers hope to master AI technology as soon as possible, and are even full of worries about it.
No one is more afraid than the Chinese and cannot keep up with this era.
After all, the biggest historical memory and lesson left to the Chinese in the past 100 years of history is:
-- If you fall behind, you will be beaten.
The great changes in lifestyle in recent decades have made Chinese have an almost religious devotion to technological change itself.
The desire to innovate is an eternal driving force for the upward, and those who move forward are never left behind by anything – including AI, although sobriety itself means more repression.
Liu Cixin said in "The Three-Body Problem": "Weakness and ignorance are not obstacles to survival, arrogance is." ”
History is the triumph of ruthlessness over brainlessness, and everyone needs to be prepared in the face of an icy AI digital human.
The fake Liu Qiangdong is rising up.