Today we feel like we're stuck in a strange circle.
Compared with history, we are in a situation of great changes unseen in a century, and new changes are taking place in society every day, but the people around us have less and less sense of gain and less participation.
Technology is constantly advancing and innovating, but we are hardly able to feel true happiness, and more are indulging in the instinctive, dopamine-stimulated short-term happiness.
Material conditions are becoming more and more abundant, but our lives are becoming more and more empty.
Every day, every month, every year is more like we are repeating, circulating, and even the lives of the previous generation and the next are caught in this endless cycle.
……
This is the voice of most people in this era, and it is also the practical and spiritual dilemma we are facing at the moment. Therefore, in response to these questions, we recently interviewed Mr. Wu Jun, a computer scientist and the author of "Context".
The following is a condensed version of the interview, I hope some of his thoughts will inspire you:
Narrator: Wu Jun, computer scientist and author of "Context".
Editor: Weilan Source: Zhenghe Island (ID: zhenghedao)
First, the general trend: except civilization, there is nothing else
Question: In the past, when it came to the concept of history, there were always people who debated the concept of heroic history and the concept of people's history. In your book, you mention that there is nothing but "civilization" in history – everything else is appearance, difficult to predict, and does not need to be predicted. Why?
Wu Jun: If you accept the concept of civilization history, you will judge people and things from a new perspective, that is, anything that is beneficial to the progress of civilization, even if it is small, is meaningful; But all those who contribute to civilization are worthy of respect.
But today, the majority of people still agree with the heroic view of history or the people's view of history.
The former is that most people will always feel that they want to do something big, but they feel that their status is low, they have no resources, they can't do it, they want to climb up, get resources, and think that they can display their ambitions with power.
Most of the latter are the opposite, thinking that if they do a little thing, they feel that they should be recognized by the whole society, get more rewards than their own contributions, and even feel that if they don't do things, the society should take care of them. The basis of these people's ideas is that history is created by the masses, and since they are members of the masses, they contribute to the creation of history.
But in fact, they ignore one point, whether it is history or the present, most people are also consuming the resources of the earth and society while creating, and what is created is offset by what is consumed, which also includes some emperors in history, although they are in high power and are in line with the perspective of heroic history, but what they create is even negative compared to consumption.
From this point of view, they are actually destroyers of civilization, not creators.
In fact, today's human civilization also stands at the crossroads of history, and this will determine whether civilization will continue to develop rapidly, or everyone will return to the old path of civilization stagnation and endless cycle.
Looking back at history, the former situation is rare, and long-term cycles without progress are the norm.
Even today in most parts of the world there is a constant cycle of no progress. As Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude reflects the dilemma of this cycle:
The attitude we use towards history determines the attitude we use to view today's society.
Q: There's an old saying that the only lesson humanity learns from history is that humanity never learns. Do we still need to think about how we look at history?
Wu Jun: Let's start by analyzing why it is so difficult for human beings to learn lessons. There are three main reasons:
First, it is difficult to summarize many laws of history, and even if some so-called laws are summed up, after the conditions have changed slightly, they have not had much reference significance.
In statistics, even if you count the probability of something happening or not happening, it takes hundreds of samples to reach a conclusion with more than 95% confidence. However, the vast majority of historical events cannot occur so many times, or even many only once, and the so-called patterns obtained in this way are actually more coincidental.
Second, there are some innate weaknesses in human beings that make people not do what is right even if they know it.
For example, many high-welfare policies in Europe and the United States have given birth to a lot of "lazy people", and even led to excessive national fiscal expenditures, but these high-welfare policies have not been stopped, but have become more radical and intensified, why?
Because politicians need votes, and people want more benefits tomorrow. The easiest way to get votes and benefits is for one side to promise more benefits, and the other side to elect representatives who can provide more benefits, and as for long-term economic development, few people care.
Third, many people find the wrong reasons for the results of history. In other words, if you use the wrong laws to guide yourself, you will naturally go in the opposite direction.
In ancient China, for example, there were many local rebellions and even regime changes in China due to the granting of real power to the princes of the imperial family, such as the "Rebellion of the Seven Kingdoms" in the Western Han Dynasty, the "Rebellion of the Eight Kings" in the Western Jin Dynasty, and the Ming Dynasty Zhu Di overthrew the rule of his nephew and became emperor himself.
The reason for this is that almost every time it is related to the fact that those in power have mistakenly learned the lessons of the previous dynasty's demise. But today, when we look back, there are many reasons for the demise of each dynasty, not as simple as handing over power to one's own royal children or restraining the royal children.
In fact, it is easy to find a logically self-consistent explanation for the phenomenon we see, but it is very difficult to find the logical relationship between the real cause and effect. For historical problems that are affected by many factors, it is even more difficult to summarize the law.
Therefore, the vast majority of those who have made achievements today are more inclined to use the learning they have gained in the present than what happened in history to guide their actions, after all, it is impossible to completely repeat history today.
Q: In your book, you make a point of view that there is only one thing in the history of the past, and that is modernization, how do you understand it? In modern times, looking back on the development and changes of the world, can we also summarize it with one or several things?
Wu Jun: Why do you say that? Let me give you an analogy to get the idea.
Once upon a time there was a group of monkeys in the jungles of Africa, and one monkey king replaced another to rule there, and although the monkeys were surprised every time a new monkey king replaced the old one, that cannot be called history. Then one day, a few monkeys came down from the trees, started using tinder and tools, and then went from the African continent to the world, and that was the real progress of history.
This was true of the Agricultural Revolution, but also of the Industrial Revolution and the resulting modernization. In addition, compared with the agricultural revolution, the modernization brought about by the industrial revolution brought about a huge leap forward in the use of energy and the generation and transmission of information.
In fact, since human beings entered civilized society, energy and information have been the hard standard for measuring the degree of civilization in the world - the competition between two civilizations is to compare which civilization is better at using energy and information.
As for modernization, I think the most influential thing that has happened in the world is China's reform and opening up. This is more influential than World War I, World War II, and even the collapse of the Soviet Union.
Why?
Because the reform and opening up has increased one-fifth of the world's population from more than $100 per capita GDP to more than $10,000, there has never been such a big change in history.
Moreover, after the reform and opening up, the humanity and creativity of the Chinese nation, which had been suppressed for thousands of years, were released.
In fact, if you look back at what policies played a key role in reform and opening up, it is difficult to say clearly. But everyone knows one thing, if you have the ability, the brain, and the ability, you can get rich and succeed.
It can be said that in China's past history, there is no era in which the creativity of the people has been brought into full play compared with the reform and opening up.
Moreover, as a country accounting for one-fifth of the world's population, China's reform and opening up has not only profoundly changed China, but also profoundly influenced the world, and played an important role in promoting the process of globalization.
It is also worth mentioning here that many people today like to say that the 19th century was the era of Britain, the 20th century was the era of the United States, and the 21st century was the era of China.
There is some truth to this statement, but it is not particularly accurate.
If we modify it a little, it will be much more accurate - from the first industrial revolution (late 18th century) to the early 20th century, the British did things right; From the 19th century to the end of the 20th century, Americans did the right thing; From 1978 to the present, the Chinese have done the right thing.
If any country does the right thing, it is a representative of that era. So since the Industrial Revolution, what have the British, Americans, and Chinese done right?
The answer is what is being advocated, which is to make every citizen rich by their own efforts, to gain wealth, and then to be free by having wealth. In the process, there will be people who are richer than others, but society will not deprive the rich of their wealth, but will set them up as an example for others to see that they can be such people in the future.
This was the case in the United States in the past, and it was also the case in China after the reform and opening up.
That's why I say that the vast majority of people in China subscribe to the idea of conservatism. After more than 2,000 years of continuous dynastic changes, today's Chinese are more willing to accept gentle improvements, and are more willing to change their economic status through their own efforts in the economy, rather than relying on society for everything.
Unlike China, the United States in the 21st century has moved away from this approach. If China can continue to do the right thing, then in a few decades, in terms of results, the future era will be China's era.
2. Ego: How do ordinary people succeed?
Q: In your opinion, for most people, what are the major variables facing social development in the next 5-10 years?
Wu Jun: First of all, I think the biggest variable in the next 5-10 years is that globalization will face a reshuffle.
Because it involves the world's economy and trade layout, and this will affect countless people, and this impact is carried out unconsciously, and the day you really realize it, it may have been a earth-shaking change.
The second is the issue of ageing. Many young people may not be able to understand this at the moment, but at my age, when I am in my 50s or 40s, I should be able to empathize.
Some time ago, I attended a class reunion, my classmates still have relatively high incomes, spending hundreds of thousands of dollars every year to send their parents to a good nursing home to take care of them, and take them to check their bodies or get medicine every month, but these are actually a huge burden for them. In their words, it is that the old people are worse than dead, and they are not as good as dead.
At present, less than 15% of the population in China is over 65 years old, while the elderly population in Japan is already 29.1%.
The third is climate. This is something that everyone can see, and everyone should be aware of the recent severe climate disasters around the world, such as the heavy rain in Dubai, the red fog in Wuhan, and the strong tornado in Guangzhou.
The fourth is technological progress itself. With the development of technology, on the one hand, it will promote the development and transformation of social productivity and production methods, but on the other hand, it will also bring a large number of problems, and these problems will arise much faster than you can find solutions.
For example, take electric vehicles as an example, now that the electric vehicle industry is booming, you may think that it will not bring any bad problems to society, but many things need to be looked at for a long time.
A few years ago, I went to communicate with some people in Toutiao to discuss the integration of Toutiao, and in the process of communication, you can know that with the rapid development of Toutiao, it has actually destroyed the traditional media in many regions, and many people who used to do traditional media have been reduced to content moderation for Toutiao, and this gap is still very large.
Similarly, AI actually has this problem, such as the information annotation behind ChatGPT relies on Scale AI, a data annotation company, to employ a large number of information annotators, at first these employees were found in the United States, with an hourly salary of $20, and later they found that the information annotators with the same conditions in Kenya only paid $2 per hour, and at this time you even want to become an AI "waiter".
Q: So, what do you think is the basic abilities and qualities that an ordinary person should possess in such an era, if he wants to constantly pursue excellence and achieve sustainable development, so as not to lag behind the trend of the times?
Wu Jun: First of all, be a kind person.
There is an old Chinese saying: good people are rewarded. This looks a bit like superstitious karma, but whether it is the wisdom summarized by the Chinese people for thousands of years, or our experience over the years, it is necessary to be a good person.
Although personal strength can sometimes seem overwhelming, there are always times when people encounter adversity, and this is when the help of others is very important. In fact, any success is inseparable from the help of others, so remember to be a kind person and never go down the road to death.
Second, have the ability to judge the situation.
Take the stock market as an example, it is normal to win and lose, but some investors will never lose and not win, which is a big problem, because if you let a monkey speculate in the stock, it may still win and lose.
What kind of person will only lose and not win? When a person believes that he can accurately grasp the timing of entering and exiting the stock market, he is not far from only losing and not winning.
We can take a simple example, most people who invest in stocks, when some stocks can't be bought, you ask them to predict the future, and the direction they predict is always up, and those who sell stocks, and you ask them to predict stocks, he must predict that the stocks will fall, and he can't make objective judgments at all.
There is also a law in the stock market, that is, the price of the stock at the end (closing), especially when the option expires on Friday, will inevitably stop the price of the stock at the price that makes the most people miserable.
Therefore, you need to have an accurate judgment of the situation. Many people will only judge from the position that is beneficial to themselves, so they selectively or even completely ignore many facts, but in fact, this kind of judgment should go beyond personal likes and dislikes, and make rational judgments based on facts and data.
Third, cultivate your professional ability.
To be excellent is an abstract word, you have to do at least one thing much better than the people around you before you can say excellent.
If you do everything to 50% of the time, and you ask me how to be good, you can't be good in this situation. But when you're 99% at something and everyone else is 50%, you don't have to ask how you can be good, because you're good at it.
Today, there are many concepts that mislead everyone, such as the so-called "slash youth", like "panacea", who does both these things and those jobs, and in the end does not master any skills, which is actually a "pseudo-slash youth", which is a manifestation of impetuousness.
The real slash youth should meet 3 conditions, that is, they have worked intensively in their field and made certain achievements, and this achievement is not what you think, but has been verified by the market to pay for it.
If you just calm down and focus on doing one thing well, then no matter how the economic situation changes, those who can be excellent and top in a certain field will always find their own foothold.
Q: Do you think that with the development of technology, it will increase the inequality between adults, or will it become more equal with the development of technology?
Wu Jun: In fact, in the society of the future, the number of individuals who will actually benefit from technological progress may not exceed 2% of the population.
And it's hard to avoid, there's no good way to do it. Because it is only a few people who master technology in the beginning, and these people can get more wealth through technology.
There are always many people who think that technological progress can narrow the gap between people. But in fact, the natural world itself is unequal, even if it is artificially adjusted, it will naturally evolve after a while, that is, any group of people in any era, give them free space for development, and after two generations, they will be divided into classes and move towards inequality.
The various strata of human beings are distributed in pyramids, and even the distribution of resources in the universe is naturally characterized by pyramids of gold. For example, in the entire Milky Way, 90% of the visible mass may be concentrated in only 1% of the stars, and the rest of the stars do not have much weight.
You must know that man is actually very small in the face of the laws of nature. It is basically impossible for a society to act against the law, deliberately flatten the gap between all people, and pursue absolute fairness.
For example, if you are born in a rural area or a small city, and you are born in Beijing or Shanghai, this inequality cannot be changed, and it has no necessary relationship with technology.
But it must be admitted that with technology, at least the people living at the bottom can have enough to eat and have leisure to think about some of their own problems.
For example, in the early days of the Industrial Revolution, not to mention that the poor could hardly see any future, and the rich were no better.
There is a city called Bath on the outskirts of London, England, where the richest people vacation. When you go to the museum in Bath, you can get a sense of the standard of living of the top class in Britain at that time, who were far worse than you are now, there were no refrigerators, only some cured meat in the cellars. If you have some tea, you have to lock it up, for fear of being stolen by the maid. I can't even wash my hair every day, so I can only tickle it with a comb.
But today, even if a refugee goes to Europe, the first thing they think about may not be whether they have food in their stomachs, but whether they have a place to recharge.
Therefore, on the one hand, only a few people can rely on more advanced technology to gain more wealth, resulting in a widening gap between the rich and the poor; But on the other hand, technology itself has raised the lower bar of equality, allowing more people to have opportunities.
3. What is the endgame between the ego and the general trend?
Q: Many young people in society may have a popular view that they were born at the wrong time, did not catch up with the early wave of reform and opening up in the early decades, and did not enjoy the fruits of the new wave of technology such as AI in the later decades, but in the current era, they need to face various problems such as accelerated aging, corporate layoffs, and high housing prices.
What do you think of this view? The subtitle of your book is "The Ego and the General Trend", how can the ego understand and grasp the general trend?
Wu Jun: In fact, there are active people and passive people in any era. As Friedrich Nietzsche once proposed, people should develop a sense of ownership and independence to face life's challenges.
In the era of AI, if you look at who has benefited and who has not, you will find that the reality is completely different from what everyone imagined.
Among the two countries with the fastest development of AI technology in China and the United States, if you want to ask who has laid off the most employees in the past? In fact, it is the programmers of those big Internet companies.
Many people think that after AI comes, will it replace the delivery boys, or replace the factory workers, or those industries that seem to be low-end? But in fact, AI replaces these people who think highly of themselves and think they can enjoy themselves.
Life will always find its own way. There are many medicines in the world, but there is no cure for laziness.
In the era of AI, there are only three types of people who will be eliminated the fastest:
First, people who are not willing to spend physical strength, such as takeaway brothers and express delivery brothers, who earn money by physical strength, will not be eliminated, whether it is China or the United States, the number of employees in these industries is increasing;
Second, people who are too lazy to use their brains, that is, those who you said want to lie flat. Take AI programming as an example, now with ChatGPT, these products can assist in writing code, and 8 hours of work can be done in two hours, then I'm sorry, there is only one person left of the four of you, so if you are too lazy to use your brain, you will be eliminated by AI;
Third, people who don't work creatively are similar to being too lazy to use their brains. It's the non-creative work you are engaged in, just relying on copying, pasting, and copying answers, then you can't copy ChatGPT when you copy answers, and in many jobs or things that have standard answers, ChatGPT is much faster than you.
So these three kinds of people are the easiest to be eliminated, so is there anything wrong with the time?
Yes, but not much. More often than not, it is relatively good and relatively bad, in fact, we are living in a much better age than our parents' generation.
For example, our fathers were doing scientific research at that time, and in such a difficult environment and poor and blank situation, they also shouldered the mission of making China's science and technology reach the world's advanced level, and in the end they not only survived, but also succeeded in doing it.
Many times people are prone to fall into a misunderstanding, that is, they excessively attribute their failures to an objective condition, such as their parents have no way, so they can't do anything today; In other words, because I have to earn money to support my family, I don't have time to study and improve my professional skills.
But these are the reasons I gave myself. Everyone in the world has their own difficulties, some people find ways to solve them, and some people use difficulties as excuses.
Many times people still need to find reasons from themselves, environmental factors are indeed very important, but environmental factors are difficult to change individually, and you can only control yourself.
So I think that as long as you try to do as much as you can do better than others, even if it's only 1% better than others every day, maybe it will be very different in two years.
Question: A person's life is often after seeing the world, before they can form an attitude towards the world and establish their own pattern, so as to achieve (material and spiritual) prosperity in life, but after the abundance, we also need to review the context of our life and the context of the times, and in the process, finally find our own mission. For most people, how do they ultimately find their own mission and meaning?
Wu Jun: Actually, what people pursue in this life is a kind of freedom. So how can you really get that freedom? As I said before, first of all, you need to see yourself as the master of this society, not as a "slave".
What is a "slave"? I earned money to support my family for a house, and finally spent decades paying off the house, which is called "slave" in a way.
At present, the first thing that many people think about is the life of having a house and a car, and they think that the reason why there are many misfortunes in their lives is also because of the lack of these two things.
But is that really the case?
In fact, in today's China, unless you encounter some major changes, then your more money or less money will not affect your basic life, on the contrary, what really affects you is your mental state.
I remember when I was in my 20s, after reading a lot of books by Enlightenment thinkers, I thought that people have to do something for the world civilization in this life, no matter what they do, whether it is being a scientist, making products, or writing books to spread knowledge and ideas, you have to do something.
I think people still have to have some ideals, and this doesn't require a lot of money, and it doesn't mean that I have to wait until I have money to eat and wear before thinking about it.
Perhaps, today's society is far from being an ideal society, but it has given us a lot of freedom to realize our self-worth.
As I said in my book "Insight", life is a river, and its influence depends on three dimensions: the breadth and depth of influence, and the length of time it influences.
The value of a person is more or less the same, and its value depends on how many people benefit from his existence, how much they benefit, and finally how long his spiritual legacy lasts.
When a person always thinks that every day of his life should make his life more meaningful and valuable, then his life will always be full.
Typography | Edited by Shen Wangwang | Weilan Editor-in-Chief | Sun Yunguang
