One Heart, One Thought

It can be read as seven spans: heart gives rise to a thought, the thought becomes words, the words go into AI, AI turns them into something in a virtual world, the virtual world reaches the ground through a world model, and lands in the physical world. Seven spans — a bridge being built from both ends at once. Technology is shortening every span in the middle; the first two it cannot shorten at all.

First, plainly: this has two faces

One side towards the individual, and the other towards humanity as a whole. Both sides are the opposite of the same thing.

Six relays: each one reaches a layer deeper

Why is hard work inevitable, not a choice. If you look at the two hundred and fifty years together, there is no need to prove this matter. Order a year to see what level of human body the machine reached once.

Let me start by saying one thing that is easily mistaken. People are used to saying “steam engines drove farmers into the city,” but this statement doesn't hold true. The share of British agriculture in the labor force had already dropped from 50% to 39% in 1700 — a major shift that occurred before the Industrial Revolution. So in these six relays, what really changed was not where the person moved, but what layer of the human body reached every time the machine reached. Broadberry, Campbell & van Leeuwen · Explorations in Economic History 50 (1) · 2013↗

机器学习是绕过去的，不是翻过去的：讲不出规则，那就不讲规则，直接看成功的例子学。所以这一次伸手够到的，是「讲不出规则、但写得成文字」的那一层——判断、语感、经验。还剩下的那一层，是从来没被写成文字的：手上的分寸，和发念的地方。人被推向心力劳动，不是谁的主张，是这条路自己走到了这儿。

How far the bridge has got: span by span

The following are not news. Put them back on that chain; they're piers — each marked with a date, organization, and original source. The closer you get to the language, the better it gets; the section closer to the ground, the more it's exploding. But the ascetic walk is on the other side. Click on a paragraph to watch this one.

At the end of the seven paragraphs, the conclusion is only one sentence: technology is shortening the middle five sections; only the first two paragraphs can't be crushed by a single word. And almost everyone's energy was spent on those five steps in the middle.

A person