30th Original Share | Reading time: 4 minutesDuring the weekend, I took my child out for a bike ride and saw a floor-cleaning robot parked by the roadside.My son was very interested and kept asking me: “Dad, will there be robots everywhere when I grow up?”I smiled and said, “Yes, it won’t be long before we enter the era of robots.”My son fell silent, starting to envision future scenarios.
Recently, I was chatting with a friend who asked me if I was planning to buy a house in a good school district.I asked why he wanted to buy a house in a school district. I understood his thinking as working hard to save money to prepare a house for his child in a good school district.Then, through this house, the child could enter a good high school, then go to a 985/211 university, and finally find a job.After that, it would be about working overtime and repeating our 996 path?
This is actually a form of path dependence; most people of my generation have established themselves in big cities through this path.However, we must recognize that our current education system is derived from Prussian education, designed for an industrial society.With the progress of the industrial revolution, machines entered factories in large numbers, thus requiring a large workforce to serve these machines.Schools were training cogs for the assembly line, essentially changing individuals to adapt to the machines in factories.Of course, this is slowly starting to change.With the arrival of AI and robots, a significant amount of intellectual labor will be replaced by AI, and a large portion of physical labor will be replaced by robots.Looking ahead to the future scenarios for the next generation of university graduates, I can envision a widespread presence of AI and robots.This also means that many current jobs will be replaced.Factories that once required a large number of industrial workers may not need them in the future.With the rapid leap in productivity and nearly ten million university graduates entering the job market each year, some people will find it difficult to secure jobs; being unneeded in the workforce will become the norm, and we should get used to it.In this context, if we continue to follow the path of our generation—buying houses in good school districts to get into good schools and then finding stable jobs—it is likely to be unfeasible.The future will be an era of explosive productivity, fundamentally rewriting the history of human society’s long-standing productivity shortages.From the agricultural society of the feudal era to the modern industrial society, there has always been a supply-demand imbalance, with no unsold goods.However, in the future, a large number of low-end products produced will be distributed as social welfare for free to those who cannot find jobs, ensuring their basic needs are met.As productivity develops, the level of social welfare will gradually rise.However, high-end products, due to their scarcity, will still require a premium price.Once people’s basic needs are met, they will develop various personalized demands, and fulfilling these demands will be the future of work.We need to reflect on why we are needed by others and what value we bring.The CEO of Xiaomi Auto can secure 100,000 orders with just one product launch event, a task that previously required thousands of car salespeople.Dong Yuhui from Oriental Selection can generate over a hundred million in sales in a single live stream, leaving other hosts in the dust, meaning that most other positions are no longer needed; he is doing the work of many.Anti-involution has already been written into high-level documents, and the next step is to reduce production capacity and inventory, as seen in the real estate, photovoltaic, and automotive industries.Everything is part of the economic cycle.However, regardless of the era, continuously enhancing one’s value and ensuring one’s scarcity, and considering how to be needed by others, is what we need to think about.