Introduction: "Class solidification", "Difficult for the poor to rise", "Middle-class falling back into poverty"... These words permeate the Chinese air, becoming a collective anxiety. We are concerned about the invisible yet solid starting line and fear the powerlessness of the "rely on parents" era.
But what if I tell you that we might be stockpiling the wrong ammunition for a war that has already ended? While people are still passionately discussing the "classes" of the old world, an era of a more thorough and cruel "great divergence" driven by AI has quietly begun.
This time, a person's position will no longer be measured by wealth or origin, but by the dimensions of cognition, judgment, and creativity.
Over the past decade, no topic has been more enduring on the Chinese internet than "class solidification". Countless articles, discussions, and memes have been telling the same story: the ladder of social mobility is narrowing, and the value of personal struggle appears pale and powerless in the face of parental wealth and resources.
From "I struggled for eighteen years just to sit and have coffee with you" to discussions about "润学", to lamenting the "middle-class fragility" under big company layoffs, this anxiety is real, stemming from the pain of a resource stock game era.
We seem to have accepted a default premise: the world's structure is relatively stable, like a pyramid already built, and all we can do is struggle to climb in predetermined slots, praying not to slip. We calculate how many generations of accumulation are needed to establish a foothold in a first-tier city; we are anxious about paving an expensive path to elite education for the next generation.
However, we must be wary of cognitive inertia—using an old map to navigate an entirely new world. Because while we are anxious about "solidification", a unprecedented technological force is accumulating energy like magma deep in the earth's crust, capable of reshaping the entire landscape. This force is artificial intelligence.
AI is not another "Internet+" or another round of technological innovation. It is a paradigm shift, a catalyst capable of dissolving existing social structures. What it is doing is making the very concept of "class" itself totter.
A New Great Divergence Accelerating
Recently, Silicon Valley venture capital godfather Paul Graham posted: "For a period of time, AI will widen the gap in work returns. Average programmers now find it difficult to get a job, but top programmers' incomes are higher than ever."
He also said: "This trend has existed since the Stone Age. Technological progress always widens the work return gap. Bottom-tier income can be zeroed, while technology continuously breaks through the top-tier income."
Look at this timeline depicting human technological development.
Hundreds of millions of years of almost horizontal progress, rising after the Industrial Revolution, and now that red line suddenly becomes a vertical cliff. Behind this cliff is the crazy acceleration of technological evolution—changes that once took a century can now be iterated in five years, or even one year.
This exponential power, forged by the afterglow of Moore's Law and the dawn of the accelerating return law, makes all attempts at "solidification" seem futile.
In such a dramatically changing environment, those seemingly solid "class barriers"—whether built on capital, information gaps, or specific licenses—may be overwhelmed overnight. A hundred-year-old bank's business might be overturned by a financial application built by AI with a few genius programmers; an education group relying on massive teaching resources might be challenged by a platform offering personalized AI tutoring.
The advantages of the old world are rapidly depreciating. When AI can generate legal documents, business contracts, code, and design drawings at near-zero cost, traditional "middle-class" moats relying on licenses and process knowledge are instantly filled.
In the past, wealth could be inherited, but in this era, cognitive and AI manipulation capabilities cannot be directly inherited. A "second-generation rich" person who is numb to the new world might be far less competitive than a small-town exam taker who can skillfully use AI tools.
So the key issue has changed. The core challenge we face is no longer how to climb up in a solidified class structure, but how to cope with this new, massive divergence centered on "cognition" and "creation". To understand the rules of this divergence, we must look back at history and listen to a tragic allegory about human value amidst the roar of steam and steel.
Most People Are Running a Race Destined to Fail
... [rest of the text continues]What truly defined that era was not the more muscular workers like John Henry, but those who understood how to design, manufacture, deploy, and utilize steam drills - railroad magnates, engineers, and inventors. They did not race against machines, but stood on the shoulders of machines, gaining unprecedented leverage and reshaping the entire world.
More than a century later today, we all stand at John Henry's crossroads. Only now, the "steam drill" we face is the intangible artificial intelligence. What it challenges is no longer our muscles, but our brains.
Now, look around. Artificial intelligence is the "cognitive steam engine" of our era. It is and will continue to demonstrate overwhelming advantages in the realm of "medium-level" intellectual labor.
- When AI can generate 100 "qualified" marketing copies in one minute, an ordinary copywriter who merely competes on "writing faster and more" is the John Henry of the new era.
- When AI can instantly analyze tens of thousands of legal cases and draft legal summaries, a junior lawyer who only competes on "remembering better and searching faster" is the John Henry of the new era.
- When AI can generate countless "exquisite" design drafts based on instructions, an assembly line artist who only competes on "more skilled techniques" is likewise the John Henry of the new era.
Competing with AI on "efficiency" and "standard output" is a dead-end road. Because on this track, its progress is exponential, while ours is not. The essence of such competition is to "dehumanize" oneself, to cater to machine logic, and ultimately be ruthlessly discarded by machines.
This is the brutal starting point of the "great divergence": Are you becoming a "better" beast of burden or machine, or are you becoming a "more unique" human?
The cost of mediocrity has never been so severe, but the rewards of excellence have never been so abundant
AI is transforming "average-level" cognitive output into an infinitely replicable, near-zero-cost commodity.
When an AI model can provide free "70-point" translation, "75-point" design, and "80-point" code, the human-provided "85-point" service will see its value drastically shrink. The market will no longer pay for "good" because it is almost free.
If your skills can be clearly described, quantitatively evaluated, and have numerous successful cases for AI to learn from, then they are on the red line of being "commoditized". This not only means reduced salary but also means value reduction to zero, meaning you could be replaced by an API interface at any time.
This is the harshest punishment for "average". In the past, being in the middle meant stability; in the future, the middle ground is collapsing.
However, while AI crushes the "average", it also provides an unprecedented amplifier for true "excellence". To understand how AI spawns a "massive divergence", we must introduce another key social and economic theory: Power Law, also known as Pareto distribution or the 80/20 rule.
Simply put, the power law refers to "Winner-Take-All". In a system following a power law distribution, a few top individuals occupy the vast majority of resources or rewards. For example:
- A few bestselling authors occupy most of the book market's sales.
- A few top celebrities earn most of the entertainment industry's income and attention.
- A few internet giants (like Google, Amazon) capture most of the market's profits.
The emergence of AI is pushing the power law effect to the extreme, transforming the gap between "winners" and "ordinary people" from a crack to a bottomless canyon. There are three reasons:
1. Extreme Scalability: Industrial-era products like cars are limited by physical constraints in production and sales. AI-driven software or services have almost no marginal costs. A top AI translation model's core cost increases negligibly whether serving 1,000 or 1 billion users.
This means that if an AI product is just 5% better than its competitors, it can quickly capture 95% or even 100% of the market through network effects and data flywheel. The survival space for second and third place is extremely compressed, even disappearing.
2. Massive Leverage Effect: AI is an unprecedented "capability amplifier". In the past, a top architect's influence was mainly limited to projects they could personally design. Now, a top AI algorithm engineer can create an AI design tool that increases the efficiency of millions of junior designers tenfold, or even directly replace them.
This engineer and their small team, through the AI lever, can redistribute the entire industry's value. The massive value they create will be disproportionately rewarded to themselves.
3. Complete Devaluation of "Average": This is the most brutal aspect of the "massive divergence". The steam engine of John Henry's era replaced repetitive physical labor. The previous wave of software and internet replaced repetitive, rule-based intellectual labor (like calculation, data entry). Today's generative AI is attacking "medium-level" cognitive tasks requiring some creativity at an unprecedented speed.
How to Achieve Excellent Amplified Success in the AI Era
Excellence here does not mean being "better" than AI in a single dimension, but possessing human top-tier abilities that AI cannot touch.
1. Ability to Define Problems and Unique Insights: AI is a problem-solving tool, but it cannot discover a problem "worth solving" on its own. In business, scientific research, and art, the ability to penetrate appearances, discover unmet needs, undiscovered laws, and unexpressed emotions is the source of all value creation. If you can ask a question that AI cannot answer but is critically important, your value is infinite.
2. Extreme Aesthetics, Taste, and Creativity: AI can imitate Picasso but cannot become Picasso. It cannot possess Picasso's revolutionary artistic intuition and unique life experience. In content creation, product design, and brand building, the top-tier taste that can lead trends and define "beauty" and "style" will become the scarcest and most valuable asset. Your work becomes priceless because it is infused with your irreproducible humanity, emotions, and worldview.
3. Cross-domain Integration and Systems Thinking: AI's deep learning capabilities in vertical domains are amazing, but innovatively "connecting" knowledge, resources, and talents from different fields to build a complex, new value system remains the core ability of human entrepreneurs. Can you, like Steve Jobs, perfectly merge technology, art, and business into a disruptive product? This systemic top-level design is difficult for AI to achieve.
4. Genuine Emotional Connection and Leadership: AI can simulate dialogue but cannot establish true trust or provide heartfelt inspiration. Leading a team of top talents, inspiring their potential, and uniting them with a shared vision - this leadership based on deep empathy and human brilliance will become the core engine driving organizations forward in the human-machine collaborative future.
People with these "excellent" abilities can use AI as an unprecedented lever to amplify their influence millionfold. A creator with a unique artistic style can use AI tools to complete an animation project in a day that would have taken a team a year in the past. A researcher with breakthrough scientific concepts can command AI clusters to conduct billions of simulations to validate or refute their theories at an unprecedented speed.
This is the reward of "excellence": You are no longer just yourself, but a "human+AI" super-individual. Your thoughts can directly transform into a force that influences the world. Such rewards will no longer be linear but explosive.
Everything Solid Will Vanish into Thin Air
Let's return to the original anxiety. Yes, "social stratification" is a real dilemma in the industrial and information ages. But in a future where AI is about to take over all "routine tasks", this issue is rapidly becoming obsolete.
The old world's rule was that where you were born largely determined how far you could go. The new world's rule is that how you think determines whether you sink or soar in the current.
This great divide will mercilessly punish the mediocre and average, generously rewarding excellence and outstanding performance; it will ruthlessly punish mental laziness and outdated skills, generously rewarding those who embrace change, engage in lifelong learning, and are committed to cultivating their unique "humanity". It gives everyone a chance to redefine their "starting line".
This new starting line is not about your parents' bank account, not about the location of your school district, and not even about which prestigious university you graduated from. It's in every morning when you turn on your phone and computer:
Will you choose to use AI to kill time, complete repetitive work, and become a more efficient "gear"? Or will you choose to use AI to learn new knowledge, explore the unknown, and create unprecedented things, making yourself that unique "engine"?
Forget about social stratification. The wall we once desperately tried to climb might be dissolving in the torrent of the times. What truly determines the future is the clearer, steeper fork in the road before you.
Will you continue to stare anxiously at the crumbling old wall, or will you turn around, face AI's overwhelming waves, and start learning how to build your own ark?【ONG】
