AI productivity has doubled, why hasn’t your income increased?

In fact, your AI productivity is not important, at least not in the near future.

Author: Meng Yan

Many people excitedly predict that the world will change soon when they see the performance of AI soaring. In fact, this is a misunderstanding of the operating mechanism of modern society, or to put it another way, it is an overestimation of the importance of personal IQ and personal productivity.

Have you noticed a phenomenon that many organizations and large companies have high academic and IQ requirements for high-paying jobs during recruitment, but once people are recruited, they will only be doing jobs that require only ordinary abilities for them to be fully qualified. In addition, even today, nepotism and relationships overpowering abilities are still extremely common. Leaders can put a person with ordinary abilities but special social status and social resources in an important position, and there is usually no problem.

Why is this?

The reason is very simple, because a high-quality position represents an advantageous node on the social resource and power distribution network. The capabilities required at this node are often not high, and many people can be qualified. However, how the resources it controls is distributed is more important to this network system. In other words, the productivity increment at this position is relatively minor, and the resource flow at this position is more important. Therefore, the resource allocator has great discretion. Within a certain range, he can screen people based on his own preferences, and whoever comes up will not affect the overall performance of the system.

Modern society is a high-density network collaboration. Each person is actually only responsible for a little bit of work. Except for a very small number of people, most people actually play the role of simply routing resources in this network. As long as personal productivity reaches the standard, after reaching the standard, further improvement will not have obvious gains for the overall network system.

Therefore, as a node of a collaborative network, no matter how high your personal IQ and productivity are, you are not actually needed or used by this network. As reflected in the application of AI, you may double your work efficiency, but the network does not need your extra output. You can only bring yourself some leisure time, and your income will not increase. After using AI, most people think that I am too awesome and my productivity has increased by N times. I should be awesome very soon. In fact, you have overestimated the role of your IQ and productivity. Your productivity improvement is of little value to the entire network and cannot be distributed.

The same is true for OPC. Most of them can only be used for self-interest and cannot be sold at all.

What is really critical is the change in network connection relationships. This change will bring about a reallocation of resources and power. If your node has more connections in the network, even if you don't know how to use AI at all, you will immediately feel an increase in income, influence, and power.

In the Agent era, the differences in AI usage abilities between different people have begun to widen rapidly. Sooner or later, this gap will be transformed into changes in network connection relationships and even changes in network topology. But it will take a while, slower than most AI influencers think. If you don’t consciously take the initiative to speed up the connection, and are just complacent about the efficiency improvement in your original position, and are happy that you have more time to watch videos, then you will not actually be able to share the early dividends of AI.

This aspect is clear to us when we see many big AI Vs. They are often excited about new technological breakthroughs and make sensational predictions. In hindsight, most of these predictions came to nothing, but they gained a lot of new attention and resource connections. That’s the smart thing to do, and what they really gain isn’t AI skills or productivity, but your attention. In contrast, people who only know how to improve their AI skills without increasing social connections are too honest.

Finally, I would like to complain that blockchain is the technology that directly changes the topology of social networks. If the world can use one-fifth of the goodwill and enthusiasm for AI to promote the supervision and application of crypto, the short-term pushback will be n times stronger than AI, and the world will be completely different in a few years. But those gentlemen are really clear about it. They know that AI is only about money, and crypto is about life, so they play a good hand, suppress crypto, and brag about AI, and ordinary people still applaud.

However, no one can stop the combination of AI and crypto. From my point of view, slower is better.