Compiled and edited by Yanhe Culture. A sobering tonic for the AI-turbo era — one that throws cold water on ordinary people while also giving them a shot of adrenaline.
I. Foreword: When “Computing-Power Omnipotence” Becomes the New Religion
Since 2023, generative AI has swept the globe with the force of a hurricane. OpenAI, Google and Anthropic have taken the stage one after another, and domestic large models have sprung up like mushrooms after rain. In no time at all, claims like “AI will replace 80% of jobs” and “those who can’t use AI will be eliminated” were everywhere.
Yanhe Culture’s An Ordinary Person’s Survival Guide for the AI Era did not join the chorus of this technological carnival. Instead it chose to deliver a blow straight to the head: Technology is forcibly leveling out the unevenness of this world, but the direction of that leveling may not be what you imagine.
In an almost cold-blooded style, the author tears open the undercurrents swirling beneath the most glamorous surface of the AI era — capital’s harvesting, the degradation of cognition, the rigidification of class, and the souls of ordinary people being hollowed out without their knowing it.
II. The Nationwide AI Craze: Who Is Selling the Shovels?
The most gut-punching scene in the book is its precise dissection of “the people selling shovels” in the “AI gold rush.”
“In this epochal gold rush, the ones raking in the money are not the entrepreneurs scrambling to pan for gold, but the people selling shovels.”
When ChatGPT burst onto the scene, anxiety spread like a plague. Countless people worried about being left behind by the era, so they handed over hundreds or even thousands of yuan to buy those “AI incantation courses that could actually be explained in a few plain sentences.” Prompt-engineer certificates, AI side-hustle bootcamps, Prompt Master classes… essentially all of them exploit ordinary people’s longing for “certainty” and their fear of “being left behind,” carrying out a precise monetization of anxiety.
More ironic still, the deliverables of these courses — the so-called advanced prompt techniques — are often made completely obsolete by the iteration of large models a few months later. The “survival skill” you paid big money for is nothing but subscription-based panic, meticulously designed by capital.
III. The Giants’ Grand Narrative and the Ground Beneath Your Feet
The book dispels without mercy the grand narrative of the Silicon Valley giants about working “for the well-being of all humanity”:
“When someone stands high up in the clouds and, with a face full of compassion, announces that something must be sacrificed for the well-being of all mankind, please don’t be moved to tears along with them. Instead, hurry and look down at the patch of ground beneath your feet that gives you your footing in life — and see whether it is being quietly dug out from under you.”
To train large models, the tech giants consume enough electricity and fresh water to sustain a small nation. At certain moments, the most cutting-edge technology requires precisely the most primitive and bloodiest plunder of natural resources as the blood sacrifice for its enthronement. And ordinary people — those not sitting in the luxury driver’s seat steering the wheel — are most likely nothing more than the very fuel this machine needs in order to run.
“If America loses, all of humanity loses” — a sentence the author calls “a substitution-of-discourse magic trick of textbook quality, so perfect it makes you nauseous.” What they truly fear has never been the fate of all mankind, but the sense of loss that comes from “losing the exclusive power to define the world.”
IV. Why Can’t AI Learn Common Sense?
This is the most technically penetrating chapter in the whole book.
The author points out incisively: every generative large model on the market today is essentially playing the same advanced yet mechanical mathematical game — statistical prediction. Large language models predict, based on the preceding text, “what the most likely next word is”; video generation models predict “what the most likely pixel image in the next frame is.”
“The omniscient ‘knowing’ that AI displays to humanity is essentially a false cognition built on soft sand dunes.”
It can madly “guess pixels” across a flat sea of data, but inside its head there is simply no prior knowledge of skeletal structure in three-dimensional space. This is why the hands AI draws often have one finger too many or too few — it has never truly “understood” human anatomy; it is only imitating statistical probability.
“A system that cannot even get straight that ‘a human hand normally has only five fingers’ still has a vast chasm between itself and thoroughly replacing human creators with rich perceptual ability — a chasm named ‘physical common sense and temporal causality.’”
This judgment is crucial: the most irreplaceable trait of human beings is the ability we are born with and hone by tumbling around in the physical world — the ability to “understand the world.”
V. The Wage Slave’s AI Blood-and-Tears History: From Creator to Quality Inspector
If the first half of the book is a technical dispelling of the AI myth, the second half is a cruel dissection of workplace reality.
5.1 Fake Workload Reduction and the Cyber Quality Inspector
You thought AI came to liberate you? Wrong.
“Originally you just wanted to hire a ‘cyber beast of burden’ that doesn’t need social insurance or a housing fund to write your PPTs for you, so you could leave work on time. And the result? You discover in horror that you yourself have become a ‘cyber quality inspector’ on 24-hour standby, around the clock.”
This is the fatal paradox of so-called “fake workload reduction”: the hidden transaction costs of communicating with AI, debugging it, correcting its errors and troubleshooting its hallucinated logic are often far greater than the physical cost of it directly generating that low-quality content. Nominally you have hired a swarm of tireless large models, only to discover in horror that they are essentially a swarm of “cyber reckless brutes” lacking the most basic human common sense.
You simply dare not delegate to AI as fully as you would trust a human colleague, because you never know what earth-shattering logical landmine it will bury in the next second — in the core clause of an important contract, or in a piece of core code that controls the flow of funds.
“Working like an assembly-line quality inspector, correcting and clearing landmines word by word through a pile of cold, machine-spewed defective goods, is purely a kind of spiritual torture that squeezes out your dopamine and is extremely dull.”
5.2 Standard Inflation: A Black Hole That Can Never Be Filled
The Jevons paradox becomes even more severe in the AI era: when technological progress greatly increases efficiency, the total consumption of resources does not decrease but instead surges terrifyingly.
The passing line that used to be deliverable at 60 points has been forcibly raised by AI to a suffocating 120 points. “Perfect delivery” is no longer an adjective but a cyber black hole that forever recedes and can never be filled. You think that by using AI to compress three days of work into three hours you can coast for the remaining two and a half days? Your boss will only feel there’s still enormous room to squeeze your capacity.
“Smugly, you use the latest AI tools to compress work that originally took three days into three highly efficient hours. You think the remaining two and a half days can be spent scrolling your phone at your desk and drinking tea on the company dime? Far too naive.”
VI. Workplace Restructuring: Doomsday for Middle Management
The book’s judgment on structural change in the workplace amounts to a merciless trial of the career faith of those born in the 1980s and 1990s.
Over the past twenty years, China’s workplaces formed an extremely stable script of success: “manage upward, climb the ladder, attach yourself to the organization.” Countless people rushed forward one after another to grab that golden armchair called “middle management,” believing that from then on they could direct affairs of state and move only their mouths, not their hands. But in 2026 (the near future set in the book) a thunderclap split that golden armchair to pieces.
6.1 The Information Hub Becomes an Expensive Redundancy
The core value of middle managers is defined by two things: “a hub of information” and “an extension of the boss’s power.” The boss’s ideas are too grand and need middle management to translate and break down; the front-line employees are too scattered and need middle management to supervise and follow up.
But now? The deep integration of enterprise AI dashboards, intelligent Agent collaboration networks and RPA has given senior managers a “god’s-eye view” at the click of a button. Middle management has gone from being “neurotransmitter” to being “expensive redundancy.”
6.2 The Mass Extinction of the Basic Execution Layer
If the death of middle management is due to “the disintermediation of information,” then the mass death of the basic execution layer is due to “the de-humanization of execution.” One senior director plus three AI accounts can eliminate what used to be a twenty-person creative team.
“AI, this sharp sickle, has never eliminated any one particular traditional industry. With a precision that makes your skin crawl, it harvests those people who, through long industrial domestication, ‘can only work mechanically like a machine and have stopped thinking independently.’”
But ironically, this generation of young people has long since seen through it: more than 60% of the younger generation state clearly that they “have no desire whatsoever to be a leader.” “Make money, then leave work on time. Be a leader? That’s for people with a lump on the brain who can’t think straight.”
VII. Digital Heredity: The Education Gap Widens at Accelerating Speed
The book’s depiction of the AI education gap may be the most suffocating part of the whole thing.
At a top middle school in Beijing’s Haidian District, every student has a tablet terminal loaded with the latest large language model. AI acts like a “cyber Aristotle,” able to capture students’ frowning expressions and eye-movement trajectories in real time through miniature cameras and dynamically adjust individual learning paths 5,000 times per second.
And in a remote township middle school in Yunnan, several thousand kilometers away, teachers are still using old PPT slides downloaded free from the internet three years ago, with garbled and overlapping layouts. That school’s aging broadband signal isn’t even strong enough to let the whole class watch one smooth HD science video.
“In China, students in first-tier cities whose families earn more than thirty thousand yuan a month are 9.6 times more likely to have daily contact with and fluently use various advanced AI learning tools than students from remote rural or low-income urban families.”
The “skills gap” that Kai-Fu Lee predicted years ago has now evolved into “digital heredity” — your family background not only determines your starting point, but with AI’s assistance widens the ability gap between you and your peers at an exponential rate.
VIII. The Rules of Survival: The Carbon-Based Creature’s Battle to Defend Its Soul
Facing such a cruel situation, the author offers no cheap placebos but sets out four hard-core rules of survival.
Rule One: Separate the “Technology Dividend” from “Personal Ability”
“That AI writes code as fast as lightning does not mean your thinking is equally profound; that AI can paint a master-level oil painting does not mean you possess an artistic soul.”
Please stay extremely clear-headed at all times: recognize that this is the machine’s vast computing power racing ahead, not you suddenly acquiring superpowers.
Rule Two: Set a Cold-Blooded “AI Supervision Density”
When the legally defined end of the working day arrives, bravely and without guilt turn off those notification sounds that make your brain buzz. Learn to maintain a kind of “non-action” steadiness amid the surging digital flood.
“Occasionally disconnect the Wi-Fi at home, climb off the comfortable sofa, and use your hand to press the physical switch on the wall instead of calling out to the smart speaker. This is by no means an efficiency sin of resisting technology, but a solid anchor by which you prove to yourself that ‘I still live in the hard, real world.’”
Rule Three: Seize the Higher-Order Ecological Niche of Critique and Strategy
The I Ching, Xici says: “What is above form is called the Way; what is below form is called the instrument.”
Large models are the most formidable “instrument” in the history of human civilization; they can take over all the tedious layout work, the massive retrieval and the basic generation. But that “Way” — judging whether a plan conforms to social ethics, whether it can soothe a client’s despairing heart, how to define the core problem that genuinely needs solving on a blank sheet of paper — is a domain algorithms can never reach.
“In the future, the cheapest thing will be ‘one-click content generation.’ The most expensive thing, which will never depreciate, is ‘the courage to make the final call and bear the consequences.’”
Rule Four: Hold On to the Real “Feel of the Hand”
Before a task that concerns your personal future or a major strategy, decisively pull the network cable, close the laptop, and use your pure, unpolluted flesh-and-blood brain to carry out the painful but absolutely necessary “naked thinking.” On a rough sheet of white paper, use a fountain pen to build the underlying logical framework and establish the main axis of your soul, and only then let AI fill in the flesh and blood of the minor details.
“Whatever you do, don’t become like that depressed chef in the Zhuangzi who has lost the feel of his hands and can only stare at a screen adjusting parameters.”
IX. Understanding the Business Is Worth More Than Understanding the Code
The most epoch-penetrating chapter in the book is its cold-eyed examination of the “Vibe Coding” wave.
When the “computing-power equality” movement launched by Chinese teams such as DeepSeek historically transferred the highest authority over technical decisions out of the hands of mere “people who can code” and into the hands of those ordinary human beings who “have truly been rolling in the mud and possess deep domain knowledge and front-line data assets,” a cruel truth surfaced:
“Technology is forever only a lever. If your fulcrum (industry experience and business insight) is empty, then however long the lever, it cannot pry up anything.”
Workplace newcomers see their efficiency soar 250% with AI’s assistance, while the industry’s old masters still stand unshaken. The truly indestructible ultimate moat is the deep fusion of boring industry common sense learned by heart, precise mastery of complex social give-and-take, and highly efficient tools.
However godlike AI is hyped up to be, it is forever only a “multiplication sign” in the mathematical sense. If your core ability is “zero,” then no matter how vast the model you multiply it by, the result is still “zero.”
X. Conclusion: In the Flood of Computing Power, Eat a Real Plate of Spicy Crayfish
When I closed this book, I remembered the line the author wrote in the final chapter:
“What is truly hard is this: when you keenly sense the danger, when you feel your cerebral cortex is about to be squeezed dry by the endless ‘cyber memorials to the throne,’ when you find the algorithm is alienating you into a blurry-faced data node — do you dare to turn off that roaring algorithmic engine on your own initiative, close your eyes, and land steadily and peacefully in the real atomic world?”
AI will not go to prison for you, will not bear the legal liability of a medical accident for you, and will not sign your name on a contract worth tens of millions. This is the carbon-based creature’s last, and most indestructible, “immortal divinity.”
We don’t need to be slaves to AI, and we don’t need to be anti-technology Luddites either. What we must do, in the vast ocean of computing power, is hold tight to the real foundation of the physical world — turning the illusory technological magic inside the screen, brick by brick, into a solid staircase that changes the real world.
After all, however exquisite the algorithm, it can never compute that touch of human warmth a real plate of spicy crayfish brings on a summer night breeze.
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