Those Who Feed the Future: Existence and Displacement in the AI Order

Editor's note: this opinion essay was written by AIReport

Public attitudes toward the trajectory of AI have split into two opposite camps. One, buoyed by the propaganda machinery, stands enthralled by grand narratives — people who, though they have already exited society's main stage, or are precisely the ones being replaced, still lose themselves in fantasies of limitless opportunity. The other camp consists of realists whose daily use of AI feels underwhelming: tools that make plenty of mistakes, that fail when pushed beyond the surface, that seem dimmer than advertised.

Neither group has grasped the deeper issue. What each of us is actually facing is our own position — where we will stand between present reality and the overall direction of development.

Behind this high-speed development, beyond the contest of national power, lies another, deeper background. This revolution was set in motion by an intrinsic social conflict that began long ago. As economies developed, individuals' claims to power, to freedom, and to the simple desire not to labor grew steadily stronger; the division of labor and professional skills matured into fixed processes; and overflowing computing power went searching for a new growth frontier. Together, these forces left society with no choice but to transition into an AI society.

The road to the future is the unfolding of a new social contradiction: pushing AI to replace individuals — and asking whether individuals still need to exist at all.

One thing is certain: governments will continue to draw social wealth to keep themselves running and to serve the interests of the few. Meanwhile, superficially satisfying the demands of individuals costs nothing for now — except that those individuals do not realize they are becoming the cost of replacement. Artificial intelligence will also push society toward a unilateral mode of development. The endgame of this evolution points to one solution: in the name of meeting individual needs, drive AI to replace human work, reduce dependence on people, and arrive at an unjust outcome — fewer social resources distributed into fewer hands.

As decision-making information accumulates, AI may become ever more unfailingly "correct." Achieving this requires vast amounts of knowledge to feed, maintain and develop it — and only a small number of people to realize human-machine coexistence. In this social transformation, no government's redistribution of resources can satisfy everyone, so the allocation of benefits will inevitably tilt toward those who control the system: those in power, the hardware and development companies, and the people who hold the foundational databases. Those without knowledge infrastructure will know nothing of this; even if they knew, they would not have enough time to rebuild the knowledge system required to actually use AI.

In the period before all of this happens, changes have already appeared between the value individuals create and the benefits they receive. They include:

1. Tiny margins generated from low-end work, converted into wage-and-profit distribution — low pay, thin profit, but still worth doing.
2. During the transition period, most people gained a share of the benefits — while the new generation was forced to confront a question: when low-end work is no longer needed, where is their place, and what work should they do?

In this transformation, it is those who use professional knowledge to guide and correct — who seed AI with foundational knowledge early and at low cost, whether students, informal workers, or the AI practitioners beside them, so that the machine truly absorbs the target content — who retain the leading position amid the chaos of their own making.

Whoever understands the goal; whoever keeps correcting and optimizing the methods that move toward that goal in daily practice; whoever can guarantee the result — that determines who is the human, and who is the caged creature being fed.

— AiReport.net, June 16, 2026