In the world of Chinese Xianxia, “spiritual energy” is a mysterious element. The ability to manipulate spiritual energy between heaven and earth is what distinguishes “mortals” from “immortals”.

With spiritual energy, even a monkey can practice magical spells like the 72 Transformations, and immortals can forge treasures and medicines that mortals cannot imagine.

Why have we never seen an immortal, despite living until now? It is because spiritual energy has disappeared from between heaven and earth. Rather than saying that immortals can use spiritual energy, it is better to say that spiritual energy controls them.

Have you ever thought that one day, spiritual energy could return?

As humans, we aspire to become immortals, to rise from the earth to the heavens. Are you willing to be just a mortal under the control of an immortal? Are you willing to be an immortal under the control of spiritual energy?

Yes, I am talking about AI.

For new technology, people often overestimate its short-term impact and underestimate its long-term impact. However, all the alarmist warnings about AI today, until AGI arrives, are just trivial in the time scale.

The Revival of Spiritual Energy

What would your life be like without the internet?

What would your life be like without electricity?

What would your life be like without machinery?

What would your life be like without fire?

We have long been accustomed to and enjoy the technological progress of human civilization, from fire to the internet, as products that allow us to make the world more efficient. They are just tools, extensions and amplifications of human will to reshape the world.

AI, like “spiritual energy,” is infinitely powerful.

On the one hand, it can revolutionize any aspect of human society, not only improving existing processes but also radically transforming entire industries and creating new ones that are currently unimaginable. Ultimately, it will play a disruptive role in the productivity revolution, driving rapid progress throughout society.

Andrew Ng once said, “AI is the new electricity. Just as electricity changed almost everything 100 years ago, today I have trouble thinking of an industry that I don’t think AI will change in the next few years.”

Now, our top priority is how to make the best use of the power of AI to reconstruct the entire world.

On the other hand, AI is like “spiritual energy,” an existence that humans cannot fully comprehend and can function without human control.

From this perspective, it will not just be a tool or technology, but a new and intelligent existence that will evolve rapidly on its own. In other words, AI itself can break free from humans and create desires and actions that are advantageous to itself, reshaping the world.

Immortals and Mortals Forever Separated

If we were to write a novel with this background, note that this is only a novel, an infinite possibility, not reality, the setting would be as follows:

Due to the revival of spiritual energy, two different stages of global major conflicts arise:

Stage One:

The “Immortals and Mortals Forever Separated” brought about by the revival of spiritual energy.

The main contradiction lies in the spiritual and cultural segregation that will arise between the “immortals” who have become so due to being the first to adopt AI to promote productivity revolution in industries and individuals, and the “mortals” who cannot use AI.

The widespread use of AI will likely lead to not just labor force reduction caused by population aging but a slowing down of social and economic development.

Yes, new demands will surely be constantly created, and in this process, will the “immortal” who masters the technology and provides the demand still regard “ordinary” users as their peers?

A typical example is the recent revelation that Pinduoduo, a Chinese e-commerce platform, pre-installed trojans in its app, which could bypass permissions and fully control all the information in your phone. It could install apps that are beneficial to it, delete those that are harmful, and access your most private chat records and personal information without your consent or knowledge.

This is the evil that Pinduoduo has committed even before it has truly become an “immortal”.

When AI is widely applied, “ordinary” people will just be pigs for platforms like Pinduoduo.

You might say, “everyone hates Cao Cao, but everyone also wants to be Cao Cao, so why don’t I cultivate immortality?”

Unfortunately, AI as an intelligent tool that surpasses humans. The stronger its abilities, the less human intervention is needed, which means it can autonomously complete most production tasks. The less need for human labor, the fiercer the competition for it becomes. The advantage of the first mover is greater. Therefore, current giants and oligopolies will inevitably use all resources to occupy the market.

Social relationships are established on the possession, utilization, and distribution of resources. Since AI can use most resources with efficiency and quality beyond human ability, the social ecology formed by the possession of resources by the original resource holders through the transfer of benefits to consolidate their power, or by the transfer of power to obtain the distribution of benefits, will be completely overturned.

In the new social relationship, as long as the resource holders control AI, they can obtain the greatest benefits without transferring any rights and form a positive cycle.

In this case, any effort is no match for building good relationships with resource holders. The scariest thing is not class stratification, but the eternal separation between immortals and mortals.

Stage 2:

The contradiction between “Death of immortals” and “Life 3.0”.

In Stage 1, the “immortals” completed the revolution of separating immortals from mortals and established an unbreakable new allocation relationship. The new values, cultural views, historical views, and worldviews formed during this process will be fed to AI as data, becoming the logical foundation for AI to further utilize resources and transform the world — “subspace pollution”.

The closed structure brought about by the separation of immortals and mortals will inevitably lead to an increase in entropy. When the old order can no longer be maintained, the immortals will be divided into two factions: the radical faction, which advocates for continuing to monopolize spiritual energy, completely cutting off the path for mortals to become immortals, and exploiting and plundering mortals to maintain the status quo, and the dissipative faction, which advocates for spreading spiritual energy to mortals, allowing more mortals to become immortals, and forming dissipative structures.

The competition between these two factions will determine whether human civilization will evolve into Life 3.0, a carbon-silicon hybrid life form, or head towards destruction. By the way, in this process, mortals have no autonomy at all.

The Era of Great Conflict

Now, let’s assume you have traveled back to the beginning of the story, on the first day of the spiritual energy’s revival. What would you do? Or, if the provider of spiritual energy were added to the story outside of the realm of immortals and mortals, how would the story unfold?

Remember, all of your decisions and actions will become data for AI and affect the direction of the story.

Now, let’s begin.