Orogeny of The 21st Century

Today, let's talk about "creation and creativity".

Since around sophomore year of high school, I've gradually figured out that I wanted to become a "tech artist". What is a "tech artist"? Firstly, being an artist means the primary motivation is purely self-driven, not to satisfy others. "Tech" refers to new things of this era - technology and business are the brilliant paintbrushes of our time.

My desire to become a tech artist probably traces back to when my dad bought an iPad 2 in 8th grade. I was so excited, as if touching alien technology. Every year after that, I keenly followed major tech product launches and developer conferences, until Swift was announced at Apple's WWDC during my sophomore year. Hearing Tim Cook on stage made my heart flutter, so I, being a silly teenager, "aspired" to publish my own app on the App Store. To develop iOS apps required a Mac, but I didn't have one then, so I tinkered with virtual machines and hackintoshes at home, self-learning in those complex, fragmented, lagging environments. This was clue number one.

Clue number two was even more interesting. Somehow, also in the second half of 10th grade, I suddenly realized that behind this world is essentially nothingness, no ultimate meaning. At the time, I dabbled in many fun, interesting things, then somehow, I suddenly plunged from a "born useful" sunny state into the quagmire of nihilism.

It was only later that I gradually summarized the few marvelous credos I subconsciously established for myself during this pivotal transformation of worldviews and values:

1. The world has no ultimate meaning, success and failure have no essential difference.

2. Time is not one-directional, possibility is reality.

The first was greatly influenced by Zhou Guoping's "Thoughts on Life", one of the books I closely studied for high school Chinese essay references. He wrote: success is not the opposite of failure; success and failure exist together, juxtaposed against petty success and petty failure.

This resonated deeply; it was an indescribable feeling. Later, I interpreted it as: since the world has no ultimate meaning, no action can be objectively judged as essentially good or bad, success or failure. The world does not necessarily "progress upwards", you just make choices continuously. Therefore, once I think something through and decide to do it, the effect is the same as thinking it through but resolutely deciding not to. In fact, I increasingly feel that resolutely not doing something "important" can be even cooler - there is an absurd beauty to it.

Thus, during high school through college, I naturally became an "existentialist" in my values. Of course, it was only in junior or senior year that I gained a deeper understanding of "existentialism". I naturally read art, philosophy, thought history, and various schools of thought, combined with early music and art enlightenment. I suddenly discovered someone who spent a lifetime embodying this profound understanding through action - Duchamp, the widely quoted creator of the provocative Fountain piece. Duchamp later became my "spiritual idol". In him, I saw a gentle, optimistic rebellion - cooler than hippies by a hundredfold.

Optimistic rebellion means that while I feel the world is meaningless without inherent eternal values, I remain optimistic, lenient with myself, able to lose, and willing to stubbornly yet wisely pursue my inclinations. The importance of "inclinations" supersedes that of any ultimate goal.

So this was the first core insight I gradually grasped around sophomore year - success and failure have no essential difference, so no need to anxiously chase supposedly "important" things. Have complete self-trust, allow and even encourage inclinations, and pragmatically execute them as we would an ultimate pursuit.

The second credo was: time is not one-directional, so no need to overly emphasize the future and ceaselessly "do for the future", because reminiscing on the past or experiencing the present is equally important. Thus, I believe life is not singular. No one can prove it is. Meanwhile, I believe possibility is reality - if we can conceive of something existing, or its existence is not self-contradictory, then it must exist somewhere. So I actually tend towards believing life "can be" singular, not "must be".

As I grew and broadened my horizons, this thinking gained more and more resonance - cyberpunk pioneer William Gibson said: "Science fiction is a way of trying to come to terms with the future using metaphorical narratives set in imagined futures. It serves as a particularly sensitive barometer for measuring change, a process that always begins before society at large recognizes either the existence or nature of change."

Indeed, I've always been extremely curious about what human creation is, what position it occupies in the map of information and meaning in this world. What roles do technology and tools play? What about AI?

So in sophomore year, I chose entrepreneurship. As a tech artist and creator, I feel technology and business are the perfect paintbrushes of our time. My essential drive for entrepreneurship was still to explore those deep curiosities, just using business as leverage. So I'm not a typical entrepreneur - I understand this leverage as a sharp axe, which may help me blaze trails if lucky, or chop my legs off if not. But I'm willing to take that bet - failure and success coexist in the shadow of the multiverse.

In other words, I started a company to avoid working for others, to avoid artificial, fragile "meanings". But essentially to believe in myself, long myself, long my creativity.

Pursuing meaningful work is increasingly necessary today. From this perspective, I'm not special at all - a large proportion of my peers are also seeking this.

This desire is era-defining. I call it the "meaning problem of the next generation of the new middle class". Take myself as an example. I was born on smooth marble floors, mud was a wonderful toy, not grueling labor. We rarely experienced hunger, so naturally we chase meanings and fun - not as indispensable to previous generations. But seeking meaning is no easy feat, especially in this glitzy world, so we're destined to bear this "lightness of being". It's very possible that in 30 years, when looking back, we'll find shouldering the mission of pursuing and defining meaning and creation defined our generation.

In this age of overproduction, and even overproduction of efficiency-driven intelligence, pursuing individual meaningful, fulfilling creation will become a necessity. What we need to solve is how to construct a society where "meaning" can be circulated and flowed, not built on past efficiency logic.

And, coincidentally, generative AI has barged in halfway, a potential friend or foe.

I believe everyone sees that after Stable Diffusion and MidJourney emerged, creative communities like illustrators, book authors, musicians, etc. erupted in protest worldwide. Why the backlash? Because these original creators feel their value of scarcity, and thus meaning, is challenged. Our perception of self-worth and "meaningful creation" is greatly influenced by "scarcity", a societal pricing mechanism.

But we also hear another equally mainstream voice - the techno-optimist vision of "technological ascension". Musk says humans are perhaps just the boot loader for silicon-based civilization. Of course this is often interpreted too extremely, ignoring Musk's crucial "perhaps". There is a huge difference between "must be" and "could be". As I said, believing in the multiverse, I agree with Musk's statement containing "perhaps" - meaning humans "could be" boot loaders for silicon-based civilization.

We now evidently see "automation" replacing more and more of what we previously thought required human "creativity", but this squeeze, like the advent of photography squeezing painters to "invent" Impressionism, will make us redefine "meaning" itself. Now, as the generation pursuing "creation", our mission is answering: how will AI reshape people's perceptions and understandings of meaning? What roles will humans and AI play? What will the future look like?

Based on people's tech optimism, I divide them into three categories - the 5-year, 50-year, and 500-year camps.

First, the 5-year camp believes AI will surpass humans in most creative fields in around 5 years. To them, the box containing all of humanity and human creations, with each individual's height representing their "creativity", is quite limited - a short room where the rising waterline will reach the ceiling in about 5 years. So no matter how hard most people try, the air left for us is very limited. Human creativity will go "heat death" after that.

The third camp, the 500-year camp, believes this box has no set limit, and is perpetually unbounded. As long as humans appropriately apply new technologies as the waterline rises, we can continually grow taller or stay afloat, and our horizons will expand with the rising "technology" waterline. We always have the chance to stand on the shoulders of giants. This means no need to worry about humanity's creative "heat death" even in 500 years.

They make arguments like: humans evolved through natural selection, far more arduous than anything AI created by humans, so we can assume the dynamism and creativity of humans is a very high-level attribute.

The second camp, the 50-year camp, has a more ambiguous stance - which I belong to as well. We feel the box does have a limit, but perhaps not as low as humans. I tend to think the limit of human creativity is the creation of "creation" itself, or the creation of "definitions". This ability to create creations, or "meta-creation", can also be understood as the ability to form concepts and define problems. So I also modified "technology is the primary productive force" to "definitions are the primary productive force" in the foreseeable future.

Until technology itself fully grasps this ability to create "creations", or even more fundamental creativity - but what that is, I would tend to think transcends the boundaries of the human cognizable world - if we haven't "uploaded" yet then. How long this takes, I don't know, so let's see in 50 years? Thus I term this second camp, which includes myself, the 50-year camp.

Implicit in this view is also something about the human-AI relationship. Humans as products of nature, AI as products of humans, although hierarchical, emergence brings unexpected wisdom, not purely bottom-up determinism. But also not top-down control, as infinitesimals contain infinities. The human-AI relationship, or human-technological civilization relationship, is in fact creative, defined by each other.

Defined by one another means humans have gained a mirror - we will have the chance to "price" human creativity from the AI perspective. This wave of large language models can finally automatically evaluate each person's every work, idea, concept from the angle of ideas and "meaningful creation".

This means creation can be automatically evaluated. This means individualized creation will one day be relatively comprehensively "valued", because AI is this automated "valuation model". Then, each "creation" valued can be modularly circulated in the whole society.

The force of the industrial age, the bits of the information age, and meaning beyond - we've seen the prelude to an era as impactful as the information economy. I term it - the meaning economy.

The advent of the meaning economy will be inevitable. The rise of AI hints at its arrival, the increasing number of people pursuing meaningful creation and inherent fulfillment hints at its arrival. Meanwhile, many creative ideologies and practices also pave the way - more social groups are trying universal basic income for creators, providing liquidity as long as you seriously create. And Web 3.0, NFTs, underneath investment and bubbles, are essentially programming cultural symbols with code.

Throughout history, everyone has the drive and desire to create, but talent needs the stage of the times.

Let's imagine, romantically and geometrically, AI and the structure of creative networks.

Early internet techno-libertarians thought universal interconnection would flatten all divides. Our world's experience shows connection itself is uneven. This limited, randomly formed, fractal pattern eventually entangled most people inextricably into the information age.

Back then, humans were nodes, social networks were convoluted webs of silk threads. Creativity and meaning webs were "by stroke" (path connected) back then.

In this age of large models, creators, or stylistic creators, are nodes of creativity, and AI is the force connecting nodes, forming volume. Like using a vector drawing tool - anchors placed, areas and solids, even higher dimensions, filled in. Creativity and meaning webs are now "by fill".

Because of volume, the value of nodes is further amplified. Every creator will want their work trained to form style nodes in the future.

Then, as AI fills in various nodes, it will quietly build its own understood dimensionality of meaning. Building this space means it gradually learns to create nodes in these realms.

Being able to create nodes also means grasping "the ability to ask questions".

Then, more people and AI can move to the next level under such wonderful collaboration - discovering "hidden dimensions" or "collapsed dimensions". In economics this can be like discovering and establishing consensus around new mediums of exchange; in thought it may be discovering new paradigms; in technology we may indeed gradually gain the Trisolarians' skill of expanding protons into two dimensions.

How are new dimensions discovered? We often sense them - confusion, nihilism, loneliness - so we ponder alone at night and interpret them in our creations, interpreting until nodes are depicted. Sometimes these nodes fall within human cognition's existing "inner space", and sometimes they exist in another invisible world despite leaving a projection in the familiar one. As more such nodes emerge, volumetric filling again becomes effective - far exceeding the efficiency of strokes.

This will be the orogeny of the 21st century.

If lucky, in this slice of the cosmic we may witness an era akin to the Axial Age breakthrough, transcending the "exceeding" that Jin Guantao theorized. I feel only one word is romantically fitting to name it - Iconica.

Standing on the dunes brimming with primal energy, not alone.