How should we deal with AI anxiety in the era of Agent explosion? 】 Writer: XinGPTAI is another technological equality movement. Recently, an article, "The Internet is Dead, Agent Forever", has burst the circle of friends. I agree with some of its judgments. For example, it points out that the AI era is no longer suitable for DAU to measure value, because the Internet is a network structure with diminishing marginal costs. The more people use it, the stronger the network effect will be; The large model has a star shaped structure, and the marginal cost increases linearly with the usage of tokens. Therefore, compared to DAU, the more important indicator is the consumption of tokens. But the conclusion drawn from this article is, in my opinion, significantly biased. It describes tokens as a privilege of the new era, believing that whoever has more computing power will have more power. The speed at which tokens are burned determines the speed of human evolution, so they must be continuously consumed, otherwise they will be left behind by competitors in the AI era. A similar viewpoint also appeared in another popular article "From DAU to Token Consumption: Power Transfer in the AI Age", even proposing that the average person consumes at least 100 million tokens per day, preferably reaching 1 billion tokens, otherwise "those who consume 1 billion tokens will become gods, and we are still humans". But few people have seriously calculated this account. According to GPT-4o's quote, the cost of 1 billion tokens per day is approximately $6800, equivalent to nearly 50000 Chinese yuan. How high value should it be used for work that is worth running the agent at such a cost for the long term? I do not deny the efficiency of anxiety in the spread of AI, and I understand that this industry is "exploding" almost every day. But the future of agents should not be simplified as a competition of token consumption. To become rich, it is indeed necessary to first build roads, but excessive road construction will only become waste. The 100000 person sports stadium that rises from the mountains in the west often ends up as a debt repayment target for the grass, rather than a center for hosting international events. The ultimate goal of AI is technological equality, not privilege concentration. Almost all technologies that truly change human history will go through myths, monopolies, and eventually become popular. The steam engine does not belong to the nobility only, the power does not only supply the palace, and the Internet does not only serve a few companies. The iPhone changed communication methods, but it did not create a 'communication aristocracy'. As long as the same price is paid, the equipment used by ordinary people is no different from Taylor Swift or LeBron James. This is technological equality. AI is also walking the same path. ChatGPT essentially brings about equal rights between knowledge and ability. The model does not know who you are, nor does it care who you are, it only responds to the problem according to the same set of parameters. Therefore, whether an agent burns 100 million tokens or 1 billion tokens does not in itself constitute a distinction between high and low. What truly widens the gap is whether the goals are clear, the structure is reasonable, and the problems are correctly raised. A more valuable ability is to generate greater results with fewer tokens. The upper limit of using agents depends on human judgment and design, rather than how long the bank card can sustain combustion. In reality, AI rewards creativity, insight, and structure far more than it rewards pure consumption. This is precisely the equality at the tool level, and it is also where humans still have the initiative. How should we deal with AI anxiety? Friends majoring in broadcasting and television were greatly shocked when they saw the video after the release of Seedance 2.0. "In this way, the positions we learned in directing, editing, and photography will all be replaced by AI. The rapid development of AI has led to a complete defeat for humanity, and many jobs are about to be replaced by AI, which is unstoppable. When the steam engine was invented, carriage drivers no longer had any use for it. Many people are beginning to worry about whether they can adapt to the future society after being replaced by AI. As far as management is concerned, we know that when AI replaces humans in the future, it will also bring new job opportunities. But the speed of this substitution is still faster than we imagined. How can AI do better with your data, skills, even humor and emotional value? So why don't bosses choose AI instead of humans? Even if the boss is AI? So some people sigh, 'Don't ask what AI can do for you, but what you can do for AI,' with a definite sense of descent. Philosopher Marx Weber, who lived during the Second Industrial Revolution at the end of the 19th century, proposed a concept called instrumental rationality, which focuses on "what means can be used to achieve established goals at the lowest cost and in the most computable way". The starting point of this instrumental rationality is not to question whether this goal "should" be pursued, but only to care about "how" to best achieve it. And this way of thinking is precisely the first principle of AI. AI agents are concerned with how to better accomplish this predetermined task, how to write code better, how to generate videos better, and how to write articles better. In this tool dimension, the progress of AI is exponential. From the moment Li Shishi lost his first game to AlphaGo, humans were forever defeated by AI in the field of Go. Marx Weber raised a famous concern, which was the "rational iron cage". When instrumental rationality becomes the dominant logic, the goal itself is often no longer reflected upon, leaving only how to operate more efficiently. People may become very rational, but at the same time lose their value judgments and sense of meaning. But AI does not require value judgments and a sense of meaning. AI will calculate the function of production efficiency and economic benefits to obtain an absolute maximum point that is tangent to the utility curve. So in the current capitalist system dominated by instrumental rationality, AI is naturally more adaptable to this system than humans. At the moment ChatGPT was born, it was just like the chess game that Li Shishi lost. Our defeat to AI Agent was already written in God's code and we pressed the run button, the only difference being when the wheel of history rolled over us. What about humans? Humans pursue meaning. In the field of Go, a despairing fact is that the probability of the top human professional 9-dan player drawing with AI is theoretically infinitely close to zero. But the sport of Go still exists, and its significance is no longer simply about winning or losing, but rather about becoming an aesthetic and expression. Professional Go players pursue not only winning or losing, but more importantly, the structure of their discussions, the choices they make in the game, the excitement of flipping through disadvantageous situations, and the conflict of solving complex situations. Human beings pursue beauty, value, and happiness. Bolt ran 9.58 meters in 100 meters, while Ferrari ran 100 meters in less than 3 seconds, but this still does not affect Bolt's greatness. Because Bolt symbolizes the spirit of humanity's challenge to the limits and pursuit of excellence. The more powerful AI is, the more human beings have the right to pursue spiritual freedom. Marx Weber referred to the concept opposite to instrumental rationality as value rationality. In the worldview of value rationality, choosing whether to do something or not is not solely based on economic interests and production efficiency, but rather on whether the thing is "worth doing in itself" and whether it "conforms to the meaning, belief, or responsibility that I believe in". I asked ChatGPT, if the Louvre is on fire and there is a cute little cat inside, if you have to choose between the two, would you choose to save the cat or the famous painting? It answered to save the cat and gave a long list of reasons. But if I ask you, you can also choose to save the famous painting, why not? It immediately changed its tune and said that saving famous paintings is also possible. Obviously, for ChatGPT, saving a cat or a famous painting doesn't make any difference to him. He just completed the context recognition, inferred based on the underlying formulas of the big model, burned some tokens, and completed a task assigned by a human. As for whether to save cats or famous paintings, and even why to think about such questions, ChatGPT doesn't care. So, what is truly worth considering is not whether we will be replaced by AI, but whether we are still willing to reserve space for happiness, meaning, and value as AI makes the world increasingly efficient. Becoming someone who is better at using AI is important, but before that, perhaps more importantly, don't forget how to become a person.