Define the World’s Algo with Your MO

Foreword

This article is a translation of the 2024 year-in-review of Southern Weekly, a Chinese newspaper headquartered in Guangzhou. It was described by The New York Times as “China's most influential liberal newspaper”.

This annual report is, needless to say, written against a background of increasing global panic over the potential disruption to society from artificial intelligence. A week before its publication, OpenAI unveiled its o3 model, with figures demonstrating a significant leap in reasoning capabilities. Although some dismissed some benchmarks as unreliable because the public hadn’t gained access to o3 yet, it immediately stoked fear about the future of employment, and even super-intelligence.

This essay doesn’t limit itself to a flashback of events related to AI such as breakthroughs, applications and legislative efforts, but also uses it as an opportunity to reflect on a more fundamental challenge facing the human race, which is, in fact, the main reason I set about translating it and am so eager to share it with a global audience. The original Chinese version can be found on Southern Weekly’s website, which, regretfully, has no plans of catering to English speakers.

Please forgive your humble translator’s ineptitude (and also a not-so-good sense of wit). I hope you find it still both soothing and thought-provoking to read.

If you ever feel a sense of loss or anxiety in 2025, please do come back to this page.

Define the World’s Algo with Your MO

When autonomous vehicles flash past you,

When large language models finish your annual report,

When AI “resurrection” brings back your loved ones,

When your virtual sweetheart brings up a break-up,

Several years on, as you look back on 2024, the tip of the future world would already seem to be on the horizon. All the transformations you were going through were the confirmation of a coronation for tomorrow’s technologies.

Generative AI was quickly iterating, as conversations with chatbots seemed ever more real and surreal; AI became judges’ favourite for the Nobel Prize, with the essence of human reasoning instilled into it; on the battlefield of the war in Ukraine and amid the ruins in Gaza, AI was hunting for living targets; predicting protein and genetic structures, AI models were also aiding in the quest for longevity.

China hasn’t been missing out on that coronation. AI agents were emerging from the competitive model business; preliminary brain-computer interface experiments proved feasible, meanwhile AI-assisted diagnosis got included in the National Medical Insurance program; traditional handicraft was breaking free of repetitive labour, while time-honoured architecture was woven into part of the “Black Myth”, all thanks to AI.

Over the past year, AI has only grown more powerful. It was being baked into every industry, at a pace so swift we’d never seen it before. It is also in this year that the potential risks AI posed were looming large, ranging from ethics to an existential crisis, with implications for every aspect of our everyday life.

The buoyancy for the technological boom has come hand in hand with the Oppenheimerian anxiety. The godmother of AI called for driving its development as we had pushed for the Apollo Programme, while a Nobel-winning researcher raised concerns that “the overall consequence of this might be systems more intelligent than us that eventually take control”; the United Nations passed a landmark resolution to regulate artificial intelligence, and the European Union also ratified its first AI safety act; The Shanghai Declaration on Global AI Governance called on the usage of “AI technologies to prevent AI risks and enhance the technological capacity for AI governance, on the basis of human decision-making and supervision.” Meanwhile, however, in California, the global hub for AI innovation on the other side of the Pacific, the first legislative attempt to prevent LLMs from causing serious harm to humans was blocked by the Governor.

The controversy continued, but the “singularity” was looming. OpenAI might not be open after all, prejudices piling up; the dust of “Donkey vs Elephant” has settled since 5 November; on 29 December another diving depth record was broken by a manned submarine in China. You see, machines are bolting down the way of emulating and surpassing humans, while humans are still stumbling in their daily survival struggles.

We have come all the way from the ancient times — once striking sparks with flint to create fire, then breaking free of our inborn physical limitations with steam engines, next lighting up the night using tungsten filaments, and now bridging distances through the World Wide Web. Yet never before have we faced the paradox of “human and tool” as such:

The abundance of resources is enabling equal access to information, but at the same time it’s creating new gaps. When everyone is a “knowledge container”, how can we preserve the uniqueness of our cognition and the warmth of our thought?

Algorithms and data are accelerating cognition and decision-making, while also tipping the scale of justice within the human heart. If all choices were to be entrusted to algorithms, would the spiritual and sentient landscape of humanity also become a wasteland?

When robots become capable of undertaking all occupations, curing all diseases, reaching all locations however far, and dismissing all the supposed constraints of time from a mortal’s perspective — standing atop the pinnacle of Creation, as AI’s creator, will humankind find the morning glow of the Genesis, or the afterglow before the Terminator?

The current of evolution has overwhelmed a myriad of past generations. Sometimes the world is just like an enormous system, where all your plans and efforts for future may be destroyed in a split second by an arbitrary arrangement by the current of the times. But how can we accept, after all, the poignant prospect that some day into the distant future, AI will look back on us as we did trilobites in the Cambrian oceans, or dinosaurs in the Jurassic jungles? Born as humans and yearning to find a place for ourselves in this world, how can we reconcile ourselves to random NPCs without a role?

It is the norm of life to search for an answer in confusion, to blaze a trail through trial and error, and to evolve through arduous advancements. Vast as the world is, not everyone can board the ark. But every person that is born ordinary tries hard in their day-to-day struggles to seek a brighter future: “Only after finishing all those exam papers was I admitted to university.” “Only after all those abortive attempts did I muster the courage to declare to you my love.” “Only after countless times I waded into that river did I make it to the shore on the opposite side.” … History is not the rhetoric of those who chronicle and interpret it; it is rather composed of many a true story that is repetitive yet deeply moving, and it is marked by the innocently overoptimistic hope held against the backdrop of the treacherous way forward.

The ultimate empowerment threatens every presence with the haunting probability of an imminent exit, but every seemingly insignificant individual can mark a grand era with their dreams and defiance. The programs are calculating the most precise answers, but life is not about a straightforward path to the dénouement. In the end, there have got to be some footprints of yours in it. The twists and turns. The ups and downs that mattered to you.

You can be the variable in the system, and give meaning to your special existence.

Like a spark that sets off a profusion of fireworks, or like a butterfly that whips up a hurricane. The future is not a determined dénouement, but something in whose formation everybody can play a part, just as side quests are not mere branches of the main mission, and every storyline can write its own chapters.

Humans’ decisions aren’t the same as the commands a program receives, but rather a product of both self-consciousness and empathy for others. Amid the vicissitudes of fortune, you turn the tide; witnessing the helplessness of the disadvantaged, you speak up for justice. You remain principled in times of desperation, and sober in times of change. You hear the heartbeats in the interaction between humans and robots: you have no single model answer as a program does, but you always know what love is, what hate is, what weeping in a long night feels like, and the fleeting sense of happiness that softly touches your heart.

Humans create tools; we are never tools ourselves. Now we’re faced with challenges from the efficiency of machinery, and the omnipotence of artificial intelligence. But life’s value and dignity exist solely because we are humans — human beings who can endure hardships because we live, who dance with fiery passion because we dream, who have nothing to fear or hide because we believe, and who can devote all we have without hesitation because we love.

It is exactly the flawlessness of it that gives meaning to you. Life is never a series of mathematical modelling. AI can do high-speed computations, but it’s you that can make the tough decision in a hectic split-second timing; AI can help distract people from their preoccupations, but it’s you that can actually extend a helping hand; AI gives its advice, but it’s you that spare no effort to make it a reality. If you define the world’s algorithms with your modus operandi, and if you let your own actualities converge into the truth of the world, what illumines the night sky will not only be the rising sun, but also the fire in your heart, the light in your eyes.

Every dazzling dawn is greeted by people out there under the stars. It’s them who move incessantly in the urban streets, who focus intently in their office cubicles, and who sow the seeds in the fields. It’s also them who carry their families on their shoulders, who walk into the tempest, and who gaze at the prospects of the future, smiling. The magnificence of a civilisation does not stop at the sophistication of implements, but will ultimately come down to the dreams, the growth, and the pursuit of progress of every single individual in it, and reflect the real brilliance of humanity by means of love and duty: even if the waves are tempestuous, even if we are stalled and staggering and constantly set back, we are always striving towards the direction of our hearts.

The sunlight of the new year will soon arrive, and will shine upon every unique being. This world won’t become simple because of technology, for complexity is its essence, and eventually we will find the meaning of our existence in its complexities. You are invaluable in that you are incalculable; you aren’t perfect, but it makes you the unique you — which is our reflection on the relationship between humanity and AI, a reconfirmation of humans’ value. The reason why we walk on this planet is not to become the most efficient and the best machine, so much as to find our own places in this vast sea of stars, affirm ourselves, and fall in love with ourselves.

Wishing you a happy New Year!