A 5,000 yuan token and a person costing 5,000 yuan, which one do you choose?

First, the conclusion: for things that can be solved by burning tokens, try not to hire people.

There’s a soul-searching question online: is it more cost-effective for the boss to burn 5,000 yuan worth of tokens, or to spend 5,000 yuan to hire a person?

Let me put it this way: in most cases, what can be done with 5,000 yuan worth of tokens is of much higher quality and much faster than what a person earning 5,000 yuan a month can produce — assuming “needing a month” is the default premise, meaning others also need a month. But if someone can burn tokens to get the job done within 3 days, then manually doing it over a month is just foolish.

The work is still work. You do it the same way as before, or you do it differently. What was reasonable before may no longer be reasonable now. The essence is what I said: human society has never been about “doing things to a certain standard and calling it good.” There is no such standard. The definitions of good and bad are always relative to others.

Managing people is exhausting because humans have emotions, get sick, slack off, produce variable quality, and sometimes even backstab you. There are many issues, so a new discipline has emerged: “management science.” In the future, the value of this discipline will decline because the “cost-effectiveness of managing people” is decreasing. And that’s not to mention that hiring a person for 5,000 yuan actually costs much more than that — anyone who has run a company knows this.

So, will the future be all one-person companies? No hiring, everyone just commands a bunch of AIs to work? Not quite. It depends on the size of the system. If you let Zhang Yiming control a bunch of AIs managing ByteDance, can they work normally? No. Why not? Because the system is too complex. Even if all the processes and background details are clearly laid out, a single person’s decision-making alone would take more than 24 hours a day — when a system becomes complex enough, many small and medium decisions still need to be outsourced to trusted, tuned human-like AIs.

Therefore, humans are still needed. But what’s needed is a bunch of people who know how to control AIs to do the work — maintaining the original system, creating the same amount of social contribution, but with fewer people. This also means that if so many people still work as before and find new roles in the AI era, human civilization can be advanced several levels further.

The conclusion is clear: neither 5,000 yuan worth of tokens nor 5,000 yuan of human labor is the optimal solution. The best approach is to hire a bunch of people costing 5,000 yuan each, and burn 5,000 yuan worth of tokens for each of them. The output will definitely far surpass hiring two people at 5,000 yuan, or even the boss burning 10,000 yuan worth of tokens himself, because the boss’s decision bandwidth is limited by physical laws.

Here, 5,000 is just a placeholder; it could be 10,000 or 50,000. But the trend is clear: fewer people plus more AI systems to accomplish more complex tasks — this is 100% certain. In any social contribution, human plus AI can only match value; pure humans will inevitably be eliminated from the market due to efficiency issues.

From this, we can easily derive a “hot take”: in this era, if you haven’t deeply integrated AI into your work, regardless of your field, your position, your high exam scores, achievements, or impressive titles, you might not be considered a “talent,” and in the future, you won’t even qualify to produce value for society. Because you are not aligned with the trend of value production. #Gate正式推出股票交易