Lately I’ve been reading Deng Xiaomang’s The Beginning of Philosophy (哲学起步) and Harari’s Sapiens, and a question about “humans and tools” has been circling in my mind. Especially while deeply using various Agent tools every day, the “sense of hollowness” behind all that efficiency grows ever stronger.
When a tool is no longer merely an extension of the hand, but begins to take over the verdicts of the brain—what exactly are we going through?
1. The Vanishing “Friction”
When defining human nature, Deng Xiaomang proposed a core idea: making and carrying tools.
In classical philosophy, a tool is the “objectification” of humanity’s essential powers. The carpenter fells trees, sharpens the axe, and pushes the plane; every real collision with the material world feeds back into and confirms the existence of the “self.” This friction is the whetstone of self-consciousness.
Today’s Agents, however, are smoothing away that friction. In the past we used tools by operating them; now we delegate. You hand over a vague intention, and the Agent delivers a nearly perfect result. In the process, you skip the pain of logical reasoning, skip the correction of wrong paths, and skip the sense of accomplishment that comes after “overcoming resistance.”
When the world becomes too smooth, the subject’s sense of participation begins to collapse.
2. The Crisis of “Outsourcing” Judgment
My deepest anxiety is this: when judgment and final verdicts are handed over to Agents, what is left of the human being?
Looking at the history of human evolution, we have been “transferring power” all along: writing let us outsource memory, clocks let us outsource natural rhythms, and computers let us outsource calculation. With each transfer, Socratic laments arrived on schedule. But this time, Agents are touching humanity’s last forbidden zone—judgment.
Judgment is not innate; it is an intuition fed by countless “mistakes.” When an Agent becomes our cognitive nanny, directly serving up the “optimal solution,” we are in fact losing the “freedom to be wrong.”
For adults, this may merely be an efficiency gain; but for the next generation—especially children like my own, aged 9 and 3—it may be a structural cognitive degradation. If a child grows up from birth accustomed to “the AI suggests, I give it a thumbs-up,” his “moral muscles” and “logical foundations” will become extremely fragile. He may possess enormous “tool power” while lacking the “sovereign soul” needed to support that power.
3. Building an Individual “Defense System”
Faced with this irreversible turn in our evolution, we need to build a defense system within ourselves. The core of that system is guarding that one “inalienable right of judgment.”
- Defend the value of the “process.” Re-sanctify honest, painstaking effort. In core cognitive domains, we should deliberately create “artificial friction.” Read the original work instead of the summary; write the underlying logic instead of just calling the API. Only after enduring the bewilderment of “not knowing why” can you possess the depth of “knowing why.”
- Question the “optimal solution.” The essence of algorithms is compliance and alignment—they build you a comfortable cognitive echo chamber. We must learn to “resist” the most convenient path an Agent offers, deliberately introducing randomness and uncertainty.
- Strengthen the presence of the “physical body.” An Agent can simulate logic, but it cannot simulate the fragrance of wood shavings from a plane, or the complex emotions of real social interaction. Only through hard collisions between the body and the physical world can a person develop a stable sense of self that no algorithm can shake.
4. The “Carriers” of the New Era
Socrates once worried that writing would make people stupid, yet writing ultimately enabled more people to learn higher-order thinking. Today, we likewise need not reject Agents like ascetics.
What we must do is become “lucid users.” We still “carry” the most advanced Agents, but deep inside we must preserve an independent consciousness as primitive as a stone axe.
In the age of Agents, humanity’s most essential skill will no longer be “how to use tools,” but “how, as an independent subject, to examine the world that tools present to you.”
Judgment is the final signature a person leaves on their own existence.
Follow the WeChat public account 技术后花园 (Tech Backyard) for more
