What kind of era are we living in?

Unfortunately, I've discovered that I seem to have depression, at least mildly. There's no need to scare myself, but it's best to get through this period of high stress.

However, this state of uncertainty is particularly conducive to writing, and today I want to talk about the kind of era we live in. This can also be considered a continuation of the previous article, "..."Travelogue to the SouthAfter returning to the United States, I found myself in a crisis and took the initiative to find my own way out. During this period, I talked a lot with different friends and gained many insights.

What kind of era are we living in? I'm very pessimistic; I believe we've reached the end of the internet revolution. It's been almost 25 years since 1993. What has happened in that time? The dot-com bubble of 2000, the iPhone of 2007, social networks starting in 2008, mobile internet starting in 2012, and AI (let's call it AI for now) starting in 2014. The internet went from something like science fiction to something real (computers), and then it became integrated into our lives (mobile phones). Why do I say we've reached the end? We can look back at the last two industrial revolutions: a technological leap, then the large-scale establishment and production of factories, and finally, its integration into people's daily lives, leading to a variety of user-friendly products, even to the point of redundancy.

Does this sound familiar? Since 2007, the demand for software engineers has been increasing year by year, and the salaries have been very considerable. Since 2016, many redundant internet products have emerged, and many of them do not survive for more than a year. Of course, this is related to domestic policies to some extent, but it is undeniable that this is an overheated market.

Although not in China, the situation in the US is very similar. There's a huge demand for software engineers in the US, and salaries are top-tier for young people. This has led to a surge in people entering the industry. In 2013, I was doing fewer than 200 coding challenges; this year it's almost 600. More and more people wanting to live in the US are switching to computer science through coding challenges. Then this year, the situation suddenly changed. Everyone noticed the problem, and companies started tightening their hiring policies.

More and more useless products are being produced, and more and more workers are being trained. This is a bottleneck.

I'd like to share two viewpoints that many people disagree with, but I still want to discuss them in the hope that more people can clearly understand them:

1. The internet itself has no value; it must be built upon existing foundations. There's no future in creating internet products in isolation. Furthermore, not everything can succeed simply by adding the internet; many things are just pointless and wasteful.
2. Current artificial intelligence isn't true artificial intelligence, in fact, it's far from it. Most of it is hype; I've hardly seen any large companies that have done well call themselves AI. The bottleneck of 1990 remains unbroken. From 2012 onwards, it's merely an explosion of data and computing power, leading to a data-driven intelligence approach. However, the so-called intelligence built on data is always tied to the past; it lacks the ability to predict the future. Prediction isn't intelligence; it's just a machine that helps you organize and summarize information. This hype will eventually pass. Look at the products Google, Apple, and Amazon are making—they're all experimenting; it's still early days.

This is where I see us, and I'm very pessimistic. We're at or about to reach a turning point, a turning point that will cause many people to experience pain again. But I also see something optimistic: hardware engineers. While the internet has already ushered in a new era through software, hardware hasn't even begun. The future belongs to hardware engineers. Tesla, for example, is one such example.

We're like factory workers back then, going to get off work in the morning and leaving in the evening. The only difference is that they used to work in front of machine tools, while we work in front of computers. What's the same is that everyone thinks they're amazing, outsiders are envious, and insiders are confused.