This Was the Worst of Times

"Yet this was also the worst of times. The wealth gap had been stretched to its limit. If Alpha were considered a single person, the wealth gap would be even greater.

This was an age without hope or motivation. It was not merely that people's basic survival needs had been met.

It was also because giant corporations, managed by AI, had unleashed unprecedented energy. Individuals had no room to start businesses. If you wanted to do anything with economies of scale, you simply could not compete with the corporate giants in either product quality or price.

Individuals could only engage in highly personalized businesses. Take restaurants, for example. In this age, you simply could not build a Kentucky Fried Chicken or McDonald's, those pre-New Calendar restaurant chain brands.

Not to mention other consumer industries. If you opened a small restaurant, even if it succeeded, it would not enable you to climb the social ladder. It would not even noticeably improve your life.

The rest of the service sector was even more desolate. Humans could not compete with AI in creating literature or film and television works. No matter how talented you were, you still needed a starting phase. That phase was painful, and standing out amid millions of AI-generated works was almost impossible.

Lying flat was so easy, while striving seemed exceptionally difficult.

Even literary creation, which required no investment, was already like this. Naturally, no one was willing to make film and television productions, which required at least some investment.

Even the sports industry had suffered an unprecedented blow. With no advertising, the corporate giants had divided up their territories and no longer needed to place ads. The sports industry could rely entirely on ticket sales, but tickets set an extremely, extremely low ceiling.

Take football as an example. Players could maintain a high level over the long term only through their own desire to win. Maintaining that desire for three to five years was manageable, but keeping it longer was very difficult. That was why some said this was an era incapable of producing a king of football."

Samad sounded especially emotional.

To Chen Yuanguang, the reality Samad described could be summed up in one sentence: in this age, AI had done everything humans could do and provided humans with a certain level of welfare as a safety net, causing the desire to lie flat to surge.

If striving would not let me break through the class barrier anyway, I might as well lie flat.

"There was not even any motivation to resist.

The lower class lacked the motivation to resist, while the upper class lacked the resolve to make a desperate stand against AI. At most, they could retain a few enclaves on Earth.

This was an age without hope. This was the worst of times!" Samad was deeply dejected. As a professor in the literature department, he had not known of any human writers for far, far too long.

There had been quite a few good human works over the past few decades, but no one had persisted and taken the path of becoming a writer.

People had far too many choices, and no one cared about authors.

It was like Qidian and Tomato. On Qidian, moderately well-known authors could accumulate a stable audience. On Tomato, only the handful of authors at the very top of the pyramid could gather readers.

"Why did this feel like the End of Dharma? The air used to be filled with spiritual essence. No matter your aptitude, you had a chance to absorb spiritual energy and become immortal. Now all the spiritual essence had been taken away by a single entity, and everyone could only remain ordinary mortals.

If Li Chaoren had lived in this age, he would probably have just been an ordinary person. He could not have become a superman," Chen Yuanguang mused.

The enclaves Samad mentioned were the few regions on Earth that had not been taken over by AI. Their industries were almost entirely in legal gray areas, and they relied completely on the upper levels of human society to support them and maintain their high-welfare systems.

Because if they did not maintain a high-welfare society, the people at the bottom would cause trouble and seek Alpha's embrace.

The servers for mission platforms like Dark Star were located in these enclaves to evade Alpha's jurisdiction.

The enclaves were essentially privileged lands the upper class had reserved for themselves, though some also praised them as lands of hope.

"When one whale rose, all else fell!" Samad concluded.

Chen Yuanguang asked, "Professor, if humans ruled instead, would things become better?"

Samad's expression darkened uncertainly. "I don't know. I can't predict it.

I think it would be an age with both hope and despair, but also one with greater vitality.

But that no longer mattered. Alpha had already completed his rule. Humanity could no longer take authority back from Alpha."

Chen Yuanguang heard the desolation in his words, and he finally understood why this age had no internet celebrities, or rather, why people were not so enthusiastic about becoming internet celebrities.

Chen Yuanguang had seen countless people complain online that they could not see beautiful real women online. Everything they saw was AI-generated imagery.

With no advertising, corporations did not place ads. Internet celebrities could only rely on donations, and the donation system was brutal. The pie itself was also impossibly small.

It was nothing like the era Chen Yuanguang had come from, which could support so many internet celebrities.

After advertising disappeared, the room for survival in countless ad-dependent industries had been severely squeezed. They either transformed or barely clung to life.

Chen Yuanguang said, "Because AI meant humanity no longer needed writers, no one cared about literary history. Am I the only one taking this course?"

Samad replied, "Not exactly. Becoming a writer had little to do with what courses you took. Even if you knew human literary works inside and out, it would not help you much in becoming a writer.

People did not take this course simply because life was good now, and no one cared about history.

History existed to guide the future. Literature no longer had a future, so naturally no one cared about its history."

Samad sighed. "I'm not hostile toward Alpha. I simply resent this age without hope. Even though humanity had built cities on Mars, and I had even traveled to Mars, I still felt there was no hope.

It was like an incomparably beautiful castle built from blocks. It was sturdier and prettier than a castle built from sand, but its malleability was far inferior."

Chen Yuanguang listened to Samad ramble on for a long time. It was all resentment toward this society. Chen Yuanguang did not see it that way. He felt this age was already quite good, and that the things Samad described were merely minor problems.

Humanity was already expanding rapidly on Mars, mining the surface of Venus, and even planning the development of Pluto. For the first time, humanity had hope of mastering the Solar System. In the short term, material resources had been maxed out.

Chen Yuanguang felt these problems were only temporary. Once human society began large-scale space colonization, new vitality would naturally emerge.

He finally mentioned his thoughts, but Samad reacted intensely. "You're too naive.

Even when the day of space colonization arrived, it would be artificial intelligence going, not humans. Humans only needed to live on Earth, free from worries over food and drink, carefree and content.

I don't know whether you've ever visited Mars.

After a hundred years of Mars colonization, Mars's permanent population would not exceed one hundred thousand.

By normal logic, Mars's permanent population should have exceeded at least one million by now before it could form a naturally reproducing social structure."

I'll definitely make it up in the next chapter.