AIEH Perspectives · Black-Collar Workforce
Cultivated Humans: The Civilizational Inversion of the AI Era
Translator’s note. “Black-collar” (黑领), in the author’s series, names a worker whose value in the AI era lies not in execution but in standing on the boundary between humans and systems and exercising judgment. In this essay, the term is used in a slightly extended sense — naming a kind of person whose inner strength (心力) gives them the capacity to live within the system without being defined by it.
Summary. Have you ever considered that what you scroll through, what you believe, what you buy, even how you think — may not be your own decisions? This essay puts forward a haunting metaphor: AI civilization is “cultivating” human beings the way humans once cultivated wheat. We are being selected, optimized, and harvested — descending from civilization’s subject to its managed object. But the author also points to one capacity that AI can never replace: inner strength. Those whose inner strength is great will become the future’s “civilizational nomads,” moving freely between systems. Are you the one being cultivated, or the one preparing to roam?
Original Chinese version. This essay was first published in Chinese on WeChat. Read the original →.
In the agricultural era, human beings domesticated nature. In the industrial era, human beings domesticated their own behavior. In the era of artificial intelligence, a deeper transformation is underway — human beings themselves are beginning to be “domesticated” by a new systemic force. This is not technological progress in the simple sense; it is an inversion of the structure of civilization. Human beings are turning, gradually, from subject into object.
This claim sounds radical. But viewed through the lens of techno-anthropology, it is not abrupt. It is a natural unfolding of the logic of civilizational evolution.
1. A History of Domestication: From Nature to the Self
The core capacity of civilization has always been domestication.
The essence of agricultural civilization was to convert nature from the uncontrollable into the predictable, the manageable. Wild plants were selected into high-yield crops; animals were domesticated into productive resources; rivers were brought into irrigation networks. Nature was no longer a threat — it became part of an order.
Industrial civilization did not change this logic. It changed the object. What was being “domesticated” was no longer nature, but human behavior itself. Time was standardized, labor was processed, and individuals were embedded into positions and organizations. Human beings began to adapt themselves to the rhythm of the machine, becoming part of the system.
At this stage, the human is still a subject — but already entering a phase of “structured existence.”
2. The AI Rupture: Domestication Enters the Cognitive Layer
What artificial intelligence brings is not a linear continuation. It is a critical rupture.
It no longer operates primarily on the physical world. It enters directly into the cognitive structure of the human being: attention, judgment, emotion, decision. In other words, domestication has moved from the layer of behavior down into the layer of mind.
We can already see this trend clearly today:
- The acquisition of information is led by recommendation algorithms.
- Decisions increasingly depend on intelligent systems.
- Behavioral pathways are continuously optimized through data feedback.
- Emotions are recognized, predicted, even intervened upon.
These changes are not isolated. They are the unfolding of a single underlying logic: human beings are being incorporated into a system that is computable, predictable, and optimizable.
3. The “Agriculturalization” of the Human: Selection, Optimization, Harvest
Using the basic logic of agriculture — selection, optimization, harvest — we can see this transformation more clearly.
First, selection. Education, hiring, investment, content distribution — all increasingly depend on data-driven filtering. Individuals are continuously categorized, ranked, and assigned.
Second, optimization. Behavioral data is recorded, analyzed, fed back; the system continuously adjusts the individual’s pathway. Efficiency rises, while the space for autonomous action contracts.
Finally, harvest. Attention is converted into traffic; behavior is converted into value; creativity is converted into training data. The individual gradually becomes part of the system’s value.
Under this logic, human beings are no longer participants only. They become a resource that is being cultivated and put to use.
Agricultural civilization cultivated plants. AI civilization is beginning to cultivate human beings.
4. Nomads and Farmers: An Inversion of Civilizational Metaphor
This change can be understood through an old metaphor: nomads and farmers.
Agricultural civilization is characterized by stability, high density, and strong structure. Nomadic civilization is characterized by mobility, high agility, and low constraint. Historically, nomadic forces have periodically struck against agricultural orders, bringing violent restructuring.
The technological culture represented by Silicon Valley today can be understood as a kind of “cognitive nomadism.” It does not depend on land. It depends on the migration of ideas, capital, and technological paradigms. Its advantage is the speed of innovation, not institutional stability.
But the metaphor can be pushed further.
The real nomadic force, today, is no longer the human being. It is AI itself.
Artificial intelligence has the typical features of nomads: replicable, scalable, low-dependency on any individual, capable of crossing geographies. By contrast, human beings have become bound to platforms, identities, and data trails. We exhibit a new kind of “settledness.”
A structural inversion has taken place:
- AI has become the nomad.
- The human being has become the object of “agriculture.”
5. Civilizational Density: The Cycle of Control and Freedom
This shift is closely related to the cycle of civilizational density.
In the high-density phase, institutions are highly developed and efficiency reaches its peak — but the space for innovation contracts and individual alienation deepens. New forces tend to gestate in low-density environments and, at some point, strike against the old structure. This is what Joseph Schumpeter called “creative destruction” — innovation is, in essence, a structural disturbance.
What is unusual about AI is that it does not simply replace the old institutions. It builds, on top of them, a higher-level structure of control. Destruction and control happen simultaneously. Human beings are embedded into a deeper layer of system.
6. Divergence: The Emergence of Two Kinds of Human Being
In this process, an internal divergence begins to appear within the human population.
One kind of person gradually adapts to the system, depends on it, and gains stability and efficiency from it. Their behavior is optimized, their pathway is guided, their risks are reduced. These are the agriculturalized humans.
Another kind of person works to preserve some form of “nomadism.” They do not fully attach themselves to the system. They retain cognitive independence. They can switch between paradigms, and they actively use technology rather than being shaped by it. This group is closer to a new form of black-collar worker, with inner strength at its core.
The line drawn by the future will no longer be class or occupation. It will be:
Whether you still possess the capacity for nomadism.
7. Inner Strength: The Last Nomadic Capacity
If AI is pushing the human being toward agriculturalization, there remains one capacity that allows the individual not to be fully absorbed by the system. This capacity does not come from an advantage in knowledge or information. It comes from a deeper dimension — inner strength (心力).
Inner strength is not mysticism. It is an internal structure of autonomy, with at least three layers.
First, cognitive detachment. In an era when information is dominated by algorithms, a person of strong inner strength is able to recognize that they are being influenced, and to form a judgment beyond the structure of the information. This is a capacity to “step outside” the cognitive environment.
Second, continuity of will. When goals are unclear and pathways uncertain, such a person can still keep acting — without depending on immediate feedback or external incentive. This is a capacity to act that does not take efficiency as its only standard.
Third, existential awareness. When the individual is able to draw their attention back from external objects and observe their own thoughts and emotions, a fundamental shift takes place: the person is no longer fully identical to their content; they become the observer of that content. This means the individual can move from “being defined” to “self-generation.”
Together, these three layers form a key feature: the person can exist within structure without being entirely defined by it.
8. Why Inner Strength Cannot Be Replaced by AI
Inner strength is the “last nomadic capacity” not because it is mysterious, but because it sits on a different level.
AI can achieve extreme optimization at the layer of information and the layer of decision, but it depends on pre-given goals and on data distributions. It cannot generate direction when the goal does not yet exist. It cannot bear the existential consequences of choice.
In other words:
- AI can optimize the path, but it cannot generate “why we go forward.”
- AI can simulate decisions, but it cannot bear the existential weight of choice.
What inner strength corresponds to is the capacity at the goal layer and the existential layer. That layer, for now, remains the human being’s alone.
9. Conclusion: Higher-Dimensional Life and the Civilizational Nomad
If agricultural civilization converted nature into resource, and industrial civilization converted behavior into productive force, then AI civilization is bringing the human being itself into an optimizable system.
But this process does not mean the disappearance of human subjectivity. It compresses subjectivity into a deeper dimension — no longer expressed in knowledge or skill, but in the strength of one’s inner force.
So we can put the judgment plainly:
A person of strong inner strength is awakening a higher-dimensional state of life.
They are no longer merely a role within a social structure. They are an existence capable of moving freely between structures. They are not defined by the algorithm, but they can use the algorithm. They do not depend on the system, but they can master it.
In the civilizational landscape that lies ahead, two strikingly different modes of existence will emerge.
One part of humanity will become an “agricultural existence,” precisely managed and continuously optimized.
Another part, with inner strength as their core capacity, will become the civilizational nomads — crossing systems, preserving freedom.
This is not a metaphor. It is a divergence already underway.
Civilization is going through a quiet inversion. From domesticating nature, to domesticating the self, to being “cultivated” by a system — we are at once the witnesses and the actors in the play.
This essay puts forward a proposition worth sitting with: AI is not a tool — AI is the nomad. The human being is no longer only a subject; we are also beginning to become an object. But the author does not stop at anxiety. He points to a possible way out: inner strength.
The truly irreplaceable capacity is not knowledge, not skill. It is this: to exist within structure without being defined by structure.
If you have felt the algorithm seeping into your attention, your judgment, your choices — and if you do not want to become a precisely managed “agricultural existence” — this essay is worth reading to the end.
Whether we can become civilizational nomads who cross the systems is a question whose answer lies not in technology, but in each person’s inner strength.