Throughout history, every technological revolution has been met with predictions of disaster. People said that the printing press would devalue knowledge, the telephone would destroy face-to-face communication, and the internet would weaken human relationships.

Stanford economist Charles Jones proposed a "Weak Link Theory" in his paper "AI and Our Economic Future."
This theory suggests that any complex production process is composed of a series of complementary tasks, like a chain. The overall efficiency of this chain is not determined by the strongest link but by the weakest link.
It's quite similar to the traditional "barrel theory," where the capacity is limited by the shortest board.
This theory provides an extremely important perspective for understanding the potential impacts of AI on the real world.
AI may increase the efficiency of certain tasks by ten thousand times, such as coding, data analysis, and image generation. But as long as there is a "weak link" in the production chain that cannot be automated by AI—such as complex offline negotiations requiring human input, waiting for government regulatory approval, or reliance on physical construction—the overall efficiency will be firmly limited by this "weak link."
In other words, the impact of AI may not be as rapid or exaggerated as we imagine, but rather a gradual process tamed by various "weak links" in the real world.
The Pew Research Center conducted a survey showing that nearly three-quarters of respondents are willing to let AI assist them in their daily tasks to some extent.
What we see is not a group terrified by AI. It is a group of ordinary people learning to coexist with AI.
I think of a friend who has been a chef for over ten years and now runs his own restaurant in a hutong in Dongcheng. I asked if he was worried about being replaced by AI, and he thought for a moment and said, "I'm more worried about food prices going up."
This is a very simple judgment about what one can control.
Technological development has never been a straight line. It is a tangled mess, full of fear, greed, surprises, resilience, and many ordinary people, in every era, continuing to live their lives in their own way.
Camus once wrote, "The greatest generosity to the future is to give everything to the present."