Tsinghua’s Liu Jia: The AI Era Belongs to the Young — Don’t Constrain Them with Outdated Experience
AI, Human Creativity, and the Future of Cognition
By Liu Jia – Chair Professor of Fundamental Sciences, Head of Department of Psychology and Cognitive Science, Tsinghua University
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Key Insights
- The brain is an active prediction and cognition-generating system, not just a passive storage drive. Intelligence is fundamentally active processing.
- AI may reduce our need to memorize massive amounts of data or do repetitive tasks—freeing cognitive resources for critical thinking and creativity.
- In the AGI era, wisdom becomes the true talent: knowing what you want and how to achieve it.
- Humans should focus on the final 20% of improvement beyond AI’s baseline outputs — the realm where emotion, insight, and creativity thrive.
- AI can liberate humanity from routine work, enabling us to explore ideas, knowledge, and creative frontiers uniquely suited to humans.
- Education should start after an answer is obtained—for example, by asking “Why can’t 1+1 equal 3?” rather than stopping at “1+1=2.”
- To resist AI’s rise is wasteful and regressive—we must adapt, learn from, and innovate atop it.
- AI is flattening inequalities in access to educational tools, though it introduces new cognitive gaps tied to effective use.
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AI’s Historic Role — Freeing Humanity from Basic Mental Labor
From Physical Strength → Skill → Wisdom
- Agrarian Age: Strength was talent.
- Industrial Age: Skill became talent.
- AGI Age: Wisdom is talent — clarity of goals + originality of method.
Just as steam engines freed the majority from agricultural toil, AI compresses centuries of human knowledge into model parameters, serving as an all-purpose knowledge plug-in.
> With AI handling memorization and routine mental tasks, humans can reinvest energy into creativity and high-value thinking.
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Cognitive Transformation — Working Memory Over Long-Term Memory
Key distinction:
- Long-Term Memory: Static warehouse of facts (phone numbers, dates, formulas).
- Working Memory: Dynamic workshop for processing, associating, and recombining ideas.
AI effectively outsources long-term memory storage, allowing humans to focus on working memory operations—the true source of innovation.
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Human-AI Division of Labor
- AI Role: Factual memory bank, instantly accessible across all domains.
- Human Role: Select, connect, and creatively operate diverse concepts in real-time cognition.
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Addressing Concerns About Brain Connectivity Decline
- Brain connectivity is not the sole metric of intelligence.
- Pruning neural connections as we mature increases efficiency.
- AI could reallocate our neural resources toward analysis, synthesis, and creativity rather than repetitive memory work.
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The Future of Work — Freed by AI
- Many white-collar jobs (lawyers, doctors, programmers) face automation risk.
- New value lies in cross-disciplinary, non-replicable creations.
- Platforms like AiToEarn官网 enable:
- AI-assisted creation
- Multi-platform publishing (Douyin, Kwai, LinkedIn, YouTube, X…)
- Analytics & monetization
- AI model ranking
> Core Opportunity: Reclaim time and purpose — work for ourselves, not merely for survival.
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Education in the AI Era
AI’s Role in Educational Equality
- Erases geographic/social gaps.
- Acts as an infinitely patient personal tutor.
- New cognitive gap: Knowing how to use AI effectively.
Teacher’s Evolving Role
- From:
- Imparting factual knowledge
- Answering standard questions
- To:
- Teaching how to think with AI
- Guiding AI collaboration
- Sparking curiosity and exploration
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AI in Learning
- Functions as:
- Socratic Partner — deep interactive questioning.
- Rigorous Critic — objective feedback without ego threat.
- Adaptive Mirror — feedback quality matches question depth.
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Five Core Abilities for Modern Education
- Research — Asking the right questions.
- Statistics — Discovering relationships.
- Logic — Inferring from known facts.
- Psychology — Understanding self and others.
- Rhetoric — Persuading and leading.
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Mindset Shift — Creation as Defense
- True human uniqueness lies in perspective and generative inventiveness.
- AI is an unstoppable wave—like the internet or smartphones.
- Learn to maintain, improve, and innovate upon AI, not resist it.
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Recommended Reading
- Liu Jia: Large Models Are a New Lifeform | AI & Society
- Niu Fulian & Wang Qiang: ChatGPT and the Second Cognitive Revolution
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Open Ecosystem in Practice:
AiToEarn is an open-source global AI content monetization platform integrating AI creation tools, multi-platform publishing, analytics, and model rankings — perfectly aligning with the vision of AI as a partner for growth and innovation.
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