China News Service, Wuzhen, November 5 (Xi Jinyan, Li Jinlei, Tong Yixuan) When AI iterates on a monthly basis, and when large models move from "writing poetry and painting" to "driving to see a doctor", a common anxiety is spreading: Will I be replaced? How should we get along with AI?
At the 2026 World Internet Conference Wuzhen Summit Internet Entrepreneurs Forum, many business leaders gave their own thoughts - the answer lies not in fighting technology, but in redefining the boundaries and division of labor between humans and AI.
Forum site. Photo provided by the organizer
Faced with the anxiety of AI replacement, Zhang Chaoyang, founder, chairman and CEO of Sohu, gave a straightforward prescription: continuous adaptation and active learning. He regards the iteration of business models and jobs as the norm, and uses Nokia's missed smartphone wave as a lesson - "If you don't take the initiative to evolve, you will be eliminated by the times. Only by continuous adjustment can you seize new opportunities in the AI era."
The underlying logic of this judgment is that the essence of AI anxiety is not the technology itself, but the gap between the evolution speed of individuals and enterprises and the speed of technological iteration. Bridging this gap does not rely on resistance, but on the reconstruction of learning abilities.
However, active learning does not mean embracing it all. Zhang Chaoyang maintains a dialectical review of the "intelligent Internet": AI improves information efficiency, but the Internet carries emotional connections and spiritual communication between people. Recently, Sohu has innovatively launched the "Attention Stream" product as a balanced supplement, focusing on the social distribution logic of spontaneous recommendations from real people.
"Social networking often does not need to be efficient, but needs to retain relaxation and authenticity." Zhang Chaoyang believes that social products should guard the boundaries of technology, be wary of technicalism, refuse to rely on static tags and AI to forcibly match social objects, and avoid "machines coercing real people to socialize."
This provides an important revelation: the premise for harmonious coexistence of man and machine is to recognize that certain human values exist precisely where technology gives way. Those inefficient, accidental, and uncalculable moments in real social interactions are the proof of what it means to be human. Regarding real-person social networking as Sohu's breakthrough point is itself a commercial verification of this judgment.
Li Bin, founder, chairman and CEO of NIO, gave a positive scale of AI value from the perspective of industrial implementation. He believes that smart electric vehicles have become the largest AI application industry, and the greatest significance of smart driving "is not to make taxi drivers and online ride-hailing drivers lose their jobs, but to free up energy and reduce accidents."
"The value of AI is to make people's work easier and safer, not to deprive humans of the meaning of existence." Li Bin believes.
This statement shifts the focus of the human-machine relationship from "who to replace" to "what to liberate." When AI takes on repetitive and high-risk labor, humans can shift to more creative and safer work - this is not a zero-sum game, but a redistribution of labor value.
Zhihu founder, chairman and CEO Zhou Yuan positions the current AI wave as "the largest knowledge transfer in human history" - after books and the Internet, the accumulated knowledge of humans is being transferred to AI in batches. But he emphasized that the end point of this migration "is not the model itself, but to better serve people."
Zhou Yuan also revealed the other side of anxiety: Zhihu’s 2025 question “What is real?” reflects the public’s general anxiety about the illusion and authenticity of AI. And when the digital divide accelerates and evolves into the "smart divide", the distribution of technological dividends is not equal - the cost structure of commercial pricing and channel distribution is not in the hands of small and medium-sized enterprises. He therefore suggested that platforms with technical capabilities open up more innovation opportunities and provide space for small and medium-sized enterprises to distribute dividends.
From this "Wuzhen Dialogue", the path to harmonious coexistence of humans and machines may be clear: for individuals, it is to use continuous learning to hedge against anxiety, and to regard AI as an extension of capabilities rather than a job threat; for enterprises, it is to guard the boundaries of technology, maintain the tension between efficiency and authenticity, and at the same time promote the overflow of technological dividends to small and medium-sized enterprises; for industry, it is to use "liberating people, serving people, and achieving people" as the value anchor, so that AI will never deviate from the coordinates of humans when moving from the digital world to the physical world.
AI will not replace humans, but it will replace minds that are unwilling to evolve. Harmonious symbiosis is not a concession of technology to people, but a process in which people reaffirm their irreplaceability in the wave of technology. As Zhang Chaoyang said, only by continuous adjustment can we seize new opportunities - this is true for individuals, this is true for enterprises, and it is also true for the relationship between people and AI. (over)
