AI时代到底该做专才还是通才？

Imagine interviewing for a job in 2035. An AI sits across from you, scans your résumé in 0.01 seconds, and then asks, “What unique value do you bring?”

As AI becomes increasingly powerful, every one of us has to think about this question.

We might begin by reconsidering an age-old question: in this era, is it better to be a specialist or a generalist?

Before ChatGPT appeared in 2022, AI was still operating within narrow domains and had little effect on most people. Today, large language models have dramatically advanced AI's capabilities. They are spreading through every industry, and no one is untouched by this transformation.

How powerful is AI?

In intelligence, AI far exceeds the average person in multitask language understanding, code generation, mathematical reasoning, and standardized examinations. Kai-Fu Lee has said that AI's current intellectual capacity has reached three times the average human level.

In memory, AI can retain two hundred million legal provisions and more than a million medical papers, then retrieve and analyze them within seconds.

In speed, AI can filter and analyze terabytes of data in milliseconds and translate more than one hundred languages in real time with accuracy above 95 percent.

AI's “brain” contains trillions of parameters, far more than the human brain's one hundred billion neurons. We have to accept that in memory, calculation, reasoning, reaction speed, and specialized knowledge, AI overwhelms human capability.

If your work depends mainly on the abilities above, I am sorry to say that AI replacing it may only be a matter of time.

Has the logic behind human specialization begun to break down?

From the agricultural age through the industrial and information ages, the world grew increasingly complex. As knowledge exploded, no one person could master everything, so specialization emerged.

Under specialized division of labor, each person digs deeply into a narrow field. Doctors specialize in orthopedics, dermatology, or hematology; programmers in front-end development, back-end development, big data, or algorithms. This division of expertise has greatly improved society's efficiency.

Now, empowered by AI, every person has access to a vast brain trust—as if a thousand world-class experts were always ready to help. If you do not understand law, you can summon a legal expert. If you cannot program, you can call on a brilliant developer.

With AI, you can quickly understand and even begin working in a field completely unfamiliar to you. The professional barriers that once made every other field feel like a distant mountain are easily breached. A specialist's exclusive expertise no longer offers the same advantage.

Where, then, is the path forward for people?

The key is to understand what gives human beings a distinctive competitive advantage.

The good news is that AI remains far behind humans in abstract reasoning, transferring insight across domains, and independent creativity. In some respects, it cannot even match a five-year-old child.

The fundamental reason is that AI is trained on static data. It has no genuine sensory experience or emotional awareness.

The lines “the Milky Way falling from the highest heaven,” “parting has always stirred the deepest feeling,” and “when life goes well, enjoy it to the full” express uniquely human encounters with nature, emotion, and life. AI cannot have those experiences. It can only imitate their surface, not truly feel or create them.

If AI someday acquires sensory experience, self-awareness, and creativity, humanity may have to question the meaning of its own existence, because such machines could replace us completely.

For now, however, AI's limitations appear extremely difficult to overcome and may even be permanent. AI is therefore more likely to remain a powerful tool that complements and collaborates with human beings.

Should we become specialists or generalists?

AI has broken down professional barriers, allowing anyone to learn and acquire specialized knowledge quickly. At the same time, as Wang Zhigang has observed, “an expert is profoundly one-sided.” Excessive specialization often narrows our thinking.

From an evolutionary perspective, adaptable generalists—able to hunt, gather, and socialize—were the norm throughout most of human history. Specialists are largely a product of the industrial age.

If AI now takes over the role of the “specialist,” does that mean humans should return to our generalist instincts? Or should we develop an entirely new way of working?

Return to the AI interviewer's question: “What unique value do you bring?”

If you were asked to design a profession that AI could not replace, what would it be?

Share your thoughts in the comments.

In the next article, I will continue exploring how we should redefine value in the age of AI.