For the past few hundred years, human society has revolved around one question:
What kind of labor can a person provide to society?
In the age of the Industrial Revolution, physical labor and the ability to operate machinery had economic value.
In the age of the Information Revolution, knowledge, technology, and expertise gradually became central to social competition.
Engineers, financial analysts, lawyers, designers, and programmers earn relatively high salaries largely because acquiring the skills required for these professions takes considerable time and money.
But artificial intelligence is changing this system of value distribution, which has been in place for decades.
As AI becomes capable of writing code, analyzing financial markets, designing products, making videos, and even helping companies make a large number of decisions, a question worth considering begins to emerge:
If AI can do most knowledge work in the future, will people still need to spend more than a decade training to become professionals in a particular field?
Or perhaps we should start to rethink:
What, exactly, should humans devote their limited lives to?
I. AI Is Eroding the Scarcity of Traditional Professional Skills
Economic value has never depended only on how difficult a skill is. It depends even more on how much the market needs it and how many people can provide it.
In the past, people needed years of professional training to develop skills in software development, financial analysis, or professional design. These skills were expensive partly because they were costly to acquire.
But AI is rapidly lowering the barriers to using these abilities. In 2025, a study published by the International Labour Organization (ILO) found that the jobs of around one-quarter of workers worldwide are affected by generative AI to varying degrees.
Notably, the research suggests that most jobs are more likely to be transformed than eliminated outright. This means we can't simply assume that engineers, financial analysts, or other professionals are about to lose their jobs.
But another trend is already worth paying attention to:
As professional knowledge becomes easier to access, simply possessing knowledge is becoming less and less likely to provide a lasting competitive advantage. The professionals who are truly valuable in the future may need to control capital, resources, trust, responsibility, and decision-making authority—not just have the ability to perform a particular task.
This also got me thinking about another possibility. If AI can take on more and more work for humans, should people devote more time to themselves?
II. The Next Industry Worth Investing in at Scale May Be Humanity Itself
Imagine two young people. The first spends five years learning programming, financial analysis, and various professional subjects, hoping to join a large technology company or financial institution.
The second person also spends five years, but makes a completely different choice.
They work out consistently and get into excellent shape. They study skincare, hairstyles, clothing, and makeup, refining their appearance to the highest level.
They learn dance, martial arts, backflips, gymnastics, parkour, skateboarding, and various extreme sports. They develop their communication skills, camera presence, and social skills. At the same time, they use social media to consistently document and showcase their progress.
Under the values of the past, the first person would more likely be seen as pursuing a stable path with economic rewards.
The second person might be seen as simply cultivating hobbies. But in the age of AI, the economic value of these two paths could diverge dramatically.
Some of the skills the first person learns are facing an increase in supply brought about by AI.
The abilities the second person develops, however, may simultaneously create physical attractiveness, physical expressiveness, entertainment value, social advantages, and personal influence.
More importantly, these abilities can be showcased directly on the internet to millions of people. A video of a difficult backflip might attract millions of views.
Someone with outstanding looks and physique might gain a large following by sharing everyday life content. Someone with a distinctive personality, strong communication skills, and an engaging lifestyle might win the affection of thousands of strangers.
And there are already well-established ways to monetize that attention and affection: brand partnerships, ad revenue sharing, paid subscriptions, livestreaming, personal products, and various business ventures built on personal influence.
This means:
Investing in one's appearance, body, and talents may also be an investment in one's lifestyle, social life, and finances.
This is something that traditional ideas about careers have rarely discussed.
III. From the Labor Economy to the Economy of Being Loved
I would like to propose a concept:
The Economy of Being Loved.
This is not a formal category widely accepted by the economics community. It is a hypothesis I propose about a possible shift in value in the age of AI.
In the past, most people's income came from the labor market. Companies needed a certain skill, so they paid a salary in exchange for your working hours.
But in the creator economy, someone may earn an income simply by being widely loved, even without directly doing any work for their audience.
For example, someone shares their fitness journey every day. Their audience hasn't asked them to work out on their behalf, nor have they directly paid for their physical labor.
But people are willing to watch, follow, interact, and even buy products they recommend. The economic value created here comes from entertainment, connection, companionship, admiration, and trust.
More interestingly, audiences may not need this person to have world-class professional skills at all.
They don't necessarily have to become a world champion.
They don't necessarily need a PhD.
They don't even necessarily have to be in the top one percent in any particular field.
As long as their appearance, personality, physical abilities, lifestyle, or way of expressing themselves can consistently attract a particular group, they may build an audience relationship with commercial value.
This is fundamentally different from the traditional labor market.
The traditional labor market primarily rewards what tasks you can perform, whereas the Economy of Being Loved may reward the kind of person you are and how willing others are to keep following you.
Of course, the two are not entirely opposed.
An excellent doctor, engineer, or investor can also earn widespread admiration through their professional abilities.
The difference is that professional expertise may no longer be the only main path to attention and wealth.
IV. Economic Data Already Supports This Trend
The growth of the creator economy offers a real-world case worth studying.
Goldman Sachs once predicted that the global creator economy's potential market size could grow from around $250 billion to $480 billion by 2027.
This forecast doesn't mean that every creator will earn a high income, but it does reflect an important phenomenon:
Personal influence is gradually forming a vast commercial market.
A 2026 creator earnings study published by CreatorIQ also showed that brands continue to increase their spending on creator marketing.
However, income is very unevenly distributed.
The study found that in 2025, the top 10% of earners among creators received about 62% of the total compensation in the sample.
Another 2026 survey covering more than 5,000 creators found that about 67% of creators earned less than $10,000 a year from content creation.
These data reveal two things at once.
First, making money through personal influence is already a real and massive market.
Second, there is still a high barrier between gaining attention and successfully monetizing it.
This also means that a new competitive landscape may emerge in the future:
A small number of people who can consistently win widespread affection and turn that attention into commercial value may accumulate far more wealth than the average person.
This income gap could even become more extreme than in traditional workplaces.
V. When Everything Can Be Faked, Real Humans Will Become the New Luxury
AI is bringing about a very unusual phenomenon.
In the future, we may no longer be able to tell from a video alone whether what we are seeing actually happened.
Someone who has never trained can use AI to generate a video of themselves performing a difficult backflip.
Someone who can't dance at all can appear in a video displaying the body control of a world-class dancer.
Even a person who doesn't exist can have perfect looks, a perfect physique, a voice, and a life story.
When this kind of content can be produced cheaply and on a massive scale, visual displays on the internet may gradually lose the evidentiary power they once had.
That's because we can no longer be sure that someone in a video truly has those abilities just because the video is impressive.
But there is a paradox worth considering here.
When anyone can use AI to appear perfect, might people who genuinely have these abilities become even more valuable?
Imagine this.
When the internet is flooded with AI-generated extreme sports videos, someone who can perform a difficult move in the real world still has to train for years, risk injury, and overcome real physical limitations.
When AI can create countless perfect faces, people with outstanding looks, posture, and presence in real life still have to live in this world as real people.
When AI can generate any kind of dance performance, people with genuine dance skills can still stand before an audience and perform those movements with their own bodies.
The time, effort, and physical cost required to develop these abilities don't disappear just because AI can imitate them.
In fact, as fake content becomes more common, people may place even greater value on performances that can be verified as real.
There is also an economic logic to this phenomenon worth discussing.
When a product can be copied in large quantities, people may start to care more about its origins, authenticity, and scarcity.
For example, digital images can be copied infinitely, but artworks with a documented creative history and verifiable provenance can still have considerable value as collectibles.
The same logic may gradually apply to human beings.
When AI can infinitely reproduce human appearances and performances, what is truly scarce may no longer be the beautiful images, but the real person behind them—someone who genuinely exists and truly has those abilities.
This also means that another important change may take place in the future of social media.
Audiences may no longer just appreciate the content itself.
They may care more about a creator's real identity, life experiences over time, live performances, and whether they can build a trustworthy relationship with a real person.
Livestreaming, live performances, sports competitions, offline events, and even forms of content that can prove their authenticity may all receive more attention as a result.
Of course, this doesn't mean AI-generated content will lose its market.
Virtual idols, AI characters, and generative entertainment may still attract large audiences.
But people's appreciation of real individuals may gradually form another value system, one that places greater emphasis on identity, experience, and trust.
When fake perfection is readily available, real human beings may instead become the hardest things to replicate in this era.
This could also give rise to a new economic phenomenon:
The Authenticity Premium.
When the market is flooded with content whose authenticity is difficult to discern, people with credible backgrounds, real experiences, and verifiable abilities may command additional market value.
In the future, human competition may not just be about who has the most outstanding abilities, but also about who can prove that they truly have them and inspire others to feel admiration and affection as a result.
VI. Appearance and Physical Ability May Become New Forms of Personal Capital
In traditional economics, we often discuss financial capital and human capital. Financial capital includes cash, stocks, bonds, and various assets.
Human capital includes education, knowledge, skills, and work experience. But if we consider people in the context of social media and the AI era, I believe we need to pay greater attention to another kind of capital.
Personal Presentation Capital. It includes appearance, posture, clothing, presence, physical control, communication skills, and a person's ability to shape how others perceive them.
These traits have not only recently become valuable. Physical attractiveness, athletic ability, and social status have always played important roles in human history.
What has really changed is that the internet gives these abilities the chance to spread widely and be monetized. In the past, someone who was good-looking, had a great physique, and was skilled at dancing might only attract attention at school, at work, or within their social circle.
Today, that same person can use short-form videos to let millions of people see their appeal. This ability to reach an audience gives personal advantages that once existed mainly in offline social settings the potential to become digital assets that can accumulate over time.
But there is another phenomenon worth noting here. As more people pursue extreme looks and physical performance, the standards of competition will keep rising.
Fitness, skincare, cosmetic procedures, styling, photography, and personal image management may all see increased demand as a result. However, relying too heavily on judgments about appearance may also cause anxiety, body image pressures, and constant comparison.
So the real goal in pursuing Personal Presentation Capital should be to improve physical ability, health, aesthetics, and personal expression together, rather than endlessly conforming to external standards.
VII. The Super-Individual of the Future May No Longer Need a Traditional Career Identity
I believe the AI era may also change something else.
That is how people define themselves. In the past, when two strangers met for the first time, one of the most common questions was:
“What do you do for work?”
This question actually implies a system of social evaluation.
Your profession is often used to infer your income, education level, social status, and personal abilities.
But suppose that in the future, someone can use AI to do a great deal of knowledge work and earn an income through their community influence. Would they still need a clearly defined job title?
They could be an investor, a sports enthusiast, a content creator, a dancer, and a researcher in a particular field all at once.
Their income might come from investments, brand partnerships, personal products, and digital content.
They could freely divide their time among physical training, learning, travel, creative work, and social activities. They wouldn't need to tie their entire life to a single career.
More importantly, all these seemingly unrelated activities might be strengthening the same asset:
Themselves.
Improving their appearance increases their appeal at first sight.
Improving their physical abilities creates a richer range of ways to perform.
Improving their communication skills makes their ideas easier to understand.
Social media helps more people see these qualities.
AI lowers the cost of research, creation, management, and business operations.
Financial assets provide long-term options and reduce dependence on a single source of income.
Combined, these abilities may create a way of life entirely different from traditional career development.
A person is no longer just an employee of a company or a professional in an industry, but an independent individual with their own capital, abilities, audience, and commercial value.
VIII. What Will Society Reward When Humans No Longer Need to Devote So Much Labor to Survival?
This is the deepest part of the whole question.
The systems of reward in human societies have always been tied to whatever resources were scarcest at the time.
Agricultural societies valued land.
Industrial societies valued capital and productive capacity.
Information societies value knowledge, technology, and information-processing abilities.
If AI greatly reduces the cost of knowledge and production in the future, will human competition gradually shift to other areas?
For example:
Who has the most outstanding looks and physical abilities?
Who is better at art, dance, sports, and performance?
Who can create richer emotional experiences?
Who has the most distinctive personality and lifestyle?
Who can earn the admiration, trust, and affection of more people?
These questions may gradually become new arenas of social competition.
And there is another promising aspect to this shift.
For the first time, humans may have the chance to redirect much of the time spent pursuing economic survival toward personal development.
Someone might learn to dance without intending to become a professional dancer.
Someone might learn martial arts without intending to compete.
Someone might exercise without intending to become a fitness trainer.
Someone might improve their appearance without intending to enter the entertainment industry.
These activities can bring joy, health, a sense of achievement, and a sense of identity in their own right.
And once social media and business models are well established, some people may also earn money from them.
I think this is a very important positive sign.
In the past, society often made people choose between their interests and their income.
In the future, there may be more opportunities to bring the two together.
Of course, whether this future becomes possible still depends on how the wealth generated by AI productivity is distributed, and whether ordinary people can truly gain more free time.
If technological progress only allows a small number of capital owners to capture most of the gains, most people may not be able to leave traditional jobs.
But if AI really does lower the cost of living and production, and gives more individuals the tools to generate income, the way people live in human society could change profoundly.
IX. Being Loved May Become a New Form of Economic Productivity
I've always believed that the most important question to consider about the future may no longer be whether to choose the technology sector, the financial sector, or another high-income industry.
Instead, it's this:
As AI becomes capable of doing more and more work, what else can a person do to make themselves more valuable?
In the past, people were used to proving their abilities through their work.
Measuring their success through their income.
Building a social identity through their job title.
But in the future, people may build entirely different systems of value through their appearance, physical abilities, artistic performance, lifestyle, personality, and ideas.
They might spend years training themselves to have an outstanding physique, excel at several sports, develop an eye for aesthetics, express themselves well, and create content consistently.
And things that were once considered hobbies or personal pursuits may gradually become sources of income.
This doesn't mean everyone should become an influencer, nor that traditional professional skills will lose their value.
But it does offer a new possibility.
The future economic system may no longer reward only those who are best at getting work done. It may also increasingly reward those who can inspire emotional connection, admiration, identification, and affection in others.
In the industrial age, humans trained themselves to become more efficient workers.
In the age of AI, perhaps humans can finally develop themselves into works of art worthy of admiration.
And the value of that work of art will no longer be decided entirely by a company.
It may be determined collectively by millions of people who are willing to watch you, admire you, trust you, and even pay for what you offer.