An Underestimated Analogy
Many people think the development of AI technology can be analogized to the invention of computers back in the day. This sounds quite reasonable—computers changed the world, and AI is changing the world too, so AI must be the "next generation of computers."
But Jensen Huang had a point that I found quite illuminating: making this analogy may vastly underestimate the impact of AI.
Why? Let's look at some numbers first.
The global IT industry is roughly 100 trillion. No matter how powerful computers are, they are essentially tools—excellent tools, but ultimately serving humans. You need people to write code, operate systems, and maintain servers for computers to function. So after decades of development, the IT industry has been working within that $1 trillion pie.
AI agents are different. As Agent technology gradually matures, they cease to be merely tools assisting humans, but can deliver results directly without human intervention. This means the AI industry isn't competing with traditional IT for that 99 trillion of productive activities—things that previously could only be accomplished by human labor.
This is a qualitative change.
A Completely New Economic Transformation Model
If we follow this logic further, you'll discover a deeper transformation is underway.
In traditional economic models, converting capital into output inevitably requires massive amounts of human labor in the intermediate steps. You have money, you need to hire people, train them, manage them, and people execute to get things done. So the productivity transformation chain has always been: Capital → Labor → Output.
But AI is rewriting this chain. After capital is invested in computing power, electricity, and models, it can transform directly into productive forces to a considerable degree, no longer requiring such a large proportion of human labor intervention. This will give rise to an entirely new economic model and production relations—the role of capital is being greatly amplified.
Looking back at history, impacts of this magnitude are rare. In agrarian societies, productivity relied mainly on land and labor, with little room for capital to play. After the Industrial Revolution, machinery multiplied the efficiency of capital, but you still needed large numbers of workers to operate and maintain the machines. Now, AI may allow capital to convert almost directly into output.
Saying AI is the next computer? I think a more accurate analogy is the steam engine—even surpassing it. The Industrial Revolution took a century to reshape the world, while the AI revolution may compress this process into ten years.
Choices at the Crest of the Wave
When the power of capital is further amplified, the ensuing problems become very real.
Every leap in productivity throughout history has been accompanied by transformations in governance. The steam engine brought factory systems and labor laws, electricity gave rise to modern corporate governance, and the internet drove data privacy legislation. For this round of AI, what is the corresponding governance framework? There is no answer yet.
Marx's extrapolation in Das Kapital of the unlimited expansion of capital power has been mitigated by various institutional designs over the past century. But if AI truly significantly weakens the necessity of human labor in production, will those previous balancing mechanisms still suffice? This is not a distant philosophical question, but a real challenge already underway.
In 2026, we may truly be standing at the crest of a great transformation unseen in a century. This is not alarmism—when a technology simultaneously changes the source of productive forces and the structure of production relations, its impact goes far beyond the technical level.
As someone working in this industry, I believe understanding the depth of this transformation is more important than chasing any specific technical hot topic. Tools will iterate, frameworks will update, but the reconstruction of production relations may only happen once in a century.