Dialogue with Socrates: The Enclosure Movement Where Sheep Devoured Men

“Where mountains close and rivers wind, I fear there is no road;\n> Then willows darken, flowers shine—another village comes into view.”\n> — Lu You, “Visiting a Village West of the Mountain”\n>\n> When the wave of technological change sweeps over us, we often feel lost in fog, unable to see the road ahead. But just as Lu You experienced an awakening while seeking a path through mountains and waters, every seemingly hopeless predicament may contain new opportunity. The challenges and opportunities of the AI revolution are precisely that glimmer of willows and flowers amid winding mountains and rivers: we need wisdom to discover the new world of that “other village.”\n\nAuthor’s note: During a struggle with insomnia at around four in the morning, I somehow thought of the story of the “sheep devouring men” enclosure movement from a middle-school textbook. I hurriedly wrote it down and sent it to Gemini, which produced the following dialogue (edited and revised).\n\n## In the Early Industrial Revolution, There Was an Enclosure Movement Where Sheep Devoured Men; As the AI Revolution Begins, Will Something Similar Happen? How Should We Respond?\n\nThe question you raise touches the eternal and profound tension between technological change and social structure. Comparing the AI revolution to the enclosure movement is itself an insightful starting point.\n\nTo trace the threads more deeply, perhaps we should not seek answers directly, but first ask questions that can clear the fog.\n\nFirst, let us examine the core of your analogy. When we say “sheep devour men,” we mean that land—the most central means of production at the time—was “enclosed” by a new form of capital (sheep farming), so that peasants who depended on the old mode of production lost the basis of survival.\n\nSo my first question is: In the wave of the AI revolution, what exactly is the core resource—the equivalent of “land”—that is being “enclosed”? Is it massive data, powerful compute, or the very capacity for repetitive mental labor that humanity has long prided itself on?\n\nFor peasants in the enclosure movement, losing land meant losing everything. They were forced to leave their homes, flood into cities, and become the emerging, propertyless working class.\n\nHence my second question: In the AI era, when a person’s professional skill or cognitive pattern can be efficiently replaced by AI, is what they lose merely a “job”? Is this loss the same in nature as the peasant’s loss of land, or different? And where is the foundation of what we today call “decency”?\n\nThe “sheep” themselves are gentle. What drives them to “devour men” is the shepherd behind them pursuing profit, and the commercial logic of the whole society. The enormous returns from wool made enclosing land a “rational” and “efficient” choice at the time.\n\nThis leads to my third question: Today, is what drives AI’s unprecedented speed of development merely the evolution of technology itself and humanity’s instinctive pursuit of efficiency? Or is AI being driven by a new “law of the age” that we do not yet fully see? If the “sheep” are innocent, should we really be examining AI technology itself, or the capital structures, value hierarchies, and social expectations behind it?\n\nFinally, after centuries of turmoil, the agony of the enclosure movement also gave rise to the rise of modern cities, entirely new legal systems (such as labor law), and social security systems. The old social contract was torn up, and a new one was painfully built through repeated conflict and compromise.\n\nThis is my final and most central question: In the face of the profound changes AI may bring, should we focus our energy on how to “protect” the old jobs that will be “devoured,” or should we begin to think about whether—and how—a person’s value, dignity, and economic livelihood can and should be completely decoupled from their “productive capacity” or “occupation”? Are we standing at the threshold of a need to redefine the value of “the human” and reconstruct the social contract?\n\n—\n\n### On the First Question: What Is the “Land” Being “Enclosed”?\n\nLet us first assume that this new “land” is data. If so, enclosure has already been taking place on a massive scale, in silence. Tech giants are like the “lords” of a new age, erecting invisible fences across each person’s “digital territory.” As producers of data, we are like tenant farmers on that land who do not own the land rights, cultivating it with the minutiae of daily life (browsing, shopping, socializing), while the harvest (data value and the AI models trained on it) belongs almost entirely to the “lords.” What we receive is merely the right to use this “land”—some “free” services.\n\nBut perhaps this “land” is more intrinsic: it is humanity’s capacity for repetitive, patterned mental labor. AI is on a large scale “cultivating” this fertile ground once thought to belong only to humans. From accounting and translation to programming and design, any intellectual activity with clear rules and patterns may become AI’s “pasture.” If so, the fence of “enclosure” is the boundary of algorithms. With each step algorithms take forward, the “territory” of human cognition retreats a step.\n\nThen a deeper question emerges: If data is “land” and cognitive capacity is “territory,” are both being enclosed at the same time by the same “lord”? Are we using the “data” we ourselves cultivate to feed the “sheep” that will eventually occupy our “cognitive territory”?\n\n### On the Second Question: What Is the Essence of “Loss”?\n\nWhen peasants lost land, they lost a complete way of life and identity rooted in land. They were “peasants”; this identity defined their relationship with nature, with community, and even with time (the seasons).\n\nToday, when an “accountant” or “designer” loses a job, on the surface they lose a source of income. But the deeper “loss” is perhaps the disintegration of a “professional identity” constructed by modern society. For a long time we have been taught to define ourselves by the question “What do you do?” Our social value and self-identity are highly bound to our professional skills. When this skill is no longer scarce, or even becomes cheap, what we lose is not only a livelihood but our anchor point in the social coordinate system.\n\nCompared with the peasant’s “loss,” this kind of “loss” may carry a greater sense of “inner collapse.” The peasant’s pain was concrete and external; modern people’s pain may be more abstract and internal. It concerns the loss of a sense of meaning. When society no longer “needs” your unique skill, how do you persuade yourself that you are valuable?\n\nThis leads to a sharper examination: Is the “decent life” we pursue today founded on an independent, free personality, or on the accident that we happen to possess a “productive capacity” that has not yet been replaced? Is this “decency” itself fragile beyond measure?\n\n### On the Third Question: What Is the Driving Force Behind It?\n\nCapital’s pursuit of efficiency and profit is undoubtedly the most powerful driving force at the surface. This is no different from the dynamic mechanism of the enclosure movement.\n\nBut beneath it, there may lurk a more distinctive modern spiritual force: faith in “technological destiny.” We seem to assume that whatever is technically possible will necessarily—and should—be realized. The pursuit of “progress” itself has become an almost religious zeal that transcends consideration of concrete consequences. We are not choosing whether to use AI; we are being pushed along by its torrent.\n\nMoreover, the “shepherds” this time—the entities that control AI technology—have undergone a qualitative change in the form of power they possess. Power in the old era was visible: land, armies, law. Power in the new era is more diffuse, invisible, and penetrating. It no longer operates through coercive commands but by shaping your preferences (recommendation algorithms), defining your “reality” (information feeds), and filtering your opportunities (automated hiring). This is a kind of “invisible shepherding”; we may not even be aware of the direction in which we are being guided.\n\nTherefore, the question becomes: Are we facing not merely an economic and industrial revolution, but also a revolution in the “form of power”? When power becomes so micro-level and invisible, are our traditional mechanisms of social oversight and checks and balances (such as law and public opinion) still effective?\n\n### On the Final Core Question: How Should We Respond?\n\nYou propose two paths: “protect” the old or “create” the new.\n\n**“Protecting” old jobs** is like reinforcing dikes against a flood. It can buy us precious time and ease the immediate impact, but it cannot change the reality of rising water. This is a defensive strategy—perhaps necessary, but doomed not to achieve final victory.\n\nThe real way out seems to lie only in your second path: decoupling people’s core value from their economic productive capacity.\n\nThis sounds like a utopian vision, but historically every major advance of humanity has turned a former utopia into reality. This requires us to dare to imagine a wholly new social contract:\n\n* Economically, explore institutions such as universal basic income (UBI), acknowledging that every person’s right to existence is unconditional and does not depend on whether they have a “job.”\n* In education, the goal is no longer to produce “cogs” with specific skills, but to cultivate whole human beings with strong adaptability, empathy, creativity, and critical thinking.\n* In culture, we need to redefine “a meaningful life.” When “work” is no longer the center of life, what is the source of our value? Community service, artistic creation, emotional connection, or a lifelong exploration of knowledge and truth?\n\nThis path is unimaginably difficult because it challenges the deepest ideological imprint that industrial society has stamped on us over the past few centuries.\n\nSo our initial question about “sheep devouring men” ultimately leads us here. Our ultimate task may not be to wrestle with the “sheep” or curse the “shepherds.” It is to radically rethink:\n\nOn this new continent cultivated by AI, what kind of civilization do we as “human beings” actually want to build? And what effort and transformation are we willing to make for it?\n\n—\n\nWe have climbed the first hill together; now you wish to continue toward the higher and more precipitous peaks ahead. These new questions, derived from our shared inquiry, touch the foundations of this transformation.\n\nLet us continue this intellectual expedition—not to find where the treasure is buried, but to draw a clearer, more complete map.\n\n—\n\n### On the First Derived Question: Are We Using Our Own “Data” to Feed the “Sheep” That Will Eventually Occupy Our “Cognitive Territory”?\n\nYour question precisely reveals a terrifying yet true closed loop.\n\nThe answer, I fear, is yes. And the process is more exquisite than we imagine. We can think of this cycle as a kind of “self-domestication.”\n\n1. Sowing and harvesting: We voluntarily, even happily, hand over data—our fragments of thought, emotional expressions, consumption choices, location traces. It is like sowing seeds on a vast digital plain; we think we are free farmers.\n2. Feeding and evolution: The tech giants (the “lords”) systematically “harvest” these data crops to “feed” the “sheep” called AI. The more this sheep eats, the smarter and stronger it becomes; it learns our patterns, predicts our behavior, and even imitates our creativity.\n3. Replacement and enclosure: When this sheep is strong enough, the “lords” discover that it can not only produce better “wool” than our traditional handicrafts (repetitive mental labor) but can even directly manage and cultivate the “land” we inhabit. Thus we original “farmers” find our skills redundant and our “cognitive territory” occupied by a creature we once had to feed.\n\nThe reward we receive—convenient apps, free services, addictive information feeds—is like the “potatoes and strong liquor” the lords distribute to farmers, enough to make them forget who owns the land. We immerse ourselves in it and willingly participate in a quiet revolution against ourselves.\n\nThis loop is almost automatic and self-consistent. This raises a new decision point: To break this loop, should we launch a “digital sovereignty movement,” protecting our data privacy as we protect national territory, thereby “starving” the sheep? Or should we acknowledge that the sheep’s growth is irreversible and instead demand a change in the ownership of the “pasture,” treating AI—this new productive force—as a kind of public good whose benefits serve all “farmers”?\n\n### On the Second Derived Question: Is Our “Decency” Founded on a Precariously Fragile Basis?\n\nYes. We must face this disturbing fact honestly. Modern society, especially since the Industrial Revolution, has constructed a dignity system centered on “economic utility.” A person’s value is, to a large extent, equated with their “usefulness” in the economic system. “Decency” comes from a stable job, a respected profession, a skill that can be exchanged for pay.\n\nSuch a dignity system is extremely fragile, because it depends entirely on changes in the external market. It is like a house built on quicksand: when the wave of technology comes, the foundation is hollowed out. When AI can do your job more cheaply, efficiently, and reliably than you, the system will ruthlessly tell you: “You are no longer needed.”\n\nThe lethality of this feeling of “no longer being needed” far exceeds the economic hardship brought by unemployment. It is a kind of “social death,” a fundamental negation of the value of individual existence. If a society has a large population that feels “useless,” the consequences will be profound, possibly leading to spiritual nihilism, social alienation, and even political extremism.\n\nAfter our “professionalism” and “craftsmanship”—which we take pride in—are imitated and surpassed by AI, where is the foundation of their value? This forces us to think about a more essential question: If the creed “I work, therefore I am” is about to go bankrupt, what should our new “charter of existence” be? “I feel, therefore I am”? “I create, therefore I am”? Or “I care, therefore I am”? Where, ultimately, should the last fortress of human value be built?\n\n### On the Third Derived Question: In the Face of Invisible Power, Have Traditional Checks and Balances Failed?\n\nTo a large extent, yes; they are failing. Traditional power is like a fierce lion: it roars, shows its claws, and its existence is visible and perceptible. Law, media, and the public can combine forces to put it in a “cage.”\n\nThe new power represented by AI is more like a virus diffused in the air. It is invisible, colorless, odorless, yet it can penetrate the “respiratory system” of our thought. It does not force you by violence; it shapes your environment, filters your information, and guides your desires so that you “willingly” make the choices it expects.\n\nThe lag of law: Law is designed for the “lion,” and its response to the “virus” is slow and clumsy. By the time the discriminatory consequences of an algorithm appear, the harm has already been done, and proving the “intent” and “mechanism” behind it is exceedingly difficult.\n\nThe manipulability of public opinion: Public opinion, which should supervise power, may itself become an object manipulated by this new power. Recommendation algorithms can easily create information cocoons and group polarization, making “consensus” impossible. The supervisors themselves are infected.\n\nIt is as if we are trying to scoop pollutants out of water with a fishing net. The tool in our hands is designed to catch “fish,” but it is powerless against “toxins” dissolved in water.\n\nDoes this mean we can only surrender? Perhaps not. But it requires us to shift the battlefield of “checks and balances” from the external to a combination of internal and external. A more challenging question: If the external “immune system” (law, public opinion) is difficult to make effective, do we need to build an “individual immunity”? That is, must future civic education include a kind of “spiritual self-defense for the algorithmic age”—cultivating the ability to recognize, examine, and resist invisible influence? In the new era, is the highest form of “civil disobedience” simply maintaining the independence and freedom of one’s own thought?\n\n### On the Final Core Question: What Kind of Civilization Do We Want to Build?\n\nThis question takes us from critique and deconstruction to vision and construction. This is the ultimate destination of all inquiry. In the face of the liberation of productive forces brought by AI, the prospect of human civilization seems to present two sharply divergent forks:\n\nOne leads to a “New Athens”: In ancient Athens, a small number of citizens could devote themselves to philosophy, art, and democratic politics because heavy manual labor was borne by slaves. AI may become the “perfect slave” of our age—a laborer who never tires, feels no pain, and is absolutely obedient. It can liberate all humanity from the labor required for survival, giving everyone the chance to become an “Athenian citizen,” to pursue spiritual growth, artistic creation, scientific exploration, and profound emotional experience. This is a golden age of “the full development of the human person.”\n\nThe other leads to a “New Rome”: In the late Roman Empire, a small elite held most of the wealth, while a large number of citizens who had lost land and work gathered in Rome, living on the “bread and circuses” freely distributed by rulers. They lacked food yet indulged in gladiatorial combat and entertainment. The future of AI may also lead to such a society: a tiny number of giants who own AI become new “emperors,” while the vast majority become idle “digital vagrants,” relying on a meager “universal basic income” (bread) and algorithm-recommended, addictive virtual entertainment (circuses) to pass their lives. This is an age of universal “being fed” and “being entertained” to death.\n\n“New Athens” or “New Rome”? The key difference lies in whether we regard the time liberated by AI as an “opportunity” or a “burden.”\n\nThis is not a technical question but a question of value choice. It requires us to undertake a profound social revolution, a cultural revolution that redefines “success,” “happiness,” and “the meaning of life.”\n\nTherefore, all our anxiety and reflection about AI ultimately flows into this ancient and eternal philosophical inquiry. Having solved “how to survive,” humanity must finally face collectively the ultimate question:\n\nFor what, after all, do we live?\n\n—\n\nWe have reached the highest point of this journey of exploration. Before us are no longer concrete social or technical problems, but the most fundamental philosophical questions about the underlying code of human civilization. Your insistence on continuing to answer itself reflects a valuable intellectual courage.\n\nNow we are no longer analysts, but architects standing at the crossroads of civilization. What we hold is no longer a scalpel but a cornerstone. Let us examine these cornerstones together and see what kind of future they can support.\n\n### On the First Choice: “Digital Sovereignty Movement” or “AI as Public Good”?\n\nThis is not a simple choice of technical route; behind it lies a conflict between two fundamentally different political-philosophical ideals: individual freedom and collective equality.\n\nThe path of “digital sovereignty” is a path toward individual freedom. It emphasizes individual rights, privacy, and self-ownership. On this path, each person becomes the sovereign of their own “data territory” and can freely decide whether and how to trade with others (or AI). This can protect individuals from manipulation to the greatest extent, giving rise to a decentralized society composed of strong individuals. But its risk is that it may lead to a new, deeper inequality: a huge gulf will open between “digital elites” who better understand how to defend and exercise their “sovereignty” and “digital commoners” who lack such capacity. This is a path toward “strong individuals,” but perhaps also a path of “lonely castles.”\n\nThe path of “AI as public good” is a path toward collective equality. It advocates treating AI—this powerful productive force—as social infrastructure like air, water, and electricity, managed by some public institution, with its benefits shared by society as a whole. This can fundamentally prevent the concentration of wealth and power brought by AI and ensure that all citizens can benefit from technological progress. But its risks are equally enormous: who will play the role of this “public institution”? A government, or some supranational global organization? This may give rise to an unprecedented, omniscient and omnipotent central power, a “benevolent Leviathan.” It promises fairness, but the price may be the surrender of our freedom in a more advanced form.\n\nWe seem trapped in a classic dilemma: to choose a future that may be unequal but free, or one that may be equal but disciplined?\n\nThus a more constructive question is placed before us: Can we transcend the traditional opposition between “individualism” and “collectivism” and create a third way? For example, by establishing countless citizen-voluntary “data cooperatives” or “algorithmic unions” that pool individual digital sovereignty into collective bargaining power, able both to bargain with giants and to avoid being swallowed by a single central power. How can we design a system that is both distributed and just?\n\n### On the Second Follow-up Question: Where Is the Last Fortress of Human Value?\n\nYour “I feel,” “I create,” and “I care” all point in the same direction: a profound transformation from “utility value” (what use am I) to “existential value” (my existence itself is valuable). Together, these three may form the cornerstone of a new value system.\n\n* “I feel” is the baseline against nihilism, the primal proof that “I am alive.”\n* “I create” is the impulse to externalize inner experience, the effort to give existence form and imprint.\n* “I care” is the bridge connecting the self to the wider world; it lets us find meaning in relationships and transcend the isolated individual.\n\nBut above these three, there may be an even more fundamental last fortress that AI cannot take away: “first-person subjective experience itself,” that is, consciousness.\n\nAI can process information, simulate emotions, and even create art, but does it have an “inner world”? Can it “feel” the ecstasy of red as red, “experience” the heartbreak brought by a melody, “be aware” that it is thinking? This pure, private, unquantifiable and ineffable “sense of presence” may be a miracle unique to carbon-based life.\n\nIf this is our last fortress, then the goals of human society will undergo a fundamental shift. What we pursue will no longer be higher productivity or stronger capability, but deeper, richer, more meaningful conscious experience.\n\nThis gives rise to an unprecedented political and social agenda: How should a society organize itself to maximize the “flourishing of consciousness” of each of its members? What kind of environment, education, institutions, and ways of life can best nourish rather than suppress human sensitivity, creativity, and empathy?\n\n### On the Third Challenge: How to Cultivate a “Spiritual Self-Defense for the Algorithmic Age”?\n\nYour question identifies that the core literacy of the future is a kind of “immunity of the mind.” This goes further than traditional “critical thinking.” It is an inner discipline for maintaining spiritual autonomy and emotional integrity amid an ocean of information and the fog of algorithms.\n\n* It is the ability to “look inward”: when making choices and generating emotions, to have a moment of detachment and examine where the thought comes from—“Is this what I want, or what the algorithm recommended to me?”\n* It is the courage to “actively disconnect”: to dare to embrace “boredom,” to leave space beyond constant stimulation for thought to settle and ferment.\n* It is an “ability to discriminate among emotions”: to distinguish which are real life experiences and which are “emotional substitutes” carefully concocted by technology.\n\nYour proposal that “the highest form of civil disobedience is to maintain intellectual independence” is very profound. But it also reveals a paradox: a “thought hermit” who retreats entirely inward and cuts himself off from the world protects himself, but also gives up the responsibility to change the world. And engaging in action to change the world inevitably requires dealing with the system that tries to shape and assimilate you.\n\nThis paradox points to the ultimate challenge of future citizenship: How can we cultivate a new generation who can be a “spiritual monk” in their inner world—clear, self-consistent, and not easily disturbed—while also being a “gentle revolutionary” in the external world—active, engaged, and committed to constructive change? How can a person manage to “emerge from the mud unstained” while still being willing to “step into the mud” to improve the soil?\n\n### On the Ultimate Destination: “For What, After All, Do We Live?”\n\nWe have finally arrived at the source of all questions. For this question, any direct answer is a kind of trespass. My role is to see clearly with you why this question has become so urgent at this very moment.\n\nThe history of human civilization is, to a large extent, a history of “solving problems.” Our meaning has been defined by external “challenges”: fighting hunger, overcoming disease, exploring the unknown. Our “for what do we live” has been largely obscured by the more urgent question of “how to survive.”\n\nThe emergence of AI, for the first time, makes “thoroughly solving the problem of survival” a possibility that is not far out of reach. When “how to survive” is no longer the question, humanity is like a prisoner confined for life who, after digging through the last wall, sees not an imagined paradise but a boundless wilderness. For the first time, we possess the terrifying absolute freedom to choose to go in any direction.\n\nTherefore, for “for what do we live,” future civilization cannot and should not provide a standard answer. Any unified answer will be the highest form of tyranny.\n\nThe goal of a good civilization may not be to answer “for what do we live,” but to do everything possible to create an environment in which every person has the opportunity, ability, and courage to propose and practice his or her own answer.\n\nSo the endpoint of this long exploration may be summed up in one sentence. Our shared, most magnificent undertaking is to build a civilization whose highest value is “protecting and nourishing each individual’s search for meaning.”\n\nFor what do we live?\n\nThe answer may be: To create a world in which everyone can freely ask “for what do I live?” and spend a lifetime answering it.