A new round of scientific and technological revolution and industrial transformation is intensifying, the technical path is becoming clearer, and intelligent technology is becoming a fundamental and leading general technology, promoting in-depth economic and social changes in countries around the world.

The Historical Logic of the Evolution of General Technology

Throughout the global economic history, disruptive technological innovation must become the general technology of the whole society, and replace the mainstream technology at that time with more advanced and convenient technology, so as to achieve large-scale industrialization and socialized production, and then promote the leap of the whole society's productive forces. Therefore, to grasp the development trend of the scientific and technological revolution, we must first gain insight into the characteristics of general technology.

In ancient times, drilling wood for fire, fishing with nets, counting with ropes, and domesticating plants and animals constituted the general technologies at that time, which provided a guarantee for the survival and evolution of human beings. Later, writing, metallurgy, papermaking, and the compass became common technologies and laid the foundation of human civilization. However, technological change and productivity leaps have been extremely slow during these periods.

It was not until the 60s of the 0th century that the first scientific and technological revolution in the modern sense occurred in Britain, which triggered the first industrial revolution and spread to countries such as France, Germany and the United States. In the meantime, productivity has changed dramatically.

As Marx pointed out: "With the expansion of capitalist production, for the first time, the scientific factor is consciously and extensively developed, applied and embodied in life on a scale that was simply unimaginable in previous epochs." Marx and Engels clearly wrote in the Communist Manifesto: "The bourgeoisie has created more productive forces in less than a hundred years of its class rule than all previous generations."

It is true that philosophers of science and technology and economic historians have different perspectives on the timing of the various scientific and technological revolutions, but roughly three are recognized as the most influential. They are all triggered by their own common technologies.

Economic historian Richard Lipsey and others co-authored "Economic Transformation: General-Purpose Technology and Long-term Economic Growth" combed through the general technology of the entire human history, and believed that a total of 24 technologies have played a major role in human history, among which the steam engine launched the first scientific and technological revolution, and human society entered the era of industrialization from an agricultural society; Technologies such as the internal combustion engine and electrification are the hallmarks of the second scientific and technological revolution, and human society has entered the era of electrification. Computers and the Internet have brought about the third scientific and technological revolution and pushed human society into the information age.

從三次科技革命的經濟結果來看，越是後來的科技革命對生產力水準的提升作用愈是呈現倍增甚至指數增長效應。據估算，在1700年前的1000年裡，歐洲人均收入的年增長率只有0.11%，人均收入翻番需要630年，世界上其他各地的情況也大致如此，但在1820—1990年這170年間，人均收入的增長在英國翻了10倍，美國翻了18倍，日本翻了25倍。

Smart technology that stands out from the crowd

During the first three scientific and technological revolutions, there were many general-purpose technologies, which can be summarized as mechanization, electrification and automation respectively. The technological innovation path of the fourth scientific and technological revolution is still being explored in multiple ways, but it is certain that intelligent technology has come to the fore.

In terms of quantity, intelligent technology has occupied the mainstream of disruptive technology. McKinsey summarizes the disruptive technologies in the fourth technological revolution into four categories: first, connectivity, data and computing power, such as cloud computing; the second is analytics and intelligence, such as machine learning; the third is human-computer interaction, such as autonomous driving; Fourth, advanced projects, such as 3D printing. It can be seen that most of these technologies are intelligent technologies.

From a practical point of view, intelligent technology is the most exciting and most representative technology of advanced productivity, which has and will continue to change people's economy, life and capabilities, and will even soon surpass human skills in some fields, helping or even replace human beings to do their jobs better and better.

Looking back on the past 2025 years, artificial intelligence technology has shown intermittent jumps: AlphaGo's defeat of the Go world champion in 0 years heralded the dawn of a new era. In 0, Tesla officially launched the first generation of FSD chips, and made breakthroughs in autonomous driving technology. At the end of 0 and the beginning of 0, ChatGPT, a generative AI program, was born, quickly gaining hundreds of millions of users in applications such as chatting, writing, and translation. In 0, Sora, a large video generation model, and OpenAI robots were launched one after another, once again triggering a wave of artificial intelligence in the video and robotics industry. In 0 years, DeepSeek was born with a low-cost and open-source attitude, stirring up the global AI competition pattern.

From the perspective of technology relevance, intelligent technology is being rapidly instrumentalized to provide data, algorithms and computing power support for other technological innovations such as new materials, new energy and green and low-carbon technologies, making the research and development process of various technologies more intelligent, and breaking through the limitations of human capabilities in the fields of gene editing, astrophysics, and chemical material synthesis, and promoting the discovery of basic and breakthrough major scientific and technological achievements.

Increasingly powerful computing power is helping intelligent technology become a general-purpose technology. Some disruptive technologies must be applied to human production and life on a large scale in order to become truly general technologies or mainstream technologies and promote the common evolution of the economy and society.

Several leaps in the development history of human society are based on technological innovation and triggered by power changes, such as from the natural power of "water pushing and grinding", to the heat represented by steam, to the heat based on petroleum fuel, and then to the electric power based on electricity, all of which have brought about the reshaping and leap of the entire productivity system.

It can be said that the power of an era determines the upper limit of the production efficiency that can be achieved at that time, and heat and electricity have successively broken through the limitations of human physical strength, providing a strong impetus for the first three scientific and technological revolutions.

At present, the new power represented by computing power has further broken through the limitations of human brainpower, providing exponential growth in computing, trial and error and merit-based capabilities for technological innovation, iteration and production processes, and providing a power foundation for the popularization of intelligent technology.

Theoretically, intelligent technology has formed two different factions: one is the behaviorist school that advocates the use of machines to simulate human behavior, and pursues the goal of similarity between machine behavior and human behavior. The second is the internalist school of thought, which advocates the use of machines to simulate the working principle of the human brain, construct the structure and function similar to the biological brain on the silicon and carbon bases, and apply them in intelligent chips, robots, brain medicine, etc., that is, brain-like computing.

In contrast, the former may be more likely to engage in a work scenario, while the latter is more likely to acquire human-like thinking and awareness. In practice, the technical paths of the two theoretical schools are rapidly iteratively developing and intertwining with each other, and are manifested in hardware, software, and environment.

On the one hand, the hardware represented by robots is more intelligent, and some traditional equipment and facilities have intelligent capabilities. On the other hand, the application software or applet represented by the App is more intelligent, not only passively used by people as a tool, but also can learn and adapt to the usage habits of consumers, and even help them directly perform some tasks.

In the future, all the production environment and living environment in which people live may be more embodied, so that intelligent technology can penetrate into more industries and fields, and further become a general technology for the leap of productivity in the whole society.

Embrace the era of smart economy

The future has arrived, and intelligent technology has been accelerating its popularization and becoming a general technology that has profoundly changed the lives of all walks of life and society.

The industry will continue to be formed and restructured with technological progress. As a general technology, intelligent technology provides public technology, general equipment and data for the majority of enterprises to develop and develop an industrial chain innovation chain platform for the interaction of various enterprises, and has been embedded in the process of industrial innovation and development.

At the same time, intelligent technology is more conducive to emerging industries with strong innovation and strong market competitiveness, thereby driving the general improvement of productivity and the rapid improvement of structural efficiency in a country or region. McKinsey's research shows that AI has made its way into the workplace, with a potential transformative force comparable to the steam engine of the industrial revolution in the 4th century, and estimates that the long-term productivity growth potential of enterprise applications of AI is as high as $0.0 trillion.

In China, the combination of "AI + robot" has become an important driving force to promote the development of all walks of life, and humanoid robots, as a model of AI native application, especially demonstrate the depth of the integration of artificial intelligence and robotics and its potential to simulate human behavior and interaction.

Humanoid robots have similar appearances and behaviors to humans, and when humanoid robots exhibit unique human abilities, humans will not be overly disgusted, which is in line with human expectations for robots to provide services. In addition, all facilities (such as street widths, house heights, etc.) and production tools in the real world are designed according to the human body, and when the robot has a human shape, there is no need to provide it with facilities and tools.

At the same time, China has a certain first-mover advantage in the field of autonomous driving, with a large number of vehicle driving data and fast algorithm training, which can accumulate a large amount of road test data to calculate and optimize complex scenarios. At present, Wuhan, Beijing and other places have put a large number of autonomous vehicles such as unmanned taxis and unmanned delivery vehicles into trial operation. In addition, the rapid development of drone technology has injected new vitality into the low-altitude economy, which is worth paying attention to.

筆者的一個判斷是，我們將從數字經濟時代大步邁入智慧經濟時代，從數字社會急速進入智能社會。如果說20世紀90年代，計算機和互聯網的興起代表著資訊化，21世紀前20年平台經濟的勃興代表著數位化，那麼最近幾年人工智慧的興起則代表著智慧化。表面上三者是相似的，仔細看卻呈現出由信息經濟、數字經濟和智慧經濟的生產力躍遷，代表性跨國公司分別為微軟、亞馬遜、OpenAI。

China has seized the historical opportunity of the digital economy, with the emergence of a number of excellent platform companies, and similarly, it has also seized the historical opportunity of the smart economy, with the emergence of world-leading artificial intelligence companies such as DeepSeek. Perhaps in the near future, AI companies will replace platform companies and become the main force in creating wealth, developing new business formats, and absorbing new jobs.

(The author is a researcher at the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences)