Future Landscape of Human-Machine Collaboration and Social Governance
Yan Fangjie and Yi Jiaxin, School of Marxism, East China Normal University
Recently, Futian District in Shenzhen welcomed its first batch of 70 “AI Digital Employees” as government auxiliary tools. These AI tools cover 240 business scenarios, including document processing, public welfare services, and emergency management, achieving exponential gains in efficiency. This development has sparked intense public debate: while some admire the “revolution in government efficiency,” others worry about job displacement. Still, many are pondering deeper questions—when AI is deeply embedded in social governance, how should we define the boundaries between humans and machines? Can we achieve both high efficiency and humanization? These concerns reflect the deeper issues of social governance in the intelligent era.
Technological dividends come at a cost, and AI is not a panacea. The key to positive technological empowerment is balancing instrumental rationality with value rationality. We must leverage AI to break through efficiency barriers while ensuring fairness and inclusiveness through value-driven interventions.
Currently, AI’s “replacement” capabilities are mainly concentrated in patterned and low-emotional tasks. Just as photography ended the realistic function of portrait painting but allowed the art of impressionism to flourish, AI’s takeover of mechanical labor is freeing human creativity that has long been shackled by trivial tasks. AI is not a replacer but an “ability amplifier,” liberating humans from the constraints of mechanical labor and instrumental rationality and evolving us into higher-level roles as decision-makers, commanders, and innovators.
Today, the coexistence of humans and machines is an undeniable trend. How to manage this relationship is a critical question for our times. In China, big data, the Internet of Things (IoT), and AI are updating and iterating at an unprecedented pace, driving social governance into a new era of comprehensive intelligence. This shift reflects a move from confrontation to symbiosis in human-machine relations, a new paradigm under the socialist system. Humans and machines should not just coexist physically but should achieve symbiosis, sharing, and co-creation. The ultimate goal of human-machine collaboration is to achieve “co-governance” through “collective intelligence.”
Shenzhen’s “AI Digital Employees” are a microcosm of technological empowerment and a testing ground for modern social governance. In this experiment, humans must actively remap the frontiers of our cognitive abilities and maintain the capacity for deep reflection amidst the efficiency race. We must avoid losing our intuitive human touch in the dependence on data and AI. Modern social governance should anchor on human dignity and rights, inject human warmth into machine rationality, and build ethical flexibility into institutional design. Together, silicon-based intelligence and carbon-based humanity can create a path that balances efficiency with fairness and integrates technology with humanity.
Published on April 3, 2025