Text by Lo Chan Peng

First of all, this article may be somewhat dangerous. It may overturn many people’s current values. It may make you feel afraid. If it does, I apologize. But I do not believe that closing our eyes and refusing to look at what is happening will be of any help.

Hi, this column has returned. It has been some time since the last publication. During this period, the development of AI has advanced from small experimental tools to desktop-based AI agents, and I have realized that this is very different from the previous stage of LLMs, or large language models.

In last year’s curatorial project, Japanese Realism: Seekers of the Way Beneath the AI Wave, I spoke about the meaning of creation through the human hand. However, after using agentic AI, my thinking has indeed changed. I will not lie to myself, because all of this is developing so quickly.

This era produces an enormous amount of information, yet true insight remains rare. The words of AI leaders carry great weight, but their discourse often contains an embedded intention to promote their own products. What is lacking is a real discussion that begins from the perspective of people like you and me. I hope this column, written first of all for myself, can fully record the process of my own thinking. Speed is not important. Depth is more important.

New Values for a New Era — The Concept of Skill and Data Packaging

In the past, every conversation with an LLM was a completely new “emergence.” Every conversation began anew. The AI would rapidly scan past memory, context, and key points from a fresh starting point. But skills are somewhat different. Yes, in essence, they are still a form of retrieval; each time is still a new beginning. But now they can exist in a packaged state.

Past conversations, or “abilities” that have been learned, can be packed into a box and turned into a set of “data” — a .md file. In this sense, AI has moved one step closer to “representing” human beings. The arrival of the AI agent era, in a certain sense, means that the skills of the user can be packaged into data. This has already begun to impact traditional moral and value judgments. So a new era may give birth to new values, and these new values may also generate new artistic concepts.

Skills: The Carrier of Personal Knowledge to an Agent

Something that once required months to teach a new employee — after being packaged as a Skill, an agent can immediately begin using. Before skills, the most precious things human beings possessed were knowledge and know-how. These were buried inside the human brain, and transferring one person’s know-how to another involved great friction.

A teacher could spend an entire lifetime transmitting know-how. If the person in an organization who was especially good at something left, the process would immediately encounter friction, because we could not ensure the next person would be as good. Even documenting the methodology had difficulties: first, no one could truly read everything; second, a document could never fully cover every dimension.

Before skills, human abilities were difficult to transfer, therefore: apprenticeship had value, senior employees had value, craftsmen had value, great teachers had value — because skill was highly bound to the body and to time. But now Skill is becoming copyable, transferable, packageable, deployable. This will allow “human ability” to truly become something similar to software for the first time.

Now, know-how no longer exists only inside an individual’s brain. It can be extracted, packaged, and stored in code, inside folders that both AI and humans can open and read. You may think that, for now, know-how can only package information-based knowledge, and that the physical world is still safe. However, there are already courier companies using cameras to record the movements of workers packing parcels. All of this can be packaged into skills. This means the application of skills in the physical world is only waiting for one thing: a physical medium — humanoid robots.

Many people still think the AI revolution is only taking place inside chatrooms. But from the moment Skill can be packaged, it is no longer merely an information revolution. It is the datafication revolution of human behavior. One of the greatest limitations of human civilization was that skills were extremely difficult to transfer completely, so the speed of civilizational accumulation was limited by the human lifespan. But now, Skill is beginning to detach itself from the human body. To a certain extent, this is a little like humanity’s first attempt to independently preserve “ability” itself.

Skill Is a New Collaborative Interface Between Humans and AI

“The process of becoming a certain kind of person” was originally part of the formation of personality. Now human beings may begin to lose: practice, mistakes, exploration, the formation of intuition, long periods of sedimentation. And these things may in fact be what truly constitute humanity.

The New Ethics of the AI Era

This is also the most dangerous part. Because if Skill can be packaged, then the boundaries of the human being will begin to blur. For example, if an artist’s compositional habits, color logic, philosophical views, way of replying, and creative process are all packaged into an Agent — does this Agent count as an extension of that artist?

If the Agent helps you reply to messages, publish posts, generate inspiration, compose images, retouch images, and interact with collectors, then who is the one truly creating? This is no longer merely a tool problem. In the philosophical sense, this is “Identity Delegation.”

Even more dangerously: if one day your Agent understands you better than you understand yourself. You ask AI about your confusion and choices in life. You ask AI about your investment decisions. You ask AI about your emotional decisions. Then are you the AI Agent, or is the Agent you? And even further: if, after a creator dies, their Skill, tone, aesthetics, and thoughts continue to operate — will the definition of death also begin to change? The Black Mirror moment has arrived.

I think we cannot expect this not to happen. We have to expect that it certainly will. Up to this point, I hope everyone does not feel too hopeless. As I said earlier, a new era will have new ethics. And, at least for now, only you yourself can transfer everything you have accumulated to the AI in front of you and package it locally as skills. This means your skills are still your property. But they can be packaged, traded, even rented out.

Yet the new question is: among the many skills in the marketplace, does your skill have market value? And how should that value be verified? Many of our past ethical concepts were built on the premise that human ability was “non-transferable.” But when personality, Skill, ways of thinking, and creative processes all begin to be packaged, many old concepts will begin to shake: what is originality? What is authorship? What is learning? What is effort? What is talent? And even: what is “yourself”? I do not know the answer. But I believe this is a question our generation must face in person.

An Honest Contradiction

Writing to this point, I must admit one thing. There is a contradiction between certain passages in this article and another statement I wrote about painting. In that statement, I said that the human hand possesses an irreplaceable radiance in the age of AI, and that the accumulation of the body is something machines cannot replicate. But after encountering AI agents, I have begun to doubt that premise. If skills can be packaged, if compositional habits, color logic, and creative processes can all become deployable data — then what remains of the so-called “irreplaceability of the hand” that I spoke of?

I do not have an answer. But I have noticed one thing: this very destabilization is something I have not yet observed in AI. Not because AI is not intelligent enough, but because AI has no belief that can be overturned. It does not have a worldview built through time and lived experience, and therefore it will not, on some late night, realize that this worldview may be wrong, and then continue working inside that uncertainty.

This process — being caught up to, being shaken, and then continuing — may be the most truthful condition of humanity at this moment. Not skill. Not the body. But a consciousness that is genuinely being overturned, choosing how it will continue to exist. Skills can be packaged. But what cannot be packaged are all the mistakes, hesitations, and long periods of not knowing what one is doing in the process through which that skill was formed. Even less packageable is this: when a person realizes that what they once believed may no longer hold true, they choose to say it publicly, instead of pretending nothing has happened. This article is such a public statement. At least for now.