- Essays··8 min read
What a Person-Time Cannot Tell a Courier
China's AI reskilling target — 50 million subsidised training person-times by 2030 — rests on a unit that counts seats filled, not workers transformed. This essay examines why 人次 cannot show whether any displaced worker found stable employment at better pay, a defect JD.com's Nirvana Plan for 700,000 couriers inherits unchanged. The sole instrument that could honestly answer the question is already in place: a pension contribution ledger read at 36 months.
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China's Bank-AI Push Forgot the Middle
China's largest banks are automating the base of their workforce (branch tellers, credit clerks, back-office processors) while importing senior AI PhDs for the apex and eliminating the middle tier entirely. A Hangzhou court ruling in April 2026 drew the first legal line against pure AI substitution; the more serious reckoning arrives when the next credit cycle exposes the judgement gap left by the hollowing. The reskilling pathway that would close it does not yet exist.
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Cutting the apprentices to pay for the autopilot
Profitable firms are cutting staff to fund AI capex they cannot yet show pays off, and freezing the junior hiring that manufactures expertise. Cutting the apprentices to fund the autopilot looks brilliant on a deck and ruinous in a decade.
ai-and-labourdeskillingreskillingtech-layoffsRead - Essays··8 min read
The owners are right. That's the part nobody wants to sit with.
The owners are directionally right that they can run with far fewer people. They are very often wrong about which people, how fast, and what it costs to get there. Those two things are the whole story.
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