With the increasing proportion of service industry and service consumption, there will be some new trends in economic and social development in the post-industrialization era.

First, changes in employment structure and vocational skills. At the manufacturing stage, people work with machines, so simple training can get a junior high school worker to work on a factory assembly line. But in the post-industrial world, a lot of jobs are in the service sector, and people have to deal with people.

At the same time, machine, big data, artificial intelligence and other technological advances have occurred, and the assembly-line work in the manufacturing industry has been replaced by artificial intelligence and machines in large numbers. However, in the service industry, some jobs are hard to be replaced by artificial intelligence and machines because they are personalized. On the contrary, they are hard to be replaced by artificial intelligence and machines. They also create a lot of new jobs in the service industry, such as deliverymen, couriers, and ride-hailing drivers. When work is service-oriented, it needs more skills to deal with people, including the ability to express and treat people, which can not be replaced by artificial intelligence and machines.

Our school education should get rid of the inculcation of knowledge and memory, and pay more attention to the training of social skills. Vocational education, on the other hand, should focus on social skills (such as presentation) as well as on general skills (such as data analysis) to cope with an era of accelerating change.

Second, social governance needs more and more personalized needs. Because when the demand for services increases substantially, it is difficult for the top-down administrative system to understand people’s needs. The information from the demand side is extremely personalized, and changes with time and place, which is extremely complex. Here, the importance of the community will become stronger and stronger, because in the geographical space of the community, residents’ income, education, culture and other backgrounds are relatively homogeneous, and they also have more common interests. At this time, the grass-roots organizations of the community are more able to respond to the individualized needs of the residents in a timely manner.

At the same time, community residents’ mutual assistance and autonomy can complement grassroots organizations to jointly respond to residents’ individual needs. For example, community group-buying and wechat groups are playing such a role. Post-industrial communities will return to our lives. In the industrial age, people knew their colleagues but not their neighbors. This is not the future of a good life.

Third, the whole logic of industrial policy will change, and the industrial policy of direct government intervention will face challenges. In the industrial era, the government was most familiar with the industrial policy is to set standards, enterprises to do according to the standards, do successful government subsidies. But this logic has a very important premise, is that the manufacturing stage of the product is standardized and scale, and can know in advance what kind of manufacturing products are good.

This logic has changed in the service-oriented stage. On the one hand, the service industry is niche, personalized and non-standardized. On the other hand, you don’t know what good service is beforehand, and even if you do, what you think is good isn’t necessarily the same as what I think is good. For example, what is a good movie, good design, you think good, I don’t necessarily like. Therefore, in such an era, the functions of government and the logic of industrial policy will undergo fundamental changes.

Let me give you an example. In my recent research on the platform economy, I found that local governments want them to study together what “digital talents” are. The logic is that once the digital talents are defined, they can formulate corresponding policies to attract relevant talents, such as incentives for household registration and public housing.

The question is what is “digital talent”? People agree that programmers must be digital talents, but live streamers are not digital talents, I’m afraid there will be disagreement. E-commerce platforms tell me that what they need most are powerpoint presentations to investors and clients on Nanjing West Road, which might not normally be considered “digital talent”.

But one thing is for sure, with the development of artificial intelligence and the advent of ChatGPT, it’s easy to replace junior programmers, and it’s hard to replace streamers. Such is the nature of the post-industrial era that it has become increasingly difficult for policymakers to understand the trends of the future and the talents and industries needed.