- AI Will Not Eat You

Whether you have sought it out or not, I imagine you have seen plenty of "AI bloggers selling courses online." The most common narrative is, "This is the era of AI. If you don't learn now, you will be left behind," as if the world will end tomorrow if you don't buy their course today. Does this feel at all familiar to you, the reader?

Let's try this: "Don't let your child lose at the starting line." "First grade is the most important year." "If they fall behind in second grade, they'll never catch up." (Please mentally fill in the rest for third through sixth grade.) "The transition to middle school is a crucial moment in life." (Please continue to fill this in all the way to the college entrance exams.) Once in college, you'll be asked, "How can you sleep at your age?" And after starting work, someone else will say, "If you don't learn how to use AI, you're finished!"

Wow. Cool.

This article is an extension of the previous one, "The Next Step in Education." I encourage you to patiently read the first piece before continuing with this one.

The Funnel Rule

The first piece of information I want to share with you is a fundamental marketing strategy: Open with emotion, narrow cognition, and open the wallet.

"Emotion Roulette", a wheel lists a large number of words describing emotions and feelings, both positive and negative. While these emotions manifest differently, they share a common characteristic: they narrow our cognition.

Psychologically speaking, our emotional state is closely linked to our cognitive ability. When we are in a state of intense emotion, whether it be fear, anxiety, excitement, or hope, the activity in our brain's prefrontal cortex changes significantly. The prefrontal cortex is responsible for executive functions, including rational analysis, long-term planning, and impulse control. When emotions run high, these functions are partially inhibited.

Imagine you are scrolling through your phone out of boredom when an ad pops up in your notifications: "Your competitors have already mastered a brand-new technology. You may be at risk of being eliminated." This might immediately trigger anxiety or fear. At this moment, your brain has entered a "fight or flight" state of cognitive narrowing. You are no longer thinking comprehensively but are instinctively focusing on the threat and a possible solution, rather than rationally considering whether this person is just bluffing.

At that point, the ad offers you a panacea: "An AI course that will benefit you for life," complete with a "limited-time discount code." A friend with weaker mental defenses might skip the "competitor research" phase and "rush to buy."

This strategy is effective precisely because, in an emotionally charged state, we lose our ability to make comprehensive comparisons and rational analyses. We are more likely to grasp at the "lifeline" presented to us.

In fact, quite a few people make a living with this tactic. Some sell a kind of "inner peace," while others sell a "fantasy of a better life." A more insidious approach is to directly sell anxiety. "Mr. Teacher, can you make this part a bit more anxiety-inducing?" is a very common marketing request in the fields of knowledge and education.

Simply listening to someone speak with "impassioned rhetoric" or a "heart-to-heart" tone is usually not helpful. This is because a certain pinnacle of marketing is reached when you not only convince the customer that you have a "treasure that will exceed their expectations" but also make the people packaging the product deeply believe in its supreme value. This creates an information space "filled with emotion and faith," where, as you can understand, rational analysis has almost no place. It is as inappropriate as debating science in a place of worship.

Of course, this is not entirely a bad thing. The narrowing effect of emotion on cognition is not, in itself, morally charged. When we criticize consumerism and anxiety-peddling marketing narratives, we are warning against the instrumentalization of this mental vulnerability. It would be unwise to completely reject all consumer advice. In fields with high professional knowledge barriers, such as medicine, law, or cutting-edge technology, we may lack the cognitive tools to break down the problem. In these situations, we need to rely on the professional judgment, altruism, and goodwill of others.

The core issue here is not emotion itself, but whether we are consciously aware of how emotions influence our decisions and whether we can ask the questions that matter to us at critical moments. Especially in decisions involving a significant investment of resources, powering up the prefrontal cortex becomes particularly important. We must carefully examine the arguments buried beneath the emotion. Is the logical chain complete? Is the path from the problem to the conclusion clearly constructed? And then, we must honestly ask ourselves if the problem this product...