A philosopher’s teahouse / yilinhut.net
Writing since 2005: history of science, philosophy of technology, AI, and Web3. The old essays are all here, and new ones keep coming.
Hu Yilin: The Digital Identity of the Future Should Not Be a Safer ID Number, but a Rights System of Proof on Demand
Preface｜ The Singapore Land Authority recently disclosed that a cloud-based development and testing environment managed by IBM was accessed without authorization, exposing the names, NRIC numbers, and then-current property addresses of about 70,000 people. The incident sparked public discussion about digital government, outsourced systems, and the protection of identity data. Scholar Hu Yilin believes that this event should not be…
Stablecoins Are the “Royalists” of the Crypto World: Open USD Lets the Old Monetary System Enter the Arena Itself
Introduction｜The arrival of Open USD shifts stablecoin competition from a scramble for market share among crypto startups to a contest over infrastructure in which traditional finance, payment networks, technology platforms, and public-chain ecosystems all take part together. Around this new alliance involving more than 140 institutions, scholar Hu Yilin argues that stablecoins are not the moderate wing of the crypto…
From the China Zun Incident to AI Governance: Hu Yilin on New Technologies, Safety, and Social Mobility
IntroductionAfter the Beijing CITIC Tower, “China Zun,” was struck by a small aircraft, low-altitude flight safety once again became a public issue. But in the view of technology philosophy researcher Hu Yilin, this accident should not be understood only as a low-altitude economy risk; it should be discussed within a much larger problem: whenever a new technology moves into mass…
The Future Did Not Attend the Project-Approval Meeting: From Unpaid Wastewater Plant Fees to Pre-Sold Apartment Buildings, Hu Yilin Discusses the Monetary Roots of “Afford to Build, but Not to Maintain”
Introductory noteRecently, the operator of the wastewater treatment plant in Gongping Town, Haifeng County, Guangdong, took the Gongping Town government and the Haifeng County Finance Bureau to court, demanding payment of more than 70 million yuan in wastewater treatment fees and late charges accrued through the end of 2025. Caixin reported that this wastewater plant has been in continuous operation…
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From “Speak Mandarin” to “Preserve Dialects”: Singapore’s Language Policy Has Reached the Point of Shifting Gears
Hu Yilin on language policy, the revival of dialects, and the boundaries of freedom IntroductionA Chinese film led mainly in Teochew, Dear You, has recently sparked discussion in Singapore. The film was originally released in Singapore mainly with Mandarin dubbing, but after audiences responded enthusiastically to screenings of the original Teochew version, Golden Village added Teochew showings and continued to…
Stop Asking Whether It Was Written by AI; First Ask Whether It’s Any Good
Hu Yilin on AI Writing, Authorial Responsibility, and the Academic Paper System IntroductionAfter science fiction writer Hao Jingfang spoke about AI’s participation in novel writing, a dispute broke out over whether “AI writing should be labeled” and whether “AI as the chief writer still counts as creation.” What such arguments really touch is not how much AI a particular writer…
Freedom is the root, plurality is the end; one cannot sacrifice freedom in order to protect plurality
The Singapore government recently required YouTube, Facebook, and X to block 14 pieces of online content targeting the Indian community. Singapore’s Ministry of Home Affairs said these posts attacked the Indian community and undermined Singapore’s multiracial social model, and that the relevant content may have originated on Chinese platforms. The police issued directives to the platforms under the Online Criminal…
AI Regulation Must Not Become a New Despotism in the Technological Age
Recently, the U.S. government, citing national security, asked Anthropic to suspend foreign nationals’ access to its frontier large models Fable 5 and Mythos 5. Anthropic then announced that, in order to ensure compliance, it would take both models offline for all users. This incident quickly sent shockwaves through the AI industry: if one country can, on security grounds, suddenly cut…
Universities that prohibit students from using AI to write papers should be dissolved immediately
It’s graduation season again, and recently many universities in China have acquired a new task: checking AI-generation rates. Rules like “if AI-generated content (AIGC rate) exceeds 40%, you cannot graduate” are simply hilarious; they show how helpless some universities are in the age of AI. I believe that any university that stipulates that using AI means you cannot graduate can…
The whole world has erupted into a shouting match—what right does a museum have to step in and play peacemaker?
Published in Science Times (2026-05-15, p. 4, Culture); here is the original draft. You may be scrolling on your phone at this very moment, have seen this astonishing title, and clicked in to have a look. If you saw this article in the printed newspaper, that is quite rare, but even then you must have first noticed these eye-catching headlines….
If Scholars Don’t Use AI, That Counts as Academic Corruption
AI’s New Advances At the end of last year, at someone’s request, I wrote a piece, Will AI Restructure the History of Science?. That happened to coincide with the release of gemini 3.0, and I thought it marked a watershed, the point at which AI moved from the level of a student to the level of a professional researcher. Less…
Gathering All the Books in the World—Can the Library of Alexandria of the AI Era Endure?
This article was published in China Science Daily (2026-04-23, p. 3, General), with the title changed to AI Can Now Read “All the Books in the World”; Do Humans Still Need to Read Books?. It was edited down and divided into sections at publication; the original draft is posted here: Around 295 BCE, Ptolemy I commissioned the Greek scholar Demetrius…
Distribution According to Enjoyment: How to Break the Logic of Involution in the Age of Artificial Intelligence
The Cycle of Involution and Unemployment Could We Really Work Only Two Days a Week? As artificial intelligence keeps iterating, a new wave of “raising lobsters” (OpenClaw) has recently swept in: we can give AI permissions, let it act on its own, operate computers like a human, scrape data, write papers, build websites, make trades—there is nothing it cannot do….
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