分类：Culture & Public Commentary

Hu Yilin: The Digital Identity of the Future Should Not Be a Safer ID Number, but a Rights System of Proof on Demand

Culture & Public Commentary2026.07.06
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 understood simply as a failure of Singapore’s digitalization; on the contrary, Singapore’s recent move to restrict the use of NRIC is worthy of affirmation. What really deserves discussion is the next generation of digital identity systems: in the future, identity verification should no longer rely on a single global number…
technology law identity Singapore
阅读全文

2026年7月6日
The whole world has erupted into a shouting match—what right does a museum have to step in and play peacemaker?

Culture & Public Commentary2026.05.17
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. In this age of mass media, this age of information explosion, this age of the attention economy, the foremost question for information providers is not whether the content can withstand scrutiny from every angle, or whether it can withstand the test of time, or whether the author has deep accumulations,…
culture history commentary tradition
阅读全文

2026年5月17日
Gathering All the Books in the World—Can the Library of Alexandria of the AI Era Endure?

AI & Scholarship2026.04.23
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 to build a magnificent library and Mouseion (an academic institution) in the city of Alexandria. Demetrius proposed the grand vision of “collecting all the books in the world,” and it received the continuing support of the Ptolemaic royal house. The first three Ptolemies carried the project forward one after another,…
scholarship commentary internet knowledge
阅读全文

2026年4月23日
Distribution According to Enjoyment: How to Break the Logic of Involution in the Age of Artificial Intelligence

AI & Scholarship2026.03.30
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. Although at present it still does not seem easy to train a truly labor-replacing “lobster,” the sense of crisis among wage workers is already hitting us head-on. One lovely fantasy might be this: wage workers go on working as usual and collecting their salaries, but hand all the actual labor…
everyday life culture freedom AI
阅读全文

2026年3月30日
Opening Remarks for the Brain-Computer Interface Forum: Interface or Port?

AI & the Future of Technology2025.11.01
Opening Remarks for the Brain-Computer Interface Forum: Interface or Port?
On November 1, 2025, I was invited back to Tsinghua to take part in the third event of the Science and Culture Week, “Me in the Interface: Brain-Computer Interfaces and the Future of Consciousness,” namely the roundtable discussion “Decoding ‘Me’: The Boundaries of Brain-Computer Interfaces and Consciousness.” I served as the academic moderator. In fact, this was probably the first time I had acted as a moderator at a relatively formal event, but I felt I did rather well: I managed both to slip in some of my own private agenda and to let the guests each give full play to their strengths. I am posting here the guiding remarks…
philosophy technology culture media
阅读全文

2025年11月1日
Let Beibei Become Someone Different from Yang Weiwei

AI & Scholarship2025.11.01
Let Beibei Become Someone Different from Yang Weiwei
The report I gave on October 25 at the National Academy of Art, “Human Childhood: The Forum for the Eighth International Cross-Media Arts Festival and the Fifth Sensibility Forum.” This year’s festival took the 1988 film Electric Boy as its starting point. I specially watched Electric Boy and prepared a talk that was as on-topic as possible. Here is the draft: Electric Boy tells the story of a child with extraordinary powers—a child who carries electricity—from being out of place to finally becoming integrated into society. In my personal view, this is a tragedy, because in the plot Beibei is gradually recognized by others only by doing good deeds and…
technology culture China freedom
阅读全文

2025年11月1日
How Science Museums in China Can Innovate by Bringing Forth the New

Culture & Public Commentary2025.09.12
How Science Museums in China Can Innovate by Bringing Forth the New
Published in Science Times (2025-08-28, p. 3, general), with the title changed to “The first users of science museums should not be teenagers, but scholars” In this summer vacation, which is about to end, science museums have joined the ranks of the many must-check-in tourist destinations. For parents, if they want their children to take part in some edutainment-oriented activities, science museums are obviously one of the best choices. In recent years, our country has continuously increased investment in science museum construction. According to Xinhua News Agency, the number of science museums open free of charge in China increased from 92 in 2015 to 409 in 2024, with an average…
China science history of science scholarship
阅读全文

2025年9月12日
In the Digital Age, How Do We Win the “Battle to Defend Childhood”

AI & Scholarship2025.06.01
In the Digital Age, How Do We Win the “Battle to Defend Childhood”
Published in China Science Daily (2025-05-30, p. 4, Culture). The original draft title was “How to Protect Childhood in the Digital Age”; this is a reprint of the published version. International Children’s Day on June 1 is approaching. The holiday was initiated by the Soviet Union, originally to commemorate the children persecuted in the Lidice massacre of June 1942; later it became “International Day for the Protection of Children,” aimed at protecting children’s rights to survival, health care, and education, and at opposing the hiring of child labor. As for the right to survival and the right to health care, adults ought to have those too. What is truly special…
culture book reading media education
阅读全文

2025年6月1日
Museums in a Changing Society

Culture & Public Commentary2025.05.19
Museums in a Changing Society
An assignment from 中国科学报; the WeChat article was retitled “Where Are Museums, Born Out of the ‘Temple of the Muses’ and the ‘Cabinet of Curiosities,’ Heading in the Digital Age?” It should have been polished, so I am posting the original draft here. What is a “museum”? If we trace the history back, the concept of the museum and the social role it plays have never been fixed; they have continuously changed along with society. This was true in the past, and it is even more true in the future: in this rapidly changing society, museums are giving rise to new meanings. The word museum comes from Alexandria in the…
culture history of science history Aristotle
阅读全文

2025年5月19日
Encrypted Flight Vol. 11 | Will Tsinghua People Who Have Gone Out Dream of a Bitcoin-Standard World? An Interview with Hu Yilin

Culture & Public Commentary2025.04.27
Encrypted Flight Vol. 11 | Will Tsinghua People Who Have Gone Out Dream of a Bitcoin-Standard World? An Interview with Hu Yilin
My most recent long-form interview. Thanks to uncommons @fulihang2009 — it was a delightful conversation, with rich content and excellent editing. Condensed version https://mp.weixin.qq.com/s/2ZQVRTshnxU7tlT5fCESYQ Full version https://blog.uncommons.cc/cryptoflight-v Reporter's note/访者记 If one were to name the thinkers in the Chinese-speaking crypto world and seasoned Bitcoin players, Hu Yilin, who once taught philosophy of technology at Tsinghua University, is a name one cannot avoid. I first met Teacher Hu at the Bitcoin conference in Singapore last March; afterward, on a sweltering afternoon, we arranged to walk around Geylang until our legs nearly gave out, then found a café and talked about everything under the sun for two hours. But Bitcoin and, more…
philosophy technology China scholarship
阅读全文

2025年4月27日