Partial Replacement of the Human Brain by ChatGPT and Prospects for New Industrial Development Frontiers: An Economic Analysis Based on the AI Driven Technological Upgrades
He Da’an
Modern Commerce and Trade Research Center/School of Economics, Zhejiang Gongshang University, Hangzhou 310018, China
Abstract：Generative AI is enabling human being to transcend the limitations of the biologically-evolved constraints of egocentrism and poor cooperative instincts, progressively advancing toward substituting humanity’s primitive brain, emotional brain, and rational brain. This substitution signifies that advancements and paradigm shifts in artificial intelligence technology are not only influencing the decision-making processes of enterprises and governments and reshaping the digital technology ecosystem, but also giving rise to new opportunities for the industrial development. The impact of AI-driven technological upgrades on enterprise and government decision-making is primarily reflected in the relative changes in the marginal productivity of enterprises, their ability to forecast markets, and relative evolutions of governments’ data governance capabilities. The extent to which this impact will broaden new industrial development frontiers can be discussed prospectively through cases like ChatGPT’s partial substitution of human cognitive labor.This discussion will address the interconnectedness of digital technology advances, digital technology ecosystems, and new frontiers for industrial development. (1) It is necessary to explain the correlation mechanism between digital technology advancements and the digital economy ecosystem by employing the evolving technical layers and development trends of the digital technology ecosystem as its framework. It examines both the horizontal and vertical dimensions of the ecosystem’s development, as well as the short-term and long-term effects of digital technology upgrades. (2) With reference to the realistic technological composition of ChatGPT as a partial substitute for the human brain, and based on the technical process by which generative AI collects, trains, optimizes big data to assist in corporate investment and operational activities and government macroeconomic regulation, it analyzes the mechanistic composition of ChatGPT’s partial substitution of the human brain. (3) Regarding the analysis and explanation of how ChatGPT will broaden new industrial development frontiers, as well as the background, stages, and paths generated therefrom, an attempt should be made to theoretically frame the practical processes of digital industrialization and industrial digitalization as a dynamic interplay of algorithms, computing power, and data. Thus, the future development of AGI will be used as the basis for analyzing digital industrialization, and the low, medium, and high tier technical capabilities in mining, collecting, processing, and handling big data will be used as the basis for analyzing industrial digitalization, in order to summarize the different stages and their inherent paths through which AI technology upgrades broaden new industrial development spaces.This paper places “AI technology upgrades” within the overall framework of digital economic operation for research, representing a worthwhile attempt at theoretical level. This is not only because it can provide a feasible approach for our further research on fundamental economic issues such as enterprise operation and industrial organization changes in the context of ubiquitous intelligence, but more importantly, such a theoretical attempt reflects that AI technological advancement remains the main thread of digital economic operation.
何大安. ChatGPT局部替代人脑与产业发展新空间前瞻[J]. 浙江大学学报(人文社会科学版), 2025, 55(4): 5-18.
He Da’an. Partial Replacement of the Human Brain by ChatGPT and Prospects for New Industrial Development Frontiers: An Economic Analysis Based on the AI Driven Technological Upgrades. JOURNAL OF ZHEJIANG UNIVERSITY, 2025, 55(4): 5-18.
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