We Already Know

Everybody is wondering what our lives will mean if AI ends up doing everything and we all live on some kind of universal income. Where will people find purpose? What will get anyone out of bed? I think we already know exactly what that would look like.

Machines can make goods and services until the price approaches zero. What they cannot make is anything defined by comparison. Prestige is a ranking. Popularity is a ranking. Greatness is a ranking. Being loved — chosen, out of everyone, by a person who could have chosen otherwise — is the strictest ranking of all. Production cannot be increased.

And we already know what that scenario looks like, because small groups of people have lived there for centuries. Look at the upper classes of any society, any era. You will find jealousy, ambition, feuds, ruinous love affairs, and boredom. You'll find soaring ambition aplenty. You'll find tireless workers on crusades. You'll find idleness. You'll find the full spectrum of human activity.

I find this reassuring, in two directions. It makes the abundant future easier to believe, because it stops asking me to believe in paradise and asks only that one department of human want might get solve: the material one. We could solve scarcity of goods and services the same way we solved smallpox. Bounded things actually happen. Framed this way, it doesn't sound so farfetched.

And if it doesn't sound so farfetched, perhaps that means there really is a path. That we will find a way to effectively and with relative fairness distribute the abundance that will hopefully be coming soon our way.

So if that comes to pass the lives of our grandchildren won't be empty, and they won't be at peace either. They'll still lie awake wanting — to be somebody, to earn the respect of people they respect, and most of all to be loved. There will still be tests and trials and tribulations. Our relationship with life will feel much the same, for good or bad, but poverty will just be one problem among many that we solved and relegated to the past, a historical condition of our ancestors that we read about with astonishment and dismay.