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An unorthodox guide for a post-AI world.
Half my social media timeline is “you are going to be obsolete any day now” and half is “you are going to be dead any day now.” Not sure which fate I prefer: to see the rock roll over my limp body or to watch it roll up the hill by itself?
But I do know something.
I’m not alone in wondering whether there is anything I can do to secure a reasonably tranquil rest of my life (whether that is another forty years or four weeks). Below are some candid thoughts neither ordered nor fully coherent.
First thing is to stop reading people whose whole identity is thinking about 2030.
Those who want the thing “the sooner the better” or those who’d rather kill themselves are both bad guides. Whether they are right or not—irrelevant—they can’t help you. Their currency is your anxiety. They think they’re helping, but of what help is it to tell an ant that a boot is about to crush it against the ground?
If the future is jobless, you don’t want to strain yourself for that; if it’s unpredictable, you don’t want to think about that; if it’s a human genocide, you don’t want to partake in that. Start searching for your own meaning or come laugh at the meaninglessness of existence. Your call.
History can scream; you have a life to live.
“Plan for AGI” is not a plan. How do you prepare? Learn Python? Neuralese perhaps? Buy land? Where. Have children quickly? (Don’t have children at all?) How could I bring a new life into a world where it won’t even have the opportunity to become the best chess player in history? That’s immoral. Become a plumber? I’ve seen Manchester by the Sea. Become a GPU? I’ve seen The Matrix.
The best standard advice eventually degenerates into the habits of your average conscientious middle-class adult: save money, stay healthy, be kind to your neighbors, don’t become useless meat without the internet (they are with the internet), find something you love and pursue it obsessively. Etc. Etc.
Audendo virtus crescit, tardando timor.
You can also hit the barbells: either go all in on AI or assume that “nothing ever happens.” Or do them both in alternate weeks—they are good advice.
To be honest, you should not need this post at all, but I have the suspicion that you guys are solving the wrong problem. You keep asking how to remain “economically valuable” in a world soon-to-be populated with superhuman machines. Why? You will not care about money, either because it will be worth nothing or because the elites have figured out how to redistribute the robot tax into the underclass.
There is no in-between because no system, however robust it might appear, survives having its entire population lose its stake in it.
But, but the transition…
There is no transition—this is the transition!
Insofar as the transition could be prolonged by geopolitical or economic factors, the answer is what I already said above: the less time you spend listening to AI gurus, the better prepared you are to deal with a delayed takeoff because those quirky cult-prone dudes are often nerds, autists and overall people with poor people skills.
The last remnants of humanity to fall to the machine will be those that resemble a high-school lunch break or, conversely, 18th-century Versailles, both of which are absolute hell on Earth for the computer types.
What you actually need—whatever happens—is to remain interested.
This is more difficult. With or without AI, it is difficult. A machine can take your job tomorrow and you will find yourself somewhere else; boredom is forever. People often say you need to find your own meaning—e.g., me, above, ten paragraphs ago—but this is a category error. Meaning is an object in search of a subject. You.
There are no interesting things; there are only interested people.
You found all your meaning at work? (Doubt it.) Ok, then you will have to revisit your self-image. As I see it, there are worse outcomes than being obsolete. I know several obsolete technologies I’m extremely fond of. Fire. Parchment. Crossbows. Math (ouch). As a wise anonymous random sage once said, “there’s a perfect correlation between people worried about loss of meaning from automation and people who never cook for themselves.” Yeah: pick a pot.
What about you?
Me? I want a house. A big cottage in the Swiss countryside if possible, but failing that, I’ll settle for any house anywhere. This desire somehow survives every version of the future I can imagine. AGI: house. No AGI: house. AI winter: house. Ten years of 25% GDP: somehow, still, house. Kardashev level three? You guessed it: a galactic-themed house somewhere beyond the Andromedan plains.
My problems are pretty mundane, you see, so maybe my solutions are, too. A related thought: perhaps I should own more things that exist in Euclidean space. You know who will not be made obsolete by AI? Stamp collectors. No further comment.
I used to think that the sensible reaction to AI was to become better at the things AI could not do. That lasted four years after my birth in 1993. This now strikes me as an exhausting way to live. Every six months the fence moves. Coding? Gone. Mathemathing? Gone-ish. Writing? (Never, of course.) The point is: I don’t want my hobbies chosen by binary classifiers.
I can do whatever I wish.
What should get through to that thick non-silicon skull of yours is that there’s no “better vs. worse” dimension in the future. Hierarchy is a non-concept among pets. Humans defining ourselves by that was the mistake we made all along. What does a better “chill afternoon with the pals” even mean? It’s when you don’t obsess over how good the kiss is that you really learn how to give a good one.
So the obvious hedge is, again, other people.
This solution sounds suspiciously wholesome for a story about death and obsolescence and the end of purpose, so let me make it less so: machines will write better than I do, even if it looks less likely by the day, BUT my girlfriend is unlikely to replace me because Claude suddenly knows how to crack a deadpan joke. The local market for being Alberto remains pleasingly uncompetitive.
It’s in this sense that I advise: the only jobs that are intrinsically safe are those where the relationship between the people involved is the most valuable aspect. Nurture your tribe. You and me. Here. We are irreplaceable, my friend. People ask me all the time why I’m not scared of AI and the reason is that there is nothing AI can do to replace our memories together.
What makes you you? That.
So be interested.
And be interesting.
There is also the possibility that none of this happens at all.
I’m only writing this because my timeline won’t shut the hell up. But they may as well be wrong and Gary Marcus be vindicated. I would find it extremely funny for those thirty-something millennials to reach retirement age having spent thirty years emotionally preparing for impending posthumanity.
“Dad, what did you do in your thirties?”
“Mostly refreshed ai-2027.”
As advice for the younger readers out there, I return to manual competence precisely because I have none. Cooking (well). Fixing things or making them from scratch. Knowing what the fuse box does; knowing what a fuse box is. Recognizing a tree or witnessing it paint the day green with all its leaves. Plumbing is actually fine.
These are not AI-proof skills in any meaningful sense but I think you could use fewer layers between action and consequence. In this sense a post-AI life rhymes with a pre-technology life. We’ve come full circle. We’ve spent some 10,000 years adding layers between ourselves and the world and AI will cut right through all of them.
But if you remain unconvinced and don’t want to think much about these advices, the best argument I have for you is plainly empirical: look around.
Today is made of carbonated beverages, carbon-eating plants, carbohydrates and hydrocarbons, and a favorite between the ages of 0 and 33: carbonara spaghetti. Just like the world of yesterday. Meanwhile, the singularity somehow remains a perpetually imminent eschaton. So, to hell with silicon, it has a long way to go.
I don’t know what survives AGI. But I know today I don’t really care. Tomorrow-me asks the same question. If nothing relevant has changed—and given what I’ve said, I doubt it—tomorrow-me reaches the same answer. Then the same is true of the next tomorrow. I call this recursive self-contentment.
"reach retirement age having spent thirty years emotionally preparing for impending posthumanity"
They would be not be the first group of people to have done that. Far from it.
"There is no transition—this is the transition!"
I awakened this morning and made coffee, then picked up the keyboard to check my news feed.
Before it even opened, I thought to myself "it doesn't matter how destructive AI is or will be, nor how much friction is applied to its development and deployment; there is money and power in death, and the oligarchic pattern is always utilitarian regarding the cost of imposed consequence. Fast or slow, the killing will continue, so make your life meaningful right this moment."
And then I check my e-mail after the third cup of coffee and here's Mr. Romero's post.
Of course, I do have the advantage of having already been momentarily dead a few years ago, albeit no more "brain dead" than I've ever been; they resuscitated me. Knowing that cardiac arrest and complete respiratory collapse (the first step of being dead) doesn't hurt, changes one's perspective, or probably should.
Yes, we must remain interested, involved and engaged, but a civilian in wartime becomes collateral damage by a roll of the dice.
The tech bros may or may not actively seek the death of others, so the default approach has to be that they simply don't care; it's probably nothing personal. That attitude is supported by the entire tech business model and the choice architecture of everyone who has ever invested in it, including those whose passive investing strategy has one dollar of their portfolio in tech-related instruments.
"Don't forget to live" is good advice; life is as Hobbes described; solitary, poor, nasty brutish and short" for the mass of men who, as Thoreau described "lead lives of quiet desperation."
As Mr. Romero points out so accurately and concisely; it is our humanity from which we derive meaning, in all of its various forms of expression.
Regard meditatively, the raindrop on a leaf, but don't forget to perform and acknowledge those little everyday acts of human kindness and conviviality.
.....but it doesn't hurt to look for one's own version of Walden Pond; just make it a meaningful search that sustains your spirit.