The Big Break

"What's a fantastic restaurant around here?" is the first question I don't ask someone on a strict, lifelong diet.

"What will we do with our lives, Sam, Elon, Dario?"

Likewise, clever as they are.

These AI company chiefs understandably feel compelled to answer. Use the magnificent tools (or be outmoded by those who do). Prepare for abundance (following a perhaps only brief spell of destitution). Geoffrey Hinton tells us to become plumbers.

Anyone else got an idea?

Another Crisis of Leisure!

It's hard not to look with pity on those innocents like myself, on the eve of technological revolution, projecting another crisis of excess leisure. Excuse me, have you met the human race?

If you don't need convincing human labor is really a goner this time, skip to The Meaning of Life.

Previous tech revolutions obviated some part of human toil. Tractors, etc. Though even early computers were provably universal computation machines, like our own brains, we've taken awhile realizing the algorithms and architectures to bring their latent universality to full service.

Now I bet we can agree, looking at the trajectory of AI over the last two years, and the remarkable trajectory of AI agents over the last two months, that sometime in the next thousand years, if not sooner (I'm taking the under on five years), AI will be fit for any cognitive labor, and, embodied in robots, any physical labor.

Companies, unless compelled, won't pay people to do what AI and robots can do as well for less. Corporate profits will balloon, then shrink, as unpaid people make slack consumers. Regulation, legislation, we can suppose will lag the urgency. Besides, the context in which these considerations make sense, the economy as we know it, will disappear.

From the foothill precipice on which we've hunkered these centuries, we can expect a great fall.

Finally, we can ascend the mountain!

I'll leave the picks and crampons—universal basic income, basic equity, etc—to more down-to-earth types, and situate myself cross-legged on a ledge just shy of the peak.

The Meaning of Life

What about people deriving meaning and identity from work?

If you don't need convincing that even the best employment is unsuited to human beings, skip to What to Do with Ourselves?

Like all writers but three or four, I have a day job. Like yours, mine is an especially good one, with lovely, intelligent colleagues. Is it ideal? Is our top prospect after many well-deserved promotions the ideal tool for dispatching our life?

The odds approach zero, if only because jobs don't evolve under the selection pressure of the employee's satisfaction. The pressures are, rather, the satisfaction of the customer, enrichment of the shareholder, current state of technology and theories of organizational structure, availability of focus-enhancing compounds, and other factors orthogonal to the the gratification of the job's performer.

We may have been lucky enough to have our pick from the buffet, but it's a buffet pleasing human tastebuds only here and there by chance, with dozens of tasteless, brownish clots for each coincidental cookie.

There are, for instance, few jobs done a century ago we don't now see as fitter for simple machinery than the waking life of a fellow being.

In our darker moments, if not every moment, we feel a shadow of that pity fall on ourselves from the future in which our present jobs will be the province of simple machinery.

Now we feel that future leaping ahead in line.

People, humans, fellow flashes of sentience the universe took 14 billion years and trillions of stars to produce a fleeting trace of, let's not screw this up again.

If we derive meaning and identity from work, that's a moving testament to the human capacity to find meaning.

So what to do when the job goes? I think we know: fall into vast, roiling social media rabbit holes, video games, shows, porn, VR headsets, neural implants directly wanking our receptors. On the healthier side, we'll muster some hobbies, learn a new skill we might admit we'd have learned by now had we really had the passion for it.

Along with work, these trifling antidotes will go. Having closely coevolved with human labor, they're unfit as zoo-born pandas to be set loose in the proper human wilds.

Which are?

What to Do with Ourselves?

Is there really a world, as deluded leisure prognosticators of past ages, along with today's starry tech lords, would try to tell you, where people wake up and rush happily off to do what they care most passionately about all day, before gathering with like-minded souls for a convivial evening, exchanging dreams, ideas, discovering and deepening relationships that will immeasurable enrich the rest of life?

Yes, and I've been there many times. It's called an art residency.

These tend to be only month-long engagements, some more rustic than others, providing studio and living space, often meals, sometimes funding, to artists admitted by a competitive application process. I can attest to the strange sight of everyone absolutely packing off to their studio each day with relish, and returning strangely devoid of the feeling that a day of what wasn't quite their one true life has passed. A day of their true life has passed, and now let's have dinner. Most of my best friends I've met at residencies, including my wife.

Lucky me. Lucky writer of this to belong to that elite race of beings handed a consuming passion and the talent to pursue it, while the mass of humanity needs someone to assign them arbitrary tasks to keep them grounded in the world.

Does that sound right?

If there's a limiting factor to artistic inclination, I suspect it's not a widespread lack of curiosity, creativity, or anything else so obviously the defining characteristic of humanity, but rather the capacity for loneliness.

You may gather at dinner, but you had been at it alone all day in the studio. Most people, healthily, prefer to pursue a goal or passion in concert with others. And most people, I suspect, can, and would tend toward a more individual, characteristic, self-guided pursuit with practice.

Either way, that sounds like a pretty small alteration in the residency format to me.

In short, that the art residency is fit for artists but not the greater dull run of humans betrays a contempt for the fellow person, a bigotry, we won't tolerate here in paradise, sir.

Balaji Srinavasan's recent, thriving Network State School off the coast of Singapore is exactly an art residency for people who don't happen to be practicing artists.

Everyone alas has the curiosity, imagination, and spiritual vim to spend far more than the years they have in wrapt pursuit and exploration. These things, may, at the moment, lie under some layers of crust.

"What's a good restaurant around here?"

We at least know who to ask.

Not AI executives, economists, or others who've never lived outside the dietary experiments of the metabolic ward. Ask the artists.

So How to Get There?

Now, on my ledge, I start sweating and take the opportunity to point out some fine cloud formations billowing up over the peak.

But, in fact, looking at the clouds, falling into their slow, majestic evolutions, not instantly assigning them a shape or meaning (lingering in the zone of presignification, in Douglas Rushkoff's words), might be the start.

Whether and how we change our living arrangements we can put off awhile. For now, we can happily summon an acronym:

AIR! (artists in residence) and:

• Attend: to what's hidden behind the screens of work and its antidotes
• Immerse: in society, rather than mere civilization
• Recoil: from our forced embrace of counterfeit wealth

Attend!

Living in society, rather than a civilization more or less devoid of society, as our current one, demands jettisoning the deranged amusements created by business to monetize and standardize those enervated by business—us.

The person who today resists looking at their phone for the eternity during which their companion goes to the restaurant bathroom, which I admit I myself find almost physically painful, will see parts of the world, of human experience, almost no one has seen in a decade.

Our life and opportunity being so hugely a function of our perception, the compass of which will so hugely expand with the removal of what blocks it all day, or narrowly trains it on something alien to our passions—that is, work and its meager antidotes—we must prepare to take in the waves of opportunity and delight, and avoid the algorithmic riptide our present habits of perception will otherwise drag us off in.

Immerse!

Distasteful as it may seem, I tend to agree with the sugar-coating tech lords that material abundance, via technology, is not on the verge of bucking the trend of the last two centuries, and that despite the passing tumble from our relative maximum of steady employment, we are in the next fifteen years headed toward a state of unaccustomed abundance.

Whether we reorganize society into kibbutzes and farming communes, or high-end resorts populated by our friends and families, or simply build more affordable housing and stay put, the AIR program calls for a migration back into society.

I've taken the rash baby step of inviting everyone in my social circle, if I may stretch the term, to a routine weekly hangout at Westkill Brewery here on Broadway—no planning, no sweat if you can't make it any given week. As with day-end at the art residency, society is better when not the product of weeks' coordination and missed signals, but a given, as in Seinfeld, Friends, Cheers, and any such warm bath of the spirit.

Recoil!

I'm not proud to have somehow become a person in thrall to money and its symbols. I wear fancy watches. It will be an adjustment to embrace a world in which money can't confer status, and no superiority of intellectual or entrepreneurial fizz could possibly exalt me over anyone else. Machine excellence at remunerative tasks will render today's workplace titan and slouch more or less indistinguishable.

Happily, after a day or two as an artist in residence, I find my sense of status shifting to accommodate the environment. The watch stays abashed in the drawer. Do our rankings not just shift then from who's the best in business to who's the best in art?

There is that, but it's a small, and not altogether unwelcome component, and not so easily quantified. If we can't escape status games, we can take heart in the reflection that our passion for superiority, so integral to human nature, and ignored at society's peril (see communism), did not develop on Madison Avenue, but over millennia of primate and human tribal society far more like the art residency than the corporation or atomic suburban existence. LVMH has to advertise constantly to keep its artificially implanted symbols alive in hostile soil.

If you've ever felt the serene cool of awaiting a friend in an elegant hotel cafe, in your best linen shirt, hair just right, legs debonairly crossed, lording over the twinkle of downtown Manhattan, as well you should, and then compare it to the feeling you have once your friend arrives and you've made her laugh, you readily see where things stand with us creatures.

From Artificial Intelligence, Natural Employment

If AI relieves us of the opportunity to misspend our lives in the accustomed way, and offers every opportunity to misspend it in novel ways, it can also be a harmonious partner in life after employment, or the life of natural employment.

For one inspiring instance, see Adam B. Levine's Midnight Protocol experiment. (Update: it appears to be defunct.)

I'm cooking up my own, not as good, AI-assisted experiment in human togetherness. Anyone else have an idea?

(Update: it is as good. It's called Groucho—custom art-residency-inspired real-world third places for those on a real-world schedule. Tap here, after reading the next two sentences, to come and meet your people.)

School is letting out, after these fruitful and fretful centuries at the desk, ready or not.

I'm hoping to see you at summer camp.