You’re worried that, sooner or later, AI will replace you and you will be unemployed (and eventually even become unemployable). How will you be able to provide for your family, then? What will you do when they tell you that you will never find a job again because all jobs have been handed over to machines? You don’t know.
Sometimes, you allow your mind to drift and visit the future, where humans are not required to produce anything anymore because everything is produced by the Great Machine. You find it easy to imagine a world without work, where artificial intelligence (with its fifty trillion tentacles) does all the work. But somehow you find it very hard to imagine a role humans can play in that world. No, you cannot think up one important role they can play.
Your mind hovers over the cities of the future like an all-seeing invisible eye looking for humans. In some cities, there are no humans at all. In other cities, humans are there, but their roles are obsolete, and they just hang about idly waiting for something to happen to them. Yet, here and there, there is a city or two in which you detect higher human activity. But what are they all doing? Eating, drinking, and playing all the time. Some of them are making handmade bracelets while others are painting. A lot of them are sunbathing. A few of them are reading books. But what are they really doing? They seem to be waiting… waiting for you to give them ideas.
Now, you think: When this happens, I may not need to worry about providing for my family because, very likely, we’d have entered a post-scarcity world, where there’s absolutely everything abundantly for absolutely everyone. (That is the best case scenario, after all, isn’t it?)
“A job is not simply a source of income but of meaning, purpose, and direction in life as well,” Daniel Susskind writes in A World Without Work. What he says may not be undoubtedly true, but that is how you (and everybody else) have been programmed. Susskind writes, “In a world with less work, we will face a problem that has little to do with economics at all: how to find meaning in life when a major source of it disappears.” And then he quotes Keynes who says, “There is no country and no people, I think, who can look forward to the age of leisure and abundance without a dread. For we have been trained too long to strive and not to enjoy.”
When there’s no more work, what will you do? Who will you become?
Something tells you that gaming will replace work for most people. These individuals will plug themselves into an open-world game where simulations of work keep everyone busy…
And then, there will be others who prefer leisure, who will eat, sleep, and consume slop, and slowly drown in the infinite ocean of simulacra and simulation…
But nothing is inevitable yet. Not yet.
Bored Absurdist 