Some of this feels like at times a public frenetic grieving process. Some of the rationalizations are fairly tortured, the seeking to place the world in some definite order is bordering on obsessive.

We don’t know where this technology advance will lead or settle, so it’s absurd to try to establish a working paradigm at this point. It’s like any system, the initial conditions can be extremely chaotic and impossible to model, but with time often a stable state emerges. But the stable state is impossible to identify from early initial states.

I know a lot of folks feel this, to torture other physics metaphors, sensation of jerk - acceleration of acceleration. It’s an unpleasant and dislocating sensation. A world that felt safe and stable suddenly isn’t, and not in a micro tragedy sense but in a global realignment sense. This happened to factory workers who had enjoyed generations of stable work, farmers more slowly and just as surely.

This is what the late stages of scarcity feels like. Labor of various types devalues rapidly. Our exchange of meal and health coupons for toil cracks, and people realize their labor wasn’t godly as great books told us, but simply needed for want of an alternative. The realization that our labors might not be valued any more, and that our sense of purpose is shaken, coupled with the fact we’ve tied bare survival to our toil in our labor, is mortally tightening. No wonder people are grieving publicly.

But maybe our purpose isn’t to toil? Maybe we’ve passed peak population, and as toil is less valuable, we need less people and that’s why population is declining. Maybe we don’t need to exchange food and health coupons for toil, maybe mathematicians don’t need to rationalize their value to pursue mathematics. Maybe they can pursue it because they can’t help but pursue it, and our ever improving automations can produce their meal and health coupons?

But it might require Dr Tao to take an AI generated cancer medicine some day.