We won't "just hang out"

I dunno—I spend a lot of time “just hanging out” with people who aren’t particularly dazzled by work or intellectual pursuits or higher education. I feel like those constitute one set of processes by which people come together and form relationships and, for those of us who are mainly familiar with that set, it can be instructive to seek out communities that form without any of those elements.

One place to look might be ministry or service. Illness, loss, grief, infirmity, death, age, family strains—people require care and people give care regardless of their postgraduate endeavors. Nuns and Jesuits and the like aren’t for everybody—but look to the neediest among us and, in large parts of the world, those sorts of order are the people doing the invisible, unglamorous, uneconomical, “chop wood, carry water” form of devotion and social labor day in and day out. In intimate community even with very difficult (and sometimes ungrateful) members.

Another might be the sort of ad hoc communities that arise in exigency: disaster, forced migration, encampments, solidarity against forces of difficulty.

Unhoused, unemployed, and retired people can provide a particularly illuminating contrast to the pastimes and concerns that animate a working life. A visible minority fill their days with addiction, but a whole lot are complete and interesting people with the full range of human ambitions and desires and fears and joys, and somehow they fill their waking hours with more than just material striving.

Another might be organizations like union halls, advocacy groups, music scenes, circus folk, jugglers, running clubs, political groups…

Kids are great for this too. They do a lot of hanging out, with nothing more than imagination and a drive to self-expression.

Even our hominid ancestors do a pretty good job of hanging out litigating social hierarchy and nurturing one another—no university degree or novel engineering task required…

This argument ignores sexual selection and people's desire for status (the two are closely related). In many respects, many of us already have superabundance, in that our basic physical needs are taken care of. Yet we convince ourselves that's not enough and continue to work.

What is the object of that work, usually? The respect of others, exclusive limited resources like land, and to have highly desirable mates. These three are closely related, and that's probably not an accident. Sexual selection has likely been a powerful force in shaping our psychology.

Spending all day alone watching TikTok is low-status and doesn't get anyone's respect, so I predict that it won't actually be the thing that most people end up doing.

This take seems shortsighted. There's something to be said for doing things because they are enjoyable. People cook for themselves because they enjoy the process, not just the meal. I climb mountains because it makes me feel good -- I wouldn't take a gondola to the top even if it existed. The 100m race is not run by motorcycles.

There's more to life. Perhaps we will value eachother on an even *more* human level, based on how kind and interesting someone is, rather than their economically useful skills and their bank account.

I'm keeping this short but I have more to say to corroborate these points.

If your whole personality is derived from abstract intelligence then you will have little to form relationships with others since AI is better than people at those things.

But there is a whole world of experience outside of abstract intelligence. Go to a zoo, go camping, enjoy food, enjoy art, enjoy sports. All these activities support friendships.

The relationships formed from online forms, open source contribution and IRC won’t be created. But these sort of online mostly relationships were only forged for a couple generations.

I hope your human experience involves more than abstract reasoning and programming and you can connect to others with more visceral human experience than text over the internet.

A lot of these takes saying we're doomed to a Wall-E future seriously underestimate the human spirit I think. The tykes I volunteer teaching code to still want to write the challenging parts themselves, because they like doing hard things and expressing themselves. It doesn't matter that the robots have supposedly taken over that job.

Same as how the tykes I coach wrestling for do it because it's hard and it gives them a way to grow and express themselves. They know they're never going to see a cent from that pursuit.

If an AI singularity starts trying to feed our kids digital heroin I like to think the majority of us will be more inspired than to tell them to quit trying, tie off, and let humanity go gentle into that good night.

I find it so funny when people can't imagine any other perspective of the world than their own. It may be that you only went to university to "grow your capital", but there are a lot of people who enjoy learning purely for the satisfaction of thinking about and understanding new ideas

"University (really all education beyond teaching people to speak) will be pointless because there’s no work to do and because growing your human capital doesn’t change your life outcomes: you get the same UBI whether you’re illiterate or a PhD."

If every did get UBI, I'd imagine there would still be some who'd choose to attend (or teach at) universities for the love of knowledge.

In the same way there would be book clubs, writers' groups, 5-a-side football teams etc etc

> University (really all education beyond teaching people to speak) will be pointless because there’s no work to do and because growing your human capital doesn’t change your life outcomes

I feel sad for people that think education's purpose is completely utilitarian and there's no consideration for "enjoy learning".

Says a lot about how schools perverts what does it mean to "learn"

I personally learn more and create more and generally live a richer social and intellectual life when I have extended periods off work.

I don't think AI directly leads to some kind of post scarcity UBI utopia, but if we did reach a post scarcity UBI utopia, I think life would be much better for many people and not the bleak dystopia the author finds. I don't think needing to go to work is driving most people's social lives; if anything, needing to work all the time is taking away people's social lives and the energy to maintain them.

There is an entire class of people who are uneducated and don't work and have not created any open source projects yet are still able to have friends.

Children, they call them.

There are likely valid points made here, but I think the conclusions are considerably too strongly held. For one thing, it's already clear that humans value the achievements of other humans outside of their pure economic value. We are impressed by the athletic, artistic, and intellectual abilities of other humans, even in fields where we are surpassed by machines or computers. Cars have been faster than humans for a century, but we still value Olympic sprinters. Computers have been superior at chess for decades, but we've all still heard of Magnus Carlsen. AI can now produce art that only the most talented humans could hope to replicate, but most of us aren't particularly interested, because there's no human mind behind it.

So assuming we did somehow manage to create a post-scarcity world, I think people would still want to learn and to improve their skills. And we would still value those skills. There would also still be work to do; work that either people do because they want to, and/or that we don't want computers doing for us. Much of it work that in today's world is undervalued.

In that utopian world, there would also be room for hobbies that could fill some of the human need to produce value that work currently does. Lots of people would love to be able to learn a craft or play a sport but don't currently have the time, money, or energy to do so.

I have plenty of concerns about the impacts of AI on the world, but IF we do somehow manage to get the good outcome where it truly is transformative and the benefits manage to be at least somewhat evenly distributed... well, I agree that we won't all just hang out, but I do think we'd be ok.

This is obviously a bleak take, but it seems obvious to me that it will be happening to some extent because it already is happening in our modern, highly atomised society. We can see how damaged we all are socially, but especially the younger generations, in various statistics.

That's an overly pessimistic take. An optimistic take that deals with some of the points brought up would be that after there is no need to earn money then addictive algorithms and dark patterns to drive user engagement will be successfully made illegal after being recognized as a type of harmful mind altering drug. People will still go to university but they will primarily study the humanities, especially philosophy. Some people will still study the sciences but more out of an interest in understanding some of what the machines are up to. People will still be involved in creating media, literature, performance, etc. right alongside the machine made or machine assisted media and art because people will always want something new. Even with 10 billion channels there will still be nothing on TV worth watching. There will still be the same distribution of motivation, sociability, curiosity and intelligence unless we start engineering those things genetically. People will do things just for fun or because it interests them, they do that now even though the chances of being world class at the thing are slim to none for most. Who cares if you're the 1,000,000th person to build an ultralight airplane and the manufactured ones are 1000x better than what you can build? It's still an interesting experience for you and a lot of fun to fly once it's done. There will probably be many more things to do than there are today because the market for them will be so much bigger. People will think of all kinds of unproductive things to spend time on and talk about. Sharing those experiences with other people will remain as relevant as ever whether it's 5 other people you know or an audience of 100,000.

I've thought about this a couple of times, what happens if we truly succeed and we as a species solves all of our major problems? Like energy, food, health (incl stopping aging). Do we even need economic systems then or will the "market" become obsolete too? So lets say we solve ALL of our problems and we somehow manage to briefly unite humanity to want to dominate each other, meaning we all need to become one race, one language, one cultural blob to reduce all friction (best case scenario - won't happen in reality). How long will it take for human nature to get bored and split into groups and start controlling each other? Who decides who gets to make babies? How many babies are optimal? Who is in charge of this kind of society? What if we all get a non-invasive implant that lets us share thoughts & emotions? What does privacy look like in this world?

I think people will briefly chill out and enjoy it, but after a while, we will be back to business meaning we will create systems and hierarchy to control social order, and so the blood sport continues. Then we might realize the our problem was never energy/food/health etc to begin with, it was an addiction to power and the blood sport it invites. And round and round we go.

I also think, the moment AI becomes an actual threat (threat meaning a better/smarter consciousness) - the human brain will immediately try to eliminate it to keep its dominance. If not, we will go the same way as neanderthals.

edit: The movie Jupiter Ascending also has an interesting take what might happen once we solve our problems - then we try harvest Time.

It appears as if Mr Boretti here hasn't realised that there is a life beyond computers.

If the humans have no economic utility and just collect UBI, how long until the computer decides to simply stop them from breeding (and bleeding it dry)?

i come at this from the perspective of appreciating blogs like this, but damn are these thought experiments exhausting.

many love to learn and always will (even without the expectation of capital), love to seek out new people, experience new cultures, and so on. Some fantastical AI won’t change that, even assuming UBI came with it (as if)

a cartoonishly cynical way of viewing human interaction.

Why do I play chess, despite the fact that robots have practically solved it? Why do I make crafts despite the fact that I could purchase stuff of the same quality, if not higher, for the same cost of materials and no cost to my time? Why do I practice piano?

Why do I watch youtube videos about hobby machine shop work despite not having a metal lathe or mill? Why do I watch channels like applied science, or usagi electric, or PBS space time, when I have no interest in becoming a material scientist, working with 50 year old computers, or becoming a theoretical physicist or astronomer?

It's because its personally enjoyable to me! Human beings are naturally curious creatures! We naturally want to share with and learn from others!!

I like nearly all of my coworkers, but they're not my friends. I met my friends doing things that don't pay, maybe things that lose money like making music or art.

This analysis is too one-dimensional, and doesn't factor in social and political factors. As a fellow introverted tech nerd, I understand the perspective, but things don't play out to their logical extremes the way this is projecting. Human factors and social upheaval will come long before any of this becomes a reality as stark as described.

Let's take this all the way through : in such a world, AI operators will deem the majority of human lives to be completely worthless, and arrange for a mass reduction of it.

The struggle for supremacy is embedded in nature, and it will absolutely be at play no matter what.

He/She shuts of the screen, takes a stretch, walks outside and looks at the sun/moon. Then they remember, I'm alive!

When presented with this bleak potential future, it is natural and easy to reject it: it’s undesirable, so people will not do it, so it won’t happen, QED.

But we don’t get to the future by making one big choice of which future we desire, whereupon we are transported there instantly. We get there slowly, at a rate of one day per calendar day, by making innumerable microscopic daily choices. These choices will be endless, it will often be unclear which option avoids the bad future, they will accost you when you are tired and hungry… and several corporations have collectively trillions of dollars riding on you ending up with the bad future and the legal right to tilt the playing field.

Y'all should checkout Deep Utopia by Nick Bostrom. It's about exactly this conundrum. He's fairly rosy though about our capacity to find meaningful human interaction and activity in a "solved" world. Though some things we do for purely instrumental reasons might pass away, there's still opportunity to engage in what he calls "autotelic" activity, things we do for themselves. Like playing games, jockeying for hierarchy, sensory experience, ritual, crafts, etc. His other book, Superintelligence, is also pretty interesting--looking more at dark AI scenarios, paperclip maximizers etc.

I know lots of runners. They still love it and push themselves even though there are cars to move their bodies around a lot faster. Why would I stop learning and gathering new skills just because some machine can do it faster than I can?

I use tablesaws to make furniture. I don't get mad or dispirited that they can cut faster than I can.

The existence of status competition doesn't seem like much of an obstacle to this outcome. People at the bottom of the status hierarchy will drop out to live in simulations that give them what they wanted but couldn't get from life. After a while, they'd likely choose to suppress their memories of ever having existed outside the simulation - there's nobody in the experience machine that'll judge you for doing it. With those people gone, the people immediately above them now occupy that bottom level, and the cycle repeats.

Whoever is in charge could try to drag those people back into the real world by force, but it's hard to imagine GPT 12.2 Polaris or Claude 9 Cinematic Universe giving that the green light. The Status Game will end with a single, final winner.

Disintermediate: "The elimination of intermediary agents in transactions between buyers and sellers."

Seems like a weird thing to get wrong in the context. Gives me a Zardoz vibe.

This elementary-school-grade-in-lenght essay ain't got no depth. Next!

This take is so far from my experience I have problems relating to it. I dance salsa and bachata. You can not do that without another human and if anything I would do that more in a world that is an AI utopia. Personally, AI have reduced my interest in digital things. I'm naturally gravitating towards physical experiences and things that take effort. I stopped painting on my ipad and began painting with acrylics. I started writing in a physical journal etc.

I think the opposite is true and people will have the opportunity to be more social than before. Majority of people, including those intellectually inclined, bond not over efficiency but … human things. We do things together not out efficiency. Think about house cats that play together, what drive them to play with each other if they need not to make an effort, they live in post scarcity world of no work.

Can't wait to get bored to death. Too bad I can't imagine how this post-scarcity for all could come about no matter how hard I try.

I don't subscribe to this bleak outlook because it doesn't account for the change in the value of things, which shift over time. I'm not just taking about monetary value.

At the moment people are confusing the equivalence of things because it's a point in time. This always happens at any given point in time.

This article tells us more about the author than anything else really. If they can see themselves spending their infinite leisure time on dopamine maxxing rather than being with humans... well, you do you man. If "work" is the only reason you get out of bed, form relationships, or do anything at all, please feel free to stay in bed.

It's scary but I truly believe that everyone should try and find meaning in life outside of their work (or make their "work" building or creating something they want to see exist in the world). Go step in a stream, pluck some guitar strings, sip a strong cocktail, touch grass...

I find a lot of meaning in my human connections. I will always have these, because I want to have them and put in work to grow and maintain them. I've taken a long career break and loved having time to read, exercise, see friends, and be an overall well-rounded human being. I don't see abundance as a universal problem here.

Post-scarcity means post-nature, doesn't it? We have to turn all ressources into paperclips... computers.

> Work, obviously, is pointless in a world of cheap superhuman intelligence.

Really? So doing things like learning to play an instrument or mastering chess are pointless?

> University (really all education beyond teaching people to speak) will be pointless because there’s no work to do and because growing your human capital doesn’t change your life outcomes: you get the same UBI whether you’re illiterate or a PhD.

Why must a university education be only a career generator? What about a well-rounded education, with a specialization in the things that interest you?

> If Claude Code has existed when I was starting out, nobody would have cared about Austral or my other open-source projects

Claude code is here, and yet I'm still writing open source code that people appreciate.

> As a teenager I tried to install Linux, ran into all kinds of problems, and went on the IRC chatrooms to get help. And in the process I made friends. Today, I would just ask Claude. AI disintermediates everyone, so that we no longer need each other.

Your friends don't need to all be techies. There are many other ways to make friends.

> What even is the point of cities in a world without work?

Community? Actually physically going outside and meeting people?

> The BATNA to hanging out keeps getting better, cheaper, and more convenient. When people’s sensorium becomes an infinite firehose of AI-generated superstimulus, why would they hang out with anyone?

Human connection? Experiencing things in the world together? Physical contact?

This model of human existence is incomplete

Yeah this is why people stopped playing chess once the engines got good enough…

In my experience, the best type of social hangouts is where they happen spontaneously. That doesn't happen if we live far away from our friends.

I have a friend that I used to see a lot because they lived a 5 min walk away from me. Now that they live in the suburbs, it's a 1 hour+ drive to meet them. I now see that person maybe once a month if we're lucky.

I suspect that people will end up focusing on exercise and self-preening (fashion, grooming, etc.).

And possibly physical skills that AI can’t do, like cooking, carpentry, assuming robotics lags behind AGI.

Humans will always collectively and emergently determine some metrics on which sexual selection occurs, whatever happens, and humans will spend their time optimising for those.

if people didnt have to work 40+ hours a week im sure theyd have more energy to do things besides go on the internet. do you just sit on the computer on your days off? also i think theyre massively overestimating how “hyperstimulating” ai media is going to be. the greatest video game imaginable still only appeals to people who like video games.

> The BATNA to hanging out keeps getting better, cheaper, and more convenient. When people’s sensorium becomes an infinite firehose of AI-generated superstimulus, why would they hang out with anyone?

Yeah, I mean why would I interact with a woman when I can just play that headpat simulator on Steam? There's really no competition!

Benevolent AI and biological immortality sounds like a good problem to have; at that point surely you only have yourself to blame for being boring

I made friends online in programming even after Claude Code. Other people's projects are cool

> since we will lack the experiences of struggle and striving that generate interesting personalities

Will we? AI won't replace a trip to Yosemite (nature), a spiritual discovery or the exploration of your mental health (introspection), the creation of art (creativity), playing volleyball on the beach (sports), enjoying the sun on the beach (leisure). The choice to be an interesting personality has existed for a long time, you just have to make it

It’s funny reading takes like this from software engineers that think the only way to meet people is at school, work, and in… IRC chatrooms...what? People do go outside and socialize in other places.

As someone who's not a social butterfly, this sounds very good to me. I can engage in hobbies without wanting to shop around for attention at conferences or hobbyist groups. People like the author seem to think that socialization with humans is an end in itself for some reason. But if the AI can be reasonably intellectually stimulating, what's the issue?

I share the concern about TikTok-ification and intellectual stagnation, but this is unrelated to the main concerns of the article.

Yes, I expect this to be a problem in 250 years.

Hell No!

I’d be supervising and playing with my children and grandchildren, gardening, reading, reading Instagram poasts of people exploring the galaxy. Watching Anton Petrov’s daily science YouTube. Lots of road trips.

The minds and robots will occasionally want to play and run focus groups.

The problem with unconditional basic income and unlimited free time is that a person encounters an oppressive sense of meaninglessness and boredom in their heart, because of which they go to a psychiatrist for antidepressants.