Entry 2444, on 2026-06-06 at 22:10:49 (Rating 2, Comments)
Human culture evolves occasionally, sometimes slowly, and other times more quickly as a result of major changes in technology, politics, and society. For example, we saw major change during the Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution.
In general, each of these changes has lead to better living conditions, although that could be quite fairly debated. For example, is working on factory as a labourer better than working on a farm as a peasant? Is having a society primarily lead by politicians better than one lead by monarchs or senior religious figures?
I have generally believed that life is getting better for most people, and that seems to be supported by statistics on life span, health, reduced violence, and wealth. I know there are genuine short term "glitches" where violence or poverty increase, but that doesn't reflect the big picture.
At the current time there are a few issues we need to be aware of: many people feel that they are worse off financially than they expect, and that the gap between the rich and poor is far too wide. They have a point on both of these, but I think the first problem might exist significantly as a result of COVID (or more accurately, the political response to COVID) rather than being an inherent flaw in our economic system.
The rich-poor gap genuinely is more a flaw in the system, but it should be considered on balance, because the "poor" are better off, although the gap is still there, because the rich are a *lot* better off. The question is, is this an inevitable side effect of a system (broadly speaking, let's call it capitalism) which is otherwise the best system available?
Whatever the facts are on the current state of things, we are going to potentially experience far worse issues during the upcoming AI revolution. We currently define ourselves primarily by what our jobs are, and that gives most people their purpose. Even older, retired people like me still tend to do some work, and I now consider myself a self-employed, part-time computer consultant.
But what happens when there is no work? In a recent podcast I heard, an AI expert claimed that any job currently done *with* a computer will soon be done *by* a computer (more precisely, an AI). Other jobs, especially those requiring manual labour like building, will take considerably longer, but they will also go eventually.
So what do we do then? What will be our new purpose? Well, it seems to me that work is not an inevitable part of life. It is just an activity we have to do rather than one we want to do. For those lucky people where these two are the same - what they have to do is also what they want to do - is work really still work? And they could still do that work voluntarily. For example, when AI writes programs for me, I might still enjoy writing unusual programs (maybe games) for my own amusement.
Of course, I will be far less efficient at that than an AI, but who cares, because that doesn't matter. Some people still like to ride horses even though driving is a far better way to get from place to place in almost every case. Horses are an "obsolete technology", but these people ride because they like doing it, not because they have to.
You might think that the economy will collapse because what sort of system works when no one is earning money? Well, with AI there will be virtually infinite wealth, so that won't be an issue. There is one other technology we will need to complete this revolution: unlimited power generation which will be supplied by fusion plants, another technology which does seem to be finally becoming practical for actual use rather than just existing in research labs.
We have a crisis amongst many groups in society now because they lack purpose, but that is largely because we value work too highly, and they either don't have jobs or have unsatisfying jobs. Once we value recreation highly instead, people will be able to do what they want and gain purpose from that. It's not the computer revolution, the fusion power revolution, or even the AI revolution. It's the recreation revolution.
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