I've been thinking about this topic a lot recently and appreciate you writing about it. Your list of "work" that AI cannot take away from us threw me a bit. Can savoring food or enjoying a sunset be considered "work"? If so, a world more focused on human enrichment would be a welcomed change. My definition of and relationship with work is definitely an area where I have a lot to unpack and examine.
I'm also thinking about something an older person once told me. In his day, it was thought that technological advancements would leave humans with excessive amounts of leisure time. Instead, we seem to be more harried than ever before. How can we ensure that doesn't happen again as we make this new AI shift?
Your idea of collectively focusing on human enrichment could prevent that. It feels right. But can we collectively make that shift, especially when we are being bombarded with the addictive slop? Some of us can. What about the rest of humanity? Can we all pursue and create opportunities for human enrichment?
Maslow's hierarchy of needs comes to mind. Enrichment is higher in the hierarchy. What happens if AI takes away the ability for many people to meet their basic needs? Enrichment may be out of reach if one is faced with a lack of food or shelter.
This a bit rambling, but I wanted to share what this brought up for me.
The part of "work" I care about here is how it lets people participate in the economy. So for instance panhandling counts as "work" here.
I don't think savoring food can likely be turned into "work" in this sense… but HELPING OTHERS to savor food I think COULD be. Right now it's profitable to do that mostly by targeting people with lots of money. That's part of what I'd love to see shift. What would it look like for the economy to focus on supporting good child-rearing, and deepening delight, and nurturing the cultivation of wisdom?
More pragmatically, I'm thinking of education here. Learning cannot be about being employable in some way that AI will replace. And as tech advances, more and more work will be replaced. So where do we focus education? Well, if education instead is about HUMAN ENRICHMENT, and it dialogues with people's desires instead of being coercion-driven, then I think the results are much better. And as teachers get replaced with AI, they'll get replaced IN ORDER TO ENRICH rather than in order to churn out more profit machines.
Part of the issue as I see it is that we've collectively lost positive vision. It's mostly reactive. Fearfully focused on what could go wrong. What if we focus on what it'd look like for things to go RIGHT instead?
I think the future we want probably looks like, machines (a) take care of our basic survival needs, (b) help us to develop wisdom, and (b) enhance our ability to understand and solve ever more challenging problems.
But you're right, we're not there yet. People still have basic survival needs they have to meet somehow. That's part of what I see as maybe really hard about the coming transition. If half of all knowledge work gets replaced in the next ten years, what do the people currently involved in knowledge work do to buy groceries and pay rent? How about as robotics gets better and AI can start replacing large swaths of manual labor too? What jobs are even left? Do we seriously all have to become AI programmers?
I don't have a clear answer here. I don't think anyone does.
But I wonder if we might collectively CARE more about finding an answer if we were much more focused on enrichment. The important thing isn't that people have work that lets them eat. The important thing is that we deepen our wisdom and compassion, which certainly requires food. So keeping the purpose in mind naturally includes the essentials.
And I think it corrects for something about how we currently take care of the essentials. Right now the food industry has an incentive to cut corners where it can, because its job is to make money. But if its job were to support human flourishing, then the corners being cut would be the RIGHT ones. It'd be removing inefficiency instead of trying to mask unhealthy food processing with hypnotic marketing.
If we're going to automate some process that supports us, I would much rather it be a system that's focused on our deep development rather than one that's trying to figure out how to extract profit from "consumers" (literally "those who consume").
Ha! Nope. I couldn't figure out what it said. and neither could Claude. I tried to check just in case it was something like this. Well, drat! What language is it written in?
I've been thinking about this topic a lot recently and appreciate you writing about it. Your list of "work" that AI cannot take away from us threw me a bit. Can savoring food or enjoying a sunset be considered "work"? If so, a world more focused on human enrichment would be a welcomed change. My definition of and relationship with work is definitely an area where I have a lot to unpack and examine.
I'm also thinking about something an older person once told me. In his day, it was thought that technological advancements would leave humans with excessive amounts of leisure time. Instead, we seem to be more harried than ever before. How can we ensure that doesn't happen again as we make this new AI shift?
Your idea of collectively focusing on human enrichment could prevent that. It feels right. But can we collectively make that shift, especially when we are being bombarded with the addictive slop? Some of us can. What about the rest of humanity? Can we all pursue and create opportunities for human enrichment?
Maslow's hierarchy of needs comes to mind. Enrichment is higher in the hierarchy. What happens if AI takes away the ability for many people to meet their basic needs? Enrichment may be out of reach if one is faced with a lack of food or shelter.
This a bit rambling, but I wanted to share what this brought up for me.
I like what you brought! Thanks for your comment.
The part of "work" I care about here is how it lets people participate in the economy. So for instance panhandling counts as "work" here.
I don't think savoring food can likely be turned into "work" in this sense… but HELPING OTHERS to savor food I think COULD be. Right now it's profitable to do that mostly by targeting people with lots of money. That's part of what I'd love to see shift. What would it look like for the economy to focus on supporting good child-rearing, and deepening delight, and nurturing the cultivation of wisdom?
More pragmatically, I'm thinking of education here. Learning cannot be about being employable in some way that AI will replace. And as tech advances, more and more work will be replaced. So where do we focus education? Well, if education instead is about HUMAN ENRICHMENT, and it dialogues with people's desires instead of being coercion-driven, then I think the results are much better. And as teachers get replaced with AI, they'll get replaced IN ORDER TO ENRICH rather than in order to churn out more profit machines.
Part of the issue as I see it is that we've collectively lost positive vision. It's mostly reactive. Fearfully focused on what could go wrong. What if we focus on what it'd look like for things to go RIGHT instead?
I think the future we want probably looks like, machines (a) take care of our basic survival needs, (b) help us to develop wisdom, and (b) enhance our ability to understand and solve ever more challenging problems.
But you're right, we're not there yet. People still have basic survival needs they have to meet somehow. That's part of what I see as maybe really hard about the coming transition. If half of all knowledge work gets replaced in the next ten years, what do the people currently involved in knowledge work do to buy groceries and pay rent? How about as robotics gets better and AI can start replacing large swaths of manual labor too? What jobs are even left? Do we seriously all have to become AI programmers?
I don't have a clear answer here. I don't think anyone does.
But I wonder if we might collectively CARE more about finding an answer if we were much more focused on enrichment. The important thing isn't that people have work that lets them eat. The important thing is that we deepen our wisdom and compassion, which certainly requires food. So keeping the purpose in mind naturally includes the essentials.
And I think it corrects for something about how we currently take care of the essentials. Right now the food industry has an incentive to cut corners where it can, because its job is to make money. But if its job were to support human flourishing, then the corners being cut would be the RIGHT ones. It'd be removing inefficiency instead of trying to mask unhealthy food processing with hypnotic marketing.
If we're going to automate some process that supports us, I would much rather it be a system that's focused on our deep development rather than one that's trying to figure out how to extract profit from "consumers" (literally "those who consume").
On a side note – the bracelet in the last photo says "Glory to Ukraine", which surprised me, seems out of place. Was that intentional?
Ha! Nope. I couldn't figure out what it said. and neither could Claude. I tried to check just in case it was something like this. Well, drat! What language is it written in?
It's in Ukranian (so it's cyrillic alphabet)