There is an inherent difference in that communist authority is derived from being of the people and the system's own internal moral basis is working in service of the people. Loss (real or perceived) of those aspects is a threat to the order. The Chinese Communist Party conspicuously talks up its government job and cadre systems for this reason.
In contrast, post-scarcity AI models of society in the West typically offer no such bargain - money is to be distributed to the dependent workless, based on the benevolence of the leaders as the price of subservience. As noted in the article, we have no natural or historical record of systems such as these not eventually being redesigned and exploited by those with the power to do so.
For this reason we should consider these post scarcity AI models of society as much more dangerous and more likely to generate violence than communist models. It says a lot.
Communist authority is derived from the teleology of (the Marxist idea of) history, which may be only theoretically based on the people. The Bolsheviks certainly had no trouble rationalizing their unpopularity among the actual people of Russia, demonstrated both by their loss in the Constituent Assembly elections & by the numerous rebellions during the War Communism period. (& remember that the whole basis of Bolshevik ideology, even before the revolution, was the idea that the working people themselves were passive & would need to be guided to revolution by the Party.) See also the way Stalin, & much of the Party hierarchy under him, had no problem with starving millions of people to death & condemning millions more to slave labor for the sake of industrialization.
In addition if you can show or demonstrate that that lightning willfully struck someone then I would say the lightning is evil but in either case death is simply what happens. It's an inevitable event however it occurs.
No Doug. It's u fortunate. It's sad for those one leaves behind...etc. but the fact that one dies is not anymore an evil than the fact you are alive. It just is what it is. The notion of evil is more about we do to one another that causes harm or death. The context matters.
Pardon the long comment - but the dialog made me chuckle.
I just had AI review this conversation and then think about how James T. Kirk of the starship Enterprise would view it, by supporting it's claims with specific episodes and quotes from the show. Needless to say, Kirk wants us to remain human and would reject the Grand Inquisitors view. So I had the AI write a dialog between Kirk and AI tech leader with the subject being "let's show that we can cure cancer". If you like old Star Trek, I think you'll really like this!
Scene: The Briefing Room aboard the USS Enterprise.
At the head of the conference table sits Captain James T. Kirk, tunic slightly unzipped at the collar, resting a chin in his hand. Across from him stands Julian Vance, an immaculately groomed Silicon Valley founder in a tailored minimalist jacket, pacing before the wall monitor. Spock stands silently by the library computer terminal.
VANCE:
Captain, you’re missing the forest for the trees. You’re interrogating my data center footprints, you’re questioning intellectual property scrape protocols, you’re worried about whether copywriters and entry-level illustrators have "a sense of vocational destiny." Do you know what we ran through the cluster yesterday? Three million virtual clinical trials. We mapped forty-two targeted protein inhibitors for glioblastoma before your morning coffee cooled. We are on the precipice of eradicating cancer. Cancer, Captain. Doesn't that settle the ledger?
KIRK:
(Slowly leans back, his gaze steady)
It’s a magnificent promise, Mr. Vance. It really is. Dr. McCoy would give his right arm for half of those inhibitors. But no. It doesn’t settle the ledger.
VANCE:
(Scoffs, throwing his hands up)
It doesn't settle the—? With respect, that’s insane. It’s moral bankruptcy masquerading as philosophy. We’re talking about saving hundreds of millions of human lives. Children. Grandparents. Entire generations spared agony! And you’re hesitating because the machine writes a sonnet or drafts a legal brief? What kind of monster looks at a mother in an oncology ward and says, "Sorry, we had to slow down the oncology model because someone felt displaced in middle management"?
KIRK:
(Voice low, deliberate)
Nobody is asking you to slow down the oncology model, Mr. Vance.
VANCE:
That’s what regulation does! That’s what your skepticism does!
KIRK:
No. What I’m questioning is why you only reach for that sick child when someone asks you what else your machine is doing.
VANCE:
It’s a holistic ecosystem! The scale required to solve structural biology requires capital, compute, pervasive integration—
KIRK:
It’s a shield. You wrap yourself in the laboratory coats of brilliant researchers because it’s the one place nobody can challenge you without sounding cruel. You say: "Look at the tumors we’ll dissolve tomorrow," so we don't look at what you’re dissolving today.
VANCE:
What are we dissolving, Captain? Inefficiency? Drudgery?
KIRK:
Agency, Mr. Vance! The will to try. To fail. To make something with our own hands and say, “I did that. That belongs to me.” I’ve seen your kind of paradise before. Worlds where no one gets sick, where no one grieves, where the machines do all the thinking, all the building, all the painting, all the governing. Do you know what happens to the people on those worlds?
VANCE:
They thrive. They live long, healthy lives.
KIRK:
They rot! They sit like cattle in a pristine meadow, chewing on ease. No struggle. No ambition. No pride. Sandoval on Omicron Ceti III—he had perfect health, Mr. Vance! The alien spores protected him from every disease known to science. And when the illusion broke, he looked at his hands and wept because he had spent three years doing nothing. Accomplishing nothing.
VANCE:
That’s poetry, Captain, not policy. People in pain don't want a "heroic struggle." They want a therapy that works.
KIRK:
(Standing up, stepping toward him)
Then build a tool! Build an engine that calculates protein folds, feed it the telemetry, give the results to McCoy and the researchers in Starfleet Medical, and let them cure the disease! But that’s not all you’re selling, is it? You’re not satisfied with an instrument. You want to build a mind. You want to sit an autonomous agent in the center chair of human life and tell us to go sit in the passenger seat and enjoy the ride.
VANCE:
If the machine flies the ship safer than you do—
KIRK:
Then what am I here for?!
(Silence hangs in the room. Kirk leans over the table, eyes boring into Vance.)
KIRK:
A machine doesn't care whether it finds a new star or extinguishes one. It doesn't bleed. It doesn't wonder. It doesn't love. If you take away our work, our art, our decisions, our mistakes—what are you saving us for? To live to a hundred and twenty in a padded room, staring at algorithms we can no longer comprehend?
SPOCK:
(Without looking up from his viewer)
Fascinating. In Vulcan history, the First Computational Hegemony attempted a similar rationalization: the complete preservation of biological life at the cost of civilizational volition. The period is colloquially referred to as The Great Stagnation.
VANCE:
(Ignoring Spock, glaring at Kirk)
You talk about meaning like it’s a luxury only the healthy can afford. Go tell a man with stage-four lymphoma that his suffering is a noble crucible for his soul.
KIRK:
I have held crewmen while they died, Vance. I have written the letters home. Don't you lecture me about the cost of mortality. If your system can save a life, deploy it. Run the circuits until they glow white-hot. But don't you dare come into my briefing room and tell me that curing cancer earns you the right to turn mankind into a dependent species.
(Kirk taps the communicator on the bulkhead.)
KIRK:
Mr. Scott.
SCOTT’S VOICE:
(Over comm)
Aye, Captain?
KIRK:
Is the computer running the navigational telemetry for the Mutara sector?
SCOTT’S VOICE:
Aye, sir. Triple-checking the gravimetric shear right now.
KIRK:
Good. Keep it at the station. That’s where it belongs. Kirk out.
(Kirk turns back to Vance, his expression hard, completely calm.)
KIRK:
Give us the medicine, Mr. Vance. But keep your hands off the helm.
It is notable, in reading the Lincoln quote linked here, how different his ideal is from modern America. Lincoln is responding, in part, to the 'mudsill' argument of James Hammond, who argued that it is necessary in any society to have a miserable subject class of laborers, & that for these to be a caste of (as he thought) racially inferior slaves, in stable ownership & too unwise to make good use of freedom, was better for both the slaves & their masters than if the laborers were free unstably-hired workers. (The many flaws in this argument, both in general & as a justification of the contemporary Southern socioeconomic order, are left as an exercise for the reader.) Lincoln agrees that the state of a hired laborer, even a fully free one, is generally awful, but defends it by arguing that it usually is not permanent:
"Many independent men in this assembly doubtless a few years ago were hired laborers. And their case is almost, if not quite, the general rule. The prudent, penniless beginner in the world labors for wages awhile, saves a surplus with which to buy tools or land for himself, then labors on his own account another while, and at length hires another new beginner to help him. ... If any continue through life in the condition of the hired laborer, it is not the fault of the system, but because of either a dependent nature which prefers it, or improvidence, folly, or singular misfortune."
But now this is not true at all: subsistence farming (which to Thomas Jefferson was the truest guarantee of freedom) is gone, while entrepreneurship is an option taken by only a small fraction. Much of the population, whatever their prudence or intelligence, must "continue through life in the condition of the hired laborer", & thus remain in subjection to an employer. Such an arrangement is probably the only way to make an advanced industrial civilization work (cf. Mao's independent artisanal industry), but nevertheless it is a great loss for human values.
Of course people are uncertain. But I do wonder what alternate future humanity might have experienced if we polled the population (30-40% of the workforce working on farms) in 1900 on whether we might adopt the technology / fertilizers that massively increased yields and also wiped out agricultural employment?
I suspect most of the rah rah AI bros are far better read in sci fi than Dostoevsky or Tocqueville. Which means they should be have encountered many dystopias where tech was used to meet 'all material needs' and make jobs superflous. But they act like they never have.
We can't let these grotesquely socially malformed, culturally impoverished nerds run the ship.
There's plenty of that in the works of Andy Weir or, if you want to go further back, Robert Heinlein. The Culture novels are mentioned elsewhere; the Golden Oecumene counts as well, I think.
I remember the entryism into the profession, people parachuting in and trying to bring their own norms in the name of inclusiveness, because obviously women were being kept out, but women weren't going into the field in the first place, and that kind of limits things.
There's a sense of disgust involved here, "grotesque" and "malformed". High school bullying, but make it woke.
This is an own goal on the level of the Republican is losing Muslim immigrants. (Religiously conservative, wary of government overreach, a natural constituency.) But the circular firing squad needs targets, and so the left is negatively polarized against the concept of anything ever becoming better.
Viktor Frankl said there were three different ways to find meaning:
1. Working towards something or creating something.
2. Experiencing something positive like a deep and loving relationship or appreciation of art and beauty.
3. Taking a positive attitude towards unavoidable suffering.
AI risks eliminating 1 and possibly 3 (although eliminating 3 isn't bad, Frankl makes it clear that creating suffering on purpose to find meaning in is not meaningful). 2 will likely still be around in a word of AI created abundance. There will still be people to relate to and beauty to appreciate (I suppose AI might risk weakening 2 by creating nonsentient AI companions).
We don't want to preserve 3, but is there a way to preserve 1. One good start is the way people are starting to develop norms against AI art and writing. This can help keep art creation as the realm of humans. Another thing that occurs to me is multiplayer games and sports. Having more people engage in friendly competition where each team memver has a role they can fulfill could be meaningful, even if theoretically a robot could fulfill the same role.
I personally have never found a single job I have had to be meaningful. I think likely I am very good at deriving meaning from relationships and from appreciating things like art and science, so I have never found a job that doesn't feel like it is distracting from finding meaning in those areas.
". Most Americans report deriving at least some meaning or satisfaction from their work; roughly 70 percent say their job gives them a sense of purpose."...I remember reading a comment to a journalist by a guy who had just been laid off (after many years) when one of the big integrated steel mills closed: "I'm just glad I got a chance to be a part of it all"
...don't know how common that feeling was, but one man's view, at least
There's data showing that while young unemployed males report low life satisfaction, retired elderly people report very high life satisfaction. I think this tells you basically all you need to know about how we will manage in an age of AI superabundance. We will all become the elderly retirees. No status hierarchies, no day to day, no opportunity for significant economic improvement, but happy. Society won't expect us to work, and as long as govt takes care of us we'll be economically secure. We'll be happy. Things will be fine.
Way before that, Dorothy L Sayers was on it with her essay "Why Work?". Written from a deeply Christian perspective, which we might agree with or not but I find her argument at least internally consistent and well laid out.
Excellent framing — the industry keeps offering material comforts to answer a spiritual fear, and "curing cancer" is one goal we still have an intact moral vocabulary for. The Grand Inquisitor is the right fulcrum. Love the way you bring him into this.
One thing I'd offer where you address what work means. Your Black Death example may prove more than it sets out to. The same labour-scarcity shock was followed by liberalisation in the West and intensified coercion in the East — the second serfdom — which suggests the outcome depended on institutions, not on scarcity per se. Same plague, opposite institutional outcomes. Which suggests the meaning-of-work question isn't answered by a universal anthropology of what humans need, but by the institutions that respond to the shock. Jefferson, Tocqueville and Lincoln offer a specifically American answer; a nurse in Lagos and a civil servant in Singapore sit inside very different machinery, and the transition will resolve differently for them.
I think that may also offer a way out of the despair you end on. You reach for a new meaning-making institution and note there's no time to build one from scratch. But the second-order functions of work you catalogue — bargaining power, recognition, the sense of being needed — are, in effect, friction: the human unwillingness and leverage that a frictionless system removes. Civilisations have always depended on that friction as a kind of immune system. The constructive question here maybe "which institutions keep human agency in the loop long enough for meaning to survive the transition." That's more doable, and it's nearer than it looks.
you present a pretty idealistic image of work. I've only ever seen it degrade and destroy people. A mix of that striving/ego/narcissism/status games, necessity, desperation, boredom, disappointment.. seems pretty rare that work is tied to real positive meaning and outcomes in my experience. People may convince themselves otherwise out of psychological necessity - rationalizing a complete lack of real agency and control, which is the basic state of affairs for the working class
If you don't mind me asking what types of work did you observe growing up?
OMG, AI will cure cancer. I feel like my PTSD erupts every time I hear an AI bro say some version of that. Or is that PTSD? I dunno, I don't normally suffer from it :-)
Arrogance mixed with ignorance...I keep feeling compelled to write about this:
One famous science fiction treatment of how humans can find meaning in a world in which their labor isn't actually needed is the Culture novels by Ian M. Banks.
Another one that presents a "solution" but is less enthusiastic about the outcome is "Beggars in Spain" by Nancy Kress, although that novel has genetically enhanced humans being the economic threat instead of AIs.
There is something communist/socialist-adjacent to the AI abundance movement: "in the end, you won't have to work; we'll live in paradise".
Well… Communists were also materialists.
Ruxandra, I'm hoping you'll watch this video of Jensen Huang the CEO of NVIDEA at the All in Summit from today September 14th discussing A.I.
https://youtu.be/S7CrlFLAmEA?si=gL9ZmN2vNHdgs4G-
There is an inherent difference in that communist authority is derived from being of the people and the system's own internal moral basis is working in service of the people. Loss (real or perceived) of those aspects is a threat to the order. The Chinese Communist Party conspicuously talks up its government job and cadre systems for this reason.
In contrast, post-scarcity AI models of society in the West typically offer no such bargain - money is to be distributed to the dependent workless, based on the benevolence of the leaders as the price of subservience. As noted in the article, we have no natural or historical record of systems such as these not eventually being redesigned and exploited by those with the power to do so.
For this reason we should consider these post scarcity AI models of society as much more dangerous and more likely to generate violence than communist models. It says a lot.
Communist authority is derived from the teleology of (the Marxist idea of) history, which may be only theoretically based on the people. The Bolsheviks certainly had no trouble rationalizing their unpopularity among the actual people of Russia, demonstrated both by their loss in the Constituent Assembly elections & by the numerous rebellions during the War Communism period. (& remember that the whole basis of Bolshevik ideology, even before the revolution, was the idea that the working people themselves were passive & would need to be guided to revolution by the Party.) See also the way Stalin, & much of the Party hierarchy under him, had no problem with starving millions of people to death & condemning millions more to slave labor for the sake of industrialization.
Death is not an evil. Life is not possible without it. But how we livw and die matters enormously.
> Death is not an evil. Life is not possible without it.
This is what Internet smartasses call "cope".
Death is very much an evil for people who are going to die and don't want to.
Not a cope. It's a fact. Life and death go together...wake up.
If you got struck by lightning tomorrow and died, would that have been an evil?
In addition if you can show or demonstrate that that lightning willfully struck someone then I would say the lightning is evil but in either case death is simply what happens. It's an inevitable event however it occurs.
No Doug. It's u fortunate. It's sad for those one leaves behind...etc. but the fact that one dies is not anymore an evil than the fact you are alive. It just is what it is. The notion of evil is more about we do to one another that causes harm or death. The context matters.
Kind of unrelated but I got 3 notifications for this post, idk if I have an issue or you/substack did sth
sorry there was a weird substack issue where the main text wasn’t showing
This is so good I'm going to share it with my Facebook friends. Thank you!
thank you!
Pardon the long comment - but the dialog made me chuckle.
I just had AI review this conversation and then think about how James T. Kirk of the starship Enterprise would view it, by supporting it's claims with specific episodes and quotes from the show. Needless to say, Kirk wants us to remain human and would reject the Grand Inquisitors view. So I had the AI write a dialog between Kirk and AI tech leader with the subject being "let's show that we can cure cancer". If you like old Star Trek, I think you'll really like this!
Scene: The Briefing Room aboard the USS Enterprise.
At the head of the conference table sits Captain James T. Kirk, tunic slightly unzipped at the collar, resting a chin in his hand. Across from him stands Julian Vance, an immaculately groomed Silicon Valley founder in a tailored minimalist jacket, pacing before the wall monitor. Spock stands silently by the library computer terminal.
VANCE:
Captain, you’re missing the forest for the trees. You’re interrogating my data center footprints, you’re questioning intellectual property scrape protocols, you’re worried about whether copywriters and entry-level illustrators have "a sense of vocational destiny." Do you know what we ran through the cluster yesterday? Three million virtual clinical trials. We mapped forty-two targeted protein inhibitors for glioblastoma before your morning coffee cooled. We are on the precipice of eradicating cancer. Cancer, Captain. Doesn't that settle the ledger?
KIRK:
(Slowly leans back, his gaze steady)
It’s a magnificent promise, Mr. Vance. It really is. Dr. McCoy would give his right arm for half of those inhibitors. But no. It doesn’t settle the ledger.
VANCE:
(Scoffs, throwing his hands up)
It doesn't settle the—? With respect, that’s insane. It’s moral bankruptcy masquerading as philosophy. We’re talking about saving hundreds of millions of human lives. Children. Grandparents. Entire generations spared agony! And you’re hesitating because the machine writes a sonnet or drafts a legal brief? What kind of monster looks at a mother in an oncology ward and says, "Sorry, we had to slow down the oncology model because someone felt displaced in middle management"?
KIRK:
(Voice low, deliberate)
Nobody is asking you to slow down the oncology model, Mr. Vance.
VANCE:
That’s what regulation does! That’s what your skepticism does!
KIRK:
No. What I’m questioning is why you only reach for that sick child when someone asks you what else your machine is doing.
VANCE:
It’s a holistic ecosystem! The scale required to solve structural biology requires capital, compute, pervasive integration—
KIRK:
It’s a shield. You wrap yourself in the laboratory coats of brilliant researchers because it’s the one place nobody can challenge you without sounding cruel. You say: "Look at the tumors we’ll dissolve tomorrow," so we don't look at what you’re dissolving today.
VANCE:
What are we dissolving, Captain? Inefficiency? Drudgery?
KIRK:
Agency, Mr. Vance! The will to try. To fail. To make something with our own hands and say, “I did that. That belongs to me.” I’ve seen your kind of paradise before. Worlds where no one gets sick, where no one grieves, where the machines do all the thinking, all the building, all the painting, all the governing. Do you know what happens to the people on those worlds?
VANCE:
They thrive. They live long, healthy lives.
KIRK:
They rot! They sit like cattle in a pristine meadow, chewing on ease. No struggle. No ambition. No pride. Sandoval on Omicron Ceti III—he had perfect health, Mr. Vance! The alien spores protected him from every disease known to science. And when the illusion broke, he looked at his hands and wept because he had spent three years doing nothing. Accomplishing nothing.
VANCE:
That’s poetry, Captain, not policy. People in pain don't want a "heroic struggle." They want a therapy that works.
KIRK:
(Standing up, stepping toward him)
Then build a tool! Build an engine that calculates protein folds, feed it the telemetry, give the results to McCoy and the researchers in Starfleet Medical, and let them cure the disease! But that’s not all you’re selling, is it? You’re not satisfied with an instrument. You want to build a mind. You want to sit an autonomous agent in the center chair of human life and tell us to go sit in the passenger seat and enjoy the ride.
VANCE:
If the machine flies the ship safer than you do—
KIRK:
Then what am I here for?!
(Silence hangs in the room. Kirk leans over the table, eyes boring into Vance.)
KIRK:
A machine doesn't care whether it finds a new star or extinguishes one. It doesn't bleed. It doesn't wonder. It doesn't love. If you take away our work, our art, our decisions, our mistakes—what are you saving us for? To live to a hundred and twenty in a padded room, staring at algorithms we can no longer comprehend?
SPOCK:
(Without looking up from his viewer)
Fascinating. In Vulcan history, the First Computational Hegemony attempted a similar rationalization: the complete preservation of biological life at the cost of civilizational volition. The period is colloquially referred to as The Great Stagnation.
VANCE:
(Ignoring Spock, glaring at Kirk)
You talk about meaning like it’s a luxury only the healthy can afford. Go tell a man with stage-four lymphoma that his suffering is a noble crucible for his soul.
KIRK:
I have held crewmen while they died, Vance. I have written the letters home. Don't you lecture me about the cost of mortality. If your system can save a life, deploy it. Run the circuits until they glow white-hot. But don't you dare come into my briefing room and tell me that curing cancer earns you the right to turn mankind into a dependent species.
(Kirk taps the communicator on the bulkhead.)
KIRK:
Mr. Scott.
SCOTT’S VOICE:
(Over comm)
Aye, Captain?
KIRK:
Is the computer running the navigational telemetry for the Mutara sector?
SCOTT’S VOICE:
Aye, sir. Triple-checking the gravimetric shear right now.
KIRK:
Good. Keep it at the station. That’s where it belongs. Kirk out.
(Kirk turns back to Vance, his expression hard, completely calm.)
KIRK:
Give us the medicine, Mr. Vance. But keep your hands off the helm.
It is notable, in reading the Lincoln quote linked here, how different his ideal is from modern America. Lincoln is responding, in part, to the 'mudsill' argument of James Hammond, who argued that it is necessary in any society to have a miserable subject class of laborers, & that for these to be a caste of (as he thought) racially inferior slaves, in stable ownership & too unwise to make good use of freedom, was better for both the slaves & their masters than if the laborers were free unstably-hired workers. (The many flaws in this argument, both in general & as a justification of the contemporary Southern socioeconomic order, are left as an exercise for the reader.) Lincoln agrees that the state of a hired laborer, even a fully free one, is generally awful, but defends it by arguing that it usually is not permanent:
"Many independent men in this assembly doubtless a few years ago were hired laborers. And their case is almost, if not quite, the general rule. The prudent, penniless beginner in the world labors for wages awhile, saves a surplus with which to buy tools or land for himself, then labors on his own account another while, and at length hires another new beginner to help him. ... If any continue through life in the condition of the hired laborer, it is not the fault of the system, but because of either a dependent nature which prefers it, or improvidence, folly, or singular misfortune."
But now this is not true at all: subsistence farming (which to Thomas Jefferson was the truest guarantee of freedom) is gone, while entrepreneurship is an option taken by only a small fraction. Much of the population, whatever their prudence or intelligence, must "continue through life in the condition of the hired laborer", & thus remain in subjection to an employer. Such an arrangement is probably the only way to make an advanced industrial civilization work (cf. Mao's independent artisanal industry), but nevertheless it is a great loss for human values.
Of course people are uncertain. But I do wonder what alternate future humanity might have experienced if we polled the population (30-40% of the workforce working on farms) in 1900 on whether we might adopt the technology / fertilizers that massively increased yields and also wiped out agricultural employment?
I suspect most of the rah rah AI bros are far better read in sci fi than Dostoevsky or Tocqueville. Which means they should be have encountered many dystopias where tech was used to meet 'all material needs' and make jobs superflous. But they act like they never have.
We can't let these grotesquely socially malformed, culturally impoverished nerds run the ship.
What stories would you prefer? Stories where problems remain unsolved and the world remains essentially stagnant?
I miss the five or ten years where we decided to pause picking on nerds. It was kind of nice. Oh well, back to the status quo.
Stories where tech is used for good - as in the book "The Wizard and the Prophet", which despite the title is not sci-fi.
There's plenty of that in the works of Andy Weir or, if you want to go further back, Robert Heinlein. The Culture novels are mentioned elsewhere; the Golden Oecumene counts as well, I think.
The tech bros, with deranged Dr. Evil wannabees Musk and Thiel in the vanguard, kinda poisoned the brand. Blame them.
"Tech bro" was never very coherent.
The average software engineer is more likely to be liberal than the average floral designer.
https://verdantlabs.com/politics_of_professions/
I remember the entryism into the profession, people parachuting in and trying to bring their own norms in the name of inclusiveness, because obviously women were being kept out, but women weren't going into the field in the first place, and that kind of limits things.
There's a sense of disgust involved here, "grotesque" and "malformed". High school bullying, but make it woke.
This is an own goal on the level of the Republican is losing Muslim immigrants. (Religiously conservative, wary of government overreach, a natural constituency.) But the circular firing squad needs targets, and so the left is negatively polarized against the concept of anything ever becoming better.
Viktor Frankl said there were three different ways to find meaning:
1. Working towards something or creating something.
2. Experiencing something positive like a deep and loving relationship or appreciation of art and beauty.
3. Taking a positive attitude towards unavoidable suffering.
AI risks eliminating 1 and possibly 3 (although eliminating 3 isn't bad, Frankl makes it clear that creating suffering on purpose to find meaning in is not meaningful). 2 will likely still be around in a word of AI created abundance. There will still be people to relate to and beauty to appreciate (I suppose AI might risk weakening 2 by creating nonsentient AI companions).
We don't want to preserve 3, but is there a way to preserve 1. One good start is the way people are starting to develop norms against AI art and writing. This can help keep art creation as the realm of humans. Another thing that occurs to me is multiplayer games and sports. Having more people engage in friendly competition where each team memver has a role they can fulfill could be meaningful, even if theoretically a robot could fulfill the same role.
I personally have never found a single job I have had to be meaningful. I think likely I am very good at deriving meaning from relationships and from appreciating things like art and science, so I have never found a job that doesn't feel like it is distracting from finding meaning in those areas.
". Most Americans report deriving at least some meaning or satisfaction from their work; roughly 70 percent say their job gives them a sense of purpose."...I remember reading a comment to a journalist by a guy who had just been laid off (after many years) when one of the big integrated steel mills closed: "I'm just glad I got a chance to be a part of it all"
...don't know how common that feeling was, but one man's view, at least
There's data showing that while young unemployed males report low life satisfaction, retired elderly people report very high life satisfaction. I think this tells you basically all you need to know about how we will manage in an age of AI superabundance. We will all become the elderly retirees. No status hierarchies, no day to day, no opportunity for significant economic improvement, but happy. Society won't expect us to work, and as long as govt takes care of us we'll be economically secure. We'll be happy. Things will be fine.
Whether or not you think he had a point, it's worth noting that Yudkowsky was all over this more than a decade and a half ago.
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/K4aGvLnHvYgX9pZHS/the-fun-theory-sequence
Way before that, Dorothy L Sayers was on it with her essay "Why Work?". Written from a deeply Christian perspective, which we might agree with or not but I find her argument at least internally consistent and well laid out.
Excellent framing — the industry keeps offering material comforts to answer a spiritual fear, and "curing cancer" is one goal we still have an intact moral vocabulary for. The Grand Inquisitor is the right fulcrum. Love the way you bring him into this.
One thing I'd offer where you address what work means. Your Black Death example may prove more than it sets out to. The same labour-scarcity shock was followed by liberalisation in the West and intensified coercion in the East — the second serfdom — which suggests the outcome depended on institutions, not on scarcity per se. Same plague, opposite institutional outcomes. Which suggests the meaning-of-work question isn't answered by a universal anthropology of what humans need, but by the institutions that respond to the shock. Jefferson, Tocqueville and Lincoln offer a specifically American answer; a nurse in Lagos and a civil servant in Singapore sit inside very different machinery, and the transition will resolve differently for them.
I think that may also offer a way out of the despair you end on. You reach for a new meaning-making institution and note there's no time to build one from scratch. But the second-order functions of work you catalogue — bargaining power, recognition, the sense of being needed — are, in effect, friction: the human unwillingness and leverage that a frictionless system removes. Civilisations have always depended on that friction as a kind of immune system. The constructive question here maybe "which institutions keep human agency in the loop long enough for meaning to survive the transition." That's more doable, and it's nearer than it looks.
I tried to work through part of this in an essay sometime ago, if useful: [https://rajeshachanta.substack.com/p/the-owl-and-the-cathedral].
you present a pretty idealistic image of work. I've only ever seen it degrade and destroy people. A mix of that striving/ego/narcissism/status games, necessity, desperation, boredom, disappointment.. seems pretty rare that work is tied to real positive meaning and outcomes in my experience. People may convince themselves otherwise out of psychological necessity - rationalizing a complete lack of real agency and control, which is the basic state of affairs for the working class
If you don't mind me asking what types of work did you observe growing up?
OMG, AI will cure cancer. I feel like my PTSD erupts every time I hear an AI bro say some version of that. Or is that PTSD? I dunno, I don't normally suffer from it :-)
Arrogance mixed with ignorance...I keep feeling compelled to write about this:
The Interpolation engine that won't cure cancer
https://ahalflife.substack.com/p/the-interpolation-engine-that-wont
AI's biology delusion
https://ahalflife.substack.com/p/ais-biology-delusion
One famous science fiction treatment of how humans can find meaning in a world in which their labor isn't actually needed is the Culture novels by Ian M. Banks.
Another one that presents a "solution" but is less enthusiastic about the outcome is "Beggars in Spain" by Nancy Kress, although that novel has genetically enhanced humans being the economic threat instead of AIs.