A Young ‘Futurists’ Thoughts on AI, Automation, and the Economy

A spur-of-the-moment ‘essay’(rant) on why everyone is Wrong about AI

This is not a researched article… but its not an ignorant one either…

I’ve been following the trend of tech for a while now. Living it, and now building it.
I frequently study history to find the patterns in which help predict the future.

Whenever I hear people talking about what automation/AI is doing or will do to our economy and our ‘jobs,’ I realize several things:

People Dont Pay Attention To History.

This has happened a number of ways a number of times throughout history, may not ever this fast.. but definitely this dramatic.

The biggest was the Industrial Revolution. Not only did it absolutely destroy most jobs… and thus created far far more jobs… but it also dramatically changed the very idea of a job.

Prior to Industrialism… most people worked practically for themselves or their small towns. Most people were farmers.

What do you think farmers do? Here’s a hint… its nothing fancy.

We were farmers for centuries… well over 2 millennia in fact.

And before that, before civilization… most people were hunters and gatherers… For hundreds of thousands of years…

Change was slow back then, so we didnt really have to think about what the creation of the plow, or domesticated animals, or even wagons will do to the ‘economy’… You can say there was no economy… but more importantly, you can say we simply adjusted. We had the time to take these tools for what they were.. tools.

We were happy to pass on the hard work off to something else. We had time to realize that technology was not some monster come to rob us of our very livelihoods… in fact, we didnt even think of all the improvements and inventions and new things as ‘technology’… it was just a better way to do things. Allowed us to focus on more fulfilling stuff.

Now… we are reaching the edges of our collective comfort zones… we are finally coming to a point where all those tools that make life better… are making life too good to believe.

We cant believe it. We cant even fathom it.

We dont have the time to adjust.

At least that's what we tell ourselves.

We tell ourselves that we are nothing without work… that we need the work to put food on the table.
We tell ourselves that we’re just going to sit and get fat and lazy if we dont WORK.

But we fail to realize that its not even laziness that makes us fat… its diet. Its eating fat.

We forget that most people dont even like to be lazy. That's called ‘boredom’… and most people hate being bored… we do anything, Anything to not be bored… we come up with games and tools and art and philosophy and science and even war to fight boredom… to not be lazy.

So no. Even if robots come and ‘take’ every single job in the world tomorrow… we wont descend into madness.

Yes. We would all be terribly confused. We would be at a loss for a while.. we would be bored.

But many of us… MANY of us would become far more social… we’d become far more initiative… we’d become far more inventive and creative and figure out how to live the life we really want to live.. the life we say we work for.. but really only end up living our entire lives barely thinking about it, because we’re distracted by that very same work.

Dont believe me?

Look at history.

Farming is way less work than running around foraging or catching and killing animals… but clearly we didnt get fat and lazy. Farming got progressively easier over a span of centuries… but clearly we didnt get fat and lazy. Factory work and blue-collar jobs during Industrialism was far easier than toiling and milking and etc from sundown till sunset… but we still didnt get fat and lazy. Eating the wrong/excessive crap is what made people fat and lazy.

But this isnt just about the fear of wide-scale obesity and laziness… there is a fear of unemployment… of not having anything left for us to do.

The problem there is that we need to stop being a bunch of passive aggressive complainers and empower ourselves to take hold of our tools.

Just because our tools are suddenly able to do things we dont quite have the time to train away from doesnt mean our tools are invading our work… it means we’ve failed to find meaningful work.

Work is not about feeding the world fat via mass production of goods and services… (that includes everything from factories to admins to teachers)

Work is about doing what we need to do to support and improve ourselves.

For most of human history, that just meant making sure we could survive. That meant getting food, water, and a place to live.

For most of human history, we only had enough time and energy to survive.. that very few of us could live… or at least that we had very few ours in the day to enjoy life.

Most people didnt have the privilege of reading for fun or traveling or learning new skills or socializing or gaming or much of anything.

For the first time in human history… we can figure out how to survive just by living in the right place… so much so that we can now worry about anything anywhere at anytime.

For the first time in human history… we can figure out how, why, and where we want to live.

So LIVE!

We Have to Learn How to Enjoy Life

Thanks to AI, we dont have to drive a truck (for someone else) to put food on the table… or flip burgers (for someone else) sell products (for someone else) or schedule meetings (for someone else) or do anything for someone else just to support and improve our own livelihoods.

What will we all do with all this time we will have on our hands?

Be bored. And thus find ways to not be bored. Haha

This is a fvcking PRIVILEGE! Stop treating it as an epidemic or some huge disaster poised to destroy humanity.

For the first time in human history… all of humanity is about to have some free time to figure themselves out.

Use it. Live it. Enjoy it.

Because next we’re going to have to figure out where we stand on the grand scheme of things when AI grows from being just a tool to being a sentient creatures …

But let’s not get into that… I welcome our ‘Robot Overlords’ ;)

Even though I think it far more likely that we’ll augment our own minds and abilities to become our AI…

I think the REAL pressing matter is not the exponential boom in technology coming… its the friction of humans that is the real problem.

The amount of greedy people that rather keep their power (money, influence, fame), at the expense of technological progress… is terribly terrifying.

The amount of selfish people that rather keep their limited comfort zone (working for someone else, institutional inequality) at the expense of social progress… is horribly horrifying.

The amount of ignorant people that rather keep the ‘devil they know’ (bloated government, corrupt politics, scarcity-based economy) at the expense of economic progress… is fcking scary.

The problem is not that society is progressing too fast and we wont be able to handle it… the problem is that society is not allowed to progress fast enough and we are being led to believe that we cant handle it… like a bunch of young adults being guilted and coddled by their dumb parents who want to control their lives in order to live through them…

We’re being sabotaged by our own people. And that’s what scares beyond anything else.

Society is perfectly capable of figuring what to do next. People are perfectly able to adapt and find new realms of creativity to take advantage of being able to live rather than just survive.

We always have…

The one thing we excel at is not physical strength like most other animals… or remembering things like computers… or being slow and lazy like sloths… or even socializing like dolphins… we excel at creativity.

Give people the tools to live their lives how they want to live… and we will most definitely be creative in how we live our lives.

Dont believe me?

Look at those who have already had the privilege and/or the perseverance to live life on their own terms rather than just survive via some ‘job’ given to us:

Just in the past decade alone, there are people who live the lives they want to live creating content, vlogging, reviewing, gaming, reacting, etc… we call these people ‘youtubers’ or content creators… through this same platform and way of life, people have been able to express themselves in just about any niche from trippy science education videos to

In China, and now quickly coming west, we have not just authors… but webfiction writers… people who write everyday or week in an on-going story during which readers can feel way more engaged in the fiction world.
Even niche ‘lazy’ activities thought to be just ‘for kids’ has become more lucrative and enjoyed than many sports… gaming. (I wont even mention the irony that sports literally are games that people take incredibly seriously)

It doesnt stop there… now more and more people are also expressing themselves through a medium that is less attention-greedy than videos but usually earns far more attention span… podcasts; a phenomenon where people (with widely varying levels of ‘credibility) talk about what they love.
Even still… we have social media… an incredibly versatile and powerful medium for people to just share their lives. And already, we see the next wave of this idea… this meme of being able to share your life via live streams… we see it on the horizon of ‘just a weird thing’ to ‘everyday life’.

I can go on even further talking about how much this age of abstracting work from meaningless, time-consuming jobs has helped artists and performers of all kinds to really gain more

Than we have the idea of Entrepreneurs… of Startups… of Crowdfunding…

The problem is not that we cant/wont be able to figure what to do with our time and how to make money.

The problem … is friction… people that dont WANT to move on to a better system and future for all because they (mistakenly) think they will somehow suffer for it.

For the first time in human history… we will

We are finally, Finally, FINALLY here… almost there… standing on the edge of our evolutionary leap… dont fall back and fck it up just because you dont trust yourself.

Guess what… the kid is Humanity… and the Adult is AI… which us, when we ‘grow up’… Trust the process…

Take a Leap of Faith.

Thanks for reading all of this!! Once again, I had no idea what I was going to write today even less than an hour before midnight… but then I read that article and figured I’d share my thoughts… use that as a #Blogmentary haha
#Pathofatrillionaire… the trillion(s) will be made empowering humanity to free themselves.