michael-dean-k/

World hunger is solved! An elite-controlled superintelligence, which has “biomic closure,” full understanding of all living systems, was able to create a pill that prevents humans from needing to eat, drink, shit, and shower. It also prevents all disease and sickness. You take them once a week. Another one, optional, eliminates the need for sleep too. They do not bother to distribute it person-to-person in any traceable way. It’s sprayed from planes like bird seed, know as “snow pills.” They do not hand out the age-reversal pills.

This invention wasn’t explicitly requested, but rather one of many solutions to fix the economic chaos of mass automation. These magic pills are the cheapest possible way to placate a population without having to give them land, money, or power. When food is unnecessary, so is money and a job. The invention is lauded for its brilliance: why fix the labor crisis when you can solve the problem all the way upstream? "Who wants to be a wage-slave when you can pharmaceutically eradicate hunger and experience freedom?" (That's the slogan.)

And so the story takes place as society rapidly reforms around the abolition of hunger. Food-based geopolitics ends. Meat industries vanish. People shift out of cities, migrate towards places of all-year outdoor living, and shift with the weather like animals. If machines and technocrats handle efficiency, most human culture centers around art and entertainment, religion and hedonism. Humans rich and poor still want attention, status, community, and meaning—and so phones, amenities, and circus (the infrastructure of attention) is distributed for free.

The average pill-takers vary in their definition of “good leisure.” There are sex cults, renaissances in every artform, national park dwellers, farmer-protestors, entertainment-addicts, techno-ghouls, and the sorts. Unshackled from labor, we see through the diversity possible in the species. Some appeal to the games and contests of elites, others form their own counter-cultures, others forage or stave. Without capitalism, and with (elective) guaranteed survival, half see the opportunity to push limits of human potential, the other half horrified at a stratified transhuman society.

The book shifts between two characters: one is the son of an elite who has direct access to ASI and is a lead decision maker in the engineering of a new society; the other is a woman on the snow pills, a journalist road tripping across the country to stay with and interview different factions. The two eventually meet, and the son (a prince of sorts), realizes that some mortal “animals” are happier than the council of immortal leaders. He falls for her and runs away with her, but she quickly abandons him. The prince when recognized, is torn apart, tortured, and held as ransom, a bartering chip to have leverage in society’s design.

I want to be in conversation with my books. This was Montaigne’s whole thing. He did this for 10 years. I can’t help but think that Kindle/eBooks/digital reading is a better format for this. If I were only reading, ie: if I were retreating into a tower to retire and die, then I’d see the appeal of doing it all by hand. [B] I'd wire index cards with string! [A] But this is maybe a 3rd or 5th or realistically 10th priority. I’m called to it, but given the range of things I’m juggling, efficiency actually does matter here. I know efficiency does bring invisible amputations, but also, if I’m not efficient here, I might just not do it in the first place. Since all my highlights sync to Obsidian, I can build a writing app that loads in highlights and then let’s me write directly to them.

I suppose the counter-argument is that I am juggling too many things. If I were really to choose, to pick the project I’d have to do, it would probably be to focus on building my business to support my family, but that also cuts me off from soul and spontaneity, and so this whole reading/writing for leisure thing is a healthy counter-balance; [B] budding aspirations warrant a minimal efficiency to bloom.

Act as if every minute you scroll drains half your day’s potential. It’s not just a break, but a minute you’re not meditating, reflecting, journaling, creating, practicing, etc. A bad break is a minute you’re not reviving your systems. Instead you atrophy your attention and trend in the negative direction. It affects the nature of your focus for the rest of the day. After just 5 minutes scrolling, you’ve shot 97% of your days potential. This isn’t literal, but act as if it’s the case. More so: realize the returns of taking good breaks (of actual leisure).

From Bostrom's Deep Utopia:

• Learning over production
• Relationship over things
• Capital over labor

I think the leisure revolution will require people to come to their own decision about pleasure, experience, learning/skill development, goals, and community. Typically, external constraints decide and limit these factors. But in post-work material abundance, we might be forced into freedom, and that will make a lot of people uncomfortable.

Some points to consider for the age of AI:

• Have a bold vision for your life and art.
• Don’t compete with commodities or status.
• Make yourself legible to machines.
• Turn your frameworks into code.
• Start a vlog.
• Go off-script.
• Take leisure seriously.
• Meditate multiple times per day.
• Join the Boy Scouts.
• Stop watching porn.
• Aim to be sublimely well-rounded.
• Embrace for the weirdest possible future.
• Be humble as you lose your edge.
• Accept death in this hour.

So here’s why I think AI is going to take everyone’s job. There’s the classic and comforting belief that “humans’ adapt.” That’s been true. There’s been some technological breakthrough that makes an old class tools useless, and so a whole generation pivots to a new class of tools. But AI is an innovation in tool and worker. AI, when it gets cheap, commoditized, and agentic enough, will be a supply shock to the labor market.

This might happen in addition to unimaginable productivity and abundance (if not destruction), and many utopians are calling for a “post-scarcity world” where everyone gets UBI. This will be a techno-luxury marxism. We won’t have economic value, but we’ll get paid to exist? We won’t understand how the machinery of culture works. It’s the next frontier of infantilism, and our parents aren’t human.

This leads to a leisure revolution and simultaneous meaning crisis. No one will be able to “escape from freedom” anymore. We’ll look back at full-time jobs as a form of slavery, and yet also, be paralyzed by a fear of the infinite possibilities in our lives. Best case, the average middle class person has no other option but to learn to become an artist.

This is of course a cartoon vignette, but fuzzy futurism is useful to the degree that it gets you to adapt to the present. Maybe that won’t come true, but if you assumed it true, how would you act today, and does that actually serve you in today’s timeline?