Fantasies

After all this talk about ChatGPT and the remarkable progress AI has made, I started to wonder, sending my mind farther and farther into the future. Let’s say, by the use of technology like ChatGPT and fusion power, we enter a post-scarcity world. Well, I said to myself, at first there’d be next to no intellectual jobs; intellectually intensive jobs are seemingly solvable and will one day be passed onto a machine, and as the need for new technology wanes, the intellectually creative jobs will fade into the realm of amateurs. Automation will eventually take over the other fields as well (this is a far off future, but not an impossible one) to the point that it will always be more efficient to buy robots than hire workers.

I think, at this point, we would notice the quality of things deteriorating. A man who has devoted his entire life to cooking will probably cook food better than any robot ever will, but most people will have access to the robot and not to him. Most will happily take the mediocre and cheap over the quality and expensive, especially as hardly anyone will have a job. Most people will have time and no money. I’d assume, at some point, UBI and food stamps become the norm; everybody’s basic needs will be met and only the aristocracy and a few gifted specialists will rise above such slavery.

It seems inevitable then that, without any wants or real needs to hold him back, man will give himself wholly over to his vices, and at such a point, war will destroy it all. In a post scarcity world, there would be no limit to war, and the wars, if they do indeed come, would not be satiable. They would not come about out of a need that could be met, for all those needs will have been met. They will be motivated by ideology or sheer bloodlust.

Then the bombs will fall, bigger bombs than we’ve yet made, and the robots and drones will kill each other and ourselves. Man will escape to fortresses of some sort, perhaps digging deep into his grave as he makes of the earth above him a Hell. Perhaps some will fly to the cold, solitary safety of space.

And maybe man will survive himself, or maybe something will survive him. Maybe man will evolve by then into some horrible monster, a demon or an angel. Perhaps, I wonder, the star trekkers will return. Set up for yourselves, then, the meeting between these space farers and the people of the underground cities. Will there be men at that meeting, or only the children of men, grown up, just recognizing their father’s face in the other?

So were my thoughts today, a flight of fancy while I worked. It is a future that I shall never know beyond such silent musings.