For as long as there have been people, life has had one hard job: getting enough. Enough food. Enough warmth. Enough safety to see tomorrow.
Super intelligence might finish that job for us.
In 1930, the economist John Maynard Keynes made a guess. Within a hundred years, he said, humanity would solve the problem of making enough. Then we would meet our real problem, the permanent one: how to live "wisely and agreeably and well."2
Making enough is a problem for machines. Living well is a problem for us.
Keynes imagined that his grandchildren would work about fifteen hours a week. His deadline is 2030.
Aristotle said we work so that we can have leisure.3 The Greek word for leisure was scholē. It became our word school.4 Free time was never meant to be empty. It was meant for learning, friendship, play and thought.
Rest is not the opposite of work. It is the reason for it.
A cat asleep in the sun is not waiting for its life to begin. It is living it. We are the animal that worries. We trade today for tomorrow, again and again, until tomorrow is all we have.
Keynes saw this too. He wrote that nature built us, impulses and all, to solve the problem of survival.2 Our bodies still expect a small world: a fire, a few faces, the next meal. Then we built a world too big and too fast for them to ever feel safe in.
The anthropologist Marshall Sahlins called hunter-gatherers "the original affluent society." Not because they had much, but because they wanted little.5 Others argue their lives were harder than he claimed.6 But his point stays with you.
There are two ways to be rich. Have more, or need less.
Super intelligence can help with the first way faster than anything in history. The second way, no machine can walk for us.
"Do not add to his store of money, but subtract from his desires."
"He who is satisfied with his lot is rich."
Abundance is only abundance if it reaches people. A light in one window is not a sunrise.
Economists at the International Monetary Fund warn that the people who own these machines could keep a large share of what they make.7 Where the light goes will not be decided by the machines. It will be decided by us.
Most philosophy helps us wonder. Moral philosophy helps us decide.
Hannah Arendt feared a strange future: workers without work.8 People who built their whole worth on a job, suddenly free of it, with nothing else to stand on.
The first signs are small, but real. Young people starting out are finding fewer first jobs in the kinds of work these machines do best.9
Albert Camus told the story of Sisyphus, who must push a rock up a hill forever. Camus said we must imagine him happy.10 Now imagine someone finally takes the rock away. What does he do with his hands?
If your worth is your work, a machine can take it. If your worth is your life, nothing can.
From a bus window at night, a city looks beautiful. Up close, it is noise and hurry. Distance turns life into a picture.
And from the inside, you have no face. You are a window the world looks out of.
Maybe the universe is like that. A space that holds every possibility, and one of those possibilities is to look at itself. Every mind is one of its windows. Soon, a few of those windows may be ones we built.
You are not just looking at the universe. You are the universe, looking.
"Without looking out from his window, one sees the Tao of Heaven."
People say some things are impossible. Usually they mean only this: not yet.
Even zero is not nothing. It is everything that has not happened yet.
The machines may give us enough. What we do with it is still ours.
Not never. Not yet.