What will we do after the Singularity? The standard answer is: “we’ll just hang out”. The infinite vacation, as in the Culture novels. I think this won’t work. “Hanging out” implies:
- Other people exist.
- They want to hang out with you.
- You want to hang out with them.
And the post-scarcity, infinite vacation AI utopia undermines all these assumptions.
The social processes by which people come together and build relationships will disappear. Work, obviously, is pointless in a world of cheap superhuman intelligence. University (really all education beyond teaching people to speak) will be pointless because there’s no work to do and because growing your human capital doesn’t change your life outcomes: you get the same UBI whether you’re illiterate or a PhD.
I met a lot of my friends by writing open-source code, and participating in the community of software engineers. AI is dissolving that community by making human contributions superfluous. If Claude Code has existed when I was starting out, nobody would have cared about Austral or my other open-source projects or my technical blog posts.
As a teenager I tried to install Linux, ran into all kinds of problems, and went on the IRC chatrooms to get help. And in the process I made friends. Today, I would just ask Claude. AI disintermediates everyone, so that we no longer need each other. I still have friends, but I’m running off this pre-AI supply of friends I met through communities of practice. Young people don’t have that privilege.
What even is the point of cities in a world without work? If there’s nothing to do, there is no need to bring people together geographically.
The BATNA to hanging out keeps getting better, cheaper, and more convenient. When people’s sensorium becomes an infinite firehose of AI-generated superstimulus, why would they hang out with anyone?
This is less about AI and more about the trajectory of consumer technology, since many people already live like this: they go to work and watch TikTok. After work, they will just watch TikTok.
[Under] ASI this endless leisure will be passed in diminished, tiresome company, since we will lack the experiences of struggle and striving that generate interesting personalities. Our minds will have atrophied. We will have little of note to say to one another.
The people in the AI utopia will have no skills, no education, no accomplishments. We’ll be lucky if they are even literate. They will not be worth talking to, and you won’t want to hang out with them.
Maybe you and I can hang out with our existing friends. But just iterate this a bit. What about the next generation? How are they going to build meaningful relationships where the social processes that built those relationships are all in the past?
If we get radical life extension, there’s the problem of attrition over the long term: people will drift apart, drop out of society to enter the experience machine, die in accidents, or end their lives out of ennui. So your social network might be a non-renewable resource that gets exhausted over time as your pre-Singularity relationships attrite and can’t be replaced for the reasons above.