Humans Not Needed

At the time of writing this, few appreciate the huge technological leap of large language models. Most probably never will, as the transition our brain makes from “change” to “commonplace” is too quick for the outcome to be realized. Few months in, machines understanding human language and expressing creativity, is as commonplace as a scientific calculator.

When creativity becomes autonomous, everything will change, again.

Definition of Cost

When acquiring something requires only your own effort, it’s considered “free of charge”. When you’re out in nature, the small rock at your feet is free for you to take, you don’t need to pay anything except your own body’s energy.

This is true if that rock is made of gold — the material doesn’t care, all that matters in terms of “cost” is whether you need another human to expand effort on your behalf. What if a machine brought you the gold rock from a hole in the ground? There’s still nobody to pay, except the humans who made the machine.

What if no humans made the machine? What if it was designed and manufactured solely by other machines, dating back enough generations such that a human’s impact on that specific rock-bringin machine is as miniscule as the impact your ancestor 100 generations ago had on your current life? You might need to pay that human, but it would be conceivably free.

That rock can also be a phone, a meal, a car, or a house. It can be everything you need, and most of what you want.

Purpose

This seems alarming — how will I survive if I’m not needed?

Consider the fact that work has not been needed for survival for quite some time. If you live in a western country, the vast majority of your own time working is most likely dedicated to excess, not survival. It’s easy to miss the difference between survival and excess because humans always want more.

Now that everything is free, you can more than merely survive — you can enjoy your life just as you had, except you don’t have to work.

Not having to work can also sound boring, purposeless. Now consider your hunter-gatherer ancestors and what they had to do — truly for survival. What would they think, if you told them that in their future (today) they could survive for “free”, because humanity will live in abundance? Would they think such a world is boring and purposeless? Probably.

Last Role

In a world where humans are not needed, there’s only one thing a machine cannot be — human. For some reason, people sometimes prefer things if they explicitly come from other humans, even when that desire is illogical. Hand-made ice cream, furniture, art, or therapy — whether they are a lower quality than machine-made or not is often irrelevant in the question of which to buy.

Even in a world where everything is free, we’ll still find things to do, services to provide, and human effort to pay for.