Don’t be surprised that AI does your job less well. What matters to whatever replaces you is speed and a standard of quality that is very often lower than what you are used to producing as a final result. Industrializing thought has never been a matter of producing substantially better; it simply makes access to intelligence available at a modest cost to a spectacular number of people. If you think you are excellent or unique in your profession, that will not necessarily protect you from being replaced, because your clients may have changed or simply disappeared. If people once were willing to wait a certain amount of time to access an excellent service or product at a relatively high price, now they expect a correct product or service delivered as quickly as possible and at a price that defies all competition. In the economic equation, speed and quantity generally beat quality and slowness. Those who can wait are a minority, and not everyone will be able to enjoy a premium clientele; you will necessarily have to adapt, unless you are part of a tiny fraction of workers whose services or products reach an audience that knows how to wait, as is already the case for the clients of certain luxury products (Ferrari cars, collector’s bags, etc.).
The Analogy of War
The history of war has known the same twists and turns. War was for a long time the business of craftsmen. Those who were best trained generally won. Then technology came along and allowed quantity to prevail over quality. The crossbow allowed a peasant to very quickly become a lethal element of an army, whereas previously an archer needed on average five years to develop both his musculature and master his art. The advent of the arquebus is merely the continuation of this process of industrialization that the crossbow had initiated. The armies that began to spread during the Renaissance had already initiated a form of industrialization allowing the masses to join battles that had long been the preserve of the elite.
Stop Trying to Be Fast, Be Human
Of course, those who ally themselves with AI in their work will be able to resist their own obsolescence longer, but in the long run, the phenomenon we are witnessing will place everyone on the same footing. What will result is that humanity’s contributive value to the economy will inexorably approach zero. In itself, this is not a real problem; one might even say it is an opportunity: the opportunity to live more happily, thanks to a humanity freed from work, which is very often synonymous with suffering. The real problem will be organizing society (and the hierarchy it implies) beyond the prism of work.
Man’s Salvation Will Come Through His Socially And Humanly Contributive Value, No Longer Through His Economically Contributive Value, And These Are Two Different Things
Be useful to your community or be nothing. That is how one could sum up the adage summarizing the new paradigm to come. If previously people could be satisfied with “bullshit jobs,” those jobs that contribute nothing to the well-being of people—and of those who hold them—this anomaly will have to disappear in the coming years, because on the one hand AI is attacking these jobs head-on, and on the other hand the world will need people who play a truly human and social role. If you believe this phenomenon is a Marxist fable, think again: there have been precedents: the invasion of the Sea Peoples, the fall of the Roman Empire, etc. These have always brought about a decentralized community retreat and the return of solidarity as the primary principle of survival. The initial purpose of work is usefulness; yet the increasing complexity of the economy has made certain jobs obscure both in their form and in their purpose. The AI tsunami will not only reshuffle the cards, it will throw them to the ground, making them quite simply unusable. Humanity is losing the game it itself invented: we will no longer acquire status through the work we hold, but through the social and real usefulness we bring.
Rethinking Effort
If at first we had a noble idea of work—serving others, making ourselves useful, etc.—in practice we quickly realized that this idea is often corrupted. Indeed, we must very often serve economic interests more than human interests. AI and everything it implies (robotization, etc.), by making work disappear on a massive scale, will give meaning back to effort. Our status will no longer depend on a job placed at the service of sometimes questionable interests, but on the effort we provide to help our community and perhaps even far beyond it. In short, we will restore work to its former nobility, especially since it will doubtless no longer be paid.
The Culture of Honor
A society in which work has no monetary value is nothing new. It may even be the rule, if one believes the way small community groups have functioned throughout history and in every place.
Small communities have, so to speak, no need for money, because they are not centralized. Money is the tool of facilitation—and domination—of a centralizing power. If you live in a small group, what counts is mutual aid. As long as the land belongs to you, you do not need money, only an informal culture of honor that gives more importance and prestige to the individuals who serve the community best.
Money, one could even say, is the separation of prestige from its holder.
Previously, honor made it possible in a certain way to possess wealth that could not easily be taken from us, except in the case of an unpunished offense (dishonor). No need for a safe: honor came with you wherever you were. Money introduced something perverse: it separated wealth from the one who possessed it. From then on, people can lose their wealth easily. They must therefore organize their lives differently.
If You Think You Are Irreplaceable, You Are Suffering from the Cognitive Bias “It Only Happens to Others”
There are plenty of mythical figures who have fallen through pride. You are not superior to those who succumbed to believing that the gods had spared them—and even chosen them—that they were the elect and that nothing could happen to them. The era we are entering could be a new “historical turbulence zone.” The 21st century could strangely resemble the 20th century, perhaps with a few decades of chronological delay: mass proletarianization in prospect, the emergence of new populisms, and perhaps a new large-scale war that would take on proportions never seen before. The skies watching over us are certainly not radiant, but you might perhaps come out of it better than others by taking the lead.
The Future Belongs to Prepared Minds
To come out better than 99% of others, three things are needed: having a contradictory belief (shared by a minority of the population), being right about that belief, and living and acting as if that belief were true. As for AI and its influence on the world, you could already make the bet that your value no longer depends on your economic contribution, but on your human and social usefulness in a world on the verge of collapse.
The Survivalists Were, in a Way, Somewhat Right
If survivalism tends to bring us back to an animal state, it has the merit of alerting us to an imminent danger: that of seeing the world as we know it collapse before our eyes. If survivalist ideology can be troubling because it seems to be a civilizational regression, it nevertheless contains certain answers to the problems to come:
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The necessity of producing one’s own food;
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The importance of human solidarity;
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The eradication of the certainties created by the modern world as we know it.
What can be rejected from this ideology:
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Survival as the ultimate value: sometimes dying is preferable to living undignifiedly;
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Predation erected as the primary principle of survival: it is the strength of community and solidarity that in reality has allowed humans to subsist.
You Are What You Do
Do not believe that changing one’s life paradigm is simple. Millions of people in history have been left behind by change: they did not know how to adapt their way of life to face the new challenges life submitted to them. They made the bet of immobility, hoping that the train of change would not flatten them. In short, they applied the ostrich tactic, which can sometimes work, but remains the exception to the rule. The decisions you make today will condition your well-being tomorrow. Do you think it is reasonable to bet on stability in a world undergoing incontestable turbulence? Is it not wiser to take the lead by betting that upheaval is inevitable? Your best asset in an uncertain world is your character, your human qualities that generate both trust and lasting bonds with people. The ethical choices you make today will necessarily have a leverage effect on tomorrow’s uncertain situation. They will directly condition your ability to open doors or not.
Your Greatest Asset in a World in Upheaval Is Your Character
If you fail to create trust, you are dead. One of the characteristics of today’s world is mobility. People can do you a dirty trick and then disappear. This behavior will be dangerous in the world to come, because one will not be able to travel so easily and will be more attached to one’s community. If you have no moral value, no honor, your social value is close to zero, and in a community-based world, that means death. That is why you should think right now that your greatest capital is your integrity, your morality—in a word, your character. The hard times to come will need strong men and women. The easy times in which we have lived tolerated a form of mediocrity of character, or at least, people of little worth could slip through the net. In the years to come, the mesh will tighten, so that people of doubtful morality will have no choice but to take refuge in extreme marginality, because they will have been evicted from protective communities.
For Those Who Still Want to Profit from the Old World
There is still a window of opportunity of a few years that will allow astute people to enrich themselves by setting up a business with the help of AI. You could help companies carry out their transition to AI before the world collapses. In this short period of time, you will indeed have the possibility of becoming rich and perhaps buying yourself a place in an isolated bunker before the world changes for good…
The Bunker, the Fateful Symbol of Tomorrow’s World
The billionaires of Silicon Valley and elsewhere are not only preparing tomorrow’s world for the entire planet, they are also protecting themselves from the possible consequences of the world they themselves will have created. The symbol that most contradicts the optimism displayed by Tech leaders is their enthusiasm for building bunkers on islands they own, lost in the middle of the ocean. How can one give credit to their word when their real estate projects betray them so sharply? These bosses are playing with fire and are not all ready to assume the consequences of their strategic choices. The risk that things will go wrong is far from zero, and these people, who are in command and well placed to know it, are no longer unaware of this danger. Would a car with no risk of accident really need an airbag? When risk appears, the need to protect oneself from it exists immediately. Now, it remains to be known from what probability of manifestation of this risk a piece of equipment becomes useful: 5, 10, or 50%? As for the bunker, the risk of planetary cataclysm is doubtless estimated at less than 5% over the next 10 years. Although reduced, protecting oneself against it for a few hundred million dollars is reasonable when one possesses tens of billions of dollars sleeping in an account or working in the form of shares.
