A Solved Problem
February 25, 2025
3-Item Status
Current Location: Milwaukee, WI
Reading: Battle of the Linguist Mages by Scotto Moore
Listening: minute maid by Sophie Hunter & Hunna G
If you have a moment, reply with your own 3-Item Status.
New Work
This week’s Let’s Know Things is about the recent Tariff Ruling
This week’s Brain Lenses essay is about Abnormality & the pod is about Headaches
There’s also a new Do Things In Person this week
A Solved Problem
There’s a chance that some of the technologies that fit under the ever-enbroadening umbrella-term “AI” will end the world by vivifying a consciousness (or pseudo-consciousness) with goals that deviate from ours, which might then cause a spectacular economic collapse or spark a new, automated world war.
There’s also a chance it will lead to previously unseen levels of universal abundance, our species’ historical and persistent scarcity solved by minds (or mind-like systems) that determine exactly the right way to juggle resources so that everyone’s got what they need, and maybe quite a bit of what they want, too.
There’s also a chance that nothing serious happens and these tools are similar to all previous tools. They maybe herald a new personal technology paradigm, but don’t fundamentally change anything beyond the shape of the devices we covet and the specific interface through which we engage with information, entertainment, and each other.
That second what-if (the possibility of abundance) is especially interesting to me because while it would be a pretty cool outcome for most of us, it would also force us to ask ourselves who are when money (and overall economic value) is no longer the prime motive factor in our lives and a foundational element of our self-perception.
In an essay published in 1930, economist John Maynard Keynes wrote, “There is no country and no people, I think, who can look forward to the age of leisure and of abundance without a dread. If the economic problem is solved, mankind will be deprived of its traditional purpose.”
This maybe initially sounds a bit silly: of course I don’t dread the idea of plenty! If I didn’t have to work, my life would be full, my problems would go away, everything would be amazing!
There’s a reason so many people have trouble post-retirement, though. When we find ourselves setting our own paths, our own schedules, our own goals for the first time in our adult lives, it can be confusing and alarming. Many of us realize we don’t have internally derived versions of these things, so when we’re left without external instruction and motivation, we succumb to a sort of wandering listlessness and struggle under a weighty cloak of discontented ennui.
Who are we—as humans, as a species, as individuals—if we’re not working? If we don’t have careers (and career paths), if we no longer need to concern ourselves with money and the pursuit and aggregation and expenditure of it?
For all sorts of reasons, I tend to think putting everyone out of work (provided there’s a suitable safety net ready to catch us) is the ideal civilizational outcome.
I also believe it’s prudent we ask ourselves these sorts of questions ahead of time, before we desperately need to know the answers, as doing so provides directionality within the current paradigm, as well, pointing us toward our true ambitions even as economics tug at our compass needles and (to greater or lesser degrees) shape and filter our present pool of options.
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What Else
It has been an incredibly busy week, filled with meetups and road trips and hanging a lot of art and meeting a lot of people.
As March approaches and I’m finally able to spend a few consistent days at home, I’m planning a big Spring-cleaning push—hopefully it’ll correlate with the return of slightly warmer weather (as I’d love to be able to open the windows), though that’ll depend on how long this bitter cold front decides to stick around.
I’m about to jump back into the novel I’m working on with a flurry of small, focused passes, followed by a significant, holistic 4th draft that’ll hopefully make it ready for beta readers sometime around April.
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Hoo doggies! Lots to unpack here. There is a fundamental thing at work here that seems obvious now, but wasn't until I myself "retired". That sounds better than "Was downsized". Likewise retired sounds better than unemployed. Point is, I have quite a few things that I do (or am) for which work (or rather the income derived therefrom) was the enabler. I worked so I could eat & have a place to sleep while I pursued all the other stuff. Same for my wife. So we are busier in retirement than we were while working because working took up so much damned time. It's people for whom work is their identity that have problems without it. Here I mean work in the corporate sense. Maybe one worked as a writer or documentation, and can now "work" as a novelist, but more commonly it seems like they say "Oh crap, NOW what?!" and those people seem to have very short post-work lives. So cultivate something interesting to you now, I guess is what I'm saying to whoever might need to hear that. Not you obviously, but I know folks for whom being CTO of a major hospital is their identity and they are terrified of losing it for that reason. YMMV