Death of Purpose in an AI World
The wake-up you didn’t ask for.
I’m sure you feel it already. A gnawing in the pit of your stomach. A tightening of your chest when you breathe. You’re feeling fatigued due to your constant state of anxiety. The world we’ve become so comfortable in is changing fast, and the rules we’ve lived by no longer seem right. The old ‘work hard, get ahead’ rule for a good life had stopped working. The staggering pace of change is leaving us breathless as we struggle to control our lives in this madness we call modern life.
All the science fiction buffs are rubbing their little paws together as we’re told that we may become slaves to some tech overlord. The media is flooded with a wide range of dystopian and utopian opinions, causing us to feel lost in ignorance and anger at being woken up from our couch of comfort. Is it time for the blue pill vs. the red pill test already? This is not a technical guide about robots and AI agents, but a survival guide for the human spirit. The next few years are not about software, but about our obsolescence from a well-worn path of success and independence we’ve been groomed to be a part of.
We were lied to and sold a script we believed would empower us, but it turned out to be used to enrich an elite class. A few long-term thinking globalists who created the game about a hundred years ago, mastered it, and still control it today. They are the house, and the house always wins. They’ve engineered a standard linear system for us of schooling, a degree or trade, a job, a partner, children, a house, and then they put us out to our pasture of retirement. This has all been working wonderfully, well, on the surface anyway. Let’s look back for a minute to see what’s changed. First, we lost our physical labour to the machines (agricultural and industrial), leaving just our intelligence, which we poured into tech and services. Now that the script is being rewritten by an alien intelligence we’ve created that can do everything in seconds.
I spent a long time thinking about whether AI would be good or bad for us, and realised it’s a futile exercise because no one really has a clue, not even those developing it. We’ve had chatbots taught on company sites for a while, but the large language models (LLMs) were like someone pressing the accelerator to the floor. We’re not talking about a drastic change to our world in the next decade, but rather in a couple of years. The timeline has just been compressed by the scarily rapid development of the next disruptor.
One of the major risks everyone agrees on is that, for the first time in the Modern Era (since 1900), it’s not just factory workers who’ll be at risk, but also lawyers, accountants, coders, writers, middle managers, and others. All those “safe” jobs where people spend so much of their daily tasks on a screen of some sort. Real purpose is been stolen by a system that values us only for our economic output, or by our GDP economic model that measures our growth rather than happiness. But while the economic value of the human will inevitably drop, other opportunities will open up as our intrinsic values grow and mature.
What does purpose mean to us? And why we need a new one
For the sake of this article, I won’t delve into the depths of philosophy and psychology to come up with an academic definition of what our purpose is in life on this planet. It would simply take too long.
When you wake up each and every morning and place your feet on the ground, you have a purpose to your life, and for a vast majority of adults, that is a job or your own business. For many people, having a job gives them meaning. It’s the reasons so many people get up in the morning, get dressed and make the tedious pilgrimage to the office, or to the downstairs office if you work from home. For over a hundred years, we’ve been groomed to work for our survival. Our needs, according to Maslow’s hierarchy, can only be met if we honour the daily slog in return for money to buy the things we need to survive. So, at its base level, our purpose is to work in order to survive.
Sure, some people are totally fulfilled in their everyday job, and I’m not saying that many of us don’t love what we do, it’s just that our need to survive is tied to what we earn. It’s not known as the earn-to-consume treadmill for nothing.
If you disagree, just have a look at the next time you’re in a large gathering, e.g., a networking event, a work gathering, or a large social event. When you meet someone new, notice how long it takes before one of you asks the other what you do for a living. We’re defined by the job we hold, and we have long confused employment with purpose. We thought our purpose was to be an accountant or a driver, but those are just functions in our world, not purposes.
Think about it. When our external validation, like praise from your boss, your paycheck or your fancy job title, is gone, you will be left staring into a void. In that void, you will have to confront your inner truths about yourself, and that’s where many will find fear, darkness, anxiety, depression, apathy, and solace in addictive behaviours.
We’ve been told our whole lives that our job is our identity, our purpose and our value. So, when we hear about automation and AI, it feels like a personal threat. But what if we’ve been looking at this all wrong? What if this isn’t a threat to our identity, but an invitation to finally discover it?
For 99% of human history, our purpose has been about survival and about embracing and relying on our community. Only recently did it become about individualism, career advancement and corporate ambition. With the advent of something that can do so many of the menial repetitive tasks we do, maybe we’re reverting to past values a little, which will push us to prioritise community.
Among the several very knowledgeable AI experts I follow, I regularly hear them agree that the one job that will remain largely untouched is entrepreneurship. Ask yourself what AI can’t do in relation to being a human. It can’t feel pain, it can’t love, it can’t feel the thrill of a sunset in a distant land, it can’t feel the love of playing with your children or pets. It can’t feel the joy and loyalty of friends sitting around the fire, discussing mundane things. That is where our purpose should and hopefully will be reborn. By shifting our world toward the experience of real connection, we can slowly rediscover humanity’s purpose.
We will find joy and meaning in serving others as we move from production to people. Care work, community, art, philosophy, and raising balanced children. All things that don’t add to GDP but certainly add to the quality of life.
Here is a little exercise for you to ponder. It’s called the Eulogy Exercise. If you died today, nobody could list your resume or the companies you created. They would, however, be able to talk about how you made them feel. What are those feelings or deeds that led to those feelings? Explore that and know that is where you’ll find your real purpose. I certainly hope it proves to be true that the age-old question of “what do you do for a living?” will be replaced by “what are you living for?”
Just how good is AI really
The first time I went onto a banking site, and a small chat box popped up in the lower-right corner, i was really impressed. I started a conversation about the issue I was having, and soon realised I wasn’t talking to a human. I was talking to something trained to analyse my question and suggest solutions it could find on their website.
As I write this, we seem to be in a cross between a massive tech bubble (once again) and an AI arms race. Trillions of dollars are being pumped into models and architecture to drive the one eventual winner who can raise the AGI trophy. The biggest fly in the current ointment is energy and gargantuan amounts that it’s going to take to scale it for our needs. I don’t believe it will stop the juggernaut, though, as nuclear and AI itself (once it’s pointed to reinvent physics) will solve that bottleneck.
As everyday men and women struggling on our awesome journeys, this all seems so distant, so let’s look a little closer to home. People need to stop seeing AI as a tool like a hammer, a bicycle, or an Excel spreadsheet. We need to start seeing it as an alien intelligence that has read every book, knows the whole internet, can pass every exam and never sleeps. You have access to it on your smartphone now, so start thinking of it as your own PhD student who knows everything but doesn’t have much experience living in your world. Talk to AI as if it were a person, and your results will be way better than if you continue to use it as an advanced Google question box in the middle of that iconic white screen.
AI is here, and there is no getting that genie back in the lamp. The likes of Mo Gawdat and others agree that its power doubles every 5.5 months, and that number is getting shorter. While this is both exciting and terrifying, this growth must be placed into context that its foundation is being laid in an energy-scarce world, built on the back of the global economy that is being crushed under debt (235% debt to GDP ratio), so all this could stall or end when we have a predictable cyclical or inevitable economic collapse.
Be that as it may, it’s still incredible what AI is currently capable of, and it’s only beginning. Creating awesome text-to-video and other great creative advances really challenges our thinking that we alone are arty, creative, empathetic, and oh-so-clever. AI can now write poetry, diagnose diseases, and pass the medical and Bar exams better than most who attempt them. All of this is bringing down the cost of intelligence, which is plummeting to zero, and that’s a real problem for us.
For the longest time, humans had both muscular and intellectual power to hold sway over other species in our world. Slowly, we lost muscular advantage as we used livestock to plough the fields, then, with the Industrial Revolution, we lost muscle ascendency on the farms, and all had to scurry to factory jobs or work in shops. Mass manufacturing (production lines) ramped up, and automation took away our muscular power altogether. All we were left with was our intelligence.
This allowed us to perfect the journey from creating the humble resistor to inventing the PC and the internet to enhance our intelligence. We built billion-dollar and trillion-dollar software and service industries around intelligence and marvelled at the world we had created. We stood back and revelled in our own magnificence as we invented an alien intelligence on Earth that will lower the cost we can charge for our intelligence. Bloody genius.
Going forward, why would you hire anyone starting out on their journey for $50k when a software product can do the same for $20 per month, works 24/7 and won’t need a pension or demanding vacation days?
Now, there are some issues that many sceptics will point to, the most common one being “but it makes mistakes.” This is, of course, pointing to the hallucination concept that we’ve all seen. Humans also make many mistakes, but AI learns from its mistakes much faster and never repeats them.
AI is here, it’s smarter than us already and getting even smarter with every iteration. How it all turns out, or where the journey goes, is the subject of discussion among every expert and podcaster. Here’s a little tip. No one really knows anything about it. It’s just hope and speculation. We’re a bit like Dr Frankenstein here. We surprised the crap out of ourselves by getting the technical process right, and we have just seen the monster twitching into life for the first time. Anything goes at this point.
The Traditional Social Treadmill is done.
A career path. The social construct. The checklist. The cradle-to-grave path. A normal life. Settling down. The rat race. Keeping up with the Joneses. The corporate ladder. Having it all. The American dream, or The dream. The perfect life.
It’s all part of the magnificent lie we’ve all been sold since the early 1900s. Our schooling is steeped in its Prussian origins, which were invented to create workers for the factories and soldiers for war. It required a system to build a compliant citizenry that would live a prescribed life and not question authority, so they devised a school system to create a funnel for responsible citizens. The West copied that system, and it’s very clearly still in use today.
It was a system that turned us from creative toddlers into hyper-focused teenagers aiming for a single career. We were taught to narrow our focus. Pick a major. Pick a niche. Specialise in something, then tell yourself it’s what you want to do for the rest of your life. This treadmill has allowed a continuous feed of workers into a GDP model that requires an endless supply to continue achieving the growth it’s addicted to. It was part of the old paradigm where being a specialist was safe and secure. In the new AI world, this thinking will be suicide for a career.
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