SWL Week in Review - AI Is Not a Labor Crisis. It Is a Meaning Crisis.
AI Is Not a Labor Crisis. It Is a Meaning Crisis.
"Civilizations are not mainly threatened by discomfort; they are threatened by superfluity"
People are worried about all sorts of things when it comes to AI… killer robots / AGI deciding to dispose of humanity (on purpose or by accident), a modern Tower of Babel where AI makes it impossible to know truth or coordinate, etc…
But what people are not paying enough attention to is AI threat to human meaning itself — the stories we tell ourselves about why to get out of bed, suffer, strive, build, and continue. It may do so at a level no prior technology ever has…
Meaning is not some luxury layer on top of life. It is the critical input. It is the cost of our greatest gift: imagination. Because we can imagine futures, we cannot live without a reason to inhabit one.
We can weather shifts in labor markets, fight killer robots, and possibly navigate the destruction of shared reality / language — but kill human meaning and you eventually kill human civilization.
Here is why / how I see things playing out:
- PATHS TO MEANING — Meaning for humans can come from one of three paths…. Creation, Pleasure, or Dignity in Struggle (Frankl) … these are all achievable today as they always have been BUT in reality achieving real creation, real pleasure, and real dignity are hard personal journeys that most people fail at / have trouble conceptualizing or organizing their lives around… What has made civilizations work / societies scale is the invention of ‘mass-accessible’ / retail forms of meaning that organize people and make them feel good
- PACKAGED / RETAIL MEANING — Real personal meaning is very hard for people to generate, but good news - since the dawn of civilization we have been creating retail / mass versions of meaning that are easily accessible to all…
- The First Was Religion — through successive forms — the story that worked at a mass level was always something version of: Your life will be nasty, brutish, and short .. as will that of your children - but it has meaning after you die. No GDP growth means nothing will change for thousands of years — Narrative wise, we went from ‘wheels’ of life with no progress in cycles, to innovations around arrows in history / building towards things like Messiahs… but the religious narrative broadly stayed the same from the earliest family locked ancestor worship, through polytheism,… to large scalable imperial monotheisms… life sucks, you will suffer - but do it for your ancestors, or yourself in the next life, etc. do it for something beyond the grave we can wonder about and build a story around.
- The Second Was Industrial — though also successive forms - once GDP started ticking up … you unlocked the story of ‘your life will be nasty brutish and short, but if you work hard your kids will be better off’… to ‘actually GDP is growing fast enough that if you work hard now, your life will be better in the future / and you will actually get to experience it! … it cannot be stated how big a deal with shift was — we needed religion less in places where GDP was growing because the human story about the future could finally be real, tangible, and lived. What a huge deal this has been for people - not because of the ‘stuff’ but because of the massively positive high-trust narrative shift in meaning.
- PRE-AI LATE 20TH CENTURY ‘MEANING’ CRACKS — The last several decades have seen massive cracks open up in the modern industrial ‘meaning’ story we have been relying on for a while now in the first world / developed societies where GDP actually has been growing and as a result the religion story has been in decline:
- The Mike Mulligan Issue — there was a time when being dude with shovel / being able bodied and willing to work / dig holes, etc. meant you could live the industrial upward-trajectory story without a college degree.. That fell apart decades ago (hello angry white uneducated men)… even before AI… the college narrative started cracking as well in the truth that ‘if you work hard your life / that of your kids will definitely be better’
- The internet destroyed local hero systems — so much of what you could find meaning in ‘creating’ or ‘consuming / pleasure’ was relative / always has been. The problem with the internet is that it revealed that the local town poet / film maker / actor actually isn’t that globally good, the local ‘basketball’ player sucks relative to the best in the world you can see on YouTube, and the guy who was having a grand old time as the rich local car dealer in his caddy shack country club… actually isn’t that rich. Instagram lays it all bare, and makes acts of creation and consumption that people took pride in because they thought they were doing it right… they turn out not to be.
- The Fundamental Techno-Productivity Leverage Issue — and then there is just the fundamental problem that technological leverage, not to mention global stability and compound returns on capital… all means that fewer people have more and more… and to the extent meaning is a relativist story — fewer people effectively monopolize the narratives more / and more people are left with nothing to do — Elon has all the kids! ( I mention kids half seriously… because talk about act of ‘creation’ … there are places where genders differ… I would argue that part of the reason women are doing better than men right now is that they have broader built in purpose in a way men do not — at an animal level, you only need a few dudes)
- THE BIG BIG AI PROBLEM TODAY / NAIL IN THE MEANING COFFIN — The problem with AI is that it is the nail in the coffin to the industrial meaning narrative that works today.. either AI tells people they can stop striving and still receive abundance, which is not a meaningful life; or it tells them the ladder is gone and their striving no longer matters, which is even worse.… either way is bad:
- Option 1: ‘Life gets better just for staying alive’ isn’t a compelling meaning story— the ‘optimists’ on AI say, good news… life will still get better for you like during the industrial phase - but you don’t have to do anything… all you have to do is ‘Don’t Die’ / stay alive. Here is the problem though… ‘stay alive’ doesn’t really tell anyone what to do every day / isn’t motivating and isn’t directive at all in terms of how to approach struggle, engage with pain, etc. ‘Don’t Die’ in an techno accelerando story isn’t sufficient to keep people from getting super depressed and bored drifting around meaningless and upset about the pain they experience in life… it isn’t a compelling meaning, or a compelling narrative on what to do each day.
- Option 2: Life actually doesn’t get better because of AI for most people / the permanent underclass- terrible meaning narrative — AI fundamentally pulls up the ladder and makes the rich / asset owners better off, but screws everyone else because human labor in all forms is finally fully devalued — If you are a ‘have not yet’ … you can never work your way ahead beyond a sci-fi lottery narrative — this already happened to being a strong guy with shovel a century ago in the age of Mike Mulligan…. And now college / education isn’t the key — so there is just no way forward. Even if you get ‘better stuff’ individually for near free, it won’t make you happy or fulfill you in an Instagram era — because you will see others with more and have no way to get it… and both happiness and creation are relativist human achievements.
- Putting all answers and experiences at your fingertips destroys struggle and investment to meet curiosity…removing a use for IQ100 people in knowledge work destroys value of work, the list goes on… AI hacks at the ladders to success and growth, removes the investment / struggle to see and experience, and at best creates a better world for humans to passively ‘consume’… meaning that even if things get great, meaning is hung on passively watching life as TV
- NO SAM YOU ARE WRONG, AI OPENS UP ALL THE MEANING IN CREATION AND PLEASURE!. you will say… because with AI you can create everything you can imagine, and that is amazing… and you can have all the things and that is amazing… no… incorrect:
- Creation is Only Meaningful When It Is Uniquely Yours. Just as we are blind to the CGI in marvel movies .. it is all boring… or you can now make poems in chatGPT — the novelty lasts for about 2 nanoseconds just like Sora… yes it is fun to make software with Claude for now, but just for now. Creation only creates meaning when it is a unique expression of the individual (and usually when it is appreciated by more than just that individual alone) — prompting tools along with everyone else will give no meaning to people / misses the point of what creative meaning is.
- And Pleasure? also sadly highly relative after you are fed and housed… people are social beings & your brain receptors habituates to whatever chemicals you throw at them… all the massages and 8 star restaurants and beautiful sunsets in the world will - once you have them all the time - not solve your meaning problem for people getting out of bed… at best you end up with drugged out VR-PLEASURE-DRUG pods matrix style… that might keep people placated and high, but it isn’t meaning people live for beyond dopamine receptors / a VERY narrow view of humanity.
- SO WHAT - MAN CAN ONLY LIVE BY LOOKING AT THE FUTURE — What comes next? / What are the possible paths forward if what you say is true:
- (1) RELIGIOUS REVIVAL - RETURN TO THE PAST: . Religion stayed alive and well in lots of poorer countries / where the upward industrial story the west had was never quite true (Catholicism works great in the 3rd world!.. So does Islam) — it is possible that the west / we just had a nice few century detour towards agreement and hope in the future in our lifetimes, and we revert back to narratives that are relatively cheap and easy at imperial scale.
- (2) CULTS & EVER SMALLER COMMUNITIES OF MEANING … People do basically re-establish smaller communities of faith and cults… or just communities of interest — that get more and more niche… physical space doesn’t create natural boundaries anymore where people can find meaning, purpose, and place… but being super fringe does — so instead of mass culture the world fractures into tiny pieces.
- (3) BILLIONAIRE STAR-TREK / SEARCH FOR THE HOLY GRAIL. Star Trek’s narrative is that first contact created purpose for all humanity as one …. Elon’s version is bold near-religious goals like greenhouse on mars that attracts a certain type of talent and hyper focus … maybe there are more grail projects (Artemis is cool) — that can galvanize people and give some sense of collective meaning — but TBH I am skeptical, especially when AI does most of the heavy lifting (as the narrative goes) — yes, you can help with grails and cathedrals generate meaning for a few folks, but you just don’t need / have a use for most folks on these things, which makes everyone just a passive consumer of the narrative / being a ‘watcher’ isn’t compelling/ deep meaning driver. TBH I actually think the empowered / small minority is going to have a BLAST with AI leverage on their meaning quests… they are going to be full of live… but that will be a minority / sliver of humanity.
- (4) DIGNITY IN SUFFERING / STRUGGLING WELL? — perhaps the Viktor Frankl answer? … everyone learns to have a private goal… and suffer well, take the experience / all experiences as moments for growth — meaning is dignity in suffering as you look to the future — I guess my issue with this is that for all the respect I have for humanity, it just isn’t retail enough. It is too hard — it might be great and right at the high end, but this narrative I don’t think scales to most people easily without some sort of Religious or otherwise retail wrapper.
PEOPLE NEED GOALS / TO BELIEVE IN THEIR FUTURE … not just the future in some abstract way… but their personal future. It could be beyond death (which has the benefit of being a boarder we can always invent and believe stories about) … but I have a hard time seeing how it remains about the present / real world — as it has been in our lifetimes… and that is a shame, because that was a really really good story that had the benefit of also being true! — This is the real challenge of our day with AI…
OTHER NOTES FROM THINKING ABOUT THIS IN NO PARTICULAR ORDER
- Meaning systems are coordination technologies. Religion is not just doctrine. It is a social operating system for sacrifice, time, duty, death, hierarchy, trust, and belonging. Industrial modernity was also a meaning system in this sense, not just an economy.
- Religion is a coordination tool downstream of technology — Small immobile societies had ancestor worship and land-bound gods. Empires evolved polytheism as they rolled up tribes / ancestor worship and their gods… Monotheism was a technology of empires that needed to scale beyond pantheon… Industrial societies favor progress narratives. Networked AI may favor fragmented, engineered, intentional micro-religions.
- The internet destroyed local hero systems. Before global transparency, millions of people could be meaningful within bounded worlds. The internet collapsed those worlds by importing planetary comparison into daily life.
- The internet weakened narrative monopolies; AI may destroy them. Once every worldview, aesthetic, belief system, and identity can be generated, remixed, and optimized on demand, belief itself risks becoming thinner and more aestheticized.
- Industrial modernity functioned as a rival religion. It gave people redemption in this world rather than the next: work, family, progress, homeownership, upward mobility, a better life for your children.
- AI will break the effort-to-value link. This is more psychologically damaging than inequality by itself. People can survive unfairness better than they can survive the feeling that their striving is irrelevant.
- The real scarcity in an AI world may become trust, belonging, and costly commitment. If intelligence and production are cheap, people may hunger more for institutions and communities that feel anchored, exclusive, demanding, and real.
- A paradise for the self-directed few can coexist with a meaning recession for the many.
- Abundance and meaning can move in opposite directions. This may be the deepest civilizational novelty of the AI era: material life improves while subjective purpose decays.
- Civilizations are not mainly threatened by discomfort; they are threatened by superfluity. A society full of people who feel unnecessary is more dangerous than a society full of people who are merely poor.
- Religions that survive conquest are especially interesting. Judaism is worth attention not just as theology but as a portable, durable meaning system that became less tied to land and therefore harder to extinguish.
- Christianity’s Roman swerve matters. One of the most interesting religion-project points is how an initially incompatible cult became empire-compatible. That is a model for how meaning systems mutate when they need to scale.
- The coming meaning systems may look less like “belief” and more like identity + ritual + boundary + mission. In other words, the next religion may not present itself as religion.
- Politics is downstream of meaning loss. If people lose a believable personal future, they become more susceptible to tribalism, ressentiment, pseudo-religion, conspiracy, and apocalyptic politics.
- The central policy question of the AI era may not be redistribution but re-legitimation. How do you make ordinary people feel that their lives are still needed, not merely subsidized?
Best,
Sam
P.S. … books I have been thinking about in writing this .. The Ancient City, Man’s Search for Meaning, Ishmael… I am sure others lol.
P.P.S. If you somehow made it here — don’t worry I have a few more usual fun ones coming I will dash off this week in the usual style:
- WWE characters of business… as culture.
- What do you expect consumers to do with AI really?
- Openai's folly trying to tell a consumer story for non-consumer tool
- Money is made on trading not investing
- Stop Trying to Convince People AI is good
- Citrini
- Split the Consumer Market
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