Waiting for Godot in AI-ville

A few years ago while writing “Crossing Lake Pontchartrain,” I wanted Larry Winstead to revive his neglected writing dream by finding the right person to spark his inspiration. Career collapse, a retching divorce, and corrosive uncertainty about a missing father left Larry hollowed out as a 40-year-old. But a new job, New Orleans, and a single mom yoga instructor named Emma inspire his creative yearn in a close collaboration that also sparks her creativity to paint again after a long-ago trauma left her too abandoning her art. In this writing subplot, the couple shapes Larry’s idea of a future society where career work has been eliminated and now offers only parttime work in a lottery. In that world, citizens receive funds for taking care of their health, educating themselves, and performing community service but they must spend their monthly stipend to perpetuate consumption of goods or punitive consequences accrue. Strangely, this bizarre system produces a creative renaissance where people have leisure to create, to focus on health and relationships, and to improve their minds through education.

Now Pontchartrain was written several years ago before Chat GPT hit the scene like a social virus threatening to disintermediate everything, even humans, it you listen to some alarmists. My novel’s premise may have been a bit immature, but I wanted to call attention to a balanced view of the future rather than suggesting another dystopian fate. See, I still believe in mankind’s ability to overcome our dark inclinations.

But this creative renaissance of the individual blessed with economic security and stocked with limitless personal time for pursuing dreams requires a massive human shift. No one today has complete answers; I don’t even hear much discussion about opportunity but rather only about the coming devastation. And I think I have an inkling as to why.

The human creature conforms to its environment, if there are only plants, we eat plants, if nothing but fish, we scour the ocean, but in terms of mental construct, many things shape us from technology and laws to the governments we put in place as structure for the world we live in. Authoritarian governments like China rule from a central figure and power polit that decides right and wrong, directions to pursue, investments to be made, and punishments to be administered. Our democratic republic is far more nebulous operating often in ways we struggle to understand but always operate at the whim of power and wealth, the food source of politics.

Where this leads me is to the box we’ve constructed around us, a prison of sorts worm-holed with a few lingering freedoms, though clogged with misappropriated privilege. This structure manifests a sloshing oscillation as one party drives its agenda while vilifying the opposing party, then the other party gaining temporary power reverses accomplishes of its adversary, forcing its own agenda. Each push likely has some value and much drawback, but what each lacks is a commitment to policy advocating for the whole rather than for the particular tribe. Our politicians are ideal spokespeople for this adherence to chaos and blame as they exploit division with wellsprings of money wrenching our democracy with inevitable re-election. The system as a result is meant to cancel out more over time than it accomplishes because its entire reason for being is to win tribal warfare rather than seek long-term benefit for the whole population.

Let me drop down a level and be a little more specific. Imagine this, our government looks at our crisis of belief in institutions yet rather than entrenching into decisions of personal and tribal benefit instead focuses on large-scale societal challenge by deploying a balanced policy. I know, fiction, right? But take a look at affordability today, about 50% of US males between the ages of 20 and 30 live with their parents. College tuition regularly cripples young people with a lifetime of debt forgoing opportunity for home ownership, or parenthood. Have you noticed the birth rate is down? Higher education races now to become a select club for only people with money. A first-time house is unaffordable for most unless mommy and daddy help out. Childcare for young families eats up an unstainable percentage of income even if both spouses work. Insurance is unaffordable for many people who aren’t lucky enough to work for a company offering insurance benefits, and even then the cost of healthcare services after a catastrophic illness cannibalizes much of the value of employer-provided insurance benefits. This list could go on and on to include food costs, drug costs, all insurance costs, insufficient retirement security. . . Is it any wonder that young people look at the opportunity our society presents to them and see the system as fatalistic, rigged for the people who’ve already acquired privilege. And what does this distorted structure produce? More social division into tribes of younger and older. Have you heard the Milllenial/Boomer language of accusation?

These pressures are real as many of you grandchild-free Boomers out there might be noticing. But rather than motivating the political apparatus to solution, the stresses become fodder for blaming the opposing tribe. And so we as citizenry wait for Godot, hear the roaring white noise of how AI will obliterate jobs even as we soon will mint a trillionaire individual. My heart sags before the failed leadership in the wealthiest country on earth. I tense up thinking what my grandchildren if not my children are inheriting, the national debt robbing resource like a cancer attacking its host. Can we not see this path is unsustainable and we cannot give enough tax cut or tariff our way into a fix unless somehow we find a way to corral a unified national will?

There is no simple answer, no shortcut, only an unfurling scroll upon which we must write our commitment to survival, policy ideas embracing the whole of us rather than the myopia of partisanship division. I detest the blame game politics has infected society with as my firm belief is that blame is a game you cannot win. Cooperation is not weakness, it isn’t betrayal, it is a leap of moral faith that we are bigger than the narrow box we built ourselves into.

I want to think about a world, one largely like I grew up in, where an individual can pay for college or have an equally-weighed choice of becoming an electrician, or plumber, or clean-room technician, valuable skills hard for a computer to usurp. YES there will be massive productivity gains through labor realignment, already it get AI summaries of longer emails and articles and I don’t even ask for them. ChatGPT answers my gardening questions or helps me research details for my novels as a limitless resource, and I only use the free version. The subscription versions of these platforms can retrieve, sort, assemble, interpret, target, and expiate almost any data challenge presented to it. If not yet, then soon, very soon. Maybe in the burgeoning new reality a 2, 3, or 4 day work week are options. We have the productivity evidence. And if we split-shift with another worker using AI tools, gigantic output gains become real for funding wage increases and reduced work time even as corporations reap profitability benefit.

But this transition will begin with employment dislocation as the tectonic shift of information consciousness infuses into our world. Corporations will rush to seize productivity as profit, then realize it will take more employees to sustain the quantum level of growth shareholders will demand for their AI investments. But all those unresolvable social pressures I listed above can be mitigated in a cooperative union of corporate and governmental policy, tax incentive, a re-imagined symbiosis of business and education, entrepreneurial stimulation, and the personal responsibility we each will carry to re-invent ourselves to fit this new reality.

When people have base security (healthcare, affordable housing, affordable education, realistic childcare, etc.) and are motivated to work and succeed, they will. When they have more leisure time with family and self they will spend money, visit places, buy things, enrich their homes, all activities that generate jobs for others, tax income for government, and wealth for business and investors. And who knows, maybe we will find that undiscovered Michaelangelo out there who today works three jobs and barely has time to talk to his kids let along paint or write or cook or sculpt, but who has the latent talent to be brilliant if nourished in a fresh renaissance of opportunity.

This view of a potential future differs from the sexier view of human annihilation so popular with doomsayers, yet it stems from my own reality here in retirement. Split between NJ and the Dominican Republic now for years, I’ve discovered what free time does for the mind, how my will to engage my family and friends has suckled upon the blossom of a freed mind. I wake up each day filled with words I want to commit to structure, and I now see life not as the stress-obsessed drudgery but as a panoply of choice. Can we envision a world where this kind of choice exists for us all?

Perhaps we could think of the future differently, as expanding human intellectual and creative volume rather than elimination of yesterday’s work description, perhaps the bubble of human consciousness is inflating to create more region of space rather than fewer. These two views of AI intersect around a singular truth---boundaries of human mind and technological works are synthesizing and the result will lead to immeasurable new human energy.

Each industrial or technological revolution has shown us stages of this synthesis. When the iPhone was invented, did it eliminate the need for computers? Did we understand the social transformation it seeded at the time? Hardly. AI rests in a similar intersection and its evolution into inferential intelligence has not even yet had its debut. The dispersion of knowledge manipulation across all aspects of society is nascent and as more specialized domains of AI penetrate the vertical domains of healthcare, financial services, pharmaceutical research, gene therapy, robotics, etc. the transformation will be disruptive and unrelenting. Personalized AI will present humans with managerial control over the tedium of detail, the calling of customer service, financial planning and execution, health concerns and pathways of treatment, all things from vacation agenting to a lifetime health plan as personal AI assistants assume whatever functions you desire for interpreting, planning, and execution. Simplification of every aspect of human knowledge and industry will accelerate innovation.

Some businesses will lose, jobs will disappear, but new ones will prosper, old businesses will either absorb the new technologies and reformulate themselves to offer new value or die, but humans will be present in all these changes. The social fabric of mistrust fostered by our political leadership now more committed to sustaining lies than revealing truth will feed the AI-Deception machinery and we will have to learn a whole new skillset of self-defense, and it will be painful. But if we end up with more leisure time, with a healthcare system guiding us to healthier lives and rewarding us for that pursuit, if science shifts into Start Trek mode and disease treatment becomes exponentially faster to discover, pollution to be converted into invention, and food production optimized for sustainability and human health, then so be it. One day you will be the center of your healthcare, not insurance companies, and your lifetime will be available for your doctor who will also have instant access to all the world’s current understanding of your conditions, all within the same 15 minute visit. Your health will be predicted with customized mitigation strategies from birth when we don’t have to hide awareness of predispositions or genetic signals which today when discovered can be used against us by institutions.

The future can be a better world if we choose to make it, so Let’s go play golf and talk about the old days. Let’s leave our children’s children an enriching future and a thriving planet. We are the pioneers of yore riding unfamiliar currents toward the New World ahead, the world we cannot possibly imagine but must discover. But we all must pull together to keep the ship safe and headed the right direction. We must reject pettiness and blame, expel hatred and extreme partisanship, vote for larger ideals. To believe opportunity can be harvested from risks entails fear, but so too can it fill us with vision and energy, even if it feels scary. I’m a Boomer, you see, idealist as a young man, and moreso as a geezer hoping I might yet write the great American novel. Live Life, my fellow travelers, and let’s find those new currents of life to surf and share. ab