🤖 Finding Meaning in the Age of AI

The first evidence we have of religious or ritualistic behavior dates back to the Palaeolithic era, around 50,000 years ago. Archeologists have found that people in the Palaeolithic era had a burial ritual for their dead. It might sound very normal to you, but think about that fact that out of the 9 million known species in the animal kingdom, humans are the only ones who follow these rituals. Every other animal leaves their dead behind rather unceremoniously. Yet, something has drawn humans across the ages towards rituals that don’t contribute towards our biological goals of survival and procreation. It is perhaps the same something that makes us look up at the stars wonder about our place in the universe. The same something that drives us to theorize about where we came from. The same something that makes us search for a greater meaning in our lives.

The cruel irony is that humans are the only ones smart enough to ponder the meaning of existence, and the only ones dumb enough to care.

Our Search for Meaning

We know that our search for meaning has spanned tens of thousands of years. Through this time, we have found many unique ways to fill that void — religion, belief in the afterlife, philosophy, art and politics have all featured. What remains common is that we like to believe there is more meaning to life than our unexplained, statistically unlikely, lonely existence suggests. We think of the story of humanity as an oeuvre, not a collection of short stories. And if that is true, it must be a story about something, and we must be contributing in some way.

So when the ancient Egyptians built timeless monuments to the cat-gods, when the Greeks spent their lives studying philosophy, and when the Europeans created timeless art during the renaissance, they did it with the same belief — that human life adds up to more than the sum of its tangibles.

One aspect that often gets overlooked in the discussion of the meaning of life is work, which is surprising considering that most adults spend a majority of their waking hours working. It turns out that a lot of people actually do think about work when they think about what gives their life meaning. 70% of employee say that their personal sense of purpose is defined by their work.

But our work has been increasingly decoupled from survival as time has progressed. To illustrate, 44% of the global workforce was employed in the primary sector (agriculture, fishing, logging, etc.) in 1991 compared to 26% according to the latest estimates. If we go a few decades or centuries back, we would see that number be much higher.

Working in the primary sector means a relatively direct link to survival, literally producing food to sustain ourselves. The sharp increase in the number of people working in the services industry is actually indicative of great progress — we have managed to improve technology to a point where a small percentage of the world’s population can reliably produce enough food for the rest of us. Yet, the breaking of the link between productivity and survival may have its own drawbacks.

Our corporate systems today are complex and massive. For most people, the work we do rarely has a visible or tangible impact by itself. Most organizations are a viscous soup of teams of designers, developers, business development folks, middle managers and more. While this is a testament to our ability to organize in complex ways, it means that we feel ever more detached from the output. Compare that to the farmer putting food on the table for their family and the difference is stark.

The difference in clarity of goals is notable by itself. The north star for people working at most companies is to “create shareholder value,” a phrase as vague as it is unhelpful. Once again, compare that to our ancestors whose goals were as simple and actionable as producing enough food to survive the year.

The disconnect between work and survival for most people is especially concerning in a time where more and more people are looking to their work to provide meaning in their lives. The alternate sources of meaning such as religion are on a steady decline — only 2% of the American population identified as non-religious in 1948, that number is up to 21% now. Our fundamental belief that there is more meaning to our existence than meets the eye has stayed consistent, but the routes to finding that meaning have dwindled.

The AI Hope

There is good reason to believe that we may finally hit an inflection point to start narrowing the gap between our work and the output. We discussed in a previous piece how technology accelerating at an accelerating pace means we will probably see unimaginable progress in the coming years and decades. This progress is likely to be the next big change in how we work and organize ourselves.

The average number of people working in an organization rose sharply during and following the industrial revolution. This was further accelerated by the advent of internet technology, allowing people across various geographies to work together seamlessly. The more people there are in an organization, the less ownership and linkage an average person is likely to feel to the end output. With the advent of the AI revolution, there is good news and bad news on this front.

Let’s start with the bad news — our work is very likely to become even further decoupled from our survival. Maybe it won’t happen today or next month or even next year, the rapid progress in robotics combined with AI is likely to make it so that a small handful of people will be able to address the food needs of the rest of the population. Now, just to reiterate, this would be an incredible step forward for humanity, just one that will create the unhappy side-effect of increasing the gap between our work and our survival.

But there is good news as well. AI growth is likely to be the inflection point where companies start getting smaller going forward. With a quantum leap in the tools we have available, not only will existing companies be able to produce more and more output per employee, we might also start seeing one-person companies reach unprecedented scale. While this is likely to be preceded by a reshuffling of the type of work people do, along with the unfortunate deprecation of many types of jobs, the end result will probably be a new economy where individuals will have the ability to create more than ever imaginable.

Think about this in the context of the tools available to us now compared to those available to people 10 years ago. Today, with enough effort and determination, someone who has never written a line of code can build a website from scratch. They can also manage their clients in increasingly efficient ways. And they can manage their supply chain, learn about marketing, manage their marketing channels, reach millions of people through social media, and perform every action imaginable that is needed to run a business.

The rise of “solopreneurs,” entrepreneurs running one-person businesses, has been notable for this very reason. With the tools at our disposal, it is already within the realm of possibility for some people with the right disposition to build a business worth millions alone. With the advent of AI tools, millions more will enter the fold as businesses of one.

So it should appear that going forward, the career choices would be practically endless. Actually, they pretty much are even today. You can make a living doing pretty much anything imaginable — there are people who stream themselves playing video games for a living and solo writers who live off just the ad revenue from their publications. But like anything good, there is also a darker side to this.

As our potential avenues to making a living increase, the choice becomes harder than ever before. This is an effect economists like to call the “paradox of choice.” The premise is that even though we love having options, having too many choices is just as bad as having none at all. In a world of infinite possibilities, the hardest thing to choose is just one.

As machines take over, a lot of people will inevitably lose work that they love simply because a machine can do it almost as well but much cheaper and faster. This happened with many hand-crafted products during the industrial revolution, and is already happening again with AI. Just look at this post detailing how an artist lost the elements of the job they loved almost overnight:

The great wave of AI will bring new opportunities for many, but don’t underestimate the challenges that will come with it.

The Meaning of Life

Over the years we have traded straightforward career paths for increased technology, dogmatic religious beliefs for greater personal freedoms, our tribal tendencies for increased mobility and mysterious awe about our existence for elegant scientific theories. All of these have created near infinite choices for us, and with unlimited options finding meaning in life becomes a function of having a strong framework for what is meaningful to you.

This means that there is no “true” purpose of life or humanity that will make itself apparent to everyone. The meaning of life is something that depends on what you care about — religion, family, friends, love, work, music, art, underwater basket weaving. The true challenge becomes that we cannot rely on anyone else to find that meaning for us, we need to go on that formidable journey alone.