What Comes After Cheap Intelligence
Neglect Negotium, Forget Fauxtium, Opt Towards Otium
Denis Villeneuve’s Arrival presented extraterrestrials – not here to hang us – but to hang out. It repositions humanity as the existential threat to ourselves. Similarly, since the words “science” and “fiction” were smacked together, the horrors of our AI overlords took imaginations hostage. Maybe Hollywood got that wrong too. Packy McCormick poses an optimistic counter-take in his Memorandum on Human Strategy,
“AI’s gift might show us that we are low-quality machines so that we can return to being human. Novel experiences might be the last currency and the last status game.”
As machines have done before, AI will unlock the door for more otium, the Roman concept of leisure, and lessen the need for negotium, work. Once, not if, we’re presented with that truth, how will we respond? Work more or less? What will happen to our internet? Our human bonds? Will we play together once again? These are all questions that have been keeping me up at night. Let’s put them to bed.
Neglect Negotium
The data shows that AI will be able to do mostly everything we consider economically valuable in less than four years. This begins with machine-readable tasks such as accounting, copywriting, and code before infringing on the more nuanced outputs of medicine, law, and engineering. How the mechanical machine commoditized manual labor, the thinking machine could for knowledge work.
Think this timeline is too aggro? The cost of GPT-4 has plummeted 600X in two years. It’s literally breaking Moore’s Law. AI’s output went from bad LinkedIn copy to believable influencer videos in less time than that. These are near-parabolic gains.
As “skills” become commodities, humans must reevaluate what makes us “valuable.” If we’re not drowning in spreadsheets, perhaps we will care more about human-to-human trades like teaching, psychology, foreign policy, and personal training. Perhaps we could even arrive at novel forms of wellness, communication, and states of being.
Others argue that we will just keep on keeping on, busying ourselves with more of the same. Parkinson’s Law predicts that we always stretch out old jobs even when we don’t need to,
“Work expands to fill the time available for its completion. There need be little or no relationship between the work to be done and the size of the staff to which it may be assigned. The rise in the total of those employed would be much the same whether the volume of the work were to increase, diminish or even disappear.”
Yet, as opposed to when Parkinson made this observation in 1955, we have far more personal leverage. If we’re still going to work, AI could reduce our need for such mechanical careers. It’s up to us to neglect negotium.
Forget Fauxtium
Cheap intelligence could even more dramatically change our relationship with the internet. I’m already grossed out by AI-made content. At first, for its falseness, and now for its sickening realness. Why would we want to be on the internet if it’s no longer mostly human? I would tucker myself out discerning what is real or not. If much of the World Wide Web becomes AI-generated, then the only thing we can count on to be real (for now) is our fellow humans.
On top of this, there is a growing distaste for the internet amongst my peers. There is a pervasive, “We used to escape to the internet. Now we escape to real life” sentiment going around the group chats. Eugene Healey, a brand strategy consultant waxes poetic on this topic,
“Being chronically offline is the new flex. What we’ve witnessed in the past ten years is the gradual degradation of the internet from our great hope to the thing that we believe might doom us. Our online spaces have become increasingly hostile and now we treat the internet as something we HAVE to be on. Meanwhile, Big Tech has transformed you into a blood bank. In this culture of overexposure, the greatest privilege is to be as offline as possible while remaining connected.”
Sure, this offline movement is mostly a signaling game right now. iOS and Android phone users sunk THREE TRILLION hours into social media in 2024. Yet, AI could hasten the migration from a drizzle into a full-blown tsunami.
I could be naive. The Atlantic reports that millions are already choosing AI companionship,
“Even before AI has mastered fluent speech, millions of people are forming intimate relationships with machines. Character.ai, the most popular platform for AI companions, has tens of millions of monthly users, who spend an average of 93 minutes a day chatting with their AI friend. People are freely choosing to enter relationships with artificial partners because of the emotional capabilities of these systems.
These generations may discover that what they want most from their relationships is not a set of people, who might challenge them, but rather a set of feelings—sympathy, humor, validation. Long before a superintelligent machine can do the work of so many Einsteins, they may build an emotionally sophisticated one that can do the work of so many friends.”
I shudder at the idea we go the way of HER and choose clean AI relationships over messy human ones. This is folly. This is fauxtium. It's definitely tempting! But it’s the easy out. Or, we can prefer physicality in a way we haven’t in a long, long time.
Opt Towards Otium
To the modern West, “leisure” is synonymous with relaxation. Just look how much Americans spend on TV daily:
But leisure is all those other things as well. The Romans understood this. They had a command over leisure. Otium included open-air theatres and Circus Maximus for chariot sports. The Colosseum for fights. The Campus to train in track and field. We can’t forget ROMAN baths. This was all communal leisure that bonded society. If our hands, minds, and time are freed, we could return to valuing tactile leisure like this once more.
This is why I went analog after a decade of working in tech/VC. I founded Joust to push in-person play into our lives. I felt firsthand how play removes the scaffolding between strangers. How it is offline and inherently flirtatious. How it has already facilitated romantic interests and business transactions. Play is becoming a coveted form of leisure in a post-internet paradigm. It’s slow living akin to gardening, long meals, and breadmaking.
I’m not alone in this movement. Competitive socialization venues have grown 386% in the U.S. since 2021 and in the U.K. by 29% in the last year. It is quickly becoming the dominant winner of British nightlife over pubs, bars, and nightclubs.
Joust’s peers are also evolving. These play clubs without houses gather around a specific game, such as backgammon, chess, or mahjong. The New York Times recently substantiated what we’re all doing here, “Staring down an epidemic of loneliness, people are gathering to play in hopes that game clubs might help ease the isolation and digital overload that weigh heavily on their generation.”
Once cheap intelligence creates more free time, let’s spend it together. In warm rooms full of laughter on cold nights. On buzzing patios in the Summer. Let’s value sharing a moment over shareholders. Let’s entertain each other instead of entertaining ourselves into numbing isolation.
After cheap intelligence comes a chance. But we have to take it. Let the technology free us from being low-quality machines and explore what it means to be a high-quality human. Neglect Negotium. Forget Fauxtium. Opt for Otium.
Safi’s Note:
I have been making more video content. You follow me on Instagram here or TikTok here.
You can sign up for Joust from the link in bio here.
If you liked this, you should read State of Play and This Social Club Makes Your Friend Group.