We Won’t “Just Hang Out”

What will we do after the Singularity? The standard answer is: “we’ll just hang out”. The infinite vacation, as in the Culture novels. I think this won’t work. “Hanging out” implies: Other people exist. They want to hang out with you. You want to hang out with them. And the post-scarcity, infinite vacation AI utopia undermines all these assumptions. Other people exist The social processes by which people come together and build relationships will disappear. Work, obviously, is pointless in a world of cheap superhuman intelligence. University (really all education beyond teaching people to speak) will be pointless because there’s no work to do and because growing your human capital doesn’t change your life outcomes: you get the same UBI whether you’re illiterate or a PhD. I met a lot of my friends by writing open-source code, and participating in the community of software engineers. AI is dissolving that community by making human contributions superfluous. If Claude Code has existed…