Today’s post is an interlude to the Universal Moral Core series, which will resume next week.

Labor Day originated during the peak of the Industrial Revolution to celebrate workers and their contributions to the economy. Now, however, the Industrial Age is two decades past its expiration date. The decline of labor as a share of GDP, which began in the 1960s, accelerated dramatically starting in 2000. But that was just a preview of what is about to happen.

With the release of the latest AI models it is clear that we are on the threshold to artificial general intelligence (AGI). By AGI I mean systems that outperform humans across most, and eventually all, domains. While physical manipulation is still difficult, we are seeing rapid progress in robotics as well, as evidenced by the recent robot olympics.

There are many questions about how the economy may develop going forward. Analysis of a general equilibrium model reveals that in order for the benefits of AGI to be widespread, we will need competitive markets along with some degree of redistribution (e.g. a negative income tax). Competition so that the cost gains result in lower prices. Redistribution so that everyone has access to some financial capital.

Today’s post is about a more fundamental question. What will be our source of meaning? Industrial age labor as the source of identity and meaning is coming to an end. To be clear: the economy has a ton of inertia, so this will take another decade or even two to play out, especially with robotics still catching up in capabilities. During this time we will go on celebrating Labor Day, but we would be better served treating this as the Last Labor Day and figuring out what comes next instead.

How did we get to associating labor and meaning so deeply? Work did provide people with benefits beyond just the means of living. There is a pleasure in getting good at something. There is a community of coworkers. And of course companies built all sorts of systems for recognizing workers, which meets a deeply seated psychological need. We accompanied this with narratives celebrating work and denigrating leisure, all coalescing in the cultural “superstructure,” which supported the industrial age. This led us deeper and deeper down the path of defining our identities and drawing our meaning from work.

Today in casual conversation it is common to ask: what do you do? This question isn’t about hobbies or family, it is about work and along with that about wealth and status. On more than one occasion have I seen people simply stop talking and walk away if the answer was not to their liking. This is how strongly people have come to identify identity with work that they don’t think they can have a captivating conversation with someone whose work doesn’t interest them. Or alternatively that they have become so obsessed with advancing their own work career that they see other humans as entirely instrumental.

We have seen the negative psychological effects when prior categories of labor were shrunk massively, as in the decline of coal mining or the offshoring of manufacturing labor. Often what remained were people and communities in despair. Now imagine this coming, but for pretty much everyone.

We are not prepared.

We have failed to create a path of transition to a world where meaning comes from other sources for the population at large. That’s not because this isn’t possible, either historically or for individuals today, but because we have misunderstood the nature of the current change. We have kept treating it as some iteration on the industrial age instead of recognizing that it is a transition as profound as when we went from the hunter gatherer to the agrarian age and then from the agrarian age to the industrial age. In both of these prior transitions we reinvented everything, including our sources of meaning.

Let’s consider some possible candidate sources for meaning. We will see that while there are obvious candidates, they also come with failure modes to be avoided.

Religion. We could go back to religion. I recently read Romano Guardini’s The End of the Modern World and Power and Responsibility. These texts are from around 1950 but feel just as fresh as if they had been written recently. To Guardini the answer to all of what ails modernity and the post-modernity which he was presciently envisioning was a return to divine revelation as the only source of foundational truth. We are seeing two versions of a return to religion as a source of meaning happening today. One is that church attendance is back up and some religions are growing rapidly. The other is that many nominally modern quests are being given religious character, including the buildout of AI, as is visible in Dario Amodei’s essay “Machines of Loving Grace.” Religion is attractive because it has served as a source of meaning in the past, especially so during the agrarian age, and is therefore a readymade solution. The failure mode here is equally obvious, which is that religion has been and continues to be the source of many brutal conflicts between humans.

Relationships. A potentially great source of meaning are our relationships with other humans. Listening to someone, seeing them. Being listened to, being seen. We humans, courtesy of language, have an incredible capacity for relating to each other far beyond what is possible through limbic resonance. When relationships are at their best they are a potent source of meaning in our lives. Here too we need to be cognizant of an important failure mode: when the relationships come to define us, limit us, or worse injure us. A lot of groups have unhealthy dynamics for the individuals participating in them. In a fascinating and frustrating post titled “After Work, We’ll Have Each Other” Clara Collins describes how widely disparate groups ranging from aristocrats to the working class in Boston were reduced by group dynamics. Even families, as our potentially closest relationships, can be sources of meaning but also of stress. The much lamented decline in birth rates is closely related to women finding other sources of meaning in their lives than having children.

Creating. Drawing, writing, making music, etc. have been wonderful sources of meaning for humans going back over ten thousand of years to the earliest cave paintings. Creation extends beyond traditional art. One can create experiences, such as a beautiful meal in an open field under a twilight sky. The failure mode in creating as a source of meaning comes from the extreme power law outcomes as we are seeing among creators online but also in the modern art world. If meaning is derived from the valuation of the creation by third parties then it will be extremely fragile and frustrating for the vast majority of creators. This is also a problem with the analysis of this as a potential growth sector of the economy, as in the Alex Imas piece on “What will be scarce?” which as the title suggests is still rooted in scarcity thinking and fails to take power law distributions into account.

Exploring. Humans have long drawn on exploration as a source of meaning. There is so much still to be explored. We have barely seen anything of the bottom of the ocean, and humans have yet to travel past the moon. But far more prosaic exploration can be a source of meaning. For instance at Wally Farms we hold frequent nature walks. Exploring a local forest, seeing the plants, listening to the birds, spotting wildlife is profoundly inspiring. We can create meaning not just from the experience itself but from helping protect these ecosystems. Then of course there is the exploration of our own minds, which offer depths we have yet to plumb. Even when we have created von Neumann probes to explore the galaxy we will still be able to draw meaning from human exploration. The key failure mode to avoid here is striving to outcompete others in ever more extreme forms, including the now common pile ups on Mount Everest.

At this moment we face a profound choice. We can jump on a ready made source of meaning. And sensing an opportunity there are offers of easy meaning making available in each of the categories I have described above, along with many more. Or we can understand that the ultimate source of meaning is living a good life. Figuring out how to live a good life in a rapidly and dramatically changing world is hard. It requires finding our own answers to age old questions, by embarking on a journey through philosophy, science, and art. I am excited that at The Spark of Hudson we will bring together people interested in exploring what it means to live a good life in the age of AGI.