“Worthlessness”

Consider this… in the grand scheme of things, we are on a tiny planet in the universe. What cosmic contribution could you make?

Most people won’t make anything even close to “a ding in the universe”, as Steve Jobs has been reported to say.

So they may as well enjoy their life. And your worth can be to your family, to your children, your parents who took care of you.

Learning a hobby. Practicing religion. Mindfulness and meditation. Doing sports and improving your own body.

Look around if you are a heterosexual man, for instance: many women are far more attracted to men that perform in the moment, than men who labor quietly to create a product. The former enables untold hours of honing social skills and calibration, and humor and performance skills. The latter is of more durable value to society, yet relatively few women are genuinely sexually attracted to a man doing the deep work. (By the way, it is also true the other way: most men are not attracted to women for doing deep work or being a rocket scientist.)

Animals don’t do “deep work” and most animals are attracted for far “shallower” reasons. If everyone has a UBI and AI does the “deep work” then that frees up humans to be like animals in a zoo or in the wild… doing all the displays to attract mates, having babies etc. That’s not nothing — in fact it is 99.999% of everything that happened in history and 100% of what happened in prehistory.

You’re just ceding that 0.0001% which represents technological progress. The actual dread comes from the fact that you and all of humanity will be as completely powerless to change things as cats or any random animal species is powerless now. The difference is you will perhaps understand your powerlessness more than they do. But in the good scenario, you’ll be like animals in a zoo. We are constructing this zoo for ourselves now.

We will remain on this blue planet while the AIs will colonize the universe. In fact I wonder why aliens would ever come to Earth, when they’d just send their AIs or robots. Look at this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46200502

As Ernest Becker would ask, then what is your "immortality project"? Even worse, what's the immortality project for the vast majority of humanity? Do we just bring back religion to Middle Ages levels? Or do we hope everybody goes through some kind of never-before-in-history spiritual awakening?

"If everyone has a UBI" - isn't that quite a big "if"? And also - how soon would it come? Soon enough for families losing their income?