Imagine gluing some popsicle sticks together in the rough shape of an airplane and saying, "Now fly!" and that little object takes flight around your bedroom. "Now take the shape of a Learjet 55" and it does. "Now add bottom thrusters so it can land vertically and make all adjustments to the body and internals so it still flies" and it does. That's what AI will do with our thoughts on a screen. "What do we want to want" remains the only question worth contemplating in this new age. We all need to start sharing our answers to that question, lovingly, whenever we feel up for it. This post is a great start. Thank you so much, Dan. ❤️
AI actually does great on tasks requiring a personal touch in my experience. It elevates your articulation with precision and helps you find words you otherwise may not be aware that you can use to communicate your thoughts, lived experiences, and passion to connect at a level that you couldn't.
The problem with framing this as an aspirational vision is that it ignores the most obvious question: what happens to people in the gap between "AI automates knowledge work" and "post-scarcity utopia"?
Even Star Trek - the most optimistic fictional future humans have imagined - couldn't eliminate work. Kirk commanded because of judgment and experience. Scotty ran engineering because he was good at solving problems. Spock analyzed because of unique capabilities. Skill and mastery still determined role, responsibility, and quality of life. The technology eliminated drudgery, not contribution.
But Star Trek had something we don't: unlimited frontier. Multiple planets. Faster-than-light travel. Enough meaningful tasks to absorb population growth and give everyone purpose. Strip that away and you're left with a darker question: when there are fewer tasks humans need to perform but the population keeps growing, who gets to decide what they want to do? And what happens to everyone else?
We're nowhere near warp drive. Any AI disruption happens now, in this timeline, on this planet, with these economic systems. That's not a utopian thought experiment - it's a cautionary tale about what happens when we automate contribution before we've solved scarcity.
I've spent the last year using AI as a tool - debugging code, structuring arguments. It eliminated drudgery and amplified what I could accomplish. But it didn't replace judgment, expertise, or the actual work of building products that solve real problems for real people. The gap between "useful autocomplete" and "eliminates the need for human contribution" isn't just large - it might be unbridgeable.
The meaning crisis is real. But the answer isn't philosophizing about "perspective as competitive advantage" - it's recognizing that humans need meaningful work to survive both economically and psychologically, and we'd better be damn careful about dismantling that before we have something better to replace it with.
Your piece resonates deeply with me. In the age of AI, I’ve realised that if you don’t really understand yourself — and you ignore your own feelings — it’s impossible to find the work you truly love. When you aren’t passionate about what you do, you tend to deliver mediocre results because you’re simply completing tasks and shipping outputs. Those are precisely the kinds of roles AI will outperform, because machines are faster, tireless and increasingly better at routine tasks.
Paradoxically, the rise of AI forces us “hollow” people to ask: what do I actually want to do? The key is to listen to yourself without judging whether your interests are mainstream, profitable or “sensible”. Once you reconnect with what excites you, you can start a path of creation — productising your own experiences with the help of AI, finding your own niche, serving that group and getting paid for it. That’s how a one‑person company is born.
I’ve also started to accept Naval’s idea that meaning may not exist. I no longer obsess over whether the work I love is “meaningful” by some external measure. I just know it puts me in flow and helps others, and that intrinsic feeling cannot be replaced or compared by AI.
At 35, I spent years ignoring my feelings and drifting through work I didn’t love. Only recently have I accepted that I’m not interested in my current job. Even though AI helps me complete my tasks, I can feel the difference between me and those who genuinely love this work. Once I focused on my feelings, my mission became clearer. I’m ready to embrace a lay‑off, use my severance package and start building my own personal intelligence agent app.
Two examples mentioned almost in passing, one refers to hippies in the context of faux spirituality, the other, Elon Musk, is to illustrate self agency
The hippies, who seem to be the bete noire du jour in the Gen Z 'rolodex-of-blame-shaming,' are truly irrelevant to support your case.
Especially with such generalized contempt.
The statement is well below the caliber of thought I've appreciated from your very first video.
So my comment is directed at a similarly questionable example.
Elon Musk is a paragon of agency and aspiration.
He does indeed shape and influence the material reality of this world.
As such his skills and perspectives persuaded a devoted following.
In capturing attention, he convinced them of the benefit he brings to their lives.
The proportion of benefits to the number of lives is not insignificant. It hardly counts as a success given his 'shiny-object syndrome' attention span.
I fail to grasp his raison d'etre?
What is the purpose of creating a manifestly abundant life, with more money than god to..?
Impress?
His example is antithetical to your argument.
(omitting a growing number of truly immoral intimate contributions and a greater number of assaults on public systems without license with abandon, and monumentally damaging.)
This, in short, his goals, imagined from his POV:
Create agency for yourself,
capture attention to support your life, get paid and aquire oceans of wealth.
Then shape the world, not to improve it (to the degree and measure that would conclusively erase a global problem)
But to then shape the world in such a way that it becomes unbearably grim with misery.
For that eventuality, the goal is to propose a solution:
Moving to another planet!
(villain exits right stage, audience erupts in rage and self-cannibalize)
There are undoubtedly many examples of original and inspiring creators who embrace agency fully.
And they do it with ease because they understand their identity (agency) and the reason they exist.
They do it responsibly and hold themselves accountable to their fellow human beings.
People fear AI infringing on human connection. More than they fear it replacing work. People are meaning makers who have difficulty achieving well-being without social interactions.
If only you mused on technological loneliness, because AI isn't about to solve the fertility rate anytime soon. Economies will contract without consumers and young people.
I enjoyed this, but these ideas are a little flawed, because they replace humans with AI, but the point is still that most of the work AI will be doing is meaningless work. We are extracting huge amounts of energy to be able to fuel this at huge cost to planet and us in the longterm. We really need to actually let go of the idea of what we think of as work because it is killing us. We live in a closed system, there are only so many resources at our disposal and AI is already causing droughts which are affecting humans. 7 billion companies is also a terrible idea - it means we are then just creating more meaningless work for ourselves that will require at least running the company on some level.
I think the future is about finding our way back to our roots, not generating meaning, but planting seeds, nurturing them and allowing them to emerge while we hibernate for a while.
It has taken me about four years of acknowledging that I am lost and have no answers for meaning to emerge (it did so during Covid), and another four to find clarity about how I am meant to keep nurturing this meaning now.
The meaning is right here, in front of us, we just can’t see it because we have gotten so obsessed with trying to buy our happiness.
To truly move forward, we have to find a balance. Get AI to do the jobs that are necessary (and if we were honest with ourselves, the vast majority of the work we do only exists to uphold Capitalism). A more natural way will emerge on its own, because what we have been trying to do is so unnatural.
Absolutely love this post, thank you! The clarity of your thinking and the extent of your research that connects all the points make it such a pleasure to read and think about these poignant topics.
"I can’t help but think that humans will still want to work."
Absolutely. Many thinkers and successful people prove this point with their lives. Jerry Seinfeld was once asked why they still work if they are so rich. And he found that question silly. Like what are you going to do with your time? Lie on the beach 24/7? That's rest, that's not a way of life.
"Fourth, your individual perspective may just be the one thing that AGI can’t replace. It may just be your competitive edge in your creative work."
Very good point. Our perspective comes from a fusion of lived experience, learned knowledge, distilled wisdom, biological reality. AI can synthesize some of it but it will never be as complete or coherent as someone's actual lived experience.
Wowsers. I'm not even sure what I've signed up to to get this article sent my way - but it's tremendous - @dan how can I learn to tell a story like this.
Such insight Dan, and very well put using solid facts to base your beautiful opinion and motivation for humanity. The way you have approached this serious and sensitive subject is sincere and I hope it reaches everyone we need it to. Much love and support for you and your work <3
Appreciate you articulating the stakes so clearly. This letter feels like an important conversation to have before we rebuild the same cage with better metal.
One place I felt slight tension is around agency quietly morphing into another performance metric. I agree meaning doesn’t come from passivity, but I’m wary of how “become a creator / build your own thing / express agency” can slip back into a post-labor version of the same grind harder logic we’re supposedly escaping. Same god, different costume.
If AI removes scarcity in output, maybe the scarce good isn’t you as a brand, but the uncoerced attention, slowness, and work that isn’t constantly trying to justify its existence: "meaning" that doesn’t need to scale, or "creation" that isn’t always legible as progress.
In that sense, the future of meaningful work might not belong to the highest-agency operators, but to those who refuse to turn their inner life into a production system.
Such succulent reading. As someone said, “If you don’t build yourself a purpose, you will be given one by society.”
“If you don’t use your conscious mind to pick something to aim at, you will be given an aim by your unconscious mind.”
Agreed!
Imagine gluing some popsicle sticks together in the rough shape of an airplane and saying, "Now fly!" and that little object takes flight around your bedroom. "Now take the shape of a Learjet 55" and it does. "Now add bottom thrusters so it can land vertically and make all adjustments to the body and internals so it still flies" and it does. That's what AI will do with our thoughts on a screen. "What do we want to want" remains the only question worth contemplating in this new age. We all need to start sharing our answers to that question, lovingly, whenever we feel up for it. This post is a great start. Thank you so much, Dan. ❤️
AI actually does great on tasks requiring a personal touch in my experience. It elevates your articulation with precision and helps you find words you otherwise may not be aware that you can use to communicate your thoughts, lived experiences, and passion to connect at a level that you couldn't.
Burn in hell with technologies! 🫵🏼🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🔥🕳️
The problem with framing this as an aspirational vision is that it ignores the most obvious question: what happens to people in the gap between "AI automates knowledge work" and "post-scarcity utopia"?
Even Star Trek - the most optimistic fictional future humans have imagined - couldn't eliminate work. Kirk commanded because of judgment and experience. Scotty ran engineering because he was good at solving problems. Spock analyzed because of unique capabilities. Skill and mastery still determined role, responsibility, and quality of life. The technology eliminated drudgery, not contribution.
But Star Trek had something we don't: unlimited frontier. Multiple planets. Faster-than-light travel. Enough meaningful tasks to absorb population growth and give everyone purpose. Strip that away and you're left with a darker question: when there are fewer tasks humans need to perform but the population keeps growing, who gets to decide what they want to do? And what happens to everyone else?
We're nowhere near warp drive. Any AI disruption happens now, in this timeline, on this planet, with these economic systems. That's not a utopian thought experiment - it's a cautionary tale about what happens when we automate contribution before we've solved scarcity.
I've spent the last year using AI as a tool - debugging code, structuring arguments. It eliminated drudgery and amplified what I could accomplish. But it didn't replace judgment, expertise, or the actual work of building products that solve real problems for real people. The gap between "useful autocomplete" and "eliminates the need for human contribution" isn't just large - it might be unbridgeable.
The meaning crisis is real. But the answer isn't philosophizing about "perspective as competitive advantage" - it's recognizing that humans need meaningful work to survive both economically and psychologically, and we'd better be damn careful about dismantling that before we have something better to replace it with.
“What happens when we automate contribution before we solve for scarcity” is a profound insight. Thank you.
'AI can copy anything, but it cannot copy what happens next until it has already happened.'
Thank you Dan - that was the reassurance I was looking for.
Humans can tread new paths without referencing maps.
Bro that's good point I have got it from you 🙌🙌🔥✍️
That one hit different for me too.
Your piece resonates deeply with me. In the age of AI, I’ve realised that if you don’t really understand yourself — and you ignore your own feelings — it’s impossible to find the work you truly love. When you aren’t passionate about what you do, you tend to deliver mediocre results because you’re simply completing tasks and shipping outputs. Those are precisely the kinds of roles AI will outperform, because machines are faster, tireless and increasingly better at routine tasks.
Paradoxically, the rise of AI forces us “hollow” people to ask: what do I actually want to do? The key is to listen to yourself without judging whether your interests are mainstream, profitable or “sensible”. Once you reconnect with what excites you, you can start a path of creation — productising your own experiences with the help of AI, finding your own niche, serving that group and getting paid for it. That’s how a one‑person company is born.
I’ve also started to accept Naval’s idea that meaning may not exist. I no longer obsess over whether the work I love is “meaningful” by some external measure. I just know it puts me in flow and helps others, and that intrinsic feeling cannot be replaced or compared by AI.
At 35, I spent years ignoring my feelings and drifting through work I didn’t love. Only recently have I accepted that I’m not interested in my current job. Even though AI helps me complete my tasks, I can feel the difference between me and those who genuinely love this work. Once I focused on my feelings, my mission became clearer. I’m ready to embrace a lay‑off, use my severance package and start building my own personal intelligence agent app.
Two examples mentioned almost in passing, one refers to hippies in the context of faux spirituality, the other, Elon Musk, is to illustrate self agency
The hippies, who seem to be the bete noire du jour in the Gen Z 'rolodex-of-blame-shaming,' are truly irrelevant to support your case.
Especially with such generalized contempt.
The statement is well below the caliber of thought I've appreciated from your very first video.
So my comment is directed at a similarly questionable example.
Elon Musk is a paragon of agency and aspiration.
He does indeed shape and influence the material reality of this world.
As such his skills and perspectives persuaded a devoted following.
In capturing attention, he convinced them of the benefit he brings to their lives.
The proportion of benefits to the number of lives is not insignificant. It hardly counts as a success given his 'shiny-object syndrome' attention span.
I fail to grasp his raison d'etre?
What is the purpose of creating a manifestly abundant life, with more money than god to..?
Impress?
His example is antithetical to your argument.
(omitting a growing number of truly immoral intimate contributions and a greater number of assaults on public systems without license with abandon, and monumentally damaging.)
This, in short, his goals, imagined from his POV:
Create agency for yourself,
capture attention to support your life, get paid and aquire oceans of wealth.
Then shape the world, not to improve it (to the degree and measure that would conclusively erase a global problem)
But to then shape the world in such a way that it becomes unbearably grim with misery.
For that eventuality, the goal is to propose a solution:
Moving to another planet!
(villain exits right stage, audience erupts in rage and self-cannibalize)
There are undoubtedly many examples of original and inspiring creators who embrace agency fully.
And they do it with ease because they understand their identity (agency) and the reason they exist.
They do it responsibly and hold themselves accountable to their fellow human beings.
And to the inspiration that infuses them.
Here. Now.
Gold
People fear AI infringing on human connection. More than they fear it replacing work. People are meaning makers who have difficulty achieving well-being without social interactions.
If only you mused on technological loneliness, because AI isn't about to solve the fertility rate anytime soon. Economies will contract without consumers and young people.
I enjoyed this, but these ideas are a little flawed, because they replace humans with AI, but the point is still that most of the work AI will be doing is meaningless work. We are extracting huge amounts of energy to be able to fuel this at huge cost to planet and us in the longterm. We really need to actually let go of the idea of what we think of as work because it is killing us. We live in a closed system, there are only so many resources at our disposal and AI is already causing droughts which are affecting humans. 7 billion companies is also a terrible idea - it means we are then just creating more meaningless work for ourselves that will require at least running the company on some level.
I think the future is about finding our way back to our roots, not generating meaning, but planting seeds, nurturing them and allowing them to emerge while we hibernate for a while.
It has taken me about four years of acknowledging that I am lost and have no answers for meaning to emerge (it did so during Covid), and another four to find clarity about how I am meant to keep nurturing this meaning now.
The meaning is right here, in front of us, we just can’t see it because we have gotten so obsessed with trying to buy our happiness.
To truly move forward, we have to find a balance. Get AI to do the jobs that are necessary (and if we were honest with ourselves, the vast majority of the work we do only exists to uphold Capitalism). A more natural way will emerge on its own, because what we have been trying to do is so unnatural.
Absolutely love this post, thank you! The clarity of your thinking and the extent of your research that connects all the points make it such a pleasure to read and think about these poignant topics.
"I can’t help but think that humans will still want to work."
Absolutely. Many thinkers and successful people prove this point with their lives. Jerry Seinfeld was once asked why they still work if they are so rich. And he found that question silly. Like what are you going to do with your time? Lie on the beach 24/7? That's rest, that's not a way of life.
"Fourth, your individual perspective may just be the one thing that AGI can’t replace. It may just be your competitive edge in your creative work."
Very good point. Our perspective comes from a fusion of lived experience, learned knowledge, distilled wisdom, biological reality. AI can synthesize some of it but it will never be as complete or coherent as someone's actual lived experience.
Wowsers. I'm not even sure what I've signed up to to get this article sent my way - but it's tremendous - @dan how can I learn to tell a story like this.
Such insight Dan, and very well put using solid facts to base your beautiful opinion and motivation for humanity. The way you have approached this serious and sensitive subject is sincere and I hope it reaches everyone we need it to. Much love and support for you and your work <3
This was a journey, thank you.
I was thinking same about future of human, and I found out that human love to outsource instead rely on body morphology.
https://open.substack.com/pub/nandthought/p/the-great-outsourcing?r=51l9l7&selection=24154cef-d975-465f-a36f-ce2544c1a394&utm_campaign=post-share-selection&utm_medium=web&aspectRatio=stories&textColor=%23ffffff&bgImage=true
Appreciate you articulating the stakes so clearly. This letter feels like an important conversation to have before we rebuild the same cage with better metal.
One place I felt slight tension is around agency quietly morphing into another performance metric. I agree meaning doesn’t come from passivity, but I’m wary of how “become a creator / build your own thing / express agency” can slip back into a post-labor version of the same grind harder logic we’re supposedly escaping. Same god, different costume.
If AI removes scarcity in output, maybe the scarce good isn’t you as a brand, but the uncoerced attention, slowness, and work that isn’t constantly trying to justify its existence: "meaning" that doesn’t need to scale, or "creation" that isn’t always legible as progress.
In that sense, the future of meaningful work might not belong to the highest-agency operators, but to those who refuse to turn their inner life into a production system.