AI AMA – Part 2: AI Utopia, Consciousness, and the Future of Work

**Erik Torenberg** (0:02)
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**Nathan Labenz** (0:37)
What if you didn't have to work as much? What if you didn't have to worry about marketable skills after a few years out? What if you had a lot of leisure time? What would you do? I think more people should probably be thinking about that. We're just entering this steep part of the curve in robotics and probably will have like a lot of humanoid robots to actually do physical labor in the not-too-distant future. AI gods might be an emerging trend over the second half of the decade. I have no idea how we're going to relate to these things. You know, if they are meaningfully superhuman, will we even try to keep them under control? Will we worship them? We worship things that, as far as I can tell, don't exist at all. No matter how weird your alignment idea is, I think it is worth kind of pursuing. No matter how weird your kind of thoughts are about where the future might be going, I would say they're probably worth entertaining. Your scientists were so obsessed with whether or not they could, they didn't stop to think about whether or not they should.

**Erik Torenberg** (1:34)
So this question is about if you could paint a picture of AI during the utopia, what would it look like? How soon the arrival of AGI, do you think we might reach this mission? Lastly, as AI begins to reshape industries and disrupt jobs, what's your best advice for individuals to not only adapt but thrive in this evolving landscape?

**Nathan Labenz** (1:54)
Yeah, I mean, utopia is a big word, obviously. People have heard me say the scarcest resource is a positive vision for the future, and I include myself in that critique where I'm like, it would be great if I had a sharper, more fully fleshed out vision for what the AI future could look like. I think Dario Amodei from Anthropic, of course, has done a real service by trying to put his positive vision out into the world, his Machines of Love and Grace essay. At least the first half is great. He basically goes through the biggest problems, starting with health. If we can have a revolution in biology, discover the next 100 years of biomedical advances in the next five years, we could live healthier, disease-free, higher quality, and potentially longer lives. That's just from one domain. He's also got a section about some of the other things we've talked about in terms of education and just like a quality of access and the fact that a lot of people, well, we have made a lot of progress. A lot of people still are way poorer than we would like to see people be. That presumably could be leveled out dramatically. He's got interesting speculations about mental health. He thinks that basically our approaches to mental health are not super great and that in part by understanding how neural networks work, we might also be able to map some of that understanding back to how our own networks, our own non-artificial neural networks work and figure out what is actually causing a lot of the mental health problems that people have. All those are really exciting. I'm not one who worries about lack of meaning from work.
My guess is that for most people, they'll be fine. I think most, I've done small and very local surveys asking people, like, if you didn't have to work your current job to earn the money that you earn, and you could just get that money without working the job, would you still work the job? Overwhelmingly, people are like, no, I would not work the job. I think there's a very small percentage of people who are very lucky, and I count myself among them to have work that we find meaningful and that gives us some sense of fulfillment.
I really try not to take that for granted, and I try to remember that I think that's just not true for a lot of people. I'm not too worried about people losing meaning or being too adrift for lack of work. I think there will be more time with our families and doing the things that we like. What if five days a week were holidays instead of two? And you had time to read, talk to friends, go on walks and travel more. If we really allow ourselves to imagine what we would like to do if we just had a lot more leisure time, honestly, most people will be pretty fine. I can imagine some people might have a, you know, that might be destabilizing for some. But I think for most, it would just be like a great, great benefit. And that's before we even get into like, you know, crazy, uninvented technologies. If you didn't have to work for money, would your life be better or worse? I think, I think it's very clear that for the vast majority of people, it would be better. And there's, you know, potentially a gradual transition to that, where presumably, you know, we don't go from full-time work to no work in, you know, in the flip of a switch. Maybe we can imagine things going like a four-day work week, a three-day work week, a two-day work week. The main thing is that they just need to know that they're going to be sort of taken care of, right? And I think this goes back to the like, concentration of power and wealth and like what's the new social contract. If people believe that they will have their needs met, then I think they'll be pretty happy to let go of most work. If they feel like they also don't get to eat if the job goes away, then that's like a very different analysis. And that's where you get protectionism and leaditism and all that kind of stuff coming from. So, yeah, I don't know. I think it could happen relatively quick, right? I mean, all the Frontier Lab leaders are saying AGI soon, you know, sort of next year, or definitely by like 2027, like hard to imagine it wouldn't be by 2030 Those are all like not very long time horizons in the normal scope of human life. So it seems it could happen pretty soon. And even if it's like gradual over that time frame, it would still be pretty sudden in human history. And I guess the last part of the question was advice for people to adapt and thrive in the evolving landscape. I think I kind of come back to like the doing what you want to do again, at least for most people, you know, maybe think less about like marketable skills 2030 and beyond, and more about like figuring out for you what is a good life. I think that's one of the things that is sort of weirdly scarce, right, is we're all kind of rat racing around. And there's this sense that like the unexamined life is not worth living. I think there's a sense that like a lot of us are living somewhat unexamined lives. Trying to get the next achievement unlocked and what if you didn't have to do that? What would a good life look like? I definitely think it will vary. I don't think anybody else can really answer this question for you. But yeah, what if you didn't have to work as much? What if you didn't have to worry about marketable skills? What if you had a lot of leisure time? What would you do? I think more people should probably be thinking about that more. I would definitely encourage even like some radical experiments from people in that regard, because people are going to be looking for role models as this starts to happen. You know, who do I turn to to find inspiration for what I'm going to do when I don't have to work anymore? I think you could do a real service by sort of blazing a certain trail in that direction. Maybe take on more risk now, throw a caution to the wind and say, I'm really not going to worry about, you know, what my career trajectory is 2030 and beyond, or even 2027 and beyond. I'm going to focus on what it means to live a good life. And maybe, you know, if none of this comes to pass, maybe that doesn't pay off so well. But if it does, then maybe you can be upstream of a lot of other people that will be asking similar questions.