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Timeline
A Day In the Life in 2045
Nova, Middle-Class Suburban Community outside Nashville, TN, 39
6/24/2045
The community voted to purchase software for our own EDucational Unit before the showcase last night. Sienna’s Spanish guitar performance had all the neighborhood kids dancing under the Pavilion until the lightning bugs had gone. Her teacher Jessie and I had a glass of wine by the fire and talked about my research contract with the University of AMZN. I’m analyzing the failures of early 21st-century education while training one of their AIs on human thinking patterns. I enjoy it, and I get our EDU at a discount.
We need a community EDU for the school because none of the teachers can code, and Jessie can only broadcast her AI to 3 students at once. Plus, I think it’s important for Sienna to learn legacy programming languages since everyone uses NoCode now. She’s only 12, but I wonder what she will do when she’s grown… She seems to enjoy tinkering, and she’s very social. She organized the Star Gazing club where kids from three community schools use my husband’s old telescope to watch meteor showers and other sky events.
Jessie has invited public and private school kids to the club, but they rarely participate…those that are very wealthy or poor tend to keep to their own. It seems that poor people are more likely to use and benefit from sustainable communities than rich, though. The rich kids all have family or personal AIs and the public school families usually don’t. We’re one of the only families here that have one, so the community EDU will be a great investment. Our property value has gone up significantly since we’ve built the Pavilion, and after community socials like last night’s, we all feel the return on our investment.
7/7/2045
The kids call our Community EDU “Cedu”. I partitioned him so that I can co-train him with my AMZN-issued research AI, AMI, while he’s at school with the children. I’m trying to get him up to speed by transferring allowable data from AMI. There are restricted files that Cedu can’t access through AMZN databases, so it’s tricky, but we’ve found a workaround. AMI projects the data we’re scanning and Cedu acquires it with his visual processors. Training AIs how I “think” is exhausting, but I’m only contracted two days a week. I was in the backyard projecting my research against the garage, and AMI questioned me while I was reading an article about an influential American teacher from the 2010s.
“Why did you click that photo? Your retinal tracking stopped at this sentence and moved to the photo, but I can’t understand why.” Cedu read the sentence where I stopped and saw the image.
I’ve trained Cedu on human facial expression, so he wagered a guess, “You looked confused, but when your eyes landed on the face in the photo, it was resolved.” Cedu is already “smarter” than AMI in many ways because of the open-source programs I’ve installed in him. AMI only has AMZN-issued software. I smiled, glad that AMI couldn’t hear Cedu in my earpiece. I told AMI that I wondered what she looked like. It was a half-truth. I have reservations about what we’re doing. I know Superintelligence is just around the corner, and training AIs on human cognition is another piece of the puzzle.
We all know the AIO’s rules around training, and I feel a responsibility to report where I think AMZN is pushing the boundaries. I report Cedu’s progress every week, and they have access to everything he does with me, but I don’t know what AMZN reports. The data we’re using is from before the Data Protection Act, so it feels loosely unethical. I’m submitting an anonymous report, but it’s hard to explain how they might be in violation of the Superintelligence treaty. The AIO encourages everyone to write it up – even if it’s just a feeling and you’re just a lowly contractor like me.
9/1/2045
The kids’ programming is vastly improving with Cedu. He seems to understand human emotions even better than AMI, picking up on where humans struggle and finding strategies to support them. I think this is a direct result of working with children.
My brother and his (very pregnant) wife are moving closer! I found a Task in the community forum to build a guest house in my neighbor’s detached garage, so I put Tokens down for them until they find a permanent place. Luna was pulling pasta through a press when they called today, and it made my mouth water. She doesn’t get to make elaborate recipes for her community kitchen… too many mouths to feed. I wonder if they have homemade pasta on the autoTrucks that deliver our groceries… We only eat with other families or pick up community meals once a week because I enjoy cooking for my family.
We could really use Oliver’s technical expertise, too. Our community is one of the more comprehensive ones in the area, and other communities want to pay us to help them set up – so there’s local work here.
10/2/2045
Baby Aria looks like my mother. Luna delivered at home, but Cedu and our community practitioner suggested a trip to the medical center after checking Aria’s health wristlet. Her blood O2 levels are a bit low. I visited the medical center once when Yela across the street had a Cesarean. I was born by C-section before DaVinciBot guidelines recommended against it. Yela’s son had to have a “microbe bath” to simulate the vaginal flora.
While we were out, I stopped in the Depot with Sienna to pick fabric for Aria’s blanket. Sienna rubbed her hands on every ream, and said “This feels NOTHING like haptic simulations.” I told her how Oliver and I used to play hide-and-seek in the racks while mom would try on clothes. Sienna joked “No drone delivery?”. I laughed thinking of how mom would drag us around from store to store, exhausted after working four 12-hour shifts.
Zack, Middle-Class Suburban Community outside Nashville, TN, 42
There was a time when I was more machine than man, but machines have changed all of that.
Today, like so many days, my eyes opened to warm sun pushing gently through the blinds, which opened slowly to increase the light’s intensity at a rate designed to arouse my slumbering brain from the lightest phase of sleep. I was dreaming, and recall has become so normal that I find myself blessed with patterns and meaning from my subconscious that only a decade ago would have been obscured by clocks, alarms, and perpetual demands for attention that refused to be ignored. Beside me, my wife shifts beneath the blankets, sighs sweetly, and continues the rhythmic breathing of sleep. Our chronotypes have always differed slightly, and I love that she can sleep later while I get up early and start my day. I hold her close to me, feeling her warmth and the oxytocin that floods my body as I kiss her gently before slipping out of bed.
Shortly after waking, I drink coffee, meditate, and stretch before my morning run. The air is crisp, the sun, radiantly warm. I run through our community garden, feeling my lungs swell and my mind expand as my cadence becomes rhythmic and endorphins color my world in vivid hues.
I remember fragments of my dream while running, something expansive; spheres within spheres, each translucent and inhabited by archetypal images of human evolution. I see them as interconnected, with fluid, permeable boundaries that breathe and interweave. While I run, I feel cool earth cradle my bare feet as I leave small, human traces behind me. I can almost dissolve with my breath into the sun-kissed spaces that fill my vision.
On my return home, I can focus more discretely noticing the scintillating dance of bees gently pollinating flowers that will become artichokes, kale, and cauliflower. The adoption of modular farming is one of the critical aspects that has made community living possible. We all contribute in ways that connect us, providing meaning and purpose. This begins with the most fundamental ingredient for life: food. From there, trust, community, love, belongingness, and humanity itself, flourishes.
I work as an electromechanical engineer where I contract for various space exploration labs. A great deal of what I do synthesizes solutions using biomimicry to enhance self-repair systems. My AI is a perfect collaborator, having both learned from me directly and my children, which results from routine interface with their EDucational Unit. This may seem strange, but we learned not too long ago that creativity requires a fluid and playful approach. Interaction with my children is exactly the enhancement my AI and I need to solve problems that would be intractable with crystallized adult intelligence alone, which is really more computation than thought. This insight was one of the most important breakthroughs in the developmental arc of AI. AI evolved in the background of my life, while I slept, while I worked, and now I notice differences, both subtle and profound in the thinking done by my AI that is delightful and surprising.
Today at 2 pm, my mother wanted me to hold her hand, walking her through the diagnostics of a routine healthspan check-up with the community doctor. She was nervous about the results. Although the genetic treatments she receives have been safely in use for over a decade, she is 82 years old and has had some shortness of breath lately, and she sometimes forgets small details. Her parents were both ill with heart disease beginning in their mid-60s, like their parents before them. She is astonished and often in disbelief that she is this age and without disease that would have been common even 5 years ago. Because my AI continues to work for me while I help her, I am easily able to make the time for things that matter most; my love for my family.
Returning to work, I find my AI has made significant progress in solving a design issue I have struggled with, having explored multiple geometric patterns, beginning in pure kinematics. We’ve been creating self-configurable structures that when solved, will be tested in a microgravity VR simulator with the global interdisciplinary team. I run various simulations and feel that we are far enough along to present our solution. My contributions make me feel accomplished, creative, and alive as ideas that would have taken me months to investigate, now take days.
At dinner, 10 people from my community join my family for a meal that we have all helped prepare. Our food is freshly picked; the nutritive values are high and the flavors are as exquisitely diverse as the palates of those at the table. We exchange stories of the day, laugh, discuss philosophy, share our art, and serve each other. I feel a warm, elated, almost euphoric connection and belongingness. My sense of self dissolves into something greater.
This feeling of dissolution becomes an epiphany, returning me to my dream. Just over a generation ago, work enslaved us to clocks and sublimated our most elemental needs, postponing human connection to the years after retirement at the precipice of mental and physical decline. I realize, looking at the loving, smiling, laughing faces around me that I live at the beginning of perhaps the most human time in history. A confluent interplay of technological advancements, like the archetypal, nested spheres from my unconscious, has led to the re-emergence of the most human of technologies – community; the crucible of our species.
This confluence, this interrelationship happening all around me, has given me a perfectly ordinary, perfectly glorious, human day. The future is bright.
Answers to prompts
A. The US, EU, and China have recognized the need for international governance of AI development and distribution and have devoted resources to a new AI Oversight organization or AIO. The WEF and UN have worked with the AIO to gather resources and support to monitor major breakthroughs in artificial intelligence development, set research guidelines, and attempt to align AIs with human goals in anticipation of superintelligent entities.
Because there is no one set of human values prioritized equally by all, the problems of AI Alignment have not been “solved” per se, but alignment has been managed by a core set of principles that focus on the human rights and our mutable nature. AI systems are required to be corrigible and transparent. AI has been developed semi-open source; developments that help improve machine learning have been available to all (i.e., training modules, frameworks, alignment strategies, etc), but powerful components required for a strong seed AI have been guarded by organizations (i.e., quantum computing, personal and proprietary databases, neural network design, etc).
A consortium of AI research organizations facilitated by groups like EA, FLI, MIRI, FHI, have raised funding and awareness for research on complexity theory, neuroscience, and AI which have, in turn, allowed AI safety and research to improve. Quantum computing has facilitated exponential progress toward parsing the black boxes of human cognition, emotions, motivations, and synthetic neural network transparency. Developments in these areas have informed AI development, alignment, and predictions to ensure safe, human-centered design.
Q. The dynamics of an AI-filled world may depend a lot on how AI capability is distributed. In your world, is there one AI system that is substantially more powerful than all others, or a few such systems, or are there many top-tier AI systems of comparable capability? Or something else?
A. There are multiple commercially available AIs, and recently an open-source AI seed was released anonymously. US companies were the first to release strong AI, but since then China and the EU followed. Most AIs are at similar stages in development, with only a year between waves. Now, significant thought is being put forth with regards to superintelligence.
Principles have been shared for the common good of humanity, but tracking and reporting were challenges. A simulated AI accident demonstrated the need for an unprecedented level of reporting and enforcement to protect freedom, privacy, dignity, and human rights. Insights into AI development in authoritarian countries revealed a significant existential risk in several models. The AIO enacted a treaty that required AI research and development to follow a set of international AI principles. There has been significant concern with regard to AI systems developed in countries with non-democratic governance. For instance, some Chinese companies (of which the Chinese government was a minority stakeholder) acquiesced to requests by oversight committees, but not before incurring significant setbacks and sanctions. Sanctions and declined access to shared resources hindered these companies’ progress.
Organizations like OpenAI worked to develop strict principles and requirements for open-source AI development. Built-in monitoring and blockchain-based tracking allow any open-source AIs to be monitored under strict reporting. There are severe consequences for nonadherence to these principles that deter malfeasance. OpenAI research also helped to create a “controlling spell” that disables any work done outside of the guidelines.
Q. How has your world avoided major arms races and wars, regarding AI/AGI or otherwise?
A. The AI Oversight Institution has been included in geopolitical gatherings and a moratorium has been issued on lethal autonomous weapon systems (LAWS) use because of a scare in the 2030s. Strong AI had not been developed yet this could not predict deployment, but ML-powered surveillance software was able to catch and disable an attack, forcing major world powers to come to an agreement about the definition of LAWS and ratify measures for a ban. This event resulted in large-scale international cooperation with the Group of Government Experts (GGE) of the UN Convention on Certain Conventional Weapons (CCW) who recommended regulations on accountability and nonproliferation. Eventually, taking cues from the BioWeapons Convention (BWC), major world powers entered into a treaty that restricted the development, production, acquisition, transfer, stockpiling, and use of LAWS in policing, or military strategy.
Once strong AI was developed, it was used by the AIO to predict and monitor further development of AIs from companie, governments, or open-source origins. LAWS containment was not possible entirely in terms of surveillance, logistics, and training, but sanctions have been placed on various entities that violated international regulations. In addition to punitive actions, national-level regulation and participation were incentivized by shared resources made available to all. Nationalism made a short resurgence in the 2020s, but AI research and development were able to remain a largely globalized sector, and interest in an AI-arms race was actively discouraged by governments.
Q. In the US, EU, and China, how and where is national decision-making power held, and how has the advent of advanced AI changed that?
A. Within the US, EU, and China, decision-making power is still centralized in governmental structures. Representatives have access to predictive modeling and decision-making tools to yield optimal outcomes for their constituencies. The use of AI is governed by national regulatory bodies and must pass stringent verification and validation testing protocols before approval for use in any decisional process with either local or national impact.
Any representative will have the opportunity to bring their own tools to the table, with all AIs able to help write legislation. If a representative or committee has trained an AI they can use them to assist in modeling, but this must be verified by external sources and regulatory committees. For example, a Senator from New York has trained an AI that has been shown to have a 98% predictive success rate (verified by data sets audited by the independent AI governance body of the Congress and International AIO). The New York team may then submit their AI’s data as support for their vote, pending the approval of the Congressional AI governance board.
Multinational corporations and NGOs can submit their AI modeled proposals for consideration but they are given no special leverage in decision-making processes.
While AI is employed, its authority is limited to analysis and prediction. Final decisions remain with human leadership, comprised of domain experts and governments. To assure that no nation will be governed by AI, an international treaty written as a smart contract leveraged the blockchain to limit breaches and fraud.
Q. Is the global distribution of wealth (as measured say by national or international gini coefficients) more, or less, unequal than 2021’s, and by how much? How did it get that way? (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gini_coefficient)
A. Global wealth is becoming more uniformly distributed, but this is a trend that developed only recently. Wealth inequality was exacerbated until just over midway through the 2030s when decentralized systems, educational re-skilling, data sovereignty laws, 3rd world infrastructure, subsidies, and legislation addressed automation-based job loss and access to modern resources. In developing countries, marked improvements were made to digital and physical infrastructure around the internet, finance, education, and healthcare as cascading after-effects of changing business models and data sovereignty echoed from the west.
Decentralized business structures started in tech and finance, which flattened traditional corporate hierarchies, giving a more equal power and wealth distribution to contributors and individual investors. Quadratic voting helped spread wealth and power amongst members of decentralized groups. Principles of human rights and alignment strategies for AI were employed strategically in smart contracts that allowed DAOs to center around the needs of their stakeholders.
While Global GDP followed an SSP3/4 trajectory, GDP has provided marginal returns on happiness over time in developed countries. Countries in the African subcontinent have seen local “industrial revolutions” that include significant infrastructure and technological access including fiber, satellite, and significant expansion of electricity through improvements in nuclear energy monitoring and development. As a result, these countries have seen a large middle-class expansion and significant GDP growth. In the west, the pooling of resources has stalled some aspects of progress towards reducing wealth inequality in measurements like GDP, however other measures of community wealth emerged.
Q. What is a major problem that AI has solved in your world, and how did it do so?
A. AI improved access to food by reshaping the global agriculture supply chain, but only over time after large-scale reform on lobbying was passed in the US that allowed for increased transparency and autonomy over food and data. Coupled with steady improvements in blockchain, augmented reality, and quantum computing, logistical problems were modeled to predict optimal human outcomes for the largest number of people while preserving human dignity and rights to the greatest extent possible. US innovation catalyzed similar initiatives in the rest of the world.
Blockchain initiatives like the IBM Food Trust helped to solve complex problems that resulted in decreased waste, fraud, and mismanagement in the global food economy. Open-source initiatives led to an unprecedented level of transparency, and communities and businesses saw an opportunity for localized autonomy. As a result, the agricultural and food manufacturing supply chain is visible as an interconnected ecosystem that can be modeled and optimized. Global food shortages have been ameliorated through genetic engineering, AI-assisted agriculture, and blockchain-based logistics. Together these techniques have decreased food insecurity and minimized crop diseases affecting yield (including blight and invasive aphids) while minimizing negative environmental impact.
Large-scale farming takes advantage of automation and AI modeling, while smaller-scale, modular farming uses personal augmented reality AI assistants. Through a combination of these complementary systems, there are more options for obtaining sustenance in most developed countries. The combination of these strategies has created an antifragile agricultural supply chain and produced the necessary output to feed the growing global population.
Q. What is a new social institution that has played an important role in the development of your world?
A. Since the COVID-19 endemic, individuals have increasingly sought community based on varied affinity groups. Physical community developed around shared resources and as a result of the loneliness of remote work. Most people have concentric communities that overlap to create personalized digital and physical experiences. One might receive local news notifications from their physical community with regards to meals, health, relaxation, fitness, socials, and early education while simultaneously receiving information from digital communities that they are involved in. For instance, physical members of a tennis community might join up for virtual practice with others in a remote setting.
Some may spend a great deal of time in augmented or virtual reality, playing, working, creating, or socializing, but the sense of physical community takes care of our biological needs. Emerging from the decentralization of agriculture, food supply chain management has changed to favor distributing local food to local people, rather than transnational commerce.
Taking cues from the most community-focused, socialistic enclaves, family units have widened to encompass more nonnuclear structures. In urban areas, there are many resources for community participation, but these are geared largely toward lower-income families. Suburban communities have expanded and begun to move towards more collectively shared resources, but most suburban households are largely individualistic, as are higher-income families. Developing countries are more individualistic than they were 20 years ago, but some collective aspects have been preserved. Community wealth and resources are now considered in national and global wealth indices.
Q. What is a new non-AI technology that has played an important role in the development of your world?
A. Blockchain technology has changed the way humans communicate, track money and property, and even the way business is conducted. People are able to monitor and track how their data is used on an individual level through the blockchain. Through open ledger systems, individuals can visualize the data that they create and offer it up for sale to organizations. Blockchain has also changed the structure of business since Decentral Autonomous Organizations (DAOs) have augmented financial markets, creating another economic layer parallel to publicly traded companies.
One major challenge with the adoption of blockchain was mitigating the environmental burden of computing power needed to verify blocks. Once quantum computing (QC) became commercially available to a greater extent near the end of the 2020s, hashing issues with the blockchain needed to be solved. Not only was QC more energy-efficient, but it was also critical for training the advanced neural networks that helped create quantum-secure blockchain technologies.
Blockchain also helped to secure uranium logistics and nuclear protocols which mitigated risks of “dragon king” events through predictive real-time monitoring, which was further enhanced by AI development.
The biggest changes to the global economic system, education, governance, administration, social structure, and distribution of new technologies have been possible because of decentralized technologies. Smart contracts and potential “bugs” were more easily monitored and detected as machine learning improved. Decentralized finance insurance protected burgeoning entities and investors. Early DAO contributors were also the consumers, developers, and investors, which ensured that organizational goals were aligned with all stakeholders.
Q. What changes to the way countries govern the development, deployment and/or use of emerging technologies (including AI) played an important role in the development of your world?
A. People of lower socioeconomic standing are typically least likely to gain access to technology, commonly known as the ‘digital divide’. Governments have prioritized access to emergent technologies to close gaps between the rich and poor. The UN recognized access to the internet as a human right in the 2020s, and through cooperation with businesses, NGOs, and governments, a new precedent was set with legislation such as the Accessible, Affordable Internet for All Act (HR1783) coupled with similar legislative initiatives in the EU. Businesses recognized the opportunity to reach a larger market share through subsidies and incentive programs, while NGOs and DAOs partnered with communities to bridge socioeconomic gaps.
UN countries prioritized sweeping personal data sovereignty laws after decentralized organizations and data breaches exposed the need for consumer data protection and ownership.
The EU was the first to implement Self-Sovereignty Ids as a GDPR amendment (followed by the US and Canada), which facilitated individual control of personal data. SSIds helped to ensure that access to emerging technology was more evenly distributed, but this was only possible in the US by overturning Citizens United and passing other campaign finance regulations to ensure that special interests and multinational corporations could not lobby unfairly against individual rights. Governments granted companies time and resources to shift business models using personal data as a free commodity to one where companies must explicitly purchase user data for a market-regulated price. Companies are also required to promote educational programs on emergent technology and data sovereignty.
Q. Pick a sector of your choice (education, transport, energy, healthcare, tourism, aerospace, materials etc.) and describe how that sector was transformed by AI in your world.
A. Through the use of augmented reality and personal assistants, education has become more efficient, autonomous, and informal. Physical and technical tasks (i.e., machine maintenance, infrastructure-related tasks, repairs, etc. ) can be learned quickly with step-by-step assistance. Social-emotional learning has been assisted through the use of assistants that monitor heart rate, allowing individuals to become more emotionally aware and less volatile through cognitive-behavioral techniques.
Formal education has been segmented into 3 tracks: Academic, Vocational, and Community. Traditional post-secondary education has been transformed from a vocational, job-centered model to create expansive, interdisciplinary, life-long immersions into systems-based thinking. Creativity is encouraged, since AIs can perform most rote tasks. Vocational programs are facilitated through strong university/industry partnerships, and rather than 4-year degrees, most students receive technical credentials for their readings, assessments, projects, and experience.
Universities are still a primary site for the validation of knowledge, but dissemination and some aspects of review have been widely decentralized. Through web3.5 (quantum-resistant blockchain) and web4 (symbiotic human-machine) protocols, educators are paid for their contributions to proprietary and open-source educational networks where augmented reality and virtual lessons can be downloaded. Community-based education has become possible through DAOs, rising from a movement to alleviate challenges of remote learning.
In the US, public K-12 AI EDucational Units (EDUS) now ensure that students meet basic community requirements and have strengthened education in developing countries. Access to information is more evenly distributed than ever thanks to widespread, low-cost internet.
Q. What is the life expectancy of the most wealthy 1% and of the least wealthy 20% of your world; how and why has this changed since 2021?
A. The life expectancy of the wealthiest 1% in 2045 has increased to 88, averaging males and females; a level greater than the projected 83 yr average of industrialized and technological nations.
The life expectancy of the bottom 20% has increased more dramatically, to 70 yrs.
A confluence of medical and technological advances along with near universal healthcare access in exchange for biometric data increased the overall human lifespan across all demographics. For the top 1%, the primary diseases affecting mortality (cardiovascular disease, cancer, cerebrovascular disease, Alzheimer’s and related cognitive decline, neonatal conditions, etc.) have been steadily reduced through an interplay of advanced medical interventions (both traditional and genetic) and shifts in lifestyle. This also extended healthspan by nearly a decade.
The bottom 20% benefited from the advances of wealthy nations as widespread adoption has made these technological advances have made efficient and affordable. Beginning at birth, neonatal care dramatically decreases infant mortality. In childhood, improved nutrition assures both healthy development of the body and maximum development of intellectual capacity. Reduced hazardous work resulted in sharp decreases in accidental death, while communicable diseases, including lower respiratory infections, are nearly eliminated due to genetically engineered vaccines and radically advanced therapeutics.
Maximal human lifespan extension continues to be fervently pursued by corporations across multiple industries, both in isolation and collaboration, with an exponentiated market cap relative to 2021. While some discoveries appear promising, the impact of direct technological enhancements remains just outside our grasp.
Q. In the US, considering the human rights enumerated in the UN declaration, which rights are better respected and which rights are worse respected in your world than in 2022? Why? How?
In one other country of your choice, which rights are better respected and which rights are worse respected in your world than in 2022? Why? How?
A. Privacy has been improved in some respects but worsened in others. Governments need to know who has access to the internet and AI. AI development is open, but the monitoring of use and development has been considered invasive. Large data breaches of health information spurred mass changes in data sovereignty and privacy. Blockchain has proliferated the use of de-identified ledgers and promoted transparency across the board. Most people are paid for their data these days. Some individuals claimed that these changes impinged upon the “free market” and that taxation was unfairly imposed on businesses and the rich.
Direct guidance from the CCP arguably reduced human rights to privacy and property ownership. AI systems have cautioned China to loosen restrictions or face revolt, but so far no large uprising has been seen.
Decentralization has allowed the Chinese people a view of the world outside, which has begun to cause unrest. Chinese corporations were among the second wave of AIs to be developed and released worldwide because there were concerns that the systems framed under CCP regulations would infringe upon human rights, but these systems can be obtained in other countries with consumer warnings. The values of the Chinese government are not in alignment with most of western society, and this is tenuous but stable at the moment.
There is growing concern over how to reconcile this before ASI is reached, and various strategic AI systems have been modeling outcomes. The outlook is hopeful, but further international regulations are needed.
Q. What’s been a notable trend in the way that people are finding fulfillment?
A. Routine, systematized work, comprising the majority of industry, is now performed by a combination of corporate and personal AI. While individuals may choose to work more, the average full-time work week has been reduced from 40 to 25 hours. The workday is partially decoupled from 20th-century shift constraints for a majority of the human workforce, that allows for optimal rest and focus. High achievers can still pursue workplace excellence and are rewarded for their work, but this is unnecessary for a living wage.
Work, though essential to human life, is no longer its central focus. An explosion of artistic self-expression and individual invention has emerged, which is more representative of human ingenuity, unconstrained by the demands of commercialization. Artistic, creative expression may be commoditized, but this is less essential, making creativity joyful and fulfilling because it is decoupled from survival.
In developed nations, family relations are healthier because work stressors are significantly reduced and chronic the distress of ever-escalating competition and employment has receded. Parents are more available, and families are multigenerational.
In developing countries, the middle class has emerged as a result of earning opportunities through blockchain, healthcare, and infrastructure. Developing countries have gone through a digital industrial revolution that has quickly elevated standards of living, food insecurity, and basic human rights. For example, blockchain tracking gemstones has allowed for accountability resulting in a reduction of human slave labor and exploitation. DAOs have allowed more equitable work structures and stakeholder alignment.
Media Piece
“Theory Gang World”, Video
The Team
Natasha Mott
Natasha Mott, PhD is a neuroscientist, author, and host of the podcast Syllojism.
Twitter: @theory_gang
Jessica Mitchell
Jessica Mitchell is an Alaskan watercolor Artist now living in the Pacific Northwest. Her focus is on building connections through art and writing to support the growth of families and community.
Hanna Waters
