Imagine the following. All artificial intelligences and robots in the world are quietly moved to Antarctica, and the continent becomes a kind of black box for the global economy. Cargo ships arrive with raw materials, rare earths, energy equipment and spare parts; ships leave again loaded with finished products, medical discoveries, translations, software systems, industrial designs and scientific papers. From the outside nobody quite knows what is happening down there. Perhaps it is a continent-sized automated factory. Perhaps human engineers still supervise immense machine systems. Perhaps the whole place has slipped beyond human comprehension altogether. In everyday life, however, that uncertainty hardly matters, because the only visible fact is that goods keep arriving, year after year, cheaper and better than before.
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On Shumer, Citrini and the Question of Stability
You might have read Shumer’s essay Something Big Is Happening and/or the recent Citrini Global Intelligence Crisis report – or perhaps just read about them in the press – and be wondering how they relate to the line of thought I have been developing in the two recent posts, Why Everything Actually Adds Up and Why This Does Not Stabilise.
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Sustainability as a Side Effect
Much of today’s sustainability discourse is framed as a moral project. People are encouraged to do the right thing: to consume less, recycle more, feel uneasy about flights, meat, heating and the rest. The underlying assumption is that modern life is broadly acceptable, but ethically sloppy. If individuals could be persuaded to behave better, ecological collapse might be avoided.
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Why This Does Not Stabilise
In the previous essay, I argued that several apparently unrelated developments form a single pattern: the quiet erosion of professional value, the absence of visible productivity gains, rising political volatility and a growing dependence on housing wealth to maintain living standards. Together, these point to a slow but profound shift in where value now sits in the economy.
Why Everything Actually Adds Up
A number of things are currently deteriorating in ways that do not seem connected. Many professionals are quietly losing income without being laid off. The AI revolution is supposedly transformative, yet productivity barely moves. House prices in big cities keep rising even as people feel poorer. Voters drift towards authoritarian and anti-system parties.
Looked at separately, each of these developments has a tidy explanation. Looked at together, they tell a single story.
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Why Our Definition of “Intelligence” Is Deeply Parochial
Human beings have always taken their own minds as the reference point for what intelligence is and what intelligence ought to be. For centuries we have praised the abilities that separate the “clever” from the “stupid”: mathematics, literature, abstract reasoning, the mastery of symbolic systems. These have become the gold standards, the abilities through which we judge ourselves and each other.
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Forward to the Past
Whenever futurists sketched daily life after the robots, they drew silver jumpsuits, food pills, and homes that looked like airport lounges. But the more I think about it, the less likely that seems. The real future is not about speeding up everything until it’s frictionless. It’s about slowing down, because suddenly we can afford to. Not financially – temporally.
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I wish I could speak Akkadian
Imagine saying to a machine: I wish I could speak Akkadian. And instead of a blank stare, it nods politely and begins surrounding you with a world in which Akkadian is normal. Cartoons chatter in it, bedtime stories arrive in it, recipes explain themselves in it. Before long, you’re dreaming in the tongue of Babylon.
Soil and Labour
Eight months ago I wrote here about the future of food – from robot foragers bringing wild garlic to your door to decentralised swaps of apples for eggs. That vision was about what ends up on our plates. But behind the cuisine lies the soil, and if the soil fails, so does every other dream.
No More Piles
When I first wrote about domestic robots in Three-Armed Spot, I argued that we didn’t need humanoid butlers, but a practical, Spot-like creature with three arms to do the dirty work. I still believe that. But let’s imagine we’ve already got it. What changes then?
The first thing that disappears is the pile. For centuries, piles have structured our homes: the laundry pile in the basket, the dishes pile in the sink, the stack of papers and unopened letters by the front door. We pile things because we batch work. Continue reading “No More Piles”