We Won’t Just Hang Out

Kyle found this through a quote-post by Jake (@JLBornstein), which argues the opposite from experience. See The most connected time of… (tweet).

Key claims

• “Hanging out” rests on three assumptions: other people exist, they want to hang out with you, and you want to hang out with them. Post-scarcity breaks each one. The “infinite vacation” model he is arguing against is the one in Iain M. Banks’s Culture novels.
• The places people meet disappear. Work is pointless once superhuman intelligence is cheap. University is pointless because human capital no longer changes your outcome: “you get the same UBI whether you’re illiterate or a PhD.” He asks what cities are even for in a world without work.
• AI dissolves communities of practice. Borretti met many of his friends through Open Source work and asking for help in IRC as a teenager. Today he would just ask Claude: “AI disintermediates everyone, so that we no longer need each other.” He is living on a “pre-AI supply of friends,” and young people don’t have one.
• The alternative keeps getting better. The BATNA to hanging out (an endless feed of AI-generated superstimulus) gets cheaper and more convenient. He calls this more a consumer-tech trend than an AI one: people already go to work and watch TikTok, then go home and watch TikTok.
• People will stop being worth talking to. Citing Gregory Conti, he argues that without struggle and striving nobody develops an interesting personality: no skills, no education, no accomplishments.
• Friendship becomes a non-renewable resource. Even if existing friends are fine, the next generation has no social processes left to form bonds. With radical life extension, attrition (drift, the experience machine, accidents, ennui) slowly uses up a network that can’t be replaced.

Notable quotes

“AI disintermediates everyone, so that we no longer need each other.”

“I still have friends, but I’m running off this pre-AI supply of friends I met through communities of practice. Young people don’t have that privilege.”

“What even is the point of cities in a world without work?”

“So your social network might be a non-renewable resource that gets exhausted over time as your pre-Singularity relationships attrite and can’t be replaced for the reasons above.”

Full text

How it connects

• The most connected time of… (tweet) — Jake’s (@JLBornstein) rebuttal: his most connected period came when work fell away and health and relationships were all he focused on. He blames culture, not abundance.
• Loneliness · Friendship — the core subject.
• Universal Basic Income — his assumed post-work economy.
• Third Places · Community — the meeting places he expects to disappear.
• Social Media — TikTok as today’s version of the superstimulus.