404 Purpose not found

So, once we all successfully automate ourselves out of a job, what sources of purpose are left for us humans?

Well, let me propose one.

It's a bit dystopian, you have been warned.

⚠️ ⚠️ ⚠️

You've probably heard the term attention economy: the core idea being that content is plentiful and easy to generate, but human attention is a scarce resource 👀

There are only so many human brains 🧠 and eyes 👀 and they only have so much capacity to consume content.

Yet humans have hardwired social needs, amongst which to connect with others, to be heard, seen and empathised with. To belong to a group, to be accepted and liked.

A large part of that is storytelling: sharing with others our own story, our experiences and feelings.

That is, essentially, content. Content by #generativeAI is already so good that it's hard to distinguish it.

So in theory human-authored content is more valuable just because it was made by a human (if we can somehow distinguish one from the other). However, although we can scale creators to 8 billion and beyond, how do we scale the audience?

How can everyone be a creator and get their 15min of fame?

The answer: AI audiences! AI fans! AI friends! 🤖🤖🤖

Today I had a vision of a world in which "real" humans are left as the entertainers and leaders of virtual crowds of "virtual human" NPCs in some version of the metaverse.

In summary, we might become the dancing monkeys for the laughing, clapping AIs throwing us peanuts 🐒🥜

[Image by Midjourney. Text generated by my own brain]