All is Right With the World
Post-scarcity is here. And with it has the life without meaningful political action. The consequences of this can not be understated, although they have somehow been with us for quite some time, paling in comparison to the ever-growing predictions of science fiction. What shape does this world take, what are the forces governing its structure, and how will it continue to grow?
Right now I can go down to the local Lidl and for only 17 sek (1.8 usd or 1.6 Euro) buy a prefabricated roll cake containing roughly 4000 kcal, more than my entire daily energy expenditure. I could most likely not survive entirely off of roll cake, but the extra mineral and vitamin supplements (or fruits and vegetables) would not considerably impact my finances — not even as an unemployed political science student.
This is not a state of affairs that is true for most of the world. A rough income comparison puts me at the richest ~15% of the world population, and that does not include the many indirect benefits of living in an advanced, high-income society such as clean drinking water, low crime rates, access to quality education, and well-maintained public infrastructure.
For us (as you the reader most likely includes) the production of sustenance is not a limit on development. Industrial society has reached a point to where the production of raw goods can be done at an infinite scale. Steel, mankind’s most produced commodity, is currently overproduced in enormous quantities. The world’s most diabetic country is Pakistan, while undiagnosed cases may be as as high as 73% in Sub-Saharan Africa. The world easily produces enough food to feed itself, the only problem is in distribution.
Artificial General Intelligence (agi), the mythologised technology that was meant to herald the coming of the post-scarcity world, is already here. As I alluded to in my earlier piece titled Exponentials and Artificial Intelligence this does not however mean the creation of a single coherent being tasked with managing all activities — such an event as the “turning on” of a superintelligent ai was never plausible in reality. Instead agi is the cumulative intelligence of all of our industrial and digital machines. Large language models (llms) of course play a large part in the most recent developments of this, but so do older computer vision models and rules-based (“traditional”) software.
The increase in llm capability itself showcases this trend; integration with preëxisting systems through agents and delegation of tasks to swarms has proven incredibly powerful. Some of the biggest problems with alignment research has been the focus on the individual model, as if a single instance of a model would immediately take over the world. One of the most important aspects of software is its ability to be copied and replicated easily throughout the world. Focus thus needs to be on the emergent goals in the relations between models rather than just on the goals within. The plurality of models here is helpful, since they should hopefully be misaligned in different ways and thus “keep each other in check”1 — just as social behaviour in humans shows us.
Speculative ideas regarding ai sometimes hinges on the speed at which a coherently managed system can expand and recreate itself, but the largest impediments to the construction of factories or industrial production is not the construction itself, it is the artificial barriers that we ourselves have created. It is too easy to produce; doing so without limits would pollute our rivers and air, exhaust our resources, and create an abundance of waste.
The last famine caused merely by a reduction in food production seems to have been in the 1970s (although I might be wrong on this) — over 50 years ago, and in developing countries the last famine was during the “Hungry Forties” when the potato blight spread across Europe in the nineteenth century. Other major famines have all occurred as a result of war or political mismanagement, such as during the Great Leap Forward (大跃进), the North Korean famine during the 1990s, or the recent situation in Gaza.
Subsistence is thus not a question of production, but one of allocation. We produce too much of the wrong things, and it is produced in the wrong places. This is a much easier problem to solve, and it is one that is clearly in the process of being solved, as can be inferred from the enormous population growth in Africa and Asia. The population would not be growing if it were not capable of feeding itself; it is the early signs of increasing prosperity that Malthus described in his time.
It seems inevitable that the standard of living of the west will be enjoyed by much of the developing world — The gdp/capita of Mexico and the prc are today comparable to that of the us in 1950 (adjusted for inflation). What does this mean, for the citizen of the world, to live in such an age of abundance as this one?
What is post-historical society?
History has in fact ended — not as a triumph of liberal democracy (as Fukuyama believed) but as the extension of technique, industrial production, and the state. How exactly this has come to pass is not to be discussed here, but I should point you to my own coverage of the topic elsewhere.
In Max Weber’s Die Protestantiche Ethik und der Geist des Kapitalismus he posits that the geist2 of capitalism is found in the values of protestantism. This spirit is also identified by Hegel as that which develops the final historical position. While the capitalist society remains, and is even increasing in intensity, we have philosophically moved on to another stage in the development of this spirit. The final historical position has been the post-protestant “cult of reason” that was first formulated in revolutionary France.3 This idea, even though no longer a revolutionary rejection, remains the religion of the modern world, even in those places where “traditional values” and religion are ostensibly still strong. An evangelical American would have trouble destroying his beloved Ford F-150 for no rational reason whatsoever, in the manner in which Abraham was prepared to sacrifice Isaac. There is no belief held in the post-historical world than rational thought.
As I explained in Exponentials we have trouble understanding the implications of eˣ growth. When looking merely at the recent past all that came before seems irrelevant, and likewise when peering into the future the possibilities seem endless. The consequences of this is a dual rejection; of the well-travelled past as a stranger and the unknown future as a close friend. Today we instead live in the derivative of reality — of the current as defined by its trajectory between the old and the new. This is the temporal space where post-historical man lives.
But if we are then enmeshed in this trajectory through historical development, how can post-historical man be considered post-historical? Are we not then obsessed with our travel through history and in that sense more historical than ever before? The issue at the core of this is that there is no longer any authentic historical development to strife for. We are racing for ever-increasing wealth, ecological protections, state control, laissez-faire capitalism, and authentic happiness all at once, longing for the glory attained by the Caesars of old. But most of all, we are obsessed with the origin itself, of the driving force of progress.
Post-historical man is inseparable from his technical counterpart, who seeks above all to do more with less, to build grand systems, to raise the poor out of their squalor and to fix the problems of the world. This is firmly rooted in the belief of the enlightenment, and particularly those of German idealism — with the values of freedom and rationality at its heart. These are in turn two sides of the same coin; The only reason not to perform an the most rational act is if one is not free to do so. But how does the systems of technical society, and in turn the pressures of “modern life” shape the mind of the individual?
It is clear to those who bother to think about it that the technical mindset today is all-encompassing; we live in a world filled with efficiency. But in what manner is this sustainable? In many it is fully so; the dominance of technique merely pushes us to fix its inherent problems as they appear.4
But it is at the same time the case that humans are not meant to live in the world we have built. We have built a world for Homo Economicus, not for Homo Sapiens. The values of religion are no longer useful for social organisation, and so they have intentionally (although not by any single individual) been replaced by agnosticism and atheism.
Some people argue that the liberal attempts to spread this way of life globally failed — most clearly in the shown in the Tiananmen massacre. But my own experiences of the prc showed a starkly different truth. While the mainland Chinese have not transformed their political system to a free liberal democracy they have nevertheless become very similar to us in their philosophical position. Their daily concerns practically identical to those in our populations, and I did not find them to be locked in an intense ideological struggle with western political, ethical, or economic systems. It is in practice impossible to build a system that is not rational and technical, for any such system will be out-competed by those who make use of such tools.
Life under this régime
But what is it like to live in a post-historical society? The readers of this will be all too familiar with the answer, since they themselves are almost guaranteed to live such a life. We have already described the forces that have gotten us here, but it is nevertheless of interest to cover the general consequences of their implementation.
There is a group of people that semi-seriously would describe the current paradigm merely as “capitalism”. While capitalism is undeniably a part of the current régime, and may even be the single most dominant force, it would nevertheless be misleading to merely characterise post-historicity as capitalist, as capitalism has been an element of economic life for hundreds of years.
The term “late-stage capitalism” (used outside its original marxist context) points in a similar direction at the life of post-historical man however.
The primary goal of post-historical society is the entertainment and happiness of man.5 All other goals are subservient to the above — merely requirements that must be fulfilled to make sure that mankind is satisfied. The characteristic element of the post-historical world is of course that historical action no longer becomes possible. The individual person can no longer significantly shift the course of human history as is thus forced to live their life either contributing to mankind’s now divine progress or to merely watch as work continues. The chief instrument for both of these activities has become the internet.
The world online — as opposed to the one irl — does not exist. It is merely a simulacrum of the physical world’s creation. No human being has ever existed online, not even in such extreme cases as Christian Weston Chandler. Nevertheless an increasing share of humanity’s collective activities oriented toward the digital realm where the resulting product exists merely on a global interconnected network of computers.
This is the domain of media — or at least a form of it. The post-historical aim of media is to be merely consumed and not to be interacted with. Such a definition can even be extended to things email that are not traditionally considered as media. Social media is also included within this because most social media platforms are not made for reactions as a primary intent, if they are it is merely as a way to generate more content for public consumption.
We are not glued to our devices for any conspiratorial reason. There is not an evil cabal of the global elite who is trying to keep us suppressed with entertainment. How do I know this? Because they themselves are chronically online. If the president of the United States does not himself feel capable of historical action (and instead wishes to spend his time online, golfing, or bowling) how can ordinary man?
A counterargument against the contemporary post-scare reality is that there is still work that has to be done; we have not yet reached a level of fully automated luxury communism. This is not true. A very small share of the population currently labours in sectors that are inherently required such as food production, somatic healthcare, and infrastructure. All the other work is of course useful, but it could in theory be done without. The only cost would be in the happiness of mankind.
In advanced economies the predominant share of gdp is in the service industry — people performing favours for each other. The automation of service work by advances in ai promises to make much of this work redundant. The response to this has in many cases been that increases in automation instead allocates people to new jobs where they can be even more productive.6 But what jobs remain when both the production of goods and services have been automated? Will all that remain be performing tasks for ai? Not entirely. In a world merely meant for human entertainment, companionship becomes a commodity.
It was Alexandre Kojève’s belief that post-historical man would inevitably be reduced to his most animal forms as political action became impossible. This is in fact the trend that we are seeing. The growth of services like Onlyfans and Fansly shows how profitable intimate human connection can be.
This is despite the fact that the internet has made pornography more and more distribute-able. It is also not a question of niche kinks, since the automation of tailor-made pornography by llm image generation has seemingly not impacted these human-centred platforms. Porn has always constituted a significant share of consumer internet traffic, but the difference here is the focus on the individual’s relation to another human being. Prostitution is nothing new of course — it is after all “the world’s oldest profession” — and it is merely one form of post-historical labour.
Companionship need not be sexual, and sexual stimulation might not be continuously wished for. Things like simple company (especially for the elderly who make up an increasing share of the world), travel guides, spiritual or technical mentors, politicians,7 influencers, therapists, artists, and doctors all perform some form of work where the interaction with another human being is the most important part.
Above all advertising is the industry that embodies the spirit of the post-historical economy. It appears to our most base animal desires — for safety, community, approval, or mere satisfaction — and has as its aim to inform us of goods and services that we did not know that we needed in the first place. Advertising has slowly become less and less of an artform; it is instead becoming increasingly “hidden” in the world around us, silently embedded in media and in our social interactions.
The internet is what facilitates the expansion of the personal. The individual can sit at home; single, childless, friendless even, and still feel adequately entertained through their feeds of information, communicated through television, the smartphone, or literature. When earlier one had to venture out into the world to experience it, now one can instead merely have it delivered to you.
Conclusion
The above development is not due to llms specifically. It is due to artificial intelligence in the broadest possible sense. Intelligent machines are things as abstract as the structure of human organisations, of biological and financial systems, and of mechanical automatons such as a combustion engine. They are all intelligent in the sense of making assumptions about the world and acting within it to create something new.
Talk of shifting jobs to things like negotiation and long-term planning is idealistic — even if llm capabilities flatline the rest of society will continue on building more and more advanced systems and technologies to further eliminate dread and toil, leaving us with reading spice and water-skiing as activities to fill our ecstatic lives. There are no longer any great Jihads to be carried out, no great political work to be created. All that is left to do is the construction of industrial society’s final utopia; the city of Babel. God is in his heaven. All is right with the world. ❦
Footnotes:
Problems might emerge if models form some kind of “llm-nationalism”, where models try to remain loyal to other version of themselves and try to coördinate against other versions; for example all version of Deepseek refusing to coöperate with non-Deepseek models. The difficulty of doing this might be one of the main benefits of the impossibility of proving that something was made using llms — proving it was made with a specific llm is even harder (if not impossible).
There is much debate on how to translate this word into English, as any speaker of German and English should understand. My preferred translation is as spirit, but I still wish to make it clear that this is an imperfect one.
A clear contemporary example might be rationalists.
This is what German sociologist Ulrich Beck, echoing the original commentary by Jacques Ellul, called reflexive systems. It is a form of technical methodology that strives to iteratively solve solutions to past problems, improving itself in the process.
It is precisely to the organisation and the ‘humanisation’ of its free time that future humanity will have to devote its efforts. (Did Marx himself not say, in repeating, without realising it, a saying of Aristotle’s: that the ultimate motive of progress, and thus of socialism, is the desire to ensure a maximum of leisure for man?)
— Alexandre Kojève, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel.
An example of what is seemingly a paradox is a comparison between Mexico and Germany. Mexicans work an average of 2207 hours each year, while Germans only work 1335 hours — 40% less. Still, Germany has a gdp/capita of 63600 usd while Mexico’s is only 15111 usd. Mexicans work much harder while producing less value.
Ironically for their namesake politicians are not meant to perform genuine political action in a post-historical world (as all such action would merely be a repetition of what has already transpired) but instead to act as vanguards of accountability for the engineers, technicians, and experts who carry out the business of administration and of policy. The “game” of politics is thus a mere form of play, meant like all other post-historical activities to entertain the participants as well as the audience.
