Re: Nekkid Mowgli takes precedence

"What is coming will mark a greater change to humanity than the neolithic revolution.... Within the next century, 100 per cent of human jobs will be replaced." I think you underestimate the degree to which we've gone through this before and the number of doomsayers who've been proved wrong every time. Before the agricultural and industrial revolutions agriculture was where the vast majority of jobs were. Now it's like 2%. That increase in productivity freed up labor to be redirected towards new market demands because human wants are unlimited. And perhaps you don't find the idea of people having new wants to be particularly enchanting, but the point is that it pays the bills. Also, I find your solace in UBI a bit perplexing considering your argument rests on catastrophizing the end of work. Which way is it? "What worries me is the absence of any human striving for artistic creation, scientific discovery, or philosophical insight." There are more creators than ever. Perhaps you simply need to expand your definition for that term. Scientific discovery, it seems, is not something that AI does very well. Stephen Wolfram has recently addressed this (and the limits of AI more generally) and the short of it is that AI is great as language prediction because human language is predictable (and moreso than we might have previously thought), but doing original science is not something that can be done by having some AI regurgitate all of human knowledge. It does not "discover" anything than hasn't already been put to paper. As for pursuing philosophical insight, that has always been the purview of a small aristocratic niche anyway. And in another sense, thanks to social media, we're all philosophers now. Maybe not of the caliber of an Aristotle, but I think most can manage an irascible Diogenes telling Alexandros to stop blocking the sun.