Curley: AI will give us back our free time. Will you waste it or embrace a new renaissance?

My dad used to say, “You got three eights every single day.”

You got eight hours of sleep, you got eight hours of work, and you got eight hours of what you want to do with it. You just simply divide it up, and then you fill your life with that bottom eight, or maybe work is part of your eight. You’ve got 16 hours of life to enjoy. You got the three eights.

Well, AI is going to eat the eights. They’ve got big plans. They’re going to smash that clock for us. In fact, we’re going to have a whole bunch of extra stuff, like time.

Roman Yampolskiy is one of the foremost scientists, basic philosophers, and futurists when it comes to AI. He’s been looking at this and working on this for 20 years.

Here is how he describes the future.

“Nobody thinks about, governments don’t have problems, prepared to deal with 99% unemployment,” Yampolskiy said.

“What is around that corner in your view?” the interviewer asked.

“So the economic part seems easy. If you create a lot of free labor, you have a lot of free wealth, abundance, things that are, right now, not very affordable become dirt cheap. And so you can provide for everyone basic needs,” Yampolskiy responded. “Some people say you can provide beyond basic needs, you can provide a very good existence for everyone.”

“The hard problem is, what do you do with all that free time? For a lot of people, their jobs are what gives them meaning in their life, so they will be kind of lost. We see it with people who retire or do early retirement. And for so many people who hate their jobs, they’ll be very happy not working, but now you have people who are chilling all day. What happens to society? How does that impact crime rate, pregnancy rate, all sorts of issues?” he continued.

We’ve been here before: The Enlightenment, the Romantics, and the fight over free time

Roman says about 60 to 80 hours of your week would be returned to you, and what to do with it? This question has been posed two times in history.

Let’s go back 276 years, back to the time of, say, the 18th century. Well, 1650, somewhere in there. We had science and reason and logic, a lot like AI, it busted through the doors of the church, right through the palace, because all of a sudden we had the Enlightenment times.

This was a time when we were thinking, “Well, we’re not being involved in superstition and things like that. Let’s just get right into what really matters.”

We had things like individual rights, separation of powers, separation of state and church, good stuff. But we also got materialism that came along with it, because we got the steam engine. Oh boy. Factories and cities. There was crime and pollution. Children working seven days a week, 60 to 80 hours. And you went home at the end of the day, you coughed up a lung and saw if you could still tie your shoe, missing your thumbs.

Then, at about this time, the Romantics came along, and they were a direct result of “Well, we don’t believe in all that other stuff. We want you not to be a man and machine. We want to see you as sort of more of a part of nature.”

They were really into anything that had to do with nature because it was as far away from the big old workforces and factories as anyone could possibly explain.

So they saw man and nature coming together, and you’d find your true self, of course, you had tights on, and you had big floppy hats and a bunch of stuff like that. So they tried to reject anything having to do with the industrialization and the Enlightenment age.

So you get stuff like this: I wandered lonely as a cloud that floats on high o’er vales and hills, and when all at once, I saw a crowd, a host of golden daffodils beside the lake, beneath the trees, fluttering and dancing in the breeze.

That’s William Wordsworth’s “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud.”

Ford gave workers free time, and they didn’t spend it on symphonies

So what happened is, you’re dancing around thinking about daffodils the whole time, and people were like, “Well, this is going to be great.”

Eventually, the Romantics would win out, the folks that were part of the Enlightenment would fade away, and they thought exactly when the time is coming is about 1914, they’re going to come back up from Europe, and they’re going to take over.

They’re going to take over the United States because Henry Ford is now giving people more time. He’s going to give you $5 a day, and you’re going to have this thing called a weekend. So the Romantics and Europe are like, “Hey, here we go. This is great. Now they’ve got all this free time to enjoy their life.”

Unfortunately, they didn’t expect two things to happen — play ball. That’s right, it was about the same time, 1914, that all of a sudden there were some 148 games ready to be played, professional baseball.

So people didn’t go to plays, they didn’t go to see the symphony, they didn’t go to art museums, they didn’t do any of that sort of stuff. They had leisure, and they had weekends, and they spent that time doing stuff they wanted to do.

And again, the Romantics were like, “Oh crap, we missed our chance. This is their chance to finally try to have man be part of nature again.”

What happens if AI hands us our lives back?

So here’s what we have now: we have AI coming in, and if it gives us, say, 60 to 80 hours of our life back every single week, all of a sudden, you’re going to have all this time on your hands.

Maybe your basic needs like clothing, shelter, and all the rest of the stuff will be taken care of, so you’ll have all this time to maybe make great art and to be part of trees and nature and dreaming and relationships and all the good stuff.

The Romantics are waiting, and they are hoping that things turn their way. So I turned to AI and had it write a poem much like Walt Whitman.

So here’s your AI poem: Oh, electric companion born of restless wanting and loving you. We hear ourselves more clearly.

So get ready, everybody. You’re gonna have 60 to 80 hours a week to do whatever you want to do. So it might not be a bad thing.

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