AI & Hedonism

“Hedonism / noun / the pursuit of pleasure; sensual self-indulgence.”

With the current turmoil in global markets paired with uncertainty about the future of humanity, the question that seems to become ever so more difficult to answer is this: how does society survive and adapt to a world where what humans can provide becomes increasingly less valuable?

The rise of LLMs alongside broader AI technologies that have increasingly more agency and the ability to plan and act with ever less supervision, has instilled a feeling that we’re slowly (or fast) becoming useless. Skills and experience that people put blood, sweat, and tears into acquiring are now replicated in seconds even better in some data center halfway across the globe . This effect is reaching everyone from entry-level white-collar juniors getting outclassed and outworked by conventional and popular AI models, to leading figures in tech openly admitting they’re starting to feel irrelevant.

With that in mind today’s enigma is the following: what’s ahead for humanity?

To even begin to understand the societal impact, I think we need to go back and understand what made humans strive for tools and intelligence that outdid man in the first place. Starting in the stone age, we sought for ways to survive and reproduce, that was the entire goal. But as life progressed, we climbed to the top of the food chain, became the apex predator, and developed methods to produce food in abundance. Survival stopped being the only concern. We began to seek activities that not only maintained the species, but filled the empty time we now had.

Inherently, humans find pleasure in things like sex, friendships, and parenthood because they aid survival and reproduction. We’re biologically programmed to feel rewarded when engaging in them. Pleasure itself was (and still is) a survival mechanism. But as humans became smarter, we realized we could trigger those same chemical responses without performing their original functions. That marked the beginning of the era of striving for pleasure.

In reality, the pursuit of pleasure beyond biological necessity began after the agricultural revolution, when food, our main survival hurdle, became abundant. It accelerated with the industrial revolution, and exploded with the digital revolution, bringing our ability to pleasure ourselves to unprecedented levels. But one thing always kept humans in check: the need for human productivity.

No matter how much pleasure became accessible, most people still had to exchange work for it. In capitalist societies (the most productive growth engine humans have built) effort roughly translated into reward once basic needs were met. This feedback loop became the engine of societal growth. For hundreds of generations, it gave structure and meaning to our lives.

Over the last half-century however, that structure has started to blur. Human limits began fading. One person could now do more in a year than their entire lineage. This has become painfully obvious with today’s LLMs, where entire careers and decades of academic learning are compressed into seconds on a supercomputer.

Historically, this kind of exponential increase in capability was always balanced by progression to the next level: hunter-gatherers became specialists, specialists became hyper specialists. Humans adapted by moving up the abstraction ladder.

But are we finally beginning to reach the end of this ladder?

Are we approaching a time where pleasure without progress lies ahead? And if so, will humans experience more pleasure, or less, when it no longer has to be earned?

Starting with my generation, I think our lives are increasingly turning into passive journeys. What once required effort now happens online, and increasingly less of what we create is the product of human labor, instead becoming the output of technologies modeled after the human mind.This paired with vertical-scrolling social media constantly bombarding us with overstimulating content, and we’re starting to see a growing portion of a generation deprived of social connection, stripped of passion, and unable to find its footing in the world.

So far, these effects are limited because AI has mostly been constrained to the digital world. And while that’s a small part of the physical world, it’s a massive part of our lives. The real question is what happens when bridges between the digital and physical worlds are fully built.

At that point, both the mental and physical foundations of human value will be overtaken by something that simply performs better.

I don’t know exactly how this plays out.

But I am certain of one thing: the times ahead, as fascinating as they may seem, and the small day to day developments that feel inconsequential, will soon compound into something huge.

We are approaching a world where humans no longer live in the pursuit of pleasure, but in pleasure itself.

And this pushes humanity into territory that is entirely uncharted.