The Hustle Trade-off

For a few days in October of 2023, I could be found in a small mountain town in Morocco. While there, I often strolled around the medina on the warm, breezy nights with a few friends I’d made in the hostel where I stayed. I noticed that the town was always calmly alive, late into the night; children running around, men gathered outside shops smoking hashish, people lounging with their families after a day’s work selling goods in the marketplace.

I saw a similar pace of life in parts of Europe, like the Italian port city of Trieste, where the town square buzzed with life at 10:00 AM on a weekday. Yes, a fair bit of the traffic was a cruise stopping through on its way to Venice, but locals alike displayed a relaxed approach to the start of their day. They didn’t hurry into Starbucks, snatch their pre-made online order, and rush off to the office. They went into a café, ordered, talked, and enjoyed their triple-C breakfast (coffee, croissant, cigarette) with a friend, amidst the sunlight and the pigeons.

But there’s a strong case for the other end of the spectrum: the hustle-and-bustle lifestyle. This penchant for productivity, this bustling busy-ness, this fast food, fast-walking, extravaganza of GDP allows us to advance as a society. It’s the necessary landscape to cultivate the discoveries and the breakthroughs at laboratories, hospitals, and think tanks that continually alter the human experience. This culture gave us penicillin, the space shuttle, and the smartphone, but it also gave us eating-dinner-out-of-a-bag-at-your-desk-at-9PM.

It’s probably true that if we never adopted this mindset, we wouldn’t have some of the incredible advancements we now enjoy. And maybe it caused a lot of the stress, depression, and fatalist burnout we now feel. These can exist together, and it doesn’t make either lifestyle right or wrong. After all, as economist Thomas Sowell observed, “there are no solutions, only trade-offs...”

UNTIL NOW (maybe).

I have a theory that perhaps, as a society, we’ve reached a crux, a sort of pinnacle where we can, through our hard-fought technological advancements, finally achieve escape velocity. This grand turning point, this shining Excalibur I speak of is none other than the golden child of the moment, the current hype: AI, or more specifically, artificial general intelligence. For familiarity and readability, I’ll stick to calling it AI.

At risk of sounding under-educated on the matter, AI seems to promise a future where ever more tasks can be offloaded to machines. AI tools already do impressive things. They can solve complex equations, they can code, they can write blog posts (so I hear). Soon, perhaps, these machines will be able to run tests and research in the same way laboratory scientists do at top universities. Machines have always taken on the hardest work for us. The horse-drawn stagecoach (and later, the car) liberated us from having to drag our possessions under our own strength. This gave us the ability to move far and wide with much less effort. The dishwasher washes our dishes for us, freeing us up to do whatever it is we do while our dishes wash. The blender pulverizes food for us, saving us from the painstaking act of cutting, banging, and pressing foods into a similar consistency. The computer crunches numbers and the Internet locates information for us in a minuscule fraction of the time it once took. These are all forms of machines doing work for us so that we can direct our precious energy elsewhere. These machines took time to become affordable, effective, and efficient, but like any machine that’s worth having, we eventually ensure they do. And it certainly seems AI is worth it.

I am simplifying this to a dangerous degree. I understand people will still need ways to make money, still need vocations at which they work passionately, and we’re a long way from these machines doing the work of trained research scientists. I also assume that for at least a few decades, a large portion of humanity won’t have access to these artificial intelligences. I only mean to point out that in the same way machines have always helped us advance, these new machines seem perhaps to offer the greatest step in that direction we’ve yet seen.

If we keep at it, in 50 years, AI could be running the hard stuff behind the scenes. We can relax while the machines achieve breakthroughs. We can devote more time to creating art, playing with our children, or writing blog posts about topics we know dangerously little. We can eat a triple-C breakfast (I made this term up by the way, quite proud) at 10:00 AM and still have medical and technological breakthroughs improve our human experience. We can have our croissant and eat it, too.

I understand that this might not happen. I may simply misunderstand the applications for which AI is useful. I may underestimate what it takes to achieve said scientific breakthroughs. But if machines do as machines have done, I certainly see it as a very real possibility that artificial general intelligence makes obsolete our culture of productivity-at-all-costs. At this point, the world is our oyster. We can work hard at the things we truly want to work for, and then relax when our body, mind, and family demand it. Sounds like a pipe dream, but then again, democracy, human flight, and reliable agriculture were pipe dreams to billions of people throughout history.

And look at us now…