Perfectly Meaningless Lives or Meaninglessly Perfect Lives?

“The highest purpose is to have no purpose at all.”

John Cage

Ubiquitous AI will be “always-on” and integrated into every aspect of every day life. Multi-modal agents will be able to see, hear, think, talk (and move and interact), all in real-time. With this input, our AI agents will be able to perceive, conceive, and adapt. Teams of agents will proactively work for us in the background (understanding, assisting, enhancing), silently spinning in an attempt to optimize every part of our lives. Our work, our play, our interactions.

How will we handle this perfectly perceived, perfected world? A discussion question that gets the people going when I give talks on generative AI is, in this future, “what then becomes the role of the human?”

Will we live meaninglessly perfect lives or perfectly meaningless lives?

This began as a post on X, March 11, 2024.