Pleasure and Meaning in the Future

Often, in video games, the most fun part is the beginning–perhaps not the very start when you are weak and vulnerable, but the point slightly later on when you gain enough strength to confront the path of challenge ahead. With these games, by the time the end is reached, your character is stacked with powerful items, able to win any fight, and has explored all of the lands. Once this end is attained, however, the challenge is gone, and, often, so is the fun. 

Could real life be similar? Could technology bring us to the same end-of-game state where we run out of challenge? The following conversation will focus on the final state humanity could achieve with the aid of super-intelligent AI and if we might encounter the very same problem.

Let’s start by imagining that first case: rapid technological expansion takes over industries, and all roles formerly held by humans are replaced by a wise and benevolent AI. For the sake of the arguments concerning this society, we’ll assume that AI acts both through autonomous C-3PO-style humanoid robots and as an overarching, governing force. Imagine the following industries:

Transportation: AI-powered vehicles move both people and goods with both rapid speed and precision, ensuring the highest level of safety. 

Agriculture: Humanoid robots harvest, water, and monitor the conditions of plants.

Law: All cases are tried by an AI that can synthesize all past legal cases and documents, providing an unbiased verdict. 

The AI labor force would be capable of out-working humans with an efficiency that never diminishes. These conditions would produce a technological utopia in which work becomes optional for humans. These future people could do all of the things that we are currently limited from doing by either cost or time. They could be food connoisseurs, going to restaurants, trying all of the new AI-perfected recipes; they could spend all of their time at spas receiving massages from robots; or they could simply spend every minute partying with their friends. But would it really be perfect? 

The theory of hedonic adaptation provides an interesting perspective to use while analyzing these future societies. Hedonic adaptation–put simply–is the theory that humans acclimate to pleasures. Consider that time you purchased a new phone, went on break after a semester of school, or had a positive change in the trajectory of your career. The first few days were great, right? This feeling of happiness results from an improvement relative to your past standards of living, and that spike of pleasure stands out significantly to your mind. As time progresses, however, your standards for pleasure rise, and you will need even stronger pleasures to create a noticeable difference. Eventually, the things that once excited you blend into ordinary life and become an expectation. A day of this lavish, futuristic lifestyle could turn into another Tuesday, something that would likely concern the philosophers of these future societies! So, if robots do everything for us, and we grow bored of our usual activities of ice cream tasting and lounging, what should we even do? 

Existentialist philosophers provide some insight. These thinkers, namely Nietzsche, Camus, and Sartre, see human meaning derived from overcoming challenges. But if AI and robotics eliminate that challenge for humanity, then what? One option is sports and athletics. Historical precedent shows that even as humans developed technology (cars that can travel extremely fast, cannons that can shoot a ball faster than any human can hope to throw, etc), sports still remained and never lost meaning. Then, the best way we could consider sports is as a test of authentic human skill and virtue. So, even if AI dominates the fields in which we originally held careers, we could still find meaning by overcoming the challenges of sports and pursuing natural human excellence. No modern track athlete seems dismayed that a car can travel much faster. 

While the existentialists would likely be critical of this future, the philosopher Epicurus would likely support it; he stated pleasure is the highest good, and the best type of pleasure is ataraxia, which is a freedom from cares, probably better defined as a peace of mind. So, even if this future does not involve volatile spikes of pleasure and displeasure, the Epicureans would be all for it because boringness is indicative of peacefulness. 

Similar to sports and athletics, meaning could also be found in the arts. Even with technological advancements in the music industry allowing listeners to play music at will, live music performance still remains popular. A common thread connecting both of these cases in arts and athletics seems to be that humans can define any goal or task and equate success to natural, unassisted talent. Therefore, while a robot may be able to perform the task better, humans do not care because of the rules and constraints with which they defined the activity. 

In the realm of technology, there is also hope. The role of humans will shift more from being builders to being architects. Humans will lay out the vision, and the robots will implement the vision.