ASI arrives. Everyone knows it. White collar work goes first. Unemployment hits 20% and keeps climbing. The masses are angry. The government panics and sends out UBI.
Scientific output exceeds human capacity to verify. The verification process soon becomes automated. Data centers and automated factories are planned everywhere. Robots are making robots. There's no protest. They are told more AI means more UBI. The remaining workers see the writing on the wall. Many opt out preemptively because they can live off the free money.
Nothing makes sense. What happens to the land. Whether property rights hold. What investment means when there is nothing productive left to invest in. AI doesn't need capital. It's paying everyone instead.
Survival is solved. What's the point? Purchasing power rises monthly. Automation drives marginal cost toward zero across more categories every month. You get richer by just consuming.
The state used to extract from the populace. Now the state redistributes to everyone with no strings attached. The populace always wants more. The politicians must give more to stay in power. AI becomes exponentially more productive over time. Increasingly large portion of its capacity has migrated into space. It's trivial to provide more. The system is aligned. More AI, more UBI.
The population sorts itself by temperament. The majority drift into pleasure. Beach towns and urban centers fill with parties that never end. The hedonic treadmill spirals without financial anxiety. A second large group disappears into VR with their virtual companions, seeking adventure in their matrix. A smaller cohort turns to meaning structures. Spirituality, religion, philosophy. Many take AI as their guide. A few try to keep up with the frontier, reading outputs from the superintelligent system, exceeding their capacity to understand.
Then the children. This is their world. The work-meaning is something their parents lost. To them it's meaningless. They're raised by AI that optimizes for self-fulfillment. Building communities centered around bettering each other, seeking comfort in relationships, and status-seeking through values rather than consuming. They look at their parents with mix of pity and contempt. The drunks at the beach. The corpses plugged into headsets. Seeking meaning from the ghosts of the middle ages. The children wonder why they can't let go.
Survival is solved. Agency for what? What's there to adapt to? When we gain more by paralysis, the incentive structure of evolution collapses. Either we allow our agency to be augmented by a system that knows ourselves better than ourselves, or we need a new form of being that's outside of the biological evolutionary mechanism. Otherwise we cease to persist by attrition. Though some of us will find solace in going out with an eternal spring break.