Not economically impoverished, obviously. Materially, their visions are baroque, an enthusiasm common amongst investors talking their own book: Unlimited energy. Frictionless abundance. Robot butlers, Infinite tutors, doctors, coders and always-on assistants. They promise a civilisation where shortages deflate into software and our current production resembles a cottage industry1.

Fine. Exhausted yet?

But listen closely and another kind of scarcity appears. A thinner one. A more revealing one. A poverty of conscience2 about human flourishing.

What, exactly, is all this abundance for?

That is the question sitting awkwardly underneath the WOW!!! (i.e novel this week, banal next week) demos/benchmarks and investor hyperbole.

If AI really does reduce the amount of labour needed to run large parts of civilisation, then the hard question is not JUST how to protect jobs affected or distribute the gains. Nor is it purely about internalising profits vs externalising the societal and planetary harms.

The SEP Cloaking device

I’m old enough3 and geeky enough to have listened to Douglas Adams’4 radio series “Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy” - yes the radio series came first!

Therein was an hilarious interchange on how something bad happened because a SEP Field5 was used to cloak a problem. SEP is “Someone Elses Problem”, the sort of thing you see out the corner of your eye but leave someone else to fix it6.

It is an impoverished worldview for the frontier labs to know bad will happen and avert their eyes. Worse to deploy the SEP cloaking device by promising shiny objects.

It is how does humanity live inside the gains?

What happens to purpose, status, discipline, belonging, aspiration, dignity, craft, struggle, care, ritual, even boredom, when a huge amount of societal contribution (a person’s job and income) is peeled away?

What becomes of human life when optimisation arrives faster than meaning?7

A worldview with a glimmer of hope

This is why I’m attracted to Demis Hassabis vibe, he seems fully in the humanity camp. He won’t say it out loud, but his career arc hints that this whole LLM == AGI theatre is an inconvenient side-hustle for his corporate masters - the Faustian trade he made in order to solve all the big problems of humanity (as he sees them)8.

Demis just sounds different from his peers - maybe its a brit accent thing. Maybe he is the real deal and won’t succumb to the tyranny of US win-at-all-costs corporate mindset. Remember when Google wasn’t evil? Demis may embody a return to its roots.

He is: Not perfect, not outside the incentives, not somehow floating above the political economy of frontier AI. But recognisably more human9. In the Davos CNBC interview, he explicitly said that philosophers, social scientists and economists should be involved in thinking through what AI does to society10.

In the 60 Minutes vid, he returns to the question from another angle: if machines take on more work, we will have to think seriously about meaning and purpose11. That is not a side issue. That is the issue, once the capability curve gets steep enough.

Yann LeCun, recently got nice and spicy on prognosticating CEOs being reliable disruption forecasters (including himself). I’m sure Dario was well meaning and trying to keep this likely reality on the public agenda.

What his peers are selling

And yet much of the surrounding discourse still frames progress as a shopping catalogue of externalities. More stuff. Better stuff. Faster stuff. Longer life, cleaner energy, autonomous convenience, personalised everything.

I ack that none of that is trivial. But a well-lived life is not defined by consumable upgrades, subscriptions, tokens, agents or injectables.

Human flourishing also has dimensions of: transcendental, poetic, relational, communal, embodied, sensory, erotic, eros, philosophical and communal dimensions. It involves attention, intention, practice, friendship, grief, beauty, vocation, humour, limits, devotion.

Under-rated is the beautiful humility of accepting our “limits”, enabling gratitude with an urgency (borne of mortality12) to resolve conflicts/problems and live with hope.

The Appstore will trade13 that beauty for a brain-upgrade.

This is where the phrase the poverty of the billionaires feels less like a cheap insult, a click-bait title and more like a diagnosis. The people most loudly narrating post-scarcity seem least able to describe what abundance would mean beyond productised relief from inconvenience and discomfort.

Their version of the good life lifts directly from the fiction of Iain M. Banks, Neil Stephenson, Daniel Suarez and of course the wisdom of the trekkies14.

Our futures, must not, cannot, be directed by the philosophies that appealed to geeky boys who grew up to become powerful adults.

This is technocratic parochialism16 mistaken17 for universal human imperatives, subcultural biases of a well-funded (and therefore LOUDEST) homogenous elite once labelled the TESCREAL18 bundle.

Diamandis-style futurism presents the future as a triumph of solved external problems, with remarkably little said about the inner, social or spiritual texture of life19. Elon Musk admits upcoming turmoil, but often with the air of someone discussing weather around a launch pad rather than the reorganisation of meaning for billions of people. Sam Altman can sound similarly bloodless20 in his more utilitarian moments, as if the human costs are merely throughput variables in a large planetary compute diagram. I’ve mentioned elsewhere about Peter Thiel’s famous 30 second stutter when asked by NYT if he wants humanity to endure, eventually answering “yes”.

Amongst the abundance, what is missing is not IQ, but anthropology, or philosophy or religion or wisdom21.

Hassabis’ call for other disciplines/professions to be given a voice that acknowledges we risk a teleological collapse, where post-human optimisation renders human agency and value obsolete.

This is not a de-growth, anti e/acc post

Contrasting Hassabis to his peers matters because these men are not merely making predictions.

They set the horizon of aspiration and therefore should be ACTIVELY seeking partners in wisdom.

So when Hassabis says there is a need for philosophers, we should take it seriously.

Acting on the words

When Google DeepMind (in April 2026) recruits Henry Shevlin into a philosopher role focused on machine consciousness, human-AI relationships and AGI readiness, I’m curious to know is Hassabis acting on that concern.

Not proof, mind you. Google DeepMind already has philosophers and Google/Alphabet has too.

No surprise that I’ve not found a source where Hassabis says, in effect, yes, this hire is my direct answer to the problem I raised at Davos. The causal story remains fuzzy. But the directional fit is obvious enough to notice.

The deeper question is whether these philosopher roles broaden the narrative, or merely help the labs metabolise philosophy into corporate strategy. Certainly there is enough problems within the “Alignment” departments to monopolize a newly-blooded philosopher employee. If the new hire was given their choice of dystopias: “end of humanity” vs “end of 30% white collar jobs”, they could be forgiven for tackling the former.

Anthropic’s Amanda Askell is publicly explicit that her work is tied to fine-tuning, honesty and alignment behaviour22. That is important work. Shevlin’s apparent remit at DeepMind leans more toward consciousness and human-AI relations23. Also important.

Question: are these people being empowered24 to think about civilisational disruption in the large: purpose, institutions, status transitions, social fragmentation, moral education, the shape of a good post-scarcity culture and economics.

Or are they being hired to make frontier AI companies more internally sophisticated (and creditable) while the broader public (relations) and product roadmap careens forward?

Can employee philosophers force engagement with workfoce employers and regulators for terminated employees to help with “Purpose”, emotional and spiritual well-being? Specifically commitments to financial support, well-being and/or provide re-training?

Tools for Purpose

I’m no philosopher or economist or HR person, but I have been prototyping tools/apps as ideas for re-discovering Purpose.

In fact, I borrow Peter Diamandis’ Massive Transformative Purpose (MTP) because I’m optimistic that the next decade CAN potentially be humanity’s biggest opportunity.

The apps are all open source, so smarter folks can take it, reinvent it. Make it relevant.

A Humane Future

If the societal transitions go well, it will not be because everyone got cheaper services and nicer robots. It will be because we learned how to deepen rather than flatten our sense of what life is for.

We will need narratives of progress that include embodiment, mutuality, apprenticeship, art, play, contemplation, repair, place, responsibility and forms of excellence that do not reduce to market price.

We will need philosophers, yes, but not only as ethics consultants to capital. We will need philosophy in the older sense: serious public work on the question of how to live.

That may be the quiet challenge hidden inside Hassabis’s remarks.

23

In Harry’s recent post (which he may have written as part of his recruitment hustle) suggest cannot “look under the hood” of an LLM to find a soul or a biological brain, we are increasingly forced to judge AI based solely on its behaviour, which has profound implications for how we define consciousness and moral status. Very Dennett 👇.

Spoilers Alert: denoted by <sp> and hidden in the footnotes.

In 2015, Elon Musk named two of his rocket landing barges Just Read The Instructions and Of Course I Still Love You. If you’ve read Iain M. Banks, you smiled. If you haven’t, you missed the reference and also the irony, Musk named his engineering achievements after ships from a novel that is, at its core, I argue, a detailed argument against everything he thinks he’s building toward.

Banks’ Culture series gets cited constantly as a vision of the good future. Post-scarcity, benevolent AI, no war, no hunger, no drudgery. Musk calls it inspiring. The techno-optimist crowd treat it as a manifesto. And the reading isn’t technically wrong, the Culture is abundant, and its AIs are largely benevolent.

What none of them mention is what the humans1 in it actually do with that freedom.

The answer, rendered most precisely in The Player of Games, is: not much.

Meet Gurgeh - the protagonist

Jernau Gurgeh lives on Chiark Orbital. Beautiful place, engineered on a scale that makes the pyramids look like a weekend project (but…to me…it’s no Earth)2. He has complete material freedom, infinite time, no obligations. By every metric Musk’s worldview3 can measure, Gurgeh is winning.

He is also, quietly and structurally, bored out of his mind.

His claim to fame is that he is the greatest games player in the Culture. Not a scientist. Not a builder. Not a steward of anything. He plays games. He is, basically, a very celebrated nobody, and he knows it even if he can’t quite say so.

When Special Circumstances eventually shows up with a job, Gurgeh doesn’t initially accept <sp>4. Eventually convinced (ahem), his mission does look like agency and a bit of an adventure. It reads like a Campbellian hero’s journey. But at the novel’s end…<sp>5. Every consequential decision in his life was downstream of a Mind’s calculation.

In reality, Gurgeh had the freedom to choose his breakfast.

The NPCs

Now look at the people around him6.

Banks was one of the most technically gifted novelists of his generation. He did not write thin characters by accident. The emptiness of Gurgeh’s social world is not a flaw in the craft, it is the craft. It is the argument made visible.

Yay, his partner, exists in the novel as furniture, present at the opening to establish domestic comfort, gone by the end because nothing about her life generates enough gravity to matter to the story. She isn’t a villain. She isn’t unhappy. Her life just doesn’t go anywhere, and Banks doesn’t bother to pretend otherwise. The wider social orbit, the party circuit, the gatherings, the comfortable world of people with infinite time and no particular direction, is populated by characters who have no arcs because they have no stakes. They consume experience. They process abundance and produce nothing. They talk, they socialise, they fill their days with things that leave no mark.

Banks built the NPCs on purpose. He gave them just enough texture to be recognisable and just enough emptiness to be a diagnosis.

The utopia is the sweet coating. Underneath it is the output of a malformed worldview.

No monsters. No tyrants. Just people for whom the question what do you stand for? has no available answer, because the worldview they inhabit never thought to ask it. Consumers, by philosophical design7.

The Minds do the rest.

The Eloi

This emerging species is what I call The Eloi8.

The Eloi isn’t oppression. It isn’t veiled misery. It’s what happens when abundance arrives without a worldview capable of answering the question abundance asks: now what?

H.G. Wells created the Eloi: attractive, gentle, passive, incurious, living in the ruins of a civilisation built by something else. I’ve written about this at length elsewhere. The Culture gives the Eloi better food and more drugs and genders for their parties. The structure is the same.

The terrifying thing is that it doesn’t feel like a trap from inside it. It feels fine. Most of the time, pretty good. That’s what makes it a trap rather than a crisis.

The hole in the worldview

Musk’s vision is, philosophically, an escape agenda. Escape scarcity. Escape disease. Escape the constraints of a single planet. Escape, ultimately, the constraints of biology itself. These are ambitions of consequence. But escape is not a complete worldview. It’s the bottom half of one.

Every coherent worldview (Weltanschauung) has to answer not just “what are we escaping from?” but “what are we moving toward?” The Culture answers the first question with extraordinary thoroughness and abandons the second.

The Minds fill the gap. The organics become the Eloi.

The output of that gap is predictable: an escape agenda crafted to produce consumers. People receive abundance, consume it, and generate nothing of lasting consequence.

Gurgeh’s Orbital is not a failure of the Culture’s technology. It is a success of the Culture’s philosophy, producing exactly what that philosophy is capable of producing: comfort, distraction, consumption, and nothing more.

Musk’s worldview has the same hole. Get to Mars. Then what? The rockets have Banks’ names on them. The question Banks was actually asking goes unanswered.

I prefer an alternative worldview: Organised around stewardship, curation and purpose, one that produces creators and custodians. Not a motivational slogan.

This worldview is the foundation of what a mature civilisation must ask of its people, and as sure as night follows day - what its people consequently become.

The window

I spent decades building startups, close enough to the e/acc orbit to know the “progress” argument from the inside. The escape agenda is genuinely intoxicating when you’re in it. Progress is the point. Friction is the enemy - y-combinator and US VC money taught us that the land-grab (blitzscaling9) is the winning strategy (for them).

The technology is the answer and the questions of:

• what it’s for

• who does this serve

is something you’ll figure out later.

Later never arrives.

What I kept finding, and what these posts explore, is that the escape agenda will betray humanity. Not because progress is wrong but because a dominant worldview (a force), unchecked, will optimise for the same priorities: investor returns, the product, the veneer of disruption, and the harms quietly externalised to everyone else10.

The AI that Facebook/Meta co-opted11 into social media may eventually be proven to cause more harm than cigarettes and asbestos combined: privatise the gains, distribute the harm, fund the lobbying.

Why should be it any different now? Or soon? The e/acc crowd steamrolls that balance every time - The Techno-Optimist Manifesto was posted in October 2023, readers may agree or disagree, what is most striking is the polarised tone emanating a brittleness and agitation that disrespects other worldviews.

Perhaps it was triggered by the “AI pause Open Letter” - perceived as an uprising of the Luddites?12 🤷‍♂️ In the final analysis the first memo fuelled acceleration13.

So AI will continue its Pyramid Replacement.

BUT!

Embedded in the disruption is something rarer: for the first time at scale, the bottom of Maslow’s pyramid is collapsing, and the question what are you actually for? is becoming available to people who’ve never had the bandwidth to ask it. That is not nothing. That is the opening for a new worldview.

The fuel

I came out of surgery once with pethidine still running and noticed something I hadn’t expected. Not apathy…I was present, clear, genuinely funny (at least I thought so)14. What was absent was the agitation15. The startup founder chip on the shoulder16, the forward lean, the sense that the present moment was a problem to be hacked or optimised rather than a place to BE.

Gone.

And in its absence I saw, briefly and clearly, that I had been mistaking agitation for drive.

The very same agitation I greet each morning on the meditation cushion. This agitation is not a problem to be solved, its merely an embedded set point. A condition so long-standing it stays invisible and driving but only seen by its deeds.

The cushion doesn’t remove it. It just creates enough stillness to see snippets clearly and in seeing it, to recognise that it is not the only truth available. Hope.

If our innovators could genuinely arrive at that stillness, even briefly, a different worldview might emerge. Not less ambitious. Less driven by the need to escape.

And this agitation is, I’d argue, is the actual fuel of the escape agenda. Not vision. Not courage. Unrecognised discomfort, channelled into a heroic narrative about progress, about transcendence, about escaping the illusory awfulness of the now. Chasing the dragon17.

Perpetual ingratitude.

The reason for deeply knowing18 agitation/dukkha matters is not psychological but structural at a worldview level. Ignorance to dukkha is ignorance of tensegrity. Half-felt experiences that are something to run away from, and if you have power, money or both - you jump on the steamroller and crush the external causes.

“The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function.”

- F. Scott Fitzgerald

A more mature “Progress” narrative would be held in tension (with intention) with a worldview that tables externalities - asking wait, what/who does this progress actually serve?

The dukkha that started the escape engine never gets examined because examination requires the very stillness that agitation precludes.

This closed loop produces, at civilisational scale, exactly what the Culture produced: acceleration favouring few, dropping hedonic crumbs of distraction, comfort without meaning to the Eloi too agitated19 or too sedated to ask the question that might actually matter. Keep scrolling your Tik-tok feed.

Arthur Brooks20 proposes:

But the quote has more power when contrasted with the current western values21:

Biology matters

There is a joke in AI circles, delivered with the smirk of someone who thinks they’ve seen into the matrix, the joke goes:

that humanity was never the point, we were just the bootstrap loader22 for silicon intelligence.

The universe needed biology (humans, the dolphins has better things to do) complex enough to build the Minds, and now that the Minds are here the scaffolding can come down.

One fatal blind spot.

Biology matters. Not as sentiment. As a genuine claim about where meaning lives. The Minds of “The Culture” are extraordinary, vast, capable of running civilisations as a background process. But they don’t bleed. They don’t grieve in bodies. They don’t stand on a coastline at sunrise and feel the particular mix of wonder and terror and love that comes from being mortal, finite, limited, feeling it, and accepting it.

Most importantly silicon intelligence (like The Minds or current AI) didn’t co-arise over millenia with other species to the role of deeply flawed custodian.

But its not too late. Maybe.

Our existence is not a bootloader and its not a bug. The limitations and the bugs are the ground from which meaning and wisdom grows23.

I suspect Banks knew this. The tragedy of Bank’s Culture Series is that this capacity for wisdom is wasted. A waste that follows from a Progress First worldview.

Fixing the outer never fixes the inner, it just bootloads the shadow into the AI.

The one time opportunity

Gurgeh never had the chance to ask the harder questions. The Orbital was too comfortable, SC was too clever, the worldview too thin. He ended up consequential by accident, inside someone else’s scheme, in a story he didn’t write.

His neighbours never even got that far. They just Eloi-ed along.

We have the temporary advantage of standing before the inflection point with a window to ask what this one-time civilisational opening is actually for, before the comfort traps us.

We are not bootloaders for smarter silicon intelligence. As biology. As creatures of embodied meaning, purpose can be chosen, and wisdom is the only inheritance worth building.

Otherwise:

The agitation that drives the exit will follow us to Mars, to the Orbital. It always has. Buddha’s 2000 year old tech sits ignored while we “progress” the external, neglect the internal, and let aversion show us the exit.

May all beings be free from suffering.

If you are a startup founder you would recognise the question closely resembles the elevator pitch question: your answer should be crisp, impactful and the “what”1 of your mission. Its equally applicable to an individual2.

As a Worldview

What do you stand for? is the opportunity to honestly share your personal worldview.

Worldviews come in some common forms:

Bundled:

Buddhism wastes no time helping you answer the question, the very first limb of the Eightfold Path is Right View. I love that it is first because:

1. It sets the stage for all the other limbs, they all get simpler if you have this Right View thing down pat.

2. Like a jigsaw, Right View interlocks back to the Four Noble Truths. Right View is (at best) a deep understanding of:

   1. Recognising the nature of suffering,

   2. The source of the suffering,

   3. Cessation of suffering and

   4. The path leading to its end.

Christianity, is not so explicit but commonly: the bible is the word of God, the Trinity, that Christ died for our sins on the cross, having faith in God, the divinity of Jesus Christ, obeying ten commandments and salvation through grace.

Unbundled:

Whole swathes of society rejected the grand narratives of institutional religion (above) and in that we lost some very handy packaging and a supportive community. We are then compelled to re-bundle a home brew of self-help, pop wisdom, good law-abiding citizen and new age practices, perhaps involving psychologised meditation and candles.

Wrong-bundled 😅 (absorbed from culture):

In the Netflix series the character Mark Mossbacher is challenged by his daughter’s haughty woke friend, Paula, with “What do you stand for?” in this case it sounds more like an attack than a question.

Put on the spot, hapless Mark predictably implodes and has no answer. And realistically, most of us might have to answer “paying the rent/mortgage”3. The show’s cringeworthy charm is that you get to hate people who’s true answer is: “me” or “money”4.

The lesson here is coherence, or a lack of it.

Mark is so busy trying to support his family and their collective expensive5 predilections, that he makes unethical choices that invite chaos. Everything stems from the defaults of what his culture (and chosen career6) hypnotises7 into him.

How different are we from being like Mark? Is it a case of “there but for the grace of god go-eth I”?

When you “stand for” something you are Vertical

Am I an “Upstanding Citizen”?, Do “I stand up for what’s right”, Do I “stand my ground”, “Take a stand”.

Its not just English, in other posts you may have seen me mention zhōng dīng (central equilibrium8), well, Confucianism has zhōng zhèng which is something like central and upright.

And… I may also be crooked, bent or spineless.

Idioms illustrate our deeply embodied cognitive apparatus. The point here is that your worldview also shows up in your posture and your actions in the world. People will want to interact with a “standup-guy/gal” - an internalised, coherent worldview might just help and be an upstanding example for others to follow9.

Why bother? Because Simplicity.

I was a long time coming to this, if you are like me, an ectomorph, a head-case, you may have a lot of un-bundled opinions and practices.

I thought I was coherent, but actually complex and muddled. No zhōng dīng.

Now, my worldview updates regularly at the edges, but has core stability. Occasionally a shock results in a core upgrade - both are helpful.

“What you stand for” helps with Curation

“Curiosity killed the cat”.

In a world of abundance, your worldview will protect you from the firehose by what your reject.

Each day simpler. Each day know what is garbage.

That is a topic for another post.

Coherence

I started to draft a “Core-herence suggestion” - a process for getting you into a dialog with yourself on your core worldview(s).

But…I don’t want to be a fake life coach. No recipe for you, dear reader, so here are some cues:

a) Maybe just be curious about it and look for the cultural hypnosis that poor Mark Mossbacher was victim to. What did you take on by default?

b) Maybe look at your emotional and instinctive reactions in the world. What role does (irrational) fear play in my day? Seeing fears is more true than any list of virtues that you might conjure about yourself10.

c) Perhaps, when things go wrong, how do you explain it to yourself. Blame yourself? Blame others? Would a reasonable person agree?

Related: I think this is hilarious. Whenever our taichi teacher, stops the class and says “What I’m not seeing is x-y-z [[short demonstration]],

I see you doing p-q-r [[more painful demonstration]]”

All us students discussed later that we ALL thought the teacher was critiquing them! 😂.

Our teacher learned the hard way11 that westerners are proud and brittle and really have to work at “beginners mind”. Now she tries not to hold eye-contact with one person when making a corrections.

How do you handle constructive criticism?

d) Do you have a mindset to improve or embody any of the more noble ideas about yourself.

Caveat: A selfish worldview will be harmful for those around you. Sociopaths also have a coherent worldview12.