As AI accelerates, we find ourselves standing at a fork in history. Down one path lies the future envisioned by technocrats like Elon Musk—hyper-productivity, colonization, and dominance over both nature and human labor. Down the other lies a quieter but richer future: one where technology serves human well-being, creativity, and community. I believe we must take the second path.
Elon Musk has become a symbol of the first. His rhetoric glorifies extreme work, technological conquest, and planetary escape. His companies embody relentless output—cars, rockets, satellites, chips—produced faster, cheaper, and with fewer people in the loop. AI, in this model, is not about freeing us from drudgery; it’s about sharpening the tools of capital and competition.
But let’s ask a more important question: What is all this productivity for?
If AI merely replaces human workers, concentrates wealth, and leaves people without purpose, it is not progress—it is collapse wearing a shiny suit. If human flourishing doesn’t rise along with GDP, then we’ve automated ourselves into a spiritual desert.
There is another way.
Imagine a future where AI does the heavy lifting—leaving people free to pursue the things machines cannot do: play competitive sport, perform on stage, nurture one another, explore, contemplate, and create. In this world, we don’t measure success in hours worked or output generated, but in well-being, creativity, and shared meaning.
What if we paid people to engage in these deeply human activities? What if we recognized sport and the performing arts not as indulgences, but as vital contributions in a post-labor society? Wealth created by machines could be taxed and redistributed—not to reward passivity, but to empower participation in a new, more alive kind of work.
This isn't utopia. It’s a sane and sustainable response to technological abundance.
Yes, such a future would require international coordination, careful policy, and a cultural shift away from glorifying productivity for its own sake. It would mean choosing connection over control, expression over extraction, and life over logistics.
Musk’s vision may get us to Mars. But unless we reclaim our own humanity, we’ll bring the same dysfunction with us.
The age of AI doesn’t need another empire. It needs a renaissance.
Let’s build that instead.