Catholic Anonymous

Generative AI today seems to elicit all sorts of fears, many of which are at odds with each other. On one end is the fear that we will stumble into a dystopia. The machines will become too smart for us and want to kill is to fulfill their misaligned mission to turn the universe into paperclips. Or the broligarchs will use the tech to funnel ever more obscene amounts of money into their bunkers.

But on the other end is this bizarre fear that everything might actually go right. We will enter this utopia where no one needs to work anymore. The robots will take care of everything, producing ever greater amounts of abundance, leaving us to twiddle our thumbs.

Why is that terrible, my fellow working stiff? Because work gives us meaning. It gives us purpose in our lives. If we can’t work, if we can’t contribute in some way to society, then we will wander rudderless, aimless, restless. Ask not who the troll is that sits in his mom’s basement playing video games, no job and no prospects. It is you… that is, if the AI takeover is complete.

Forgive me if I think this particular fear is overblown. It probably won’t happen. Leave it to humanity to fuck up a perfectly good utopia.

But for the sake of this post, let’s indulge the tech titans. Let’s say for the moment we get there, to that gleaming technocratic city on a hill, and all of us have no need to work. Why would they think that is so bad?

Again, they say that no work = life is meaningless. What does that imply? It implies that your life is only meaningful because you contribute something. If you form a good cog in the wheel of our capitalist society, you are worth keeping around. Otherwise, you don’t matter. Isn’t that what they’re really saying?

I know that must not be what they mean. Surely they wouldn’t say a person in a wheelchair or someone with Down syndrome has a less meaningful life than an Elon Musk or a Rockefeller.

But implicit in that belief – that work gives life meaning – is precisely that assumption. In that belief is the sickness of hustle culture. 10X that shit, right? Rise and grind. All work. No grace.

In contrast to that view, that assumption about the value of the individual, the Catholic faith says that we are valuable not because of what we do but because of what we are. We are not machines. We are not byproducts of the universe factory. We are infinite souls. And we’ll never plunge the depths of everything we are because we are made in the image of God.

So what would make life meaningful if we never worked again? Maybe prayer. Diving deep into union with the God of the universe. Relationship. Diving deep into union with the universe next door or the one living in my house, maybe lying in my bed with me.

And creating. Creating beautiful things not because we have to make a living or because we are trying to impress anyone, not for status or glory, but because our stories, music, poems, art, and everything else come out of the spring of our own spirits. Spirits we were stifling trying to fit into a system that demanded we be this or that other thing because that was what society needed.

All to say, if we’re lucky enough to get our utopia, maybe some will lose meaning in their lives. Not me. I think I’ll finally find it.