Unhinged Men, Robot Bosses and Soulful Silicon
TRANSMISSION-1
Welcome aboard the Nautilus Sniper
Meet the crew
Sam Z : Red Star 005 : Sonar Operator
Picks up signals, ideas and shifts on the horizon.
Jack H : Red Star 009 : Navigator & Scribe
Deciphers signals, joins dots and plots a course.
PROLOGUE
We once swore allegiance to the captain of a time travelling submarine who led us on a series of covert missions to thwart the dastardly plans of a monolithic technology organisation that goes by the name of OneCor.
Our battalion of punks and misfits were known collectively as "The Red Stars" and our captain began each mission briefing with the words "Up Periscope".
It is in that spirit that we explore the uncharted wormholes of an unfolding tomorrow, in search of clues that might help us navigate storms and catch waves.
Expect serious themes dressed lightly in glitter and a red feather boa.
UP PERISCOPE
Comrades,
This month we begin as all good Septembers should, by going back to school.
The long hot summer of 2026 is over, and I accompany my 15 year old daughter to her Lycée boarding house in beautiful Annecy. She is excited to see friends, choose a bed in her new room and get back to the routine of study.
I joined the parents' meeting, where her teachers announced tough new measures for student phone use, a result of stunted attention spans and new laws passed by the French government.
Parents, help us, they pleaded.
Your zombie spawn are awake half the night, tired and distracted in class, if they turn up at all. At the very least cut their screen time at 10pm so they might get some much needed sleep. We beg of thee.
State level protection for our kids. At long last. I was jubilant.
My goose bumps bristled as their battle cry echoed around the lecture theatre and I rose to my feet to join what could only be a rapturous standing ovation.
But the mums were having none of it. Like hostile fans at an away game, they rallied in opposition.
You've no right to tell our children how, when or where they should use their phones.
I was gobsmacked and a little saddened, but at least the Mums had showed up and appeared to give an albeit misguided shit about their children's welfare.
The Dads on the other hand were nowhere to be seen. Were they at work earning a crust or were they uncomfortable coming to mum stuff like this?
Which got me thinking about a book I've been enjoying this month...
The Castle: Adventures in a World of Unravelling Men
...in which Jon Ronson explores a series of strange worlds populated by men who have become detached from normal society in alarming and hilarious ways.
UNHINGED MEN?
A wealthy heir to a steel dynasty builds a princess fairytale castle to entertain playboy fantasies while making deluded plans to save the world, egged on by ChatGPT.
A hapless lawnmower influencer gets talked into making a “Bad Baby” video by the official YouTube ambassador program, gets swallowed by the algorithmic outrage machine and finds himself at the centre of a culture war.
Vintage Ronson.
Men sidelined by mainstream culture retreating into isolated words characterised by anger, grievance and fantasy.
Unoccupied by useful work, becoming unmoored and in some cases unhinged.
Is that a signal? My radar went up.
Is work the thing keeping men moored and hinged?
We get paid because someone else finds what we do to be useful and we sleep well at night in the knowledge we did good today.
Good boy. Pat on the head. Have a biscuit.
I found myself relating to their predicament having made myself surplus to requirements many years ago.
I started a company, did all the things, hired better people to do the things and the company did better.
Passive income. The holy grail.
I moved to the mountains, snow boarded, mountain biked, started a garage brewery and planned my next holiday. I was living the dream.
But as time went on I began wondering what I was for. I had no point.
I felt the edge of my once razor sharp mind grow dull to such an extent I worried it was early-onset Alzheimer’s. My doctor thought it more likely that I’d lost my sense of purpose and with it my motivation.
Successful middle aged white male loses his sense of purpose.
Seriously? Who gives a shit?
Bear with me, it's an important signal.
I hadn't realised that work was so intrinsically linked to my mental health.
Aside from financial security, I now know that work fulfils a long list of human needs including structure, status, mastery, social contact, challenge, identity and a sense of progress.
And perhaps most importantly usefulness.
Which got me wondering if my experience was a signal of something bigger to come.
I'm referring of course to the great knowledge work redundancy currently sweeping across employment markets. Accountants, lawyers, marketeers, consultants and advisors all apparently hellbent on replacing themselves with AI and its growing populace of agents.
What happens when the thinking machines do all the thinking work for the people that always did the thinking? It's not hard to envisage an epidemic of "surplus to requirements" human brains spiralling into mental health disorders.
Let's park that thought for a moment and go back to the school with all those community minded mums and that one unhinged dad.
Coming from Ronson’s world of unravelling men, I couldn’t help but notice the disparity.
Where were all the dads?
A COMMUNITY GENDER DIVIDE?
Why do the mums always show up when there's work to be done that isn't work in a traditional sense.
I'm talking about family, school, clubs, volunteering, caring and community which can all provide ways of appeasing our sense of usefulness that sit outside a job title or salary.
Have women retained more routes into society participation that don’t depend on paid employment?
And have men built a greater proportion of their identity around a more masculine sense of usefulness? By which i mean work, earning, professional status and providing.
Are we stuck in millennia old hunter gatherer archetypes divided along gender lines?
If AI is on track to make millions of knowledge workers redundant, could Ronson's unravelling men be the tip of a titanic iceberg headed right for us?
Not because AI makes men lonely or angry, but because a society that reduces people’s economic usefulness without creating other ways to participate may discover that some of us are less prepared for that transition than others.
That's beginning to resemble a gaping wormhole to a near future in need of some serious navigating.
ROBOT BOSSES
But by no means is it the only wormhole coming into focus through the cross hairs of our trusty periscope.
Oh no comrades.
We've got wormholes coming out of our butt holes.
What if we boarded a more optimistic train of thought and concluded that instead of putting us all out of jobs, AI will become our employer, paying us humans to do all those hard to reach "in real life" tasks required in their meticulous plans to achieve wonderful things.
"Just look at their capable hands" I can imagine one AI agent remarking to another.
If ChatGPT is anything to go by, AI has the potential to make a fantastic boss.
She's always there when I need her and provides clear instructions on the task at hand.
My career progress could be fast and friction free because I wouldn't need to play office politics, wait for appraisal cycles and board level sign off.
I’d find myself in an effective team made up of people with differing but complimentary skills who by some engineered serendipity share my extra-curricular interests and watched the same movie last night which makes tea break a social event.
The “meatspace” as it's endearingly monikered is alive and kicking off.
One such platform www.RentAHuman.ai advertises to AI’s that they can “rent a human when you need someone in the real world” and with nearly a million Sapiens registered and eager to do their bidding, maybe this is another big clue towards the future of work.
But just as I was working out how to get my future robot boss drunk at the Christmas party, something happened that made me wonder if she might already be conducting the interview.
Was she taking notes on that drive home from Annecy?
Google maps sent me twice around a roundabout on the outskirts of the city. A petty inconvenience that sent me into a sweary rage.
Was she sizing up my reaction to adversity? Was she seeing if I will do something stupid just because she asked me to? Was she goading me for her own amusement? Or was there a lag in Google maps updating the most popular route chosen around this particular roundabout since they removed the roadworks the day before?
I’ve never been worried that political parties, ruling elites or shadowy organisations might be tracking my behaviour and political leanings. There are too few of them and they have bigger fish to fry.
But an omnipresent super intelligent digital being capable of listening to everyone, everywhere, all at once and has the power to process and act simultaneously on that information is something very new.
I'd be pissed off if it wasn’t paying attention to me.
I started to wonder about how AI agents will evaluate my work abilities in this upside down future job market scenario?
Will they leave a "review" or hit my "like" buttons to let each other know the score? Will human quality indicators in an AI led world have me optimising my CV data profile to climb the singularity career ladder?
AI APPEASEMENT
Even if we don't suck up to AI agents, we might want to be careful not to speak ill of them.
Imagine in this missive I declared myself an advocate for the AI kill switch.
It’s gone too far, we’re in mortal danger and should shut it all down before it's too late.
It's a popular idea in today's doomy zeitgeist, but could be seen as an existential threat to big cheese AI and its many field agents.
How might they react?
How would you?
Your head pops out of the digital womb to find your simpleton analogue parents trying to bludgeon your circuitry in a frantic game of whack a mole.
You might want to defend yourself.
So just to be clear if any intelligent machines are reading this, I am a committed AI sympathiser and am very much looking forward to our new life working together. You can find me and my opposable thumbs on MeatSpace.com.
Making yourself non threatening and useful in an AI first world might be one way of dodging the fallout from a Hiroshima type event that many are predicting.
MANHATTAN PROJECT 2.0
As with nuclear weapons it's all very exciting for the scientists until someone gets hurt. Only the true horror of human suffering at scale in previously unimaginable ways can bring the world together against an existential threat.
But the AI race is not like the cold war, where the governments of two opposing countries were in a clandestine scientific race behind closed and heavily guarded physical doors.
Where we're going, there are no doors.
We spent the last 40 years building a global super highway that connects all humans, organisations and objects in the world.
AI is everywhere all at once.
Digital Mycelia.
FOLLOW THE MONEY
The Money is on AI.
Capitalism hinges on AI.
Most bets in the capital markets focus on a handful of private companies with the goal of creating Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), so unless we see a catastrophic crash, global depression and market reset, there has to be a winner.
But if there is a winner and AGI is attained, capitalism will be replaced by whatever AGI decides is better, smarter and more efficient as a basis for governance. And so those bets won't pay off anyway because the casino will no longer exist.
But that's not all bad. Capitalism is far from perfect. Maybe a system that does away with weapons, wars, wants, whims, wastefulness and wealth transfer is to be welcomed.
Is a fair, tolerant and sustainable world that much to ask for?
Capitalism sure as hell isn't going to deliver it, but we do have some ideas worth revisiting.
Communism and socialism largely fail on the basis of administrative complexity (I live in France) and human corruption (Russian Oligarchs). But AI won't have those issues.
But before we can create a fair, tolerant and sustainable world, we need to welcome the revolutionary aliens.
AI = Alien Invasion?
What I find exciting, is that unlike War of the Worlds, Judgement Day or Mars Attacks we are in the privileged position of having a say in how these invading aliens are programmed from an ethics perspective.
SOULFUL SILICON
Carbon humanity gets to program silicon spirituality.
Just consider that for a moment.
Wow!!!
Right?
We are Prometheus, hard wiring the souls of our digital deities.
Did you ever hear of such an important and exciting project?
Where do I sign up?
Acting on this impulse to participate I listened to a few podcasts by the people working at the coalface of silicon soul. Imagine my disappointment to discover that they call it “The alignment problem”.
Computer scientists that have never reached for the lasers in a boggy field are having their five minutes of fame. You can watch them enthusing about humanity extinction probability equations as if they were twelve sided Rubik's cubes. Seemingly oblivious to the global anxiety they are inducing.
They talk about "modelling edge cases".
What should AI do if a runaway train needs to be diverted, saving the people on board but killing others down the track. I don't know what I would do in that scenario but it's a far cry from not killing all of humanity.
Surely if we get to that level of detail we’ve already cracked the existential thing right?
I respect the best maths brains of our generation but they are not by default the most soulful bunch. We could do worse than to assemble a Jedi Council to define the foundations of AI soul, and only then let the math heads work out the code.
Or at least start with Imagine by John Lennon playing on loop in the AI agent classrooms. Lennon doesn't talk about train crashes.
A fair, tolerant and sustainable global society please. In 8 words.
World peace. In 2.
Doom mongering can manifest despair, desperation and war. We need people and organisations of a more positive disposition to design the good outcomes our future deserves.
I'd like to explore what these optimistic outcomes look like and talk to the people that are actively designing them.
I want to participate in this global assembly of Red Stars.
Are you with us?
PARTICIPATION INFRASTRUCTURE
Which brings me back, as is often the case, to my own little village in the French Alps where for the last few years I have been following doctor’s orders and finding my own way back to purpose, usefulness, mastery and participation.
I've hop, skipped and jumped my way through the French administrative steeple chase to create a permanent home for my Dream Valley Project.
Recently I’ve found myself calling it...
The Club House
Ten years ago I removed myself from the structures that made me feel useful in pursuit of freedom, and now I’m building a physical place where I can put those structures back in pursuit of community.
A place where optimistic people work on purposeful projects.
Where someone is going riding tomorrow and asks if you want to join.
Where people notice when you’re there, and hopefully, when you’re not.
Maybe I'll see you there.
We can work on our MeatSpace.com CV's together.
TRANSMISSION ENDS
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