I buy your central thesis: effort gives meaning. The connection you draw between Kaczynski’s “power process,” Frankl, and Jiang works, and the idea that meaning lives in pushing the rock rather than reaching the top connects with a very old intuition. But I think there are other sources of meaning in human life that will survive AI, and your post leaves them a bit outside the frame.
Your frame reduces meaning almost entirely to struggle and productive effort. And I think human history offers other paths that don’t fit there.
1. The contemplative life. The Carthusian monks, the Poor Clares, the desert hermits. Their life isn’t a fight for survival in the Kaczynskian sense, and yet they report fullness. Meaning there comes from the relationship with the transcendent, not from instrumental effort.
2. The Greek philosophers. Aristotle placed theoria, contemplation, above the active life. For Epicurus, meaning was in friendship and ataraxia. The Stoics looked for inner virtue, not an external mountain.
3. Family. Raising a child takes effort, sure, but the meaning doesn’t really come from “struggling.” It comes from the bond, from loving and being loved. You sense this yourself at the end when you talk about “loving someone, being loved” as what can’t be automated.
4. Art and beauty received. Looking at the sea, listening to Bach. There’s no rock to push there.
5. And then there’s politics, which for me is the piece I miss the most. Aristotle, the same one who puts contemplation at the top, also defines man as zoon politikon, a political animal. Organizing ourselves together to decide how to live is constitutive of being human. Even if AI solves material survival, we’re still going to need to deliberate. About justice, about how to distribute what gets produced, about what kind of society we want. That doesn’t go away, it becomes more urgent. I think there’s a huge source of meaning right there, precisely when survival no longer gives it to us.
Frankl himself, who you cite, talked about three paths to meaning. The creative one (what we give to the world, your axis), the experiential one (love, beauty), and the attitudinal one (how we face unavoidable suffering). Your post stays almost entirely with the first, and I think widening it would do it good.
You acknowledge your political passivity as complicity, and I find it really honest of you to say it. I’d just add that, if the problems you describe are structural, the way out is maybe less about finding individual mountains to push, and more about the collective. The closing image of Sisyphus pushing his rock alone is beautiful, but also a bit lonely.
I think there are less lonely, more hopeful ways out.
Thanks a lot for sharing your thoughts here Ramón. I was away the weekend and couldn't reply back.
I think I might not have put my actual thesis clearly enough, and that's on me. I'm at heart an absurdist, I don't think life has any meaning at all. I accept that and try to live it passionately anyway, doing the things I describe at the end of the piece. So I don't really want to say "effort is the path to meaning". I do think effort, the mountain, gives us something. Probably not what Kaczynski himself would consider enough, which is why at the end I call my own mountain artificial. But it's not the central point I was after.
The center of my thesis is the parallel I draw to a potential future like Brave New World or WALL-E. The comfort technology gives us is making us more anxious, more depressed and more lonely. And AI is the biggest accelerator of technology humanity has ever seen. It will keep flattening more and more mountains, leading us to a future of complete comfort and Universal Basic Income. If it were for me, I'd push a big red button and roll us 100 years back on tech. I really do see us heading in the direction laid out last year in the AI 2027 article (https://ai-2027.com/).
I know there are many other readings of meaning across philosophy and history. In this article I went straight for the ones that backed my point. That said, on family and community I'm 100% with you, they're very much needed for a happy life. Loved your point on art and beauty too. The Pixar movie Soul puts it beautifully too, close to how I see life and to what I was trying to land with the list of things I enjoy at the end of the piece.
Good catch on Frankl's three paths. I oversimplified there. Gonna tweak it soon.
As for the political angle, completely agree, I do believe the way out is collective. I just don't know how yet, and I'd rather leave it out than have a weak answer (which is what I had in previous drafts).
I buy your central thesis: effort gives meaning. The connection you draw between Kaczynski’s “power process,” Frankl, and Jiang works, and the idea that meaning lives in pushing the rock rather than reaching the top connects with a very old intuition. But I think there are other sources of meaning in human life that will survive AI, and your post leaves them a bit outside the frame.
Your frame reduces meaning almost entirely to struggle and productive effort. And I think human history offers other paths that don’t fit there.
1. The contemplative life. The Carthusian monks, the Poor Clares, the desert hermits. Their life isn’t a fight for survival in the Kaczynskian sense, and yet they report fullness. Meaning there comes from the relationship with the transcendent, not from instrumental effort.
2. The Greek philosophers. Aristotle placed theoria, contemplation, above the active life. For Epicurus, meaning was in friendship and ataraxia. The Stoics looked for inner virtue, not an external mountain.
3. Family. Raising a child takes effort, sure, but the meaning doesn’t really come from “struggling.” It comes from the bond, from loving and being loved. You sense this yourself at the end when you talk about “loving someone, being loved” as what can’t be automated.
4. Art and beauty received. Looking at the sea, listening to Bach. There’s no rock to push there.
5. And then there’s politics, which for me is the piece I miss the most. Aristotle, the same one who puts contemplation at the top, also defines man as zoon politikon, a political animal. Organizing ourselves together to decide how to live is constitutive of being human. Even if AI solves material survival, we’re still going to need to deliberate. About justice, about how to distribute what gets produced, about what kind of society we want. That doesn’t go away, it becomes more urgent. I think there’s a huge source of meaning right there, precisely when survival no longer gives it to us.
Frankl himself, who you cite, talked about three paths to meaning. The creative one (what we give to the world, your axis), the experiential one (love, beauty), and the attitudinal one (how we face unavoidable suffering). Your post stays almost entirely with the first, and I think widening it would do it good.
You acknowledge your political passivity as complicity, and I find it really honest of you to say it. I’d just add that, if the problems you describe are structural, the way out is maybe less about finding individual mountains to push, and more about the collective. The closing image of Sisyphus pushing his rock alone is beautiful, but also a bit lonely.
I think there are less lonely, more hopeful ways out.
Thanks a lot for sharing your thoughts here Ramón. I was away the weekend and couldn't reply back.
I think I might not have put my actual thesis clearly enough, and that's on me. I'm at heart an absurdist, I don't think life has any meaning at all. I accept that and try to live it passionately anyway, doing the things I describe at the end of the piece. So I don't really want to say "effort is the path to meaning". I do think effort, the mountain, gives us something. Probably not what Kaczynski himself would consider enough, which is why at the end I call my own mountain artificial. But it's not the central point I was after.
The center of my thesis is the parallel I draw to a potential future like Brave New World or WALL-E. The comfort technology gives us is making us more anxious, more depressed and more lonely. And AI is the biggest accelerator of technology humanity has ever seen. It will keep flattening more and more mountains, leading us to a future of complete comfort and Universal Basic Income. If it were for me, I'd push a big red button and roll us 100 years back on tech. I really do see us heading in the direction laid out last year in the AI 2027 article (https://ai-2027.com/).
I know there are many other readings of meaning across philosophy and history. In this article I went straight for the ones that backed my point. That said, on family and community I'm 100% with you, they're very much needed for a happy life. Loved your point on art and beauty too. The Pixar movie Soul puts it beautifully too, close to how I see life and to what I was trying to land with the list of things I enjoy at the end of the piece.
Good catch on Frankl's three paths. I oversimplified there. Gonna tweak it soon.
As for the political angle, completely agree, I do believe the way out is collective. I just don't know how yet, and I'd rather leave it out than have a weak answer (which is what I had in previous drafts).
Thanks again for reading this!