Pessimists Are Right 99% of the Time and 100% Wrong

This week, Elon Musk said that every child in the United States will get a share of SpaceX. Anthropic is going public at a valuation of almost 2 trillion dollars, after losing more than 80 billion in six months (almost all of it on paper) on revenue of 16.3 billion. And it's going to set aside 5% of its shares for the public good, while people are already starting to talk about basic income.

In March I wrote the first article of this kind, with the central idea of the "paranoid optimist." I already mentioned several of the things happening today: I talked about universal basic income and the disappearance of jobs, first everything that can be done on a computer, and then all jobs in general. Physical ones too, because the bottleneck in robotics has never been robotics itself, it's that before, every action was deterministic, and now there's an LLM behind it, one that's smarter than a human being at many things, that has a physical body and that isn't in a chat.

The man who has promised to give away those shares is building what would be the largest factory in the world, Terafab, about 3 times the size of New York's Central Park, to make the chips for his data centers in space and for his humanoid robots, and to accelerate progress to the extreme.

We're living in a Star Trek movie, and today, writing this from the business district of Madrid, I realize the world is carrying on as if nothing were happening: it's not tangible yet, it hasn't yet had a significant impact on the rhythm of people's lives.

But it will. Goodbye to the white collar job, very soon.

Basically, the situation we have right now with AI is very overwhelming.

The people building AI are already putting money aside for when there's no work.

But before you get completely scared, or excited, let me give you a few details, because this week has given us plenty.

Fear 1: work

I already wrote about this in March, in The End of Work as You Know It, and I'm not going to repeat myself: the data is there. The only thing that's changed is that back then I was telling you what could happen, and today the companies causing it are already setting money aside for when it happens.

Fear 2: basic income

Musk's thing sounds lovely until you read the fine print.

• Giving away shares that have appreciated saves him the tax he'd pay if he sold them: up to about 2.5 billion dollars, according to calculations reported by Al Jazeera.
• Families can't turn them down and, in general, can't sell them for five years either. That's 72 million small shareholders with an interest in SpaceX doing well.
• They go into the so-called "Trump accounts," and the announcement comes two weeks before the midterm elections in the United States.
• In total it's roughly 1.5% of the SpaceX shares he holds.

A share isn't a basic income. It's a gift, one time.

It suits him very well. But one thing doesn't rule out the other: the fact that the richest man in the world is starting to hand out his company to children says a lot about what he thinks is going to happen to work.

The Anthropic thing also has to be told properly. It isn't setting aside cash or the money it raises on the stock market: it's committing 5% of its shares to a fund for the public good, and up to 2% more each time its valuation rises by 50%. At what it's said to be worth when it goes public, that 5% would be between 50 and 100 billion dollars. The fund will be able to donate to organizations or pay specific groups directly, and one of the problems it names is what AI is going to do to work.

The words "basic income" don't appear in the announcement, but that's how everyone has read it, and it's no coincidence. In June, Dario Amodei, its CEO, had already proposed paying a basic income with taxes on AI companies if this ends up destroying jobs on a large scale. His words: "rapid economic growth should create the tax base for shared prosperity."

Fear 3: extinction

And then there's the big one. In the first article of the manifesto I told you about the Anthropic researcher who resigned saying that the labs are "playing with our lives," and about his coworker, who puts the probability of human extinction at more than 10%. And this isn't a handful of cranks: in 2023, Geoffrey Hinton, Yoshua Bengio, Sam Altman (OpenAI) and Demis Hassabis (Google DeepMind) signed a one-sentence statement putting the risk of extinction from AI on the same level as pandemics and nuclear war.

The same people building it are putting money aside for when there's no work and, at the same time, signing that it could finish us off.

And even so, there's another side.

The other side: the genie

Meanwhile, you have a genie in your pocket for twenty euros a month.

I talked about it a few weeks ago in The Genie in the Lamp: a Claude account is the closest thing there is to asking for infinite wishes. It writes for you, codes for you, teaches you what you don't know and explains what you don't understand as many times as it takes. Six years ago, what I'm building with it would have cost me about three million euros.

And what I still find incredible is that, with a god in our hands, the lives of 99% of people haven't changed at all.

But notice one thing: of everything I've told you so far, it's the only thing that depends on you. Work, basic income and extinction happen to you. The genie is something you use.

So what is all this? A fear or an opportunity?

The paranoid optimist

Pessimists have been right 99% of the time and wrong 100%.

In March I dispatched this idea in two paragraphs and a catchphrase, and I sold it short. So today I'm telling the whole thing.

I got the idea from Morgan Housel, the author of The Psychology of Money, and one of my favorite authors. The paranoid optimist is the one who expects things to hurt in the short term, because right now there's a huge amount of uncertainty, but who trusts that in the long term everything will work the way it always has. Housel has a 2017 article explaining why almost nobody is one: pessimism sounds smarter, because blows are remembered much better than slow improvements. And he sums it up like this: "long-term improvement has to be interrupted by short-term adversity."

Look at what's happened every time someone with good arguments said this was the end:

• 1798. Thomas Malthus warned that population was growing faster than food and that famines would come. They came. And today there are more than 8 billion of us, with far less hunger than back then.
• 1811. The Luddites were smashing looms in England because machines were taking their jobs. They were right: their trade disappeared. And their grandchildren lived better than they did.
• 1930. Keynes talked about "technological unemployment." In the same essay he predicted that, around 2030, humanity's great problem would be what to do with so much free time.
• 1964. A group of intellectuals, among them Linus Pauling (two Nobel Prizes) and Gunnar Myrdal (who would win his years later), sent a memo to President Lyndon Johnson: automation was going to need less and less human labor, and they asked for a guaranteed income. Less than two years later, unemployment in the United States was below 4%.
• 1968. Paul Ehrlich wrote in The Population Bomb that hundreds of millions of people would starve to death. In 1980 he bet the economist Julian Simon that five metals would be more expensive in ten years. In 1990 all five had gone down, and Ehrlich mailed him a check for $576.07.

A basic income because of machines was already being demanded sixty years ago, with Nobel laureates signing.

They were all right about something. Hunger came, machines took over the looms and the crises really hurt. But none of them got the ending right.

Pessimists have been right 99% of the time. And wrong 100%. If the optimists are right just 1% of the time, game over.

I know what you're thinking: this time is different. And maybe it is. I told you myself a few weeks ago, in Boredom Overdose, not to take it for granted that new jobs will be created, and I stand by that. But notice what I didn't say: I didn't say work comes back. I said that every time it's been measured, life has improved. Maybe this time there won't be work for everyone and even so we'll live better than ever. My optimism isn't about employment.

And careful with the second half of the phrase, the one almost everyone skips. Optimistic about the long term, paranoid about the short term. The first lets you sleep soundly. The second means that when the blow comes, it finds you with food in the pantry, some money saved and knowing who you are without your job. I already wrote all that out in How to Survive the Next 2 Years of AI, so I won't repeat myself.

Better than ever, emptier than ever

We've never lived so long.

In 1900, a person lived 32 years on average. In 2023, 73. In 1800, out of every 100 children, about 43 died before turning five; today it's fewer than 4. And those are just two data points: in March I gave you a few more.

Everything we've achieved has given us possibilities nobody ever had, and has taken away the need to make an effort to get almost anything. Everything keeps getting easier. And that has left us more and more distracted: I told you in Boredom Overdose, we can't even last five minutes alone with our own heads. And distraction has brought the crisis of meaning, which is what's behind a mental health crisis that keeps growing.

Careful, this chain is my reading: no study proves the whole thing. But both ends can be measured.

The mental health end: according to the WHO, more than 1 billion people in the world live with a mental disorder, and it's now the second leading cause of long-term disability.

The meaning end: in a 2023 Harvard study, 58% of young Americans between 18 and 25 said that in the previous month they had felt little or no purpose in their lives. And those who didn't feel it had more than double the anxiety or depression of those who did (54% versus 25%). It's a correlation, it doesn't prove one thing causes the other, but it's hard to look at it and see nothing.

We have more years of life than ever and we don't really know what to do with them.

We've never known less what for.

What does it matter?

There's a catch in everything I've just told you, and I'll tell you before you tell me: the optimists have always been right because we're still here to talk about it. If the extinction pessimist is right one day, there won't be anyone left to admit it. In other words, the only scenario where the pessimist wins is one neither of them is going to see.

So what does it matter?

What does it matter if we run out of work? What does it matter if we end up with a basic income? What does it matter if we have an extinction? What does it matter if you have a genie in a lamp? If we don't enjoy what we have today, which is all we have.

Yes, I've just spent half an article convincing you of something that, deep down, doesn't matter. Whether it all goes well or it all goes badly, there's one thing that doesn't change: the past no longer exists and the future doesn't exist yet. The only thing you have is the present. It's the only thing you've ever had.

I know it's one of the most commonly heard pieces of advice, but that's exactly why these are the most important, and the hardest to pass on; they go in one ear and out the other. But in 2010 two Harvard psychologists, Matthew Killingsworth and Daniel Gilbert, measured it. They asked thousands of people, through their phones and at random moments of the day, what they were doing, what they were thinking about and how they felt. 46.9% of the time they were thinking about something other than what they were doing. And in those moments they were less happy, even while doing what they liked least. They called the study A Wandering Mind Is an Unhappy Mind.

Almost half the time you're awake, you're somewhere else.

That's why I prepare for what might come: so I can forget about it. The paranoid part isn't there to make you live in fear, but so you can let go of the future and be here.

So make plans, play games, use what you have. Whatever you do, do it at 100%.

Giving 100% without a wound

Living in the present isn't lying on the couch.

And it doesn't mean you stop enjoying yourself either. Giving 100% and living very intensely has nothing to do with whether you live in the present or not: you can do both at once.

The problem is that, because of the culture of effort, we take it for granted that effort comes from a wound. That to pour yourself into something it has to hurt, you have to have something to prove or something to run from, and that this wound is what pushes you. Pushing yourself 100% for something can leave you very overwhelmed, yes. But it can also mean you're giving it everything, and enjoying it.

I'm not making this up either. Robert Vallerand, a psychologist at the University of Quebec in Montreal, has been studying two types of passion since 2003. Harmonious: you do something because you like it, and it fits into your life. And obsessive: you do it because you can't stop, because what you're worth or who you are depends on it. In 2015, a meta-analysis that pulled together 94 studies found that harmonious passion goes hand in hand with positive emotions, more flow and better performance. Obsessive passion brings good and bad things at once, among them rumination and negative emotions. They're correlations, mind you, but they all point to the same place.

Both can be equally intense. What changes is where they come from.

And the beauty of it is that the more passionate you are, the more present you are. When you're passionate about something you're not thinking about anything else: you're there. In the last article of the manifesto I said that if you play, play to win, that's the fun of it, and that what matters is the person you're becoming. Well, that doesn't only apply to games. It applies to the people you love, to the ones you cross paths with every day, to everything.

You don't only give it everything in games. You give it everything in everything.

And for that you need to know what you're holding on to. The things that matter to you, your values, have to be strong, because otherwise you're like a puppet moved by the wind.

The only thing you have

I think everything is going to turn out fine.

I don't have a data point for this. It's a bet, and it's the reason we're building what we're building.

We have a higher quality of life than ever and we know more about the universe than ever. I think that's going to take us to a level of consciousness as a group we've never had: our consciousness is going to expand, and we're going to better understand the universe and why we're here. But it's only going to happen as a result of the short-term suffering, the kind that's coming now. And it's also going to be thanks to artificial intelligence. It's all connected.

Although, as I've already told you, whether it goes well or badly, the only thing you have is today. And to really live today, with strong values and not like a puppet, you have to know who you are.

That's why I'm building dIAry: so that more people can know themselves and live passionately.

At the beginning I told you the situation we have with AI is very overwhelming. And it is. But what's going to happen, nobody knows.

What you're doing right now, you do.

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Written in Spanish by Álvaro Molina and first published on Substack (original). English translation with AI. Quotations from English-language sources are translated back from the Spanish unless marked otherwise, so their wording may differ from the original.