This post was rejected for the following reason(s):
No LLM generated, heavily assisted/co-written, or otherwise reliant work. LessWrong has recently been inundated with new users submitting work where much of the content is the output of LLM(s). This work by-and-large does not meet our standards, and is rejected. This includes dialogs with LLMs that claim to demonstrate various properties about them, posts introducing some new concept and terminology that explains how LLMs work, often centered around recursiveness, emergence, sentience, consciousness, etc. (these generally don't turn out to be as novel or interesting as they may seem).
It’s a Tuesday in 2078, somewhere in the mountains of what used to be Colorado.
You wake up whenever you feel like it. The cabin already knows your circadian rhythm better than you do; light brightens in slow amber waves until you’re ready. Coffee beans roasted two nights ago in Oaxaca, ground eight minutes ago, wait brewed on the counter at 140 °F, still gently steaming. There’s no job to rush to, no commute, no Slack.
Your granddaughter, visiting from the city, laughs at something on her lens and tells you the new symphony that dropped at midnight was composed by “no one”, just the Orchestra, she says, the big one that lives in the mesh.
She’s twenty-two, speaks three languages fluently, has never written a résumé, and occasionally disappears for weeks to help seed kelp forests off vanished atolls. She seems happy. Maybe happier than anyone you knew at her age.
Outside, the forest is quieter than you remember from childhood. The wolves are back, re-wilded by something that isn’t Fish & Wildlife anymore. Once in a while you hear a drone the size of a dragonfly pass overhead: checking air quality, or counting elk, or whatever it does. It never bothers you.
You could ask it for anything. You mostly don’t.
You’re eighty-one, healthy, and for the first time in human history, completely, structurally irrelevant.
And it feels... fine.
I’ve come to suspect many already half-believe some version of this future is coming. The part we rarely say out loud:
“If we don’t blow ourselves up first, AI is going to end up running most of civilization within a couple of generations. My kids or grandkids might grow up in a world where humans are not really in charge anymore.”
The full manifesto (8500 words) is my attempt to look that possibility in the face without panic or wishful thinking, and to ask what a dignified human life can still be once we are no longer the main protagonists.
Three things I think shrink to their proper size:
As a species: whether we get a Park Ranger, a Zookeeper, or something far worse.
As societies: we still have one or two decades to influence which future we hand the keys to.
As individuals: our real leverage is mostly on the texture of our own lives. The sane response turns out to be... surprisingly liberating.
If any of that resonates (or infuriates), I’d love for you to read the whole thing and tell me where it lands.
