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The Park Ranger Scenario — LessWrong

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The Park Ranger Scenario

by legacybranch

2nd Dec 2025

2 min read

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This post was rejected for the following reason(s):

This is an automated rejection. No LLM generated, heavily assisted/co-written, or otherwise reliant work. An LLM-detection service flagged your post as >50% likely to be written by an LLM. We've been having a wave of LLM written or co-written work that doesn't meet our quality standards. LessWrong has fairly specific standards, and your first LessWrong post is sort of like the application to a college. It should be optimized for demonstrating that you can think clearly without AI assistance.

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FuturismHuman ValuesLongtermismPhilosophyAI

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"The Park Ranger Scenario" a future in which two multi-generational familiesin picnic in the shadow of AI compute monoliths, which have matrix text lightly superimposed for effect. Everyone seems content; there is a holographic topographical wildness or park display in their center where you might normally see a campfire

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—waits on the counter at precisely 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 (8,500 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.

Full piece here: https://legacybranch.substack.com/p/eat-drink-and-be-merry-for-tomorrow