Salim on what people do when work is optional

So Salim, uh, let's take the conversation one step further, which is what happens when you don't have to work? What happens when all of your basic needs — food, water, energy, healthcare, education, liberty — all of that is enabled for you, right? You and I have discussed this before, going back to the Medici family and the Renaissance and so forth, where you basically have the life — and I've written on Substack about this — where you have the life of a gazillionaire, you don't need to work. What do you do?

Right. Um, I think that's an important realization, because when we get to the point where everything is cooked, that's also the point at which we have massive abundance, where all of your needs are taken care of for you. And now the question is, what do you want to do? You know, most people in the world are working because they have to put food on the table. They have to get insurance for their family. It's not what they dreamed of doing when they were a kid, right? So, it unleashes massive possibility at that point.

Salim, I think there's two categories here. Category one is the material needs, right? When you get to that level and you — it'll take a transition to stop thinking about meeting daily needs, right? Uh, like half the country in the US can't put $500 together in an emergency. Okay, that itself is an emergency. Um, and you've got such a monster structural problem around that that has to be addressed.

Now, at some point pretty quickly — let's use the simplest argument — that somebody goes deep with AI, figures out how to use it to do an active trading hedge fund strategy, starts making enough money to pay for themselves, pay for their families, etc., etc., right? And overall, in the aggregate, people will figure out and society will figure out how to generate huge amounts of wealth with this, and then you have the distribution question of how do you equitably share it, when we've studied that. But that's all the material covering day-to-day life stuff, covers the bottom two, three layers of Maslow's hierarchy.

Uh, and we could see that happening. And when you see societies getting to this abundance level, like the Mongols taking over India or the Mongols taking over uh East Asia, or the Romans taking over — the Medici family or whatever — you've heard us talk about the idea that people end up doing four activities: uh, food, art, music and sex. And the joke is not in that order, right?

Um, once you get past that and get through that, the really interesting next dimension opens up, and you start thinking about what problems could I tackle, because we're not going to run out of problems. We're just going to be able to tackle bigger and bigger problems, right? How do we create Alex's Dyson swarm? Uh, how do we go into the stars? How do we uh kind of think about the new different types of physics that may emerge from all of this? That's where the really fascinating stuff comes along.

And you know, I think this is the area, Peter — we've had this conversation at the XPRIZE board meetings — of could we design prizes that advance humanity radically, rather than just trying to solve the problems, because those look like they'll get handled? And what's that next phase look like? I think the opportunity for human flourishing in that is so magnificent.

We love problems and we love solving problems. We'll just have bigger and bigger problems which we'll be able to solve with bigger and bigger suites of AI agents and robots.