1,000 years

What a trip to the past teaches us about earning a place in the future

Is society responsible for you, or are you responsible for society?

It is a deep question, with more sides than one essay can address. I want to pull on this specific thread: whether each of us is responsible for making ourselves useful to society, or whether society owes each of us a place in it. I suspect that how a person answers that question predicts how they feel about AI better than anything they know about the technology itself.

Two beliefs that seem to conflict

I am a firm believer in social safety nets. I grew up in emerging economies. I have spent time around people with poor health and with other circumstances they did not choose and could not change. Many people have far less control over their lives than those of us with options tend to assume. A society that does not catch people when they fall is not a society I want to defend.

I am also a firm believer that each of us carries the responsibility to find our own way of being useful to society. I use the word “useful” in its most general sense, because it is a loaded term for many people. To be useful, here, means providing something that other people need or value. A professional athlete is useful: they entertain, and they inspire people to be active and to push themselves. A housekeeper is useful: they free the people whose homes they clean to provide something else. A truck driver is useful: they carry the goods other services depend on.

Those two beliefs sit together comfortably until people’s livelihoods start to disappear or change drastically. Then the question sharpens. Does society owe the truck driver a new useful occupation? Or is it the truck driver’s job, and the job of everyone whose work is about to be displaced, to figure out how to be useful in whatever society comes next?

Put that bluntly, the second answer sounds callous. I do not think it is. But I understand why it sounds that way, so let me try a thought experiment. It involves time travel.

One thousand years back

Imagine waking up one morning and everything around you is gone. No bed, no bedroom, no house, no street. You are lying in a forest that belongs nowhere near the house you fell asleep in.

It takes a while to work out what happened. The light is wrong. The silence is wrong. Eventually you accept the only explanation that fits: you have traveled roughly a thousand years back in time.

Nothing you rely on exists. There is no sign of the Industrial Revolution, because it is seven centuries away. The printing press is four centuries away. There is no electricity, no medicine you would recognize, no road worth the name. When you finally meet people, they are not hostile. They are busy. They are working fields, herding animals, cutting wood, hunting, and looking after each other. We will assume, for the sake of the experiment, that you can understand them and they can understand you.

Now the practical question. What do you say to get these people to help you?

Take stock of what you bring. You have never hunted. You cannot tell which plants are safe to eat. You do not know which animals to fear or which streams to drink from. You have no shelter, and winter is a real thing here. Your professional skills, whatever they are, depend on an infrastructure that will not exist for centuries. Your knowledge of germs or crop rotation might be worth something one day, but only to people who have a reason to trust you, and you have given them none.

Set aside whether it would be reasonable for these people to take you in. Set aside whether it would be moral. Just answer the practical question: what is the best way to get them to help you?

Framed this way, the answer is obvious. You need to find something to do for them that they would value. You might offer to watch the children while the adults work. You might carry water from the river. You might keep watch for wild animals, once someone tells you what to watch for. You might muck out a stable, or split wood badly and get better at it. None of this requires them to owe you anything. All of it requires you to look at what they need and work out where you fit.

The onus is on you. Not because these villagers are heartless, and not because you deserve nothing. It is on you because the villagers have their hands full, and they have no way of knowing what you are capable of or what you are willing to learn. They are already an organized group, full of people who have made commitments to each other. You are the newcomer, and you must now make your own commitment to integrate into the existing group. That is the real reason the onus falls where it does: not that nobody owes you anything, but that you are the only one who knows what you have to offer.

A few years forward

Now reverse the direction of travel.

The AI revolution is also time travel. It does not send us a thousand years back. It sends us a few years forward, into a society that does not exist yet, and it does so whether we bought the ticket or not. The distance is shorter. The mechanism is the same. You arrive somewhere the people around you need different things than they needed yesterday, and the skills you brought with you are worth less than you expected.

The two trips strand you for opposite reasons. A thousand years back, your skills are useless because the infrastructure they depend on has not been built. A few years forward, some of your skills are useless because the infrastructure has absorbed them. The spreadsheet, the first draft, the routine diagnosis, the standard contract: things you were paid to produce become things the tools produce. Either way you stand in front of people who are busy, who are not hostile, and who have no particular reason to make room for you.

There are two differences. The first is that the trip to the past is instant and total. The trip to the future happens a few months at a time. That makes it easier, because you can see it coming and prepare. It also makes it harder, because you can see it coming and pretend you cannot. Nobody who wakes up in a forest a thousand years ago spends the first week arguing that the forest should not be there. Plenty of people are spending these years doing exactly that.

The second difference is that in the village you can guess what they need. Water is heavy. Children wander. Wolves exist. A few years forward, nobody knows yet what will be valued. That is not a reason to wait. It is the same instruction the villagers gave you: keep watch, once someone tells you what to watch for. Watch what the people around you struggle with. Watch what the tools cannot do. Watch what they now have time for and did not before. That is where the useful work will be.

Every technology is a time machine

I think it would be healthier for all of us to treat every major technological shift, not just AI, as a trip of this kind. It lands us collectively in a new type of society, and the same practical question applies to every one of us: what can I do for the people in this new place that they would value?

If you accept that, AI becomes a less threatening evolution. Not a harmless one. But when people talk about AI’s impact on society, the concern underneath nearly all of them is about jobs. What if my job is taken away? What if it changes so much that it becomes unrecognizable? How will I adapt?

Adapting will be hard for some people. It always is. Safety nets exist precisely for the people it is hardest on, and I want those nets strong. But a net is meant to catch you, to give you a reprieve so you have time to collect yourself for what comes next. And what must come next is a desire and willingness to adapt. Because the one sure way not to adapt is to believe that adapting is someone else’s responsibility.

So, is society responsible for you? For the reprieve, yes. For what you do with it, no. Whether the trip is a thousand years back or a few years forward, you arrive the same way, among busy people who cannot yet see what you have to contribute. Showing them is your job. It always was.