Happiness in an AI World

Some early thoughts on how to live a fulfilling life with AI:

When Youtube and Facebook rose, I realized it’s hard times for journalists, and churned for IT. That was 12 years ago. Today, I feel similar about AI. I spend my time writing about it for you, but I’m heavily contemplating trying to get ahead one more time.

Extrapolating what this world might look like in 5 years, here are some jobs I think will not only still exist, but add more happiness to one’s life in an AI world:

Carpenter

While much manual work will be replaced by robots, building furniture is a very individual, haptic, creative process. Crafting uniquely designed, comfortable to touch, tactile human processes, comfortable to sit on / use furniture, might outpace all other manual work, also as AI can reproduce your designs, and you can earn from it, if you protect the IP properly.

Dogs and Cats Services

This can range from busses to daycare to food to hospitality to good food, toys, even furniture for our pets. The more human to human interaction will become scarce, and it will, replaced by emotional AI, the more we will chase original human emotions. Some of the strongest bonds are with our pets.

Journalism / Human Authoring

90% of human content produced will fade, most will be written by AI. This one might come counterintuitive to you, as LLM is large LANGUAGE model.

Yet, that’s a learning from leaving journalism too early last time. The best of my colleagues still have good jobs, even better ones, with more liberty, as all focus is on “the web” already today.

The smart people on the reading end will appreciate unique human content even more over time, the more it fades. Maybe even printed on paper, watermarked as human voice and video, probably IP protected in Data NFTs.

Why printed magazines you ask? Tactile will be big -> you might “touch” way less physical stuff in 5 years, miss it, enjoy it.

Local Economy Workers

Again, might sound counterintuitive, but to me it isn’t. I live in the inner city of one of Europes most beautiful (and expensive) cities. I saw the city change.

All my friends with kids, some earn really well, moved out, into the suburbs. At the same time, I hear more and more French, English, Spanish, Chinese wondering the streets.

I like it, I love human languages, but it points towards a broader inner city exitus, as already seen in London or Paris. Rich kids, folks, biz chicks will AirBnB the most beautiful inner cities to death, and if not, the young party gen coming in from the suburbs every weekend will.

On top, Amazon destroyed most of the local economy infrastructure. It’s close to impossible to find a real butcher or bakery in a city center today. It’s all franchises and 24/7. Same time, automation, talking to AI, robots will increasingly be part of our daily life.

All that said, we will strive for a more basic life.

And not only strive, we will *have* to do it, to not break the planet, or have city life situations like in down town San Francisco today.

Hence: I see old villages being repopulated, just like new villages created, probably even by said 24/7 franchise brands, to not lose against Amazon completely.

In this new world, with people fleeing cities again (been an back and forth for 200 years now), there will be massive opportunity for us, humans, to lead a more original, fulfilling life, filled with human interactions, instead of just AI.

Open a meat store, a bakery, hell move the yoga studio you pay 4,000 Dollar rent in your tiny walk-in 40 square meter studio for right now to one of these old or new villages close to cities (Shermans call it “Speckgürtel”), pay a fraction of the rent, have way happier customers, know and interact with everyone of them daily, on your way to the bakery.

Social and Care

When we think of social care today, it’s mostly helping those in trouble, or sick, in hospitals.

This will change drastically, once AI scales into our daily life and routines. Human to human interactions will become increasingly more rare, which means we will need it even more.

So what used to be an underpaid, emotionally rewarding, yet draining job class in the past, can, if you pack the right empathy and feel for humans, become a well paid and fulfilling job.

Some will just spend time with other humans, listen to their challenges, questions about this modern life, others will open cafés in these new sub-urban / rural living areas, but instead of simply serving coffee and cake, these owners will be caregivers to their customers, or create environments where people can more easily interact with each other, giving people the comfort from original human interaction, something AI most probably can’t.

Watchmaker

People are weird. In the past years, I saw a massive renaissance of watch collecting. Manual watches. Yes, it might have started in panic times where nothing regarding money seemed safe (pandemic, war), but it’s more.

These watches, the good ones (not only the expensive ones, important) are dear and special to people. They were created and (at least in parts) still built by humans. Very mechanical, very analog, very human.

It gives a certain bliss to time your tea with a manual ratchet (bezel) on your arm instead of arguing with Siri for the 6th time… “SIRI, TIMER. NOW.”

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Just a few examples, as said. There are many more. Everyone will find their own happy place. The times they are a changin’, again, and we‘ll adapt once more.