Conclusion: At the Crossroads of the 21st Century roads might not seem obviously awful. In fact, they might look like success. What exactly do I mean here? Imagine an AI-driven world, thirty or fifty or one hundred years from now. Mass unemployment has not come to pass. Or, if it has come to pass, AI productivity has created so much mate- rial abundance that poverty doesn’t exist. Society-wide safety net systems of one kind or another keep everyone housed, fed, clothed, educated, and entertained. In fact, living stan- dards have increased across the globe, especially in develop- ing nations. Everyone on earth spends their days using AI to generate mar- keting memos, legal briefs, high-school essays, movies, video games, computer programs, ad campaigns, college course syn- opses, love letters, employee evals, Yelp reviews, blog posts, recipes, song lyrics, and more. Most don’t even use their own prompts to create these things; they have an AI do that for them. But these AIs are so powerful and helpful, they don’t stop there—people rely on AI to manage their diets, pick the homes they buy, and choose when (and if) to have kids. In short, most humans lead completely de-risked lives of statis- tically probable stability and abundance. In data we trust? Algocracy for the win? Here’s how GPT-4—with an assist from the great 19th-century bard of self-determination, Henry David Thoreau—replied when I asked it to describe this world: Reid: Describe a future world where AI tools have signifi- cantly increased society’s overall productivity, prosperity, 219