Now — you could fairly say: that’s a sweet story, André, but it’s one illustrator and one book. A sample size of, generously, one.
So let me widen the aperture, because I don’t think what happened with Luis is a comedic exception. I think it’s the early edge of the weather system heading our way, right fucking now.
Recently I listened to Vinod Khosla — who co-founded Sun Microsystems, and who has spent forty years watching where technology actually goes rather than where people hope it goes — work through what happens to the economy as AI gets good at, well, everything.
His read is bracing. Large-scale job displacement inside a decade. Every company forced to do far more with far fewer people. Utility — the plain usefulness of a thing — racing toward zero, because when anything can be produced infinitely and near-free, producing it stops being worth anything.
And then he said the part that stopped me — the part I couldn’t unhear.
If utility goes to zero, what’s left? What do humans actually still pay for?
His answer: human preference.
“That means if it’s made by a human, I have provenance, I have a story attached to it, I’ll prefer it … human preference, not utility, starts driving it.” — Vinod Khosla
Provenance. A story attached to it. Made by a human.
Read that back and then look at what I’d just done, months earlier, without any of this language to hand. I didn’t buy Luis’s book because it was the cheapest or most useful way to acquire 272 pages of illustration. I bought it — and then joined — because a human made it, because there was a story attached, because the provenance was the whole point. I was paying for human preference. I just didn’t have the word for it yet.
Khosla goes further, and this is the part I keep turning over: he thinks the likeliest version of 2035 isn’t mass unemployment so much as mass re-distribution — far fewer corporate jobs, and tens of millions more people working for themselves. Micro-entrepreneurs, he calls them. People who, because AI handles everything else, “don’t have to know anything other than their skill.” I grow the best flowers. I bake the best muffins. I make the strange beautiful books. And human preference — not utility — is what people seek them out for.
But here’s the thing about the weather system. It’s abstract until someone you recognize — someone with clout, with a million email subscribers, with five #1 New York Times and Wall Street Journal bestsellers to his name — makes a choice inside it.
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