🎆 The AI singularity … then what?

My fellow pro-growth/progress/abundance Up Wingers in America and around the world:

What a piece of worke is a man! how Noble in
Reason? how infinite in faculty, in forme, and moving
how expresse and admirable in Action, how like an Angel
in apprehension, how like a God?

Everyone has a favorite clip on social media that’s from a film they’ve never quite gotten around to watching. One such snippet that sticks with me comes from the 2002 film Adaptation, in which struggling writer Charlie Kaufman, played by Nicolas Cage, is hired to turn a nonfiction book into a screenplay.

At one point, Kaufman attends a seminar led by the famed screenwriting guru Robert McKee, played by Brian Cox, and while sitting in the audience, poses what I’ll call the Seinfeld Question: Might a film be structured around a story “where nothing much happens—where people don’t change, they don’t have any epiphanies? They struggle, they’re frustrated, and nothing is resolved. Something more like a reflection of the real world”?

To which an absolutely volcanic McKee responds:

The real world? The real f***ing world? First of all, if you write a screenplay without conflict or crisis, you’ll bore your audience to tears. Secondly: Nothing happens in the real world? Are you out of your f***ing mind? People are murdered every day! There’s genocide and war and corruption! Every f***ing day, somewhere in the world, somebody sacrifices his life to save someone else! Every f***ing day, someone somewhere makes a conscious decision to destroy someone else! People find love! People lose it, for C****t’s sake! A child watches her mother beaten to death on the steps of a church! Someone goes hungry! Somebody else betrays his best friend for a woman! If you can’t find that stuff in life, then you, my friend, don’t know much about life! And why the f*** are you taking up my precious two hours with your movie? I don’t have any use for it! I don’t have any bloody use for it!

Keep McKee’s entertaining eruption in mind when reading the latest round of forecasts about advanced AI, which often treat the technology as the final chapter of the human story.