I'm unsure what's going to happen

This Tomás Bjartur post became a running gag in my circles. One night I boldly decided to have Claude Opus 4.5 generate a continuation of it. You can find it here. (Attach about every kind of trigger warning you can imagine.)

Initially skeptical, expecting “AI slop”, Bjartur later came to realize, after I'd slid the Opus output into his Slack DMs anyway, that Opus was funny. It extracted many bursts of uncontrollable chuckling from him, and later even this tweet.

He spent the rest of the night running his hand through his unc hair, staring up at the ceiling in despair, a tragic backwards slouch repeating “wow we don't have much time do we".

Opus 4.5 made Bjartur afraid of a future in which everyone was funny.

Later reassured on two counts (morphological nanite-freedom in worlds where we survive giving him physical beauty even as he loses his comparative advantage in verbal wit, and this Algon post which he did not find funny), he wheeled back some of these claims.

Still. I expect the frequency of existential crises to continue.

My cousins picked me up for Thanksgiving dinner at their home, and paid for my ride back. I hoped Waymo had expanded their coverage to include Berkeley already, but this was alas not the case.

I don't like lying, even by omission, and telling the truth can lead to interesting conversations anyway; so the first thing I told the Uber driver as we rode off was “in a year I won't ever be a customer—I was hoping Waymo could take me all the way back, but it can't. This makes me annoyed and I wouldn't be here if Waymo were an alternative".

I hoped this could be helpful for him: to notice explicitly when the world is changing, and be told concretely how it may change to you is important.

We spent the rest of the ride talking about automation (he was in favor of Waymos, and treated it as his responsibility to adapt if Waymo expanded) and the bumpy ride ahead between these times and automated utopia (the alternative likely being death!).

He thought his NFTs and Bitcoin would ensure he had a stake in the future. I attempted to explain that the dollar, gold, and cryptocurrency all depend on “true wealth” as a backstop, and this “true wealth” is located in e.g. driving a person from one town to another as a service. And that next year if I'm invited anew to my cousins’ Thanksgiving, this service will be purchased from Google, not Raoul.

(We both agreed the ~servant-master dynamics of being chauffeured somewhere, even as we're both consenting to this and he's being paid a fair price, is uncomfortable. We both enjoy Waymos for the marvels they are.)

Human society currently depends on intelligence not saturating everything. There are only so many funny humans, and you have to physically move around to find them, laugh with them, provide valuable company to them. There are only so many Waymos, and only so many willing DMVs, for now. Waymos are still expensive (~200K a pop). Claude Opus 4.5 is often unfunny—in my case, it took a giant context window filled with unrelated conversation to get to the point where it was willing to produce dishwasher smut for me.

But the air is increasingly shimmering with intelligence, and I'm unsure what's going to happen. Probably, we'll adapt; but that prospect worries me rather than reassures me.