Shape of the World to Come

By Nada Faris
Exclusive to The Times Kuwait

In March, Timbaland, the American music producer, shared on The Inner Court podcast his views on hip-hop’s history, mentorship, creative evolution, and the lessons he has learned over the years. One of the moments that stands out in this YouTube clip is his expressed disappointment with today’s musicians, describing them as “uninspiring” and “soulless.” He then claims that AI could do a better job, and he signed, a few months later, the first AI agent (TaTa) to his new label, Stage Zero, which aspires to blend human creativity with AI sounds.

Artificial intelligence is an algorithm that synthesizes human knowledge, often available on the internet. In other words, it is mostly informational, like a brain processing and a mouth articulating this data. The ability to perform tasks on behalf of humans characterizes the next stage of AI’s evolution. To continue the metaphor, it suggests that the brain and mouth will develop limbs.

Why is this important—and incredibly frightening?

Because in October 2024, Andy Ayrey’s AI agent (Terminal of Truth, or ToT for short) became the first artificially intelligent millionaire. The AI agent was programmed to act independently on X (previously Twitter). After engaging with online bots, ToT received a cryptocurrency wallet before purchasing Goatseus Maximus ($GOAT), a coin which immediately shot up in value, making Terminal of Truth the first AI agent millionaire.

But what does it mean for AI agents to become wealthy when the middle class is quickly disappearing all over the globe, and harrowing consequences face anyone who is struggling financially?

At the start of 2024, in San Francisco, the heart of Silicon Valley, where Tech Bros are dreaming up The World to Come, an AI company called Artisan began showcasing its provocative advertisements. One of their giant billboards said, “Humans are so 2023. Hire an AI.”

A TikTok video then went viral in which the person recording the ad says, “Ask me how I know I’m in hell right now!” After reading the content of the billboard aloud, he adds, “We’ve got rampant homelessness, a fentanyl crisis, nobody can afford housing, but wait… your employee needs rest? Healthcare? They need to eat lunch? That is so 2023! Hire an AI!”

When I showed this video to my friends and peers and complained about The World to Come, they tried to reassure me that this was merely a hyperbole, a joke, or a marketing scheme meant to put Artisan in the minds of its potential clients.

However, in the same month, Elon Musk showcased his humanoid robot, Optimus Prime, at an event in California, where he suggested that these bipedal machines could potentially replace the need for teachers, babysitters, and even dog walkers. When Musk claimed that robots would outnumber humans in a few years and that our current ideas about the economy itself would have to change, he was still described in the media merely as an eccentric visionary.

But the end of 2024 saw a Trump electoral victory that gave Musk special governmental privileges. Through an executive order, Musk then took charge of DOGE, the Department of Government Efficiency, where he laid off people en masse. This means that the person ‘predicting’ a future in which the ratio of humans to robots will tip toward the latter is not only creating these robots but also actively laying off people and rewriting the laws in a way that privileges algorithms and machines over human beings. We are no longer talking about a marketing scheme or a Tech Bro delusion in Silicon Valley.

In fact, the situation worsened significantly this month. While war rages on in the Middle East, threatening to spill out into neighboring countries, the US military has just performed an unprecedented ceremony, swearing in tech executives as lieutenant colonels, an army rank that usually takes two decades to achieve! These tech executives either held or still hold senior positions in some of the most powerful corporations: Meta (a social media company which owns Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp), Planatir (a data analysis software providing services for the US Department of Defense), and OpenAI (an artificial intelligence organization that owns ChatGPT).

So let us recap. The idea that humans are so 2023 is not a joke. On the one hand, hundreds of thousands of people worldwide are losing their jobs to AI services designed to replace human labor. Second, new laws are currently being implemented to offer AI, AI agents, and robots legal rights. For example, two months ago, Korea gave robots pedestrian rights, allowing them to walk among humans as long as they abided by existing traffic laws. And as Musk envisioned for his Tesla bots, there are now humanoids on Chinese streets walking mechanical dogs.

Finally, Tech Bros are no longer dreaming up The World to Come from their quirky offices in Silicon Valley, since Musk’s DOGE controls some of America’s most sensitive information, while the American military has just officially coronated some of the most powerful AI companies in: Detachment 201 (a new initiative also referred to as Executive Innovation Corps), which is “designed to fuse cutting-edge tech expertise with military innovation.”

What roles would middle- and lower-class people occupy in The World to Come?

Nada Faris is a writer and literary translator. Her latest work is a translation of Bothayna Al-Essa’s novel Lost in Mecca, which was shortlisted for The 2024 Saif Ghobash Banipal Prize for Arabic Literary Translation and named a notable translation by “World Literature Today.” Website: www.nadafaris.com