The Era of Humans has just begun

I love mathematics. I was always fascinated by solving riddles, recognizing patterns, and working out ideas that have definite answers, without room for interpretation. But I realized early on that you can't make a real career as a mathematician, except for becoming some kind of engineer or data scientist, both of which I do not like. I also did not see any use in trying to make money from being good at math, since it was for my own pleasure to learn new ideas, to get a headache from trying to solve or understand some problem, and from the satisfaction when actually solving something and having that eureka moment.

I also love philosophy. Even worse still, I believe that you can't get into a credible career as a philosopher either, even less than in mathematics. The other problem is interpretation. Philosophy thrives on debate, questioning things, not having concrete answers. I love reading through Heidegger's interpretation of being, or getting a motivational boost from Seneca's letters, and finding that muse in Nietzsche. But where I would study mathematics as a hobby to become better at it personally, I would never study philosophy without always having in mind that whoever teaches me about some topic only presents his or someone else's interpretation of the texts. Philosophy is something you have to dig through yourself, in the raw original texts.

So what did I end up with? Software. It's the one field that merges all my desires for mathematics and (weirdly enough) philosophy in one applicable field. You get those riddles to chew on, how to solve that one bug, how to optimize the algorithm, or which framework would be the best choice for a given task. And on the other hand you can express your style, work through ideas in your own interpretation of the problem. You work around one of the core concepts of philosophy: aesthetics. When working on UI, you can apply your own style, deliver a message to the world and the people who use your product, you can embody your whole set of taste into a grid of pixels on a screen. Software combines the problem solving from mathematics, your own interpretation from philosophy, the technical optimization from engineering, beauty from art, and so much more. And it looks like today you'll be able to express yourself more than ever. But before talking about the elephant in the room, with its latent space and thirst for GPUs, we will look back on where we came from, and how we ended up here.

The First Settlements

12,000 years ago, the first humans got together into one group and figured out how to transform the land and animals around them to their desire. We started erecting huts and villages, put seed into the ground and harvested their fruit, put animals on leashes, clothed ourselves in their pelts, and ate their flesh. Our nomadic lifestyle as hunter gatherers ended. We have evidence that around that time humans adopted the system of settlements and agriculture en masse. We did what our genes proved to be best at: we scaled. In a short time, after an eternity of collecting berries and hunting game, we found ourselves in the first cities like Uruk. Not having to care about survival as drastically as before provided us with more time for different things. Before, we would walk through the woods all day, fear for our lives in the sight of huge mammals, slept in caves, and could barely find time to learn how to make a fire. The more free time we got, through agriculture, protecting each other, and not having to run after our meals any longer, the more we could focus on ideas. We invented a written alphabet to keep track of how many animals we got, or who was part of our settlement, and we refined our architecture and culture.

After some time we built ships to trade with others, formed armies, fought for our rising cities, and invented democracy. We used our imagination to assign value to rare things around us, from glass beads to gold nuggets. And the less time we had to spend on survival or work, the more time we had to think about our place in the universe. Philosophy was born. With it came first principles of mathematics, biology, astronomy. We measured the earth without having placed a foot on continents we didn't know exist. After 10,000 years, we lived in empires, erected monuments to our future selves, and expanded rapidly. Progress scaled faster than our ape minds could adapt to. 1,000 years ago the Chinese created gunpowder, the Islamic golden age made advancements in astronomy and mathematics, and just 500 years ago the printing press was invented. We slowly climbed towards a singularity. We were still bound by our duty to work, to make a living, but we could focus more and more on working out ideas and applying the last 12,000 years to anything we dreamt of. We taught fire to work for us in the form of steam engines, and further work in physics proved there might be no limit.

In 1903, the Wright brothers did their first flight with a prototype aircraft they built in their bicycle shop. The flight lasted 12 seconds. In 1939 we reached the first jet-powered flight. And in 1944 the V2 rocket reached space. That's just around 40 years from a 12 second simple prototype to rockets reaching space. 25 years later, in 1969, humans set foot on the moon. In 2000 the first crew boarded the ISS. In just 100 years we went from that 12 second test flight to circling earth in orbit. And in the meantime we taught sand how to think, printing computer chips that followed Moore's law, causing us to scale computers down from room-size to fitting on a fingertip. We connected the whole world through the internet, folded proteins, split atoms. And the one thing we always dreamt of came closer with every step on Moore's ladder: machines that think. From the first perceptron to computers beating chess champions, we ended up with two GPUs in a student's bedroom in 2012: AlexNet. A major advancement in visual recognition, it could classify images across thousands of categories, on a scale beyond anything we knew before. Add ten more years and ChatGPT launched. Today, October 2026, we have Anthropic's latest model, Opus 5.5, building anything one can dream of, literally.

The last Invention

In summer 2022 I attended a hackathon at my university. We had several spaces where people could present something interesting they learned about recently. Someone showed us the OpenAI developer playground on his laptop, where you could apply and get $5 credit to use their latest model, DaVinci, which later would become GPT-3. "You can ask it something and it will create text", he said. We used it on that evening to generate jokes, write funny titles for barbershops, or make up ideas for side projects we could work on. We also tried to let it create Python code, and were amazed that it actually wrote some lines. They did not work, producing errors. We were too innocent to even comprehend what this concept would become capable of one day. Looking back, we were like cavemen handed a smartphone. Just four years later we got GPT-6 Astra and Opus 5.5, which let you create whole apps without errors, running for several hours autonomously through a codebase, able to create whole music videos using just SVG and synthetic music, like this video.

Many people are annoyed by AI, and to some degree I can understand them. AI generated images quickly became a sign for cheap slop. Think about restaurants using AI images for their menu instead of just taking real photos. AI generated LinkedIn posts or whole Facebook threads of bots replying to each other fueled fears that the dead internet theory was becoming reality. LLMs create websites that all look the same, boring and bland. There are many such cases where AI is used in the most cheap way to automate things that were trivial from the beginning, or where people just don't care about their result. But what most people don't realize is that AI can become so much more. We literally taught sand to think and those people who just started getting into it are faced with the same dilemma that we were on that evening in the university. They just don't know better.

Anthropic's Opus 5.5 was one of the first scary moments I faced with AI. Before, I could not fully rely on LLMs working for me. They would hallucinate, make up things, and almost every time they produced breaking errors in your code that you would have to resolve by hand or by telling the AI how things work. Prompt Engineering became a whole field of profession where we quickly realized that LLM output can be enhanced by telling the machine in every detail what, in which order, and how it should do things. But with the latest generation that changed. Opus 5.5 can investigate patterns by itself, look how you judged decisions before, and interpret your work in a way that you wouldn't even think about. It recognizes which frameworks you use, the style and reusing of components, and no longer needs deep instructions. You also don't need to tell it which exact files to look at, it can just find them.

A major breakthrough just occurred in this case: Reverse Engineer Anything. You can give it any binary or app and it will recreate it as a clean implementation of the full functionality. Someone even created a fully open source replica of all major Adobe products, like Photoshop. Some people even modded different games into one, putting Super Mario into Elden Ring or Minecraft into Skyrim. This is a major precedent on the exponential curve towards a post-scarcity society. If AI has become advanced enough to reverse engineer literally anything, there is technically no need for proprietary software any longer. Anything can become open source, and you would just create your own apps for some problem or desire you have. You don't like how Duolingo lessons work? Just create your own clone of it. We even realized this with our own product, where the whole purpose of keeping it proprietary is now lost as anyone can just copy it. Just look at this blog, where I was annoyed by all the complexity of Substack and wanted something more tailored to my desire, so I created this whole blog website.

Now why would that possibly be good? What is the advantage of having no more value in the things you create, the work you want to make money with? The most obvious question is why we should even bother to work any longer at all. If AI can do anything, and robotics advance as fast as AI did in the last years, do we even have ANY field of profession left that won't be affected? Software developers won't be needed anymore in just a year. A manager can just create his own app and explain what he wants to a patient and non-judging LLM. And while today there are still developers needed to verify that everything is secure and not just utter slop, soon AI will be able to test any app end-to-end for any scenario, fully optimize performance, and verify the product works as intended and in the best way, better than any developer would be able to.

Mathematicians face the same dilemma right now. AI is solving problems that remained unsolved for decades, at a pace that would allow us to solve things like the Riemann hypothesis or the P vs NP problem in just a few years (or even months). They protest because they realize humans are not needed to make up ideas on how to solve math, something software developers realized years ago. But this is where my interpretation takes off, and where I propose that humanity might just have entered the final stage of being hunter gatherers.

The Age of Abundance

Nowadays we live even better than the most powerful man on earth did just 2,000 years ago. The Roman emperor could wish for anything, having the greatest feasts and palaces. He would still envy what we have today. He did not have hot running water coming out of a shower. He was not able to order any food he likes to his door in the same evening. A message to his armies would take days before arriving, while it takes only milliseconds for us to tell someone on the other side of earth how their opinion is wrong. Putting aside all other factors such as political power, we are living a dream life compared to just some dozen generations ago. Yet we still have to care for our survival, just like any other human had to before. We need to work to afford food and housing, the basic requirements for human life that everyone will face.

With the current scale of how LLMs develop, it's inevitable to face that one day work will become meaningless. Anthropic is secretly preparing for this as they just announced they will provide an amount of their revenue for public benefit. I don't want to argue about the implications for the economy here, as economics are just another side note on the larger scale from here on. As a libertarian I'm usually opposed to universal income and such concepts, and I believe that one of the hardest challenges of the future will be to sustain the concept of trade and voluntary exchange in this future. The fact is, that outcome is inevitable, so we have to prepare for that. But that's a topic for another time.

What intrigues me the most with this forecast is that such an age of abundance will result in one simple setting: the maximization of our free time to focus on thinking. In the very beginning, as animals, 100% of our time was focused on survival. Finding something to eat, drink, shelter, and avoiding predators. As we found ourselves in settlements, the ratio changed. We sat around 80% survival (making sure the crops last, stock grows, shelter stays intact) and 20% thinking (making up languages, watching the stars, telling stories). This ratio often shifted. During the beginning of the industrial revolution, people used to work 16 hour shifts, even children. The ratio was then maybe 90% survival and 10% thinking. But during the last century western civilization made a major shift.

We don't have to negotiate the trade deal to get our food. We just walk into the store and grab what we want. We don't have to fear dying of a cold any longer. Or exhausting ourselves in the factory becoming lame in early age. The biggest trouble nowadays is how much we earn to afford the standards we are now used to, and grow to be used to by every year. Now imagine what will happen if AI and robotics becomes so advanced that they grow our food, build our buildings, maintain our infrastructure, cut our hair, manage our businesses, and become human-level in any field. The share will go to 0% work and 100% thinking. I even dare to suspect that no work at all will remain, if we drop the regulations. You won't need lawyers, developers, construction workers, or any other field of work.

Many people are dooming about this. Artists in particular are prone to explain how their work remains relevant in the age of AI. But if I need some promotional banner for my company, would I create it with an AI in some minutes or commission an artist for a three digit sum? I don't promote using AI generated images everywhere here, as I'm annoyed by people putting AI images on their restaurant menus when they can just take a photo of the real thing. But for production use cases, artists become obsolete. Just like horse carriage drivers became obsolete when the first cars were produced. Or telephone operators when switches were able to automatically handle phone calls. But that does not mean those fields become irrelevant, they become obsolete, that's an important difference that we already know in so many examples.

"Made by Humans"

Before the industrial revolution, hand-crafted clothing was the norm. Whole families crafted suits and clothing and made their living that way. Why then do those handcrafted fields still exist? We have hand-tailored suits, Swiss watches, decoration, and other things that we would now call a "luxury" because the industrial craft became abundant. Is a hand-crafted good automatically better than its industrial mass-production counterpart? In most cases yes, but not always. It's also definitely not the better value for price. But the fact that it's NOT mass-produced and someone verifiably spent days on this piece, makes it more valuable for us. And there you have the reason for work in the age of abundance.

You can already use LLMs to generate wedding speeches, birthday cards, or turn that photo of your dog into an oil painting. But you would value it much more if it's made by a real human. We won't have to work any longer, but the fact that we'll still do it is what gives it worth. In the near future labeling products as "Made by Humans" will bear the same effect that luxury brands have today. It's not necessary, and not the best price value ratio, but we'll still invest in it. And that fact opens up a lot more room for optimism, because you can literally do whatever you want to do. You won't have to do the desk job you hate so much any longer. You won't need to deliver packages for Amazon if a drone can do the job. But if you love art, drawing things with a pencil and getting better at it, or enjoy cooking, you'll have the value for whatever you enjoy doing with heart.

That brings us back to my introduction for this article: my passion for mathematics and philosophy. I never saw any value in investing my time into those topics for the sake of making money from it. But in an age of abundance it would be the first thing that I would pursue for the sake of my love for it. If there is no more need to work for money, I can put all my time into the things that I want to think about. While others declare this the end of humanity, I see it as the true beginning of the era of humans.

Imagine all the things we can come up with if we don't have to work for a living but everything is provided, and we can spend all our time for the things we actually care about, including contemplation and thinking about new ideas. Maybe AI will never be able to be really creative or introduce new concepts, so this is our time to shine. A world where everyone can contemplate philosophy, exchange ideas, pursue hobbies as they like to, explore the world and new concepts, and spend no more effort on redundant tasks.

The Era of Humans

Up until now we were still bound to the constraints of nature. Ever since the Bible we wrote about how work is a burden and how we can escape it, that it's some form of punishment. The concept of a world where no one has to work, where food literally grows everywhere, was always described as paradise. But now it might just be some compute iterations away. If everyone has the time and focus to come up with new ideas, reaching the stars will be trivial. AI will help us to cure all diseases, generate unlimited energy through nuclear fusion, and help us build a Dyson swarm to turn the sun into one giant GPU. If this sounds too much like science fiction to you or exaggerated, you are not optimistic enough.

We already saw how science fiction can turn into reality, be it computers in general, spaceships, the internet, smartphones, or our latest intelligent invention. So why stop here? Why not dream about the future that is so close. Everything up until now was a prequel, preparation to separate ourselves from the concept of survival. The era of humans has just begun, and the next decades will not even be predictable because the curve went parabolic some weeks ago. In some hundred years we will look back and ask ourselves how we would endure something like sitting at the grocery checkout, or manually delivering packages. Just like we now look back at Romans not having hot showers or vaccines.

This is a call to embrace the acceleration, not fear it. Why would you bind yourself to the burden of having to work, fight survival, if everything can be provided and you can focus on the autonomy of pursuing your own ideas and interests. Everyone can help to bring humanity closer to the stars. And we will overcome the primitive idea of the stone age to fear for survival, be it by hunting game or working 9 to 5.

This text was written by a real human, not AI.