THE HUMAN DIVIDEND

The Infinities

The doomers say: "AI will do everything. There will be nothing left."

They must not have looked around.

We live in a universe of infinities. Not metaphorically. Mathematically.

The outer infinity is obvious. Billions of galaxies. Each with billions of stars. Space that curves back on itself or stretches forever—we don't even know which.

But there are infinities everywhere you look.

Music. Every song that's ever been written is a point in an infinite space. Between any two songs, infinite others. We've explored a tiny corner. A child born today could spend a billion lifetimes composing and never exhaust what's possible.

Mathematics. We keep discovering new continents. And here's the strangest part: some infinities are bigger than others. The infinity of whole numbers is smaller than the infinity of real numbers. Infinity isn't even one thing.

Games. Stories. Art. Each one an infinite space. Every video game ever made is a single point. Every novel. The space of possible experiences is not large—it's unbounded.

Here's what drives me insane about the AI doom conversation:

The smallness of it.

We're talking about jobs. Resumes. Paychecks.

Meanwhile:

We've explored 5% of the ocean. We've observed 4% of the universe. We don't know what consciousness is. We don't know why there's something rather than nothing. We haven't cured aging. We haven't left the solar system.

And we're worried about jobs?

For the first time in human history, we have tools that might let us reach into that darkness.

AI isn't the destination. AI is the flashlight.

We're not at the end of something. We're at the beginning.

So when someone says "AI will do everything and there will be nothing left for humans"—

What are they even talking about?

Nothing left where? In which infinity? We haven't exhausted a single one. We've barely left the shore.

The Unnameable

There are colors you've never seen. Actual colors. Wavelengths that exist right now that no human has ever experienced. We could fix that.

But that's the easy part.

There are thoughts you've never thought. Not because you're not smart enough. Because the concepts don't exist yet. Because the language to hold them hasn't been invented.

Language is a technology. It was invented. It shaped what we could conceive. The words create the categories. The categories enable—and constrain—which thoughts are thinkable.

What happens when we invent new languages?

Not languages with new words. Languages with new structures.

A language where time isn't linear in the grammar. Where you can speak of things that happen in parallel, in loops, in branches.

A language where emotions combine like colors. Not "happy" or "sad" but the precise shade of what you feel watching your child struggle with something you struggled with, knowing you can't help, knowing they'll be stronger for it—grief and pride and hope and memory in one unpronounceable word.

New languages. New thoughts. New selves that can think them.

Right now, you're alone in there. You can describe your experience. But I will never know what red looks like to you. The gap is absolute.

What if it wasn't?

What if you could share a feeling the way you share a photo? What if I could feel your heartbreak—not described, not empathized with, but felt, directly?

What happens to loneliness when that exists?

What happens to love?

Things that aren't thoughts, aren't feelings, aren't perceptions—but are something. States of being we don't have access to because our hardware doesn't support them.

I can't describe them. The words don't exist.

But I can point in the direction.

There is more. So much more. Categories of being we haven't discovered yet. Futures where what it means to be a someone is unrecognizable from here—not worse, not less, just different in ways we can't currently imagine.

The Source

There's something I haven't said yet. Something that might lose some readers.

I'll say it anyway.

Humans have access to something AI doesn't. Not just lived experience. Not just mortality and stakes.

Intuition.

That moment when you know something you have no reason to know. When the answer arrives whole, before the logic. When you feel pulled toward something you can't explain.

Some people think humans are just machines. That consciousness is what brains produce. That intuition is pattern-matching we can't consciously access.

I used to think that too. Then I sat down, closed my eyes, and looked.

When you get quiet enough, you feel it—consciousness doesn't end at your skull. It doesn't end anywhere.

If you've meditated, you know what I'm talking about. You've felt the unending vastness that you are. You've touched something that can't be explained by neurons firing. Not a belief. Not an experience. A knowing.

And in that knowing, something else becomes clear: the present moment is all there is. Not poetically—literally. Space and time aren't the container reality comes in. They're appearances within consciousness. Physics is starting to catch up to what meditators have known for millennia.

If you haven't sat still long enough to see this, I'm not here to convince you. But I'll say this: the people most certain that consciousness is "just" the brain tend to be people who have never looked. They're theorizing about the ocean without ever getting wet.

Humans have access to something like a field—call it universal consciousness, call it the divine, call it the source. Intuition is when we tap in directly, bypassing the slow machinery of reason.

AI can process everything that's been written, said, recorded. It can find patterns across more data than any human could absorb.

But as far as we can tell, AI doesn't tap into the source. It doesn't have intuition. It has inference.

I could be wrong. Maybe AI is conscious in ways we don't recognize. Maybe it accesses something we can't see.

But right now? The partnership looks like this:

Together, we might get somewhere neither could go alone.