The Meatbot's Guide to AI

AI IS COMING FOR YOUR JOB. THAT MAY BE THE GOOD NEWS. Most books about AI sell one of two stories. In the first, AI is a helpful intern that writes your emails. In the second, a machine wakes up, grows red eyes, and kills everyone. Both are too small. Superhuman AI won't merely automate tasks. It will automate intelligence itself. Joined with robotics, it will do nearly everything economically useful that humans do. Once machines design machines and build factories without us, the old economy doesn't improve. It ends. That sounds like a jobpocalypse. It could also be universal retirement. Vance Ashley Woodward didn't write this book to sell you an AI productivity course, a bunker in New Zealand, or shares in a startup that puts blockchain on a toaster. He wrote it because the conversation is stuck on apps and arrival dates while the real transformation will be economic, political, biological, and eventually cosmic. Across 94 questions and three epochs — post-scarcity, post-humanity, and the end of humanity — you'll learn why the fight over whether AI arrives in 2030 or 2050 misses where computation and money are obviously headed, why human labor loses its economic value, why alignment is a problem of incentives rather than programming, why you'll plug your brain into the network on purpose, and why the hunger for computation ends with matter itself converted into computronium. The appendices show the arithmetic, including the data behind the claim that a human brain's worth of raw computation already rents for about $20 an hour. You don't have to take his word for it. The book closes with a scorecard of dated, falsifiable predictions — superintelligence in the lab by 2035, the trucker wage collapsing by 2035, aging defeated in principle by 2050 — each naming the exact condition under which the author is wrong. Not a guide to prompts or the chatbot of the month. A map of the strange possibility that becoming economically irrelevant is the beginning of freedom. Part of the Meatbot's Guide series, alongside The Meatbot's Guide to Health: Live Long Happy and The Meatbot's Guide to Governance: Prepare for Peace.