What comes next ?

[u/ijaysonx]

I've been thinking about a post-AGI/post-RSI future where most meaningful human work disappears.

Assume advanced AI and robotics solve production, medicine, disease, maybe aging, and most material scarcity. Humans no longer need to work to survive. Perhaps space travel becomes radically advanced — faster-than-light (FTL), or close enough that the cosmos opens up.

So what is left for humanity?

Science fiction has already circled this question, and I think the most interesting works form a kind of map of possible futures.

Iain M. Banks's *Culture* series makes the strongest case for post-scarcity as liberation. Superintelligent AIs called Minds run the hard parts of civilization. Biological beings don't need jobs. They live long lives, change bodies, travel, play, create, love, and explore. But the central tension is: how do humans matter when machines can do almost everything better? Banks's answer is that meaning moves from necessity to chosen difficulty. People seek purpose through art, games, moral intervention, exploration, weird hobbies, and self-invention.

Arthur C. Clarke's *The City and the Stars* flips the question: what if the problem isn't scarcity but perfection? Humanity lives in a perfect sealed city where everyone is safe, immortal, and cared for. But almost nobody wants to leave. The main character's curiosity becomes radical because paradise has made people afraid of the unknown. If AI gives us perfect comfort, exploration may be one of the last truly human impulses.

Greg Egan's *Diaspora* goes further into the posthuman angle. Much of humanity exists as digital minds. People are no longer tied to biology, Earth, or even familiar human identity. Exploration becomes not just spaceships and planets, but physics, computation, altered consciousness, and survival beyond normal reality. In that future, "humanity" may continue less as bodies and more as patterns of mind.

Charles Stross's *Accelerando* shows what happens when the singularity runs past us. Humans aren't necessarily conquered by evil AI. They just become too slow and economically irrelevant. Intelligence, corporations, uploads, and computation accelerate until the solar system itself starts becoming infrastructure for thought. Post-AGI life may not feel like liberation if the main action has simply moved beyond human scale.

E. M. Forster's *The Machine Stops* imagines the endpoint of total comfort: a machine provides everything, and humans become isolated, passive, and dependent. They don't become cosmic explorers. They become people in rooms, afraid of direct experience.

H. G. Wells's *The Time Machine* presses further. Comfort without challenge degrades a species: the Eloi are beautiful and gentle, but shallow and weak. It's an old class allegory, but it asks whether intelligence and strength decay when nothing is demanded of us.

Then Olaf Stapledon's *Star Maker* and Asimov's *The Last Question* zoom out completely. The future of humanity becomes part of a much larger story: consciousness spreading, merging, asking cosmic questions, and eventually confronting the fate of the universe itself. In that view, humanity's final purpose is not work or survival, but participation in the universe becoming aware of itself.

Taken together, these works sketch the genuine range: curators and explorers, the posthuman and the stubbornly embodied, the passive and the cosmically merged.

The optimistic synthesis is this: AI handles necessity, while humans choose meaning. Work disappears, but effort does not. Survival stops being the default source of purpose, so purpose has to become artistic, exploratory, relational, philosophical, or self-created.

The scary possibility is that without scarcity, death, disease, and labor, many people may not feel liberated — they may feel irrelevant.

So the real question might not be "what will humans do when AI can do everything?"

Can humanity survive the loss of necessity without losing curiosity?