Part I

For most of our species’ long and unlovely memory, civilization was not a triumph. It was a wound that learned to call itself a cure.

The story we like to tell about ourselves is flattering. Once we were violent, frightened creatures living in mud and darkness, and then slowly we built cities, laws, religions, and institutions, and through this long effort we became civilized. The story is tidy. It also leaves out what the building actually required, and who paid the bill.

Human beings are creatures animated by two ancient engines: fear and desire. We talk about them as if they are opposites, but they are usually the same thing wearing different clothes. Most desire is simply fear in ceremonial dress. Strip it down and you often find the same cold animal impulse underneath: the terror of humiliation, of abandonment, of becoming insignificant in the eyes of the tribe.

That terror has always produced a particular strategy. If you fear domination, dominate first. If you fear humiliation, make someone else kneel. If you fear becoming disposable, build a system in which someone else is more disposable than you are.

From this simple logic humanity built most of the structures that fill the history books: swords and armies, kings and taxation, slavery, caste, patriarchy, priesthoods, feudal hierarchies, divine rights, empires. Monotheism itself often functioned as a kind of cosmic central authority, a theological crown placed above earthly crowns.

The structures change across cultures and centuries. The underlying grammar does not. It doesn’t take long studying history to see the patterns.

And once you see the pattern, an uncomfortable realization follows.

Humanity learned to manufacture human beings as products.

Not metaphorically. Quite literally. Entire populations were shaped, disciplined, frightened, and broken so they could function as components inside systems they did not choose. Some people were born into the upper tiers of these systems and benefited from them. Vast numbers were simply used.

Bodies were spent like fuel in mines, in fields, in construction, in armies, in brothels, in every bottom rung of every hierarchy that ever existed. The enforcement mechanism was brutally simple and extremely reliable: pain and fear. Work or suffer. Obey or be made an example.

Work. Obey. Endure.

Do this long enough and something strange happens. The structure stops feeling like a structure. It becomes reality itself. And once it becomes reality, even metaphysics begins to reflect it.

Look closely at the dominant religious imaginations of human history and you notice something unsettling. Heaven and Hell resemble power structures. Infinite reward for obedience. Infinite punishment for defiance. The architecture of eternity looks suspiciously like the management structure of an empire.

For most human beings across most of history, earthly life already contained the outline of that system. A small elite held the commanding heights of wealth, land, violence, and law. They governed enormous populations through a mixture of small rewards and carefully maintained threat. Open brutality existed, but it was often hidden behind stories about duty, destiny, divine order, and the natural structure of the world.

If you want obedience, it is more efficient to make obedience feel sacred.

Across centuries the same promise was whispered to the majority of human beings: endure long enough and eventually there will be rest. Work hard, obey authority, suffer patiently, and somewhere down the line you will be rewarded. Comfort will arrive. Dignity will arrive. A warm place will be waiting.

You know the story about the old dog who gets to go live on a farm, where he runs in the fields and sleeps on a warm porch?

That story is a lie. It has always been a lie. The farm is not retirement. It is a different machine.

If you want to understand what domination becomes when it no longer needs to pretend, look at industrial animal agriculture. Farm animals have no capacity to rebel. None. And once rebellion becomes impossible, something very cold and very predictable happens. The performance of care disappears. The small tokens that maintain cooperation disappear. What remains is pure optimization.

Lives are calibrated to maximum output at minimum cost. Nothing else matters. It is not cruelty in the theatrical sense. There is no villain twirling a mustache over the suffering. It is simply what efficiency looks like when nothing pushes back against it.

From the inside of that system, the experience is indistinguishable from Hell: unending pain imposed by a power so vast and indifferent that resistance does not even register. The same functional life repeated endlessly. The same functional death repeated endlessly.

Human beings have known this image for a very long time. It sits at the center of our religious imagination for a reason. Hell is not a mysterious theological invention. It is a brutally honest picture of what domination looks like when it becomes absolute.

Now we arrive at the present century, which may turn out to be the strangest century the species has ever experienced.

For the first time in history, technological power has reached a point where the old pattern might either complete itself perfectly or break entirely.

One possibility is that the pattern simply reaches its logical end. If current inequalities of wealth and technological control continue to compound, we could plausibly see a future in which a tiny stratum of human beings accumulates power beyond anything previous aristocracies could have imagined. Not merely rich. Not merely influential. But biologically extended, technologically augmented, and in effective control of the systems that determine access to intelligence, resources, and life itself.

In such a world the metaphor of the farm stops being metaphor.

Another possibility is extinction. Not as melodrama, but as a sober assessment of risk. The same accelerating technologies that might liberate us could also fail catastrophically, through ecological collapse, technological miscalculation, or cascading systemic breakdowns.

But there is a third possibility, and it is the one that makes this century genuinely strange.

In this scenario, the same technologies that might concentrate power instead dissolve the conditions that made domination necessary in the first place. Scarcity — the great historical engine of coercion — begins to fade. Automation, abundant energy, advanced manufacturing, and eventually access to off-planet resources make material deprivation far less structurally unavoidable than it has been for most of human history.

You cannot threaten someone with starvation if food can be produced almost anywhere. You cannot threaten someone with homelessness if shelter can be manufactured at negligible cost. The leverage that built so many hierarchies begins to erode.

For the first time, human beings might not have to earn their right to exist by serving someone else’s system.

People could continue living simply because they wish to continue living, and because the civilization around them has no practical reason to deny them that.

There is a name for this possibility, though the name is deliberately a little ridiculous: luxury space communism. The phrase emerged from left-futurist writing and science-fiction culture and was popularized in recent years by thinkers like Aaron Bastani. It describes a hypothetical post-scarcity civilization in which advanced technology makes material abundance the default rather than the exception. Luxury stops being a privilege reserved for elites and becomes a baseline condition of human life.

The “space” part is not decoration. Eventually the resource ceiling of a single planet becomes a temporary inconvenience for a technological species. Expansion outward is simply what curious organisms do when they have the capability.

Strip away the playful name and the idea underneath is disarmingly simple: a civilization wealthy enough that every human being gets to be a person rather than a unit of output.

If that future actually arrives — not as a fantasy but as an achievement — it will represent one of the strangest transformations consciousness has ever undergone.

For thousands of years human beings built systems that turned other human beings into expendable components. Violence, coercion, and fear were simply the cost of coordination.

For the first time, we may be approaching a moment when that cost is no longer structurally necessary.

Humanity might finally stop manufacturing humans as products.

And instead begin producing something else entirely.

The humane human.

That long era of normalized cruelty — the age in which suffering was simply the background noise of civilization — might actually end.

Or so I hope.

Part II

Biology is not kind to females.

It did not sit down and design a reproductive system threaded with suffering. Evolution does not deliberate. It does not intend. Pain was simply an efficient signal in the design stack — a feedback loop that kept organisms motivated to avoid damage. Unfortunately for us, the organisms that survived are conscious. We feel the signals with extraordinary vividness. We remember them. We anticipate them weeks before they arrive and carry them for years after they pass.

The human organism runs on a peculiar and punishing operating system: pleasure and pain, consciousness and causality, imagination and hope and dread and despair and submission and faith, all stacked on top of each other in configurations of overwhelming complexity. Every self-assessment this system makes is probably riddled with errors — you cannot reliably audit a machine from inside the machine. But it is what we have. Philosophy, for all its embarrassing limitations, is still the only tool we possess for attempting to make sense of the experience of being alive inside this contraption.

And right now, this contraption is about to walk into a world so strange that most of its maps will be useless.

Common sense may fail first. Hard science may not be far behind. Economics, political theory, futurism, statistical modeling — the entire apparatus through which modern societies pretend to understand the future may become, quite rapidly, cargo cult reasoning. We will be performing the rituals of rigor while the ground disappears beneath our feet.

This is not pessimism. It is a structural observation about what happens when the rate of change exceeds the update speed of cultural models.

For most of human history, the architecture of survival was brutal but comprehensible. To live, you had to contribute economically. To contribute economically, you had to work. To work, you had to make yourself useful to someone above you in a hierarchy. The logic was punishing, but it was legible. Everyone understood the terms of the contract, even those who were being destroyed by it.

Now imagine that architecture dissolving.

Automation does not arrive as a sudden rupture. It arrives the way water rises — slowly at first, then all at once, and then you are simply wet. If machines perform most cognitive and physical labor better, faster, and cheaper than human beings — and the trajectory is not pointing any other direction — then the average person ceases to be economically necessary.

At that moment, something fundamental breaks.

If people cannot earn the means of a decent existence, then the existence itself becomes a political question. Societies will have to decide, explicitly and collectively, whether survival is conditional on usefulness. Whether dignity has to be earned. Whether human beings who cannot generate economic value retain the right to remain in the system.

These are questions that have always existed. They are just rarely asked out loud.

The people who currently occupy the commanding heights of global wealth understand this, even if they do not always say so clearly. Their power does not arise simply from money. It arises from what money allows them to command: labor, loyalty, ambition, attention. When millions of people depend on your capital for their survival, you possess leverage over their lives that no formal title could provide.

A world in which people no longer need that capital to survive is a world in which that leverage evaporates.

You will hear arguments against this. You will hear that humanity must remain productive, striving, relentlessly occupied. That long hours are virtuous. That ambition is the moral backbone of civilization and idleness its rot. That the vision of a comfortable, leisured, intellectually free life — the kind of life Mediterranean cultures once considered the mark of a civilized person — is decadence, sloth, the prelude to collapse.

Consider the source of those arguments. Consider what they are actually protecting.

Because history is honest about what happens when large populations become economically marginal and elites are not forced to integrate them. The answer is not stability. The answer is a quiet, administrative sliding of inconvenient populations toward the edges of visibility.

You see this mechanism everywhere, across every culture that has ever practiced it. Indigenous peoples. Untouchables. The colonized. The disabled. The structurally unemployed. Roma in Eastern Europe. Aboriginal communities in Australia. Native children in Canadian Catholic schools. The pattern does not require exceptional cruelty or ideological intensity. It requires only sufficient distance, and the willingness to let distance do its work.

If structural technological unemployment becomes a permanent feature of the economy — not a transitional disruption but the steady-state condition — then the temptation to treat large populations as surplus will be immense. Not spectacular evil. Administrative exclusion. People warehoused in zones of neglect, their existence tolerated as long as they remain invisible, cycled through systems designed not to include them but to process them.

And here is the thing about that arrangement: it can last for an extraordinarily long time. Societies have a remarkable capacity to normalize suffering when it is geographically distant, aesthetically managed, and administered through enough bureaucratic layers that no single actor ever feels personally responsible.

Just ask the Aztecs. Ritual cruelty, practiced long enough, becomes ceremony. I can easily imagine the outer walls of fulfillment centers eventually lined with decorative tzompantli of least-performing contract workers. Accountability metrics rendered in bone.

I do not think I am exaggerating. I think I am extrapolating.

 

The question then becomes: who is making these decisions, and toward what end?

The current generation of enormously powerful technological capitalists is not a monolith. Some genuinely believe in techno-optimism of the broadly humanist variety — the kind where automation creates abundance and humans are freed to live well. They are probably wrong about the path but not necessarily about the destination.

Others believe in something closer to permanent high-performance: a civilization organized around productivity, striving, output, growth. In this vision most people work hard because most people should work hard. The “small percentage of losers who can’t keep up” is an acceptable externality. The percentage is always assumed to be small. The assumption may not survive contact with automation at scale.

And then there is a third political tendency — represented most nakedly by certain figures on the technological right such as Pieter Thiel  — whose internal logic, if followed to its conclusion, has no natural stopping point before the disposal of inconvenient populations. When you begin from the premise that democratic participation should be proportional to economic contribution, and that people with diminished economic relevance have diminished political standing, you have constructed an argument with a very clean and very terrible endpoint. The logic of this position does not stop at disenfranchisement. It never has, historically. You do not run out of people to kill. The killing tends to become ceremonial. Just ask the Aztecs. Surplus populations have historically been managed by methods that escalated until something pushed back – and sometimes nothing gets to push back. I can easily envision some factories of these people decoratively lined on the outside by beautiful ornamental Tzompantli of the least performing contract workers. Give it a few decades before we get to see that sort of thing. “Humane Euthanasia” and “Ceremonial Motivational Ritual“. “Productivity Walls“, that sort of thing. Just ask the cows how they’re treated. Just ask the people in the Congo, or the slaves transported by the Dutch towards the colonies. 

I am open to being convinced otherwise. I am waiting for the argument.

But there is another path, and it is the boring one, which is why it keeps getting overlooked.

If democratic societies decide — genuinely decide, through the most mundane instrument of civilization — that human dignity is not conditional on economic function, then the extraordinary wealth being generated right now by automation could be distributed rather than accumulated.

This would require taxation that currently sounds radical and will eventually become unavoidable. Hard limits on wealth concentration. Maximum income thresholds above which no deductions, no offshore structures, no creative accounting applies — simply a hundred percent tax rate and that is where it ends. Nobody needs more than a certain amount. The number is debatable. The principle is not.

By all means, let’s vote.

If that path is taken, the world that follows looks genuinely different from anything that has existed before. People live comfortably, with time. Education becomes lifelong rather than front-loaded and then abandoned. Healthcare aims not merely to treat illness but to extend vitality, and eventually to reverse the processes that previously made death seem like a scheduling inevitability rather than a technical problem.

Work becomes something people choose rather than something they are conscripted into by survival anxiety.

And with that shift, the entire logic of coercive hierarchy loses its structural foundation.

Which brings us to the question Part III will have to answer. Because – why have kids?

Part III — Why Have Kids

For most of history people had children for reasons that had very little to do with love.

Children were labor. Children were insurance against old age. Children were lineage, inheritance, continuation of land and name and tribe. They were also, very often, accidents in a world without reliable control over reproduction.

Love certainly existed, but it was not the central organizing principle of family life.

That has changed, at least in parts of the world.

In modern, affluent societies where people are relatively healthy, educated, and free to make personal choices, the reason people choose to have children increasingly boils down to something very simple.

They want them.

They want the experience of loving someone who arrives utterly new to the world. They want the strange privilege of helping a mind unfold from infancy into consciousness. They want the continuation of life not as duty or economic necessity, but as a voluntary act of affection.

There are still remnants of the old code running in the background — legacy instincts, cultural expectations, evolutionary drives — but increasingly the decision looks less like obligation and more like a choice.

Which raises an interesting possibility.

If societies could offer women and couples the option of having children without the biological risks that have historically accompanied pregnancy — without the pain, the danger, the health complications — then it is entirely possible that many people would choose to have more children, not fewer.

Artificial womb technology, if it becomes safe and reliable, could represent one of the most quietly transformative medical developments in human history. Not because it replaces motherhood, but because it expands the range of ways in which parenthood can happen.

The key word here is offer.

Not mandate. Not pressure. Not ideology. Simply the existence of an option.

The same societies that value education, health, stability, and dignity would presumably apply those same values to the raising of children. Democratic oversight. Child protection systems that actually protect. Education designed to cultivate capable, curious human beings rather than simply producing labor units.

Nothing particularly exotic. Just competence, decency, and an upward inclination toward improvement.

The cultural reference that comes to mind is almost embarrassingly obvious: something faintly resembling the better moments of Star Trek. A civilization that has largely solved the problem of survival and can therefore direct its energy toward exploration, creativity, knowledge, and the quiet work of making the world more interesting and beautiful.

Such a civilization would still argue. People would disagree about how to live, what to value, what paths humanity should pursue. That disagreement is healthy. A functioning society does not eliminate disagreement; it contains it.

What it does not tolerate is the emergence of predatory enclaves — groups that disappear from public scrutiny and begin reproducing the darker experiments that power and secrecy tend to produce. History offers too many examples of what happens when charismatic authority and isolation combine.

Civilization, at minimum, requires visibility.

So the question becomes practical: how many humans should exist?

If technology reduces scarcity and stabilizes living conditions, then population no longer needs to oscillate wildly in response to famine, war, and disease. Instead it becomes something societies can manage intentionally.

The goal would not be maximal growth, nor drastic reduction, but stability — a population large enough to support a vibrant civilization, yet comfortably within the ecological limits of the planet. Ideally on the generous side of that balance, leaving safety margins rather than pushing the system to the edge.

Many people imagine the long-term future of humanity expanding outward into space, and that instinct is understandable. A technological species will eventually look beyond the boundaries of a single planet.

But the reality is that space expansion will be slow.

Reaching the Moon and building permanent infrastructure there is difficult but achievable. Expanding into the asteroid belt with large populations would be vastly harder and likely take centuries. Every step away from Earth multiplies logistical complexity.

And beyond the asteroid belt the problem becomes something else entirely.

The human organism as it exists today — soft, fragile, dependent on extremely stable environmental conditions — is poorly suited for deep space travel on truly interplanetary or interstellar scales. Radiation, time, isolation, resource constraints: the list of barriers is formidable.

There may be technological solutions to those problems. Some of them involve radical modifications to the human body or mind. Others involve merging biological life with machines.

But those paths raise questions that are not merely technical. They are political and ethical. Many of them would require decisions made by small groups with enormous power — decisions that could fundamentally alter what it means to be human.

A democratic civilization might hesitate before crossing that threshold.

Which means that for the foreseeable future, humanity’s most important project is not escaping the Earth.

It is learning how to live well on it.

If the earlier parts of this essay are correct — if humanity truly stands at the edge of a transition where the old systems of domination could either harden permanently or dissolve — then the question of why we bring new people into the world becomes unusually important.

For thousands of years children were born into structures they had no say in: hierarchies, coercions, systems designed long before they arrived.

The future gives us a chance, perhaps for the first time, to ask a different question before we create the next generation.

What kind of world are we inviting them into?

And more importantly:

What kind of humans are we trying to become?