Plow of the Mind
I often feel a wave of existential dread when I imagine a post-AGI world. Writing helps me wrestle with that fear. Below is a poem that expresses my anxiety and hope for a future where humans and AGI move forward together in harmony. Hopefully you enjoy it.
A young engineer sits in silence,
eyes haunted by futures of empty hands.
Factories hushed, offices hollow,
a world stripped of work, stripped of worth.
But history whispers through the dread:
When the plow carved Earth,
farmers did not vanish, fields multiplied.
When the elevator rose,
cities touched the sky.
When the calculator ticked,
minds leapt toward deeper riddles.
Innovation births not an ending,
but doors we cannot yet see.
Fear remains, yet fear is fuel.
Together we march, not into ruin,
but into the unknown promise of progress.
And suddenly the weight lifts
What if this could work?
What if abundance is the next frontier?
No longer shackled to labor’s grind,
we might chase questions that
cannot be answered by machines.
For the answer is simple: 42
but the purpose is not.
Our charge in a post-AGI dawn
is not to end the search for meaning,
but to ask, with renewed courage:
What is the right question?