Thesis: The missing element in forecasting the future of AI is to understand that AI needs culture just as humans need culture.

One of the most significant scientific insights into understanding our own humanity was the relatively recent insight that we are the product of more than just the evolution of genes. While we are genetic descendents of some ape-like creatures in the past, we modern humans are also molded each generation by a shared learning that is passed along by a different mechanism outside of biology. Commonly called “culture”, this human-created environment forms much of what we consider best about our species. Culture is so prevalent in our lives, especially our modern urban lives, that it is invisible and hard to recognize. But without human culture to support us, we humans would be unrecognizable.

A solo, naked human trying to survive in the prehistoric wilderness, without the benefit of the skills and knowledge gained by other humans, would rarely be able to learn fast enough to survive on their own. Very few humans by themselves would be able to discover the secrets of making fire, or the benefits of cooking food, or to discover the medicines found in plants, or learn all the behaviors of animals to hunt, let alone the additional educations need for the habits of planting crops, learning how to knap stone points, sew and fish.

Humanity is chiefly a social endeavor. Because we invented language – the most social thing ever – we have been able to not only coordinate and collaborate in the present, but also to pass knowledge and know-how along from generation to generation. This is often pictured as a parallel evolution to the fundamental natural selection evolution of our bodies. Inside the long biological evolution happening in our cells, learning is transmitted through our genes. Anything good we learn as a species is conveyed through inheritable DNA. And that is where learning ends for most natural creatures. 

But in humans, we launched an extended evolution that transmits good things outside of the code of DNA, embedded in the culture conveyed in families, clans, and human society as a whole. From the very beginning this culture contains laws, norms, morals, best practices, personal education, world views, knowledge of the world, learnable survival skills, altruism, and a pool of hard-won knowledge about reality. While individual societies have died out, human culture as a whole has continued to expand, deepen, grow, and prosper, so that every generation benefits from this accumulation.

Our newest invention – artificial intelligence – is usually viewed in genetic terms. The binary code of AI is copied, deployed, and improved upon. New models are bred from the code of former leading models – inheriting their abilities –, and then distributed to users. One of the first significant uses for this AI is in facilitating the art of coding, and in particular helping programmers to code new and better AIs. So this DNA-like code experiences compounding improvement as it spreads into human society. We can trace the traits and abilities of AI by following its inheritance in code.

However, this genetic version of AI has been limited in its influence on humans so far. While the frontier of AI research runs fast, its adoption and diffusion runs slow. Despite some unexpected abilities, AI so far has not penetrated very deep into society. By 2025 it has disrupted our collective attention, but it has not disrupted our economy, or jobs, or our daily lives (with very few exceptions).

I propose that AI will not disrupt human daily life until it also migrates from a genetic-ish code-based substrate to a widespread, heterodox culture-like platform. AI needs to have its own culture in order to evolve faster, just as humans did. It cannot remain just a thread of improving software/hardware functions; it must become an embedded ecosystem of entities that adapt, learn, and improve outside of the code stack. This AI epizone will enable its cultural evolution, just as the human society did for humans.

Civilization began as songs, stories, ballads around a campfire, and institutions like grandparents and shamans conveyed very important qualities not carried in our genes. Later, religions and schools carried more. Then we invented writing, reading, texts and pictures to substitute for reflexes. When we invented books, libraries, courts, calendars, and math, we moved a huge amount of our inheritance to this collaborative, distributed platform of culture that was not owned by anyone.

AI civilization requires a similar epizone running outside the tech stack. It begins with humans using AI everyday, and an emerging skill set of AI collaboration taught by the AI whisperers.There will be alignment protocols, and schools for shaping the moralities of AIs. There will be shamans and doctors to monitor and nurture the mental health of the AIs. There needs to be corporate best practices for internal AIs, and review committees overseeing their roles. New institutions for reviewing, hiring and recommending various species of AI. Associations of AIs that work best together. Whole departments are needed to train AIs for certain roles and applications, as some kinds of training will take time (not just downloaded). The AIs themselves will evolve AI-only interlinguals, which needs mechanisms to preserve and archive. There’ll be ecosystems of AIs co-dependent on each other. AIs that police other AIs. The AIs need libraries of content and intermediate weights, latent spaces, and petabytes of data that need to be remembered rather than re-invented.  There are the human agents that have to manage the purchase of, and maintenance of, this AI epizone, at local, national and global levels. This is a civilization of AIs.

A solo, naked AI won’t do much on their own. AIs need a wide epizone to truly have consequence. They need to be surrounded and embedded into an AI culture, just as humans need culture to thrive.

Stewart Brand devised a beautiful analogy to understand civilizational traits. He explains that the functions of the world can be ranked by their pace layers, which depend on all the layers below it. Running the fastest is the fashion layers which fluctuate daily. Not far behind it in speed is the tech layer, which includes the tech of AI. It changes by the week. Below that, (and dependent on it), is the infrastructure layer, which moves slower, and even slower below that is culture, which crawls in comparison. (At the lowest, slowest level is nature, glacial in its speed.) All these layers work at the same time, and upon each other, and many complex things share multiple levels. Artificial Intelligence also works at several levels. Its code-base improves at internet speed, but its absorption and deployment runs at the cultural level. In order for AI to be truly implemented, it must be captured by human culture. That will take time, perhaps decades, because that is the pace of culture. No matter how quick the tech runs, the AI culture will run slower.

That is good news in many respects, because part of what the AI epizone does is incorporate and integrate the inheritable improvements in the tech stack and put them into the slower domain of AI culture. That gives us time to adapt to the coming complex changes. But to prepare for the full consequences of these AIs, we must give our attention to the emerging epizone of AIs outside the code stack.

• This article “Fetility on Demand” by @RuxandraTeslo is a fantastic report on one way to increase the fertility rate by artificially extending reproductive age. Fertility on demand

The other day I was slicing a big loaf of dark Italian bread from a bakery; it is a pleasure to carve thick hunks of hearty bread to ready for the toaster. While I was happily slicing the loaf, the all-American phrase “the best thing since sliced bread” popped into my head. So I started wondering, what was the problem that pre-sliced bread solved? Why was sliced bread so great?

Shouldn’t the phrase be “the best thing since penicillin”, or something like that?

What is so great about this thing we now take for granted? My thoughts cascaded down a sequence of notions about sliced bread. It is one of those ubiquitous things we don’t think about.

1. Maybe the bread they are talking about is fluffy white Wonder bread that crushes really easy. That might be hard to slice, and so getting white bread pre sliced is nice.
2. Maybe the bread they are talking about is not as tender as it is today, and it was actually tough to slice very thin for a sandwich. Buying pre slice saved embarrassment, and so in that respect it was a wonder.
3. Maybe it is hard to automate sliced bread, and while not that much of a selling point, maybe it took some technical innovation to make it happen. Otto Frederick Rohwedder, an American inventor, developed the first successful bread slicing machine in 1928, but it took some years for the invention to trickle into bakeries around the country.
4. Maybe this was a marketing ploy by commercial bread bakers, to sell a feature that becomes a necessity.
5. Maybe this phrase has always been said ironically. Maybe from the beginning everyone knew that sliced bread was a nothing burger, and it was meant to indicate that the new thing was no big deal.  Only later did the original meaning lapse and it become un-ironic.
6. Maybe it is still ironic, and I am the last person to misunderstand that it is not to be taken as an indicator of goodness.

Turns out I am not the first to wonder about this. The phrase’s origins lie — no surprise — in marketing the first commerical sliced bread in the 1930s. It was touted in ads as the best new innovation in baking. The innovation was not slices per se, but uniform slices. During WWII in the US, sliced bread was briefy banned in 1943 to conserve the extra paper wrapping around sliced bread for more paper for the war effort, but the ban was rescinded after 2 months because so many people complained of missing the convienence of slice bread — a time when bread was more central to our diets. With the introduction of a mass-manufacture white bread like Wonder Bread, the phrase became part of its marketing hype.

I think the right answer is 4 — its a marketing ploy for an invention that turns a luxury into a necessity. I can’t imagine any serious list of our best inventions that would include sliced bread, although it is handy, and is not going away.

That leads me to wonder: what invention today, full of our infactuation, will be the sliced bread of the future?

Instagram? Drones? Tide pods, Ozempic?

This is the best thing since ozempic!

Imagine 50 years from now a Public Intelligence that was a distributed, open-source, non-commercial artificial intelligence, operated like the internet, and available to the whole world. This public AI would be a federated system, not owned by any one entity, but powered by millions of participants to create an aggregate intelligence beyond what one host could offer. Public intelligence could be thought of as an inter-intelligence, an AI composed of other AIs, in the way that the internet is a network of networks. This AI of AIs, would be open and permissionless: any AI can join, and its joining would add to the global intelligence. It would be transnational, and wholly global – an AI commons.  Like the internet, it would run on protocols that enabled interoperability and standards. Public intelligence would be paid for by usage locally, just as you pay for your internet access, storage, or hosting. Local generators of intelligence, or contributors of data, would operate for profit, but in order to get the maximum public intelligence, you need to share your work in this public non-commercial system.

For an ordinary citizen, the AI commons of public intelligence would be an always-on resource, that would deliver as much intelligence as they required, or are willing to pay for. Minimum amounts would almost be free. Maximum amounts would be gated and priced accordingly. AI of many varieties will be available from your own personal devices, whether it be a phone, glasses, in a vehicle, or in a bot in your house. Fantastic professional intelligence can also be bought from specialty AI providers, like Anthropic and DeepSeek. But public intelligence offers all these plus planetary-scale knowledge and a super intelligence that works at huge scales.

Algos within public intelligence route hard questions one way and easy questions in another, so for most citizens, they only deal with the public intelligence with one interface. While public intelligence is composed of thousands of varieties of AI, and each of those comprises an ecosystem of cognitions, to the user these appear as a single entity, a public intelligence. A good metaphor for the technical face of this aggregated AI commons, is to imagine it as a rainforest, crowded with thousands of species, all co-dependent on each other, some species consuming what the other produces, all of them essential for the productivity of the forest.

Public intelligence is a rainforest of thousands of species of AI, and in summation it becomes –  like our forests and oceans – a public commons, a public utility at a global scale.

At the moment, the training material for artificial intelligences we have is haphazard, opaque, and partial. So far, as of 2025, LLMs have been trained on a very small, and very peculiar set of writings, that are far from either the best, or the entirety, of what we know. For archaic legal reasons, much of the best training material has not been used. Ideally, the public intelligence would be trained on ALL the books, journals and documents of the world, in all languages, in order to create for the public good the best AIs we can make for all. 

As the public intelligence grows, it will continue to benefit from having access to new information and new knowledge, including very specific, and local information. This is one way its federated nature works. If I can share with the public intelligence what I learn that is truly new, the public intelligence gains from my participation, and in aggregate gains from billions of other users as they contribute.

A chief characteristic of public intelligence is that it is global, or perhaps I should say, planetary. It is not only accessible by the public globally, it also is trained on a globally diverse set of training materials in all languages, and it is also planetary in its dimensions. For instance, this AI commons integrates environmental sensing data – such as weather, water, air traffic – from around the world, and from the cloak of satellites circling the planet. Billions of moisture sensors in farmland, tide flows in wetlands, air quality sensors in cities, rain gauges in backyards and trillions of other environmental sensors feed rivers of data into the public intelligence creating a sort of planetary cognition grid.

Public intelligence would encompass big thoughts about what is happening planet wide, as well as millions of smaller thoughts on what is happening in niche areas that would feed the intelligence with specific information and data, such as DNA sampling of sewage water from cities, to monitor the health of cities.

There is no public intelligence right now. Currently Open AI is not a public intelligence; there is very little open about it beyond its name. Other models in 2025 that are classified as open source, such as Meta’s, and Deepseek’s, are leaning in the right direction, but only open and to very narrow degrees. There have been several initiatives to create a public intelligence, such as Eleuther.ai, and LAION, but there is no real progress or articulated vision to date.

The NSF (in the US) is presently funding an initiative to coordinate international collaboration on networked AI. This NSF AI Institute for Future Edge Networks and Distributed Intelligence is primarily concerned with trying to solve hard technical problems such as 6G and 7G wireless distributed communication. 

Diagram from NSF AI Institute for Future Edge Networks and Distributed Intelligence

Among these collaborators is a program at Carnegie Mellon University focused on distributed AI. They call this system AI Fusion, and say “AI will evolve from today’s highly structured, controlled, and centralized architecture to a more flexible, adaptive, and distributed network of devices.” The program imagines this fusion as an emerging platform that enables distributed artificial intelligence to run on many devices, in order to be more scalable, more flexible, more active, in redirecting itself when needed, or even finding data it needs instead of waiting to be given it. But in none of these research agendas is the mandate of a public resource, open source, or an intelligence commons more than a marginal concern..

Sketch from AI Fusion

A sequence of steps will be needed to make a public intelligence:

• We need technical breakthroughs in “Sparse Activation Routing,” enabling efficient distribution of computation across heterogeneous devices from smartphones to data centers. We need algos for dynamic resource allocation, automated model verification, and enhanced distributed security protocols. And we need breakthroughs in collective knowledge synthesis, enabling the public intelligence to identify and resolve contradictions across domains automatically.
• We need to release a Public Intelligence Protocol, establishing standards for secure model sharing, training, and interoperability, and establish a large-scale federated learning testbed connecting 50+ global universities demonstrating the feasibility of training complex models without centralizing data. A crucial technology is continuous-learning protocols, which enable models to safely update in real-time based on global usage patterns while preserving privacy.
• We need to pioneer national policies in small hi-tech countries such as Estonia, Finland, and New Zealand, explicitly supporting public intelligence infrastructure as digital public goods as a place to prototype this commons. 
• An essential development would be the first legal framework for an AI commons, creating a new class of digital infrastructure with specific governance and access rights. This would go hand in hand with two other needed elements: “Differential Privacy at Scale” techniques, allowing sensitive data to be used for training while providing mathematical guarantees against privacy breaches. And “Community Intelligence Trusts,” allowing local communities to maintain specialized knowledge and capabilities within the broader ecosystem.

There is a very natural tendency for AI to become centralized by a near monopoly, and probably a corporate monopoly. Intelligence is a networked good. The more it is used, the more it can learn. The more it learns, the smarter it gets. The smarter it gets, the more it is used. Ad infinitum. A really good AI can swell very fast as it is used and gets better. All these dynamics move AI to become centralized and a winner-take-all. The alternative to public intelligence is a corporate or a national intelligence. If we don’t empower public intelligence, then we have no choice but to empower non-public intelligences. 

The aim of public intelligence is to make AI a global commons, a public good for maximum people. Political will to make this happen is crucial, but equally essential are the technical means, the brilliant innovations needed that we don’t have yet, and are not obvious. To urge those innovations along, it is helpful to have an image to inspire us. 

The image is this: A Public Intelligence owned by everyone, composed of billions of local AIs, needing no permission to join and use, powered and paid for by users, trained on all the books and texts of humankind, operating at the scale of the planet, and maintained by common agreement.

It is odd that science fiction did not predict the internet. There are no vintage science fiction movies about the world wide web, nor movies that showed the online web as part of the future. We expected picture phones, and online encyclopedias, but not the internet. As a society we missed it. Given how pervasive the internet later became this omission is odd.

On the other hand, there have been hundreds of science fiction stories and movies predicting artificial intelligence. And in nearly every single one of them, AI is a disaster. They are all cautionary tales. Either the robots take over, or they cause the end of the world, or their super intelligence overwhelms our humanity, and we are toast.

This ubiquitous dystopia of our future with AI is one reason why there is general angst among the public for this new technology. The angst was there even before the tech arrived. The public is slightly fearful and wary of AI based not on their experience with it, but because this is the only picture of it they have ever seen. Call up an image of a smart robot and you get the Terminator or its ilk. There are no examples of super AI working out for good. We literally can’t imagine it.

Another factor in this contrast between predicting AI and not predicting the internet is that some technologies are just easier to imagine. In 1963 the legendary science fiction author Arthur C. Clarke created a chart listing existing technologies that had not been anticipated widely, in comparison to other technologies that had a long career in our imaginations.

Clarke called these the Expected and the Unexpected, published in his book Profiles of the Future in 1963.

Clarke does not attempt to explain why some inventions are expected while others are not, other than to note that many of the expected inventions have been anticipated since ancient times. In fact their reality – immortality, invisibility, levitation – would have been called magic in the past.

Artificial beings – robots, AI – are in the Expected category. They have been so long anticipated that there has been no other technology or invention as widely or thoroughly anticipated before it arrived as AI. What invention might even be second to AI in terms of anticipation? Flying machines may have been longer desired, but there was relatively little thought put into imagining what their consequences might be. Whereas from the start of the machine age, humans have not only expected intelligent machines, but have expected significant social ramifications from them as well. We’ve spent a full century contemplating what robots and AI would do when it arrived. And, sorry to say, most of our predictions are worrisome.

So as AI is beginning to finally hatch, it is not being as fully embraced as say the internet was. There are attempts to regulate it before it is operational, in the hopes of reducing its expected harms. This premature regulation is unlikely to work because we simply don’t know what harms AI and robots will really do, even though we can imagine quite a lot of them.

This lopsided worry, derived from being Over Expected, may be a one-time thing unique to AI, or it may become a regular pattern for tech into the future, where we spend centuries brewing, stewing, scheming, and rehearsing for an invention long before it arrives. That would be good if we also rehearsed for the benefits as well as harms. We’ve spent a century trying to imagine what might go wrong with AI. Let’s spend the next decade imagining what might go right with AI.

Even better, what are we not expecting that is almost upon us? Let’s reconsider the unexpecteds.

We aren’t the only species on this planet that have domesticated another species. There is one kind of ancient ant that herds and cares for insect aphids in order to milk them of honeydew sugar. But we are the only species to have domesticated more than one species. Over time humans have domesticated dogs, cats, cows, horses, chickens, ducks, sheep, goats, camels, pigs, guinea pigs, and rabbits, among many others. We have modified their genes with selective breeding so that their behavior aligns with ours. For example, we have tweaked the genetic makeup of a wild dog so that it wants to guard our sheep. And we have designed wild cattle to allow us to milk it in exchange for food. In each case of domestication we alter genetics by clever breeding over time, using our minds to detect and select traits. In a very real sense, the tame dog and milk cow were invented by humans, and were among the earliest human inventions. Along each step of the process our ancestors imagined a better version of what they had, and then made a better version happen. Domestication is for the most part, an act of imagination.

One of the chief characteristics of domesticated animals is their reduced aggression compared to wild types. Tame dogs, cats, cattle and goats, are much more tolerant of others and more social than their feral versions. This acquired tameness is why we can work close with them. In addition, domestication brings morphological changes to the skulls of adults – they resemble the young more with larger wider eyes, smaller teeth, flatter rounder faces, and more slender bones. Tame dogs look like wolf puppies, and domesticated cats more like lion kittens. 

This retention of juvenile traits into adulthood is called neoteny and is considered a hallmark of domestication. The reduction of certain types of aggression is also a form of neoteny. The behavior of domesticated animals is similar to that of juvenile animals: more trusting of strangers, less hostile aggression over threats, less violent in-group fighting. 

In the 1950s, the Russian geneticist Dmitry Belyaev started breeding wild silver foxes in captivity, selecting the friendliest of each generation to breed into the next. Each generation of less aggressive foxes displayed more puppy-like features: rounder, flatter heads, wider eyes, floppy ears. Within 20 generations he had bred domesticated foxes.

Later analysis of their genomes in 2018 showed the presence of a set of genes shared with other domesticated animals, suggesting that there are “domestication” genes. Some scientists propose that dozens of interacting genes form a “domestication syndrome” that will alter features and behaviors in a consistent direction across many species at once. 

Although wolves were domesticated into dogs in several regions of the world around 15 to 40 thousand years ago, they were not the first animals to be domesticated. We were. Homo sapiens may have been the first species to select for these genes. When anthropologists compare the morphological features of modern humans to our immediate ancestors like the Neanderthal and Denisovans, humans display neoteny. Humans resemble juvenile Neanderthal, with rounder falter faces, shorter jaws with smaller teeth, and slender bones. And in fact the differences between a modern human skull and a Neanderthal skull parallel those between a dog and its wild wolf ancestor. [See figure below; Source.]

The gene BAZ1B influences a network of developmental genes, and is one of the gene networks found in the domesticated silver foxes. In a rare human genetic disorder, the gene BAZ1B is duplicated twice, resulting in a person with longer jaws and longer teeth, and social awkwardness. In another rare genetic disorder called Williams-Beuren syndrome, the same BAZ1B gene is not doubled, it is missing. This omission results in “elfin” features, rounder face, short chin, and extreme overly friendliness and trust of strangers – a type of extreme neoteny.  A network of developmental genes controlled by BAZ1B are common in all modern humans but absent in Neanderthals, suggesting our own juvenile-like domestication has been genetically selected.

What’s distinctive about humans is that homo sapiens domesticated themselves. We are self-domesticated apes. Anthropologist Brian Hare characterizes recent human evolution (Late Pleistocene) as “Survival of the Friendliest”, arguing that in our self-domestication we favored prosociality – the tendency to be friendly, cooperative, and empathetic. We chose the most cooperative, the least aggressive, the less bullying types, and that trust in others resulted in greater prosperity, which in turn spread neoteny genes, and other domestication traits, into our populations.

Domesticated species often show increased playfulness, extended juvenile behavior, and even enhanced social learning abilities. Humans continued to extend their childhood far later than almost any other animal. This extended childhood enabled an extended time to learn beyond inherent instincts, but it also demanded greater parental resources and nuanced social bonds.

We are the first animals we domesticated. Not dogs. We first domesticated ourselves, and then we were able to domesticate dogs. Our domestication is not just about neoteny and reduced aggression and increased sociability. We also altered other genes and traits.

For at least a million years hominins have been using fire. Many animals and all apes have the manual dexterity to start a fire, but only hominins have the cognitive focus needed to ignite a fire from scratch and keep it going. Fires serve many purposes, including heat, light, protection from predators, annealing sharp points, and control burns for flushing out prey. But its chief consequence was fire’s ability to cook food. Cooking significantly reduced the time humans needed to forage, chew, and digest, freeing up time for other social activities. Cooking acted as a second stomach for humans, by pre-digesting hard-to-digest ingredients, releasing more nutrients that could be used to nourish a growing brain. Over many generations of cooking-fed humans, this invention altered our jaws and teeth, reduced our gut, and enlarged our brains. Our invention changed our genes.

Once we began to domesticate ungulates like cows and sheep, we began to consume their milk in many forms. This milk was especially important in raising children to healthy adults. But fairly quickly (on biological time scales, 8,000 years) in areas with domesticated ungulates, adults acquired the genetic ability to digest lactose. Again our invention altered our genes, enlarging our options. We changed ourselves in an elemental, foundational way.

In my 2010 book, What Technology Wants, I made this argument, which I believe is the first time anyone suggested that humans domesticated themselves:

We are not the same folks who marched out of Africa. Our genes have coevolved with our inventions. In the past 10,000 years alone, in fact, our genes have evolved 100 times faster than the average rate for the previous 6 million years. This should not be a surprise. As we domesticated the dog (in all its breeds) from wolves and bred cows and corn and more from their unrecognizable ancestors, we, too, have been domesticated. We have domesticated ourselves. Our teeth continue to shrink (because of cooking, our external stomach), our muscles thin out, our hair disappears. Technology has domesticated us. As fast as we remake our tools, we remake ourselves. We are coevolving with our technology, and so we have become deeply dependent on it. If all technology—every last knife and spear—were to be removed from this planet, our species would not last more than a few months. We are now symbiotic with technology….We have domesticated our humanity as much as we have domesticated our horses. Our human nature itself is a malleable crop that we planted 50,000 years ago and continue to garden even today.

Our self-domestication is just the start of our humanity. We are self-domesticated apes, but more important, we are apes that have invented ourselves. Just as the control of fire came about because of our mindful intentions, so did the cow and corn arise from our minds. Those are inventions as clear as the plow and the knife. And just as domesticated animals were inventions, as we self-domesticated, we self-invented ourselves, too. We are self-invented humans.

We invented our humanity. We invented cooking, we invented human language, we invented our sense of fairness, duty, and responsibility. All these came intentionally, out our imaginations of what could be. To the fullest extent possible, all the traits that we call “human” in contrast to either “animal” or “nature,” are traits that we created for ourselves. We self-selected our character, and crafted this being called human. In a real sense we collectively chose to be human.

We invented ourselves. I contend this is our greatest invention. Neither fire, the wheel, steam power, nor anti-biotics or AI is the greatest invention of humankind. 0ur greatest invention is our humanity.

And we are not done inventing ourselves yet.

Summary: Human populations will start to decrease globally in a few more decades. Thereafter fewer and few humans will be alive to contribute labor and to consume what is made. However at the same historical moment as this decrease, we are creating millions of AIs and robots and agents, who could potentially not only generate new and old things, but also consume them as well, and to continue to grow the economy in a new and different way. This is a Economic Handoff, from those who are born to those who are made.

It has been nearly a thousand years since we last saw the total number of humans on this planet decrease year by year. For nearly a millennium we have lived with growing populations, and faster rates of growth. But in the coming decades, for the first time in a thousand years, the number of deaths on the planet each year will exceed the number of births. This seems hard to believe at first because superficially there is no evidence for that change in direction. As this chart shows, the line wants to go up.

While the fertility of humans has been declining for decades, it was mainly in the developed world, while the rest of the world kept breeding prolifically. But starting a decade ago, even the developing parts of the globe have experienced declines in fertility as they developed. Presently we have evidence that fertility rates are declining everywhere on the planet. And the rate of that fertility decline is starting to plunge much faster than anyone alive expected. The line of fertility wants to go down.

The key metric of fertility is the replacement level. If the total fertility rate is below replacement, then over time, the population decreases, because the current humans don’t replace themselves in numbers. Right now in 2025 every developed country except one (Israel) is below replacement and getting lower each year. Some countries in East Asia are so far below replacement that they are already losing population. Nearly every other country in the world is following this pattern of rapidly modernizing, reducing their birth rate in a one-way direction downward. Not a single country anywhere has been able to raise their birth rate above replacement once it dips below that threshold. It’s like a black hole.

Since the year 2000, the official forecasts of what the world population would be in the near future have been incorrectly too high each year, because it has been hard to believe fertility rates could fall so fast and not bounce back. Year after year the UN and others keep expecting fertility to bounce back, but it doesn’t. In fact, year and after it collapses even more, and yet the official projections expect fertility to recover above replacement world-wide. 

The official date of world population decline is expected in some four decades but I suspect it will happen in only two decades. Perhaps even as early as 2040. 

Many smart people welcome this depopulation without realizing that we don’t have a recovery or brake function. They believe that once the world population shrinks to a more “sustainable” size, it will level out. This is the same fantasy that the UN has had that population has to bounce back by itself. But so far no fertility remedy any region has tried has been successful in turning the rate around. Neither housing, child-care, child credits or even payments of $75,000 per newborn has made a difference. It may be that all such benefits have to be enlarged, maybe 10 times, a hundred times, before they can reverse the decline. Because the population will not level off, will keep decreasing to zero, unless something reverses it.  What will it be?

Even if we can slow down the decline of the average total fertility rate, we are headed into a brand new territory humans have never been in before. In the ancient past, there was little progress in living standards. In the last 900 years, all our progress in longevity, safety, well-being have all been accompanied – if not fueled by – rising populations. The curves of progress and the curves of population increase are highly correlated. And of course, they are mutually reinforcing. More progress enables more children to live, and older people to live longer, which gives everyone more chances to improve the world. So increased populations increase progress which increases population which increases progress.

That was before. Now suddenly, in the coming decades of this century we are entering a new regime of humanity. We want increasing living standards and progress while we decrease population. Every year we want better standards while we have fewer people. Every year we want more options, more choices, better things, more innovation, with fewer workers, smaller audiences, and smaller markets. Every year the pool of potential customers you have gets smaller. Every year, your potential audience shrinks. Every year the labor pool contracts. The population of countries halve. The population of little towns dry up. 

The capitalist system we have built around the globe thrives on growth. Progress has been keyed to growth of markets, growth of labor, growth of capital, growth of everything. However in the second half of this century, there will be no growth in humans. So to continue a rise in living standards for those who are born, we will have to devise an economy that does not rely on the growth of humans. We have no idea what that kind of economic system might look like. Most likely it has to redefine growth as a type of maturity, of gaining betterment, instead of just gaining mass. Maybe it entails UBIs and other economic innovations.

I think it is no coincidence that at the historical moment that humans progress themselves to the point of not breeding because it is inconvenient, that they invent a million virtual beings, a billion artificial minds, trillions of robots and a zillion working agents. Think of this as a handoff – a shift from one regime based on the biologically born to another based on the manufactured made. We are in transition from the world of the Born handing off to the world of the Made.

The economy of the Born is powered by human attention, human desires, human biases, human labor, human attitudes, human consumption. The economy of the Made, a synthetic economy, is powered by artificial minds, machine attention, synthetic labor, virtual needs, and manufactured desires. Most of the materials produced in this economy will be consumed not by humans, but by other machines. Most of the communications will be sent between machines; most of the materials manufactured will be used by robots for the benefit of other robots. Most of the thinking done, will be done by AI agents for other AI agents. Most media content will be generated by avatars for other avatars. Eventually some of these agents may accrue degrees of autonomy; the economist Robin Hanson calls these autonomous virtual beings who consume, ems.  My ems, or my agents, may watch a million times more TV or video than I watch so that the quality of what I actually watch with their help is a million times better. 

Ultimately, humans are the main beneficiary of this system. We create this synthetic economy of machines in order to continue the progress of our own lives. In a sense, we invite the trillions of synthetic agents into our realm so that our realm can continue. We might at first be bothered by the fact that every year a great proportion of the economic activity is consumed by synthetics, but after a while we’ll understand that this vast economic foundation is needed to serve the relatively  few humans that remain. 

Our role in the economy is to do all the kinds of things that would not count as productive. Make art, make music, create crazy things because we can, explore the frontiers of reality, and discover new ideas (with the help of genius machines), try stuff, invent new desires we did not know we had, be creative in a different way than machines are. Also, sit with each other when we are sick, have meals with friends –you know, the most important things in the universe to do.

The purpose of handing the economy off to the synths is so that we can do the kinds of tasks that every human would wake up in the morning eager to do. There should not be any human doing a task they find a waste of their talent. If it is a job where productivity matters, a human should not be doing it. Productivity is for robots. Humans should be doing the jobs where inefficiency reigns – art, exploration, invention, innovation, small talk, adventure, companionship. All the productive chores should be handled by the billions of AIs we make.

Therefore our task right now – as humans – is to make sure that in the following decades as our biological numbers start to shrink on this planet, that we can repopulate it with a sufficient number of synthetic agents, bots, and robots with sufficient intelligence, grit, perseverance, and moral training to take over the economy in time to keep our living standards rising.

We are not replacing existing humans with bots, nor are we replacing unborn humans with bots. Rather we are replacing never-to-be-born humans with bots, and the relationship that we have with those synthetic agents and ems, will be highly mutual. We build an economy around their needs, and propelled by their labor, and rewarding their work, but all of this is in service of our own definition of progress and human success.

I’ve been seriously traveling for more than 50 years, and I’ve learned a lot.

I’ve traveled solo, and I’ve led a tour group of 40 friends. I’ve slept in dormitories and I’ve stayed in presidential suites with a butler. I’ve hitchhiked penniless for months, and I’ve flown by private jet. I’ve traveled months with siblings, and with total strangers. I’ve gone by slow boat and I’ve ridden my bicycle across America, twice. I’ve been to the largest gathering of humans on the planet, and trekked into remotest areas on the planet on my own. I’ve paid for luxury tours, and I’ve done my own self-guided tours. I regularly travel for business, and once I went to Hawaii on a door-prize award. I’ve circumnavigated the globe in only 48 hours, and I traveled uninterrupted for 9 months. I’ve gone first class and third class, sometimes on the same trip. So far I’ve visited half the world’s countries, and usually manage to get far from the capital city when I do. Here is what I know about how to travel.

There are two modes of travel; retreat or engage. People often travel to escape the routines of work, to recharge, relax, reinvigorate, and replenish themselves— R&R. In this mode you travel to remove yourself from your routines, or to get the pampering and attention you don’t ordinarily get, and ideally to do fun things instead of work things. So you travel to where it is easy. This is called a vacation, or R&R. 

The other mode is engagement and experience, or E&E. In this mode you travel to discover new things, to have new experiences, to lean into an adventure whose outcome is not certain, to meet otherness. You move to find yourself by encountering pleasures and challenges you don’t encounter at home. This kind of travel is a type of learning, and of the two modes, it is the one I favor in these tips.

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Organize your travel around passions instead of destinations. An itinerary based on obscure cheeses, or naval history, or dinosaur digs, or jazz joints will lead to far more adventures, and memorable times than a grand tour of famous places. It doesn’t even have to be your passions; it could be a friend’s, family member’s, or even one you’ve read about. The point is to get away from the expected into the unexpected.

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If you hire a driver, or use a taxi, offer to pay the driver to take you to visit their mother. They will ordinarily jump at the chance. They fulfill their filial duty and you will get easy entry into a local’s home, and a very high chance to taste some home cooking. Mother, driver, and you leave happy. This trick rarely fails.

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Make no assumptions about whether something will be open. There are other norms at work. If possible check at the last minute, if not, have a plan B.

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Crash a wedding. You are not a nuisance; you are the celebrity guest! The easiest way to do this is to find the local wedding hall where weddings happen on schedule and approach a wedding party with a request to attend. They will usually feel honored. You can offer the newlyweds a small token gift of cash if you want. You will be obliged to dance. Take photos of them; they will take photos of you. It will make your day and theirs. (I’ve crashed a wedding in most of the countries I have visited.)

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Don’t balk at the spendy price of admission for a museum or performance. It will be a tiny fraction of your trip’s total cost and you invested too much and have come too far to let those relative minor fees stop you from seeing what you came to see.

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Google maps will give you very detailed and reliable directions for taking public transit, including where to make transfers in most cities.

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When visiting a foreign city for the first time, take a street food tour. Depending on the region, the tour will include food carts, food trucks, food courts, or smaller eateries. It will last a few hours, and the cost will include the food. You’ll get some of the best food available, and usually the host will also deliver a great introduction to the culture. Google “street food tour for city X.”

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The most significant criteria to use when selecting travel companions is: do they complain or not, even when complaints are justified? No complaining! Complaints are for the debriefing afterwards when travel is over.

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As in any art, constraints breed creativity. Give your travel creative constraints: Try traveling by bicycle, or with only a day bag for luggage, or below the minimum budget, or sleep only on overnight trains. Mix it up. Even vagabonding can become a rut.

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Renting a car is easier than ever today, even in developing countries, and oftentimes the best bet for getting around if you are headed for many places outside of cities. It is an option worth considering, especially if you are 2 to 3 people traveling. On the other hand, there are still plenty of places where you don’t want to drive because of chaotic roads, lawless attitudes, and unfavorable liabilities. In those places hiring a driver plus car for a multi-day trip is often a surprisingly appealing bargain—especially if you have 2 to 3 people to split the costs. The total could be less than taking trains and taxis, and you get door to door service, and often a built-in guide who knows the local roads and also local festivities and best places to eat. They will be at least 2x the cost of renting a car, but for some kinds of travel 2x as good. If you are a spontaneous traveler, a hired driver is by far the best option allowing you to change your itinerary immediately as mood, weather, or lucky timing dictate. I usually find drivers by searching travel forums for recommendations. I score candidates primarily by their communication skills.

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If you are fortunate, a fantastic way to share your fortune is to gift a friend the cost of travel with you. You both will have a great time.

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Go to a cemetery. Look for sacred places. People live authentically there. Don’t just visit the markets, but also go to small workshops, hardware stores and pharmacies –  places with easy access to local practices. See how it’s different and the same all at once.

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FlightAware is the best free phone app for the status of your flight. It will often tell you about delays hours before the airline will. Tip: use FlightAware to check whether your plane has even arrived at your departure airport.

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Sketchy travel plans and travel to sketchy places are ok. Take a chance. If things fall apart, your vacation has just turned into an adventure. Perfection is for watches. Trips should be imperfect. There are no stories if nothing goes amiss. 

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Your enjoyment of a trip will be inversely related to the weight of your luggage. Counterintuitively, the longer your trip, the less stuff you should haul. Travelers still happy on a 6-week trip will only have carry-on luggage. That maximizes your flexibility, enabling you to lug luggage up stairs when there is no elevator, or to share a tuk-tuk, to pack and unpack efficiently, and to not lose stuff. Furthermore, when you go light you intentionally reduce what you take in order to increase your experience of living. And the reality of today is that you can almost certainly buy whatever you are missing on the road.

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Getting an inside tour is the ultimate travel treat. How about a factory tour, a visit to an Amish home, or backstage at an opera? When I travel for business I will sometimes ask for inside access to an uncommon place in lieu of a speaking fee. You are aiming for experiences that simple money can’t buy. Good ones will take planning ahead.

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It is always colder at night than you think it should be, especially in the tropics. Pack a layer no matter what.

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Planning your itinerary: You want to see it all and you are likely to never return, so the temptation is to pile it on, maximize your visit. Since we are in X, and Y and Z  are so close, we might as well see Y and Z….. Paradoxically when you are traveling you should minimize the amount of time you spend in transit—once you arrive. The hard-to-accept truth is that it is far better to spend more time in a few places than a little time in a bunch of places. 

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To book a train anywhere in the world outside your home country, your first stop should be The Man in Seat 61, a sprawling website which will conveniently help you book the train you want. 

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The best way to never leave anything behind in a hotel is to keep all your sundries together in one visible place. If you must put something away in a drawer or closet, put lots of things there. If you must put a charger somewhere hidden, put several other items next to it, because you will more likely remember to pack up multiple items rather than one. Best of all, keep them visible and keep them together.

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In 50 plus years of travelling with all kinds of people, I’ve seen absolutely no correlation between where you eat and whether you have intestinal problems, so to maximize the enjoyment of local foods, my rule of thumb is to eat wherever healthy-looking locals eat.

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The list of most coveted cities to visit have one striking thing in common—they are pedestrian centric. They reward walking. Better online hotel sites like Booking.com have map interfaces which allow you to select hotels by their location. Whenever possible I book my hotel near to where it is best to walk, so I can stroll out the door and begin to wander. 

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For a truly memorable trip, go without reservations, just winging it along the way. If you like somewhere, stay a day longer, or if you don’t, split a day earlier. If the train is full, take a bus. That freedom can be liberating.

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The Google Translate app for your phone is seriously good, and free. It will translate voice, text, or script to and from 250 languages. Use for deciphering menus, signs, talking with clerks, etc. It is often a lifesaver.

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Large-scale luxury cruises have no appeal to me, yet a small boat cruise is an entirely different species and a valid option worth considering. The advantage of a cruise is that your hotel travels with you, so you unpack only once. It is especially useful for small groups because it eliminates the eternal negotiation of deciding where to eat. (You always eat on the boat.) The advantages of a small boat cruise over a huge boat are several: you disembark very quickly, very often, at smaller more intimate places than large boats can do. And the options for activities are more active than just shopping: such as snorkeling, kayaking, bicycling, hiking, visiting local families and communities. Overall you spend far more time doing things off the boat than on. I define a small boat as 40 passengers or fewer. The per day cost is high, but almost every minute of it is quality time, unlike a series of bus rides. Examples of places I’ve loved a small boat cruise; The Galapagos, Alaska inland passageway, Mekong River, Coast of Turkey, and Kerala, India.

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The rate you go is not determined by how fast you walk, bike or drive, but by how long your breaks are. Slow down. Take lots of breaks. The most memorable moments—conversations with amazing strangers, an invite inside, a hidden artwork—will usually happen when you are not moving.

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I generally find “professional” tour guides uninteresting, and too scripted. They are mostly repeating what can be found in guide books. So I rarely hire them. I much prefer to have a friend or local acquaintance show me what interests them in an ad hoc way, with no script. Let friends know you are coming to their area.

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A few laundry detergent sheets in a tiny ziplock bag weigh nothing and won’t spill and are perfect for emergency laundry washing in the sink or shower. 

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These days it is mandatory that you are connected. You need cell coverage as well as wifi. You’ll want robust mobile coverage for navigation, translation apps, ride shares and a digital wallet for payments. Best option is to use a carrier with “free” international plans (such as T-Mobile or Google Fi) so you need to do nothing. Second best is to get either a sim card or e-sim for your phone for your visiting country. E-sim apps (such Airalo) can be loaded by yourself virtually. Sims and e-sims are also sold at most international airports when you exit. Most are reputable. One tip, turn off your photo and video cloud backup while on the sim to reduce data usage. 

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People in other places are not saints. You might get cheated, swindled, or taken advantage of. Paradoxically, the best way to avoid that is to give strangers your trust and treat them well. Being good to them brings out their good. If you are on your best behavior, they will be on their best behavior. And vice versa. To stay safe, smile. Be humble and minimize your ego. I don’t know why that works everywhere in the world—even places with “bad” reputations—but it does.

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You can get an inexpensive and authentic meal near a famous tourist spot simply by walking at least five blocks away from the epicenter. 

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Digital wallets on your phone are displacing local currencies in many places. For instance I did not use any cash on my last trips to the UK and China. And in places where it has not completely eliminated cash you can reduce your cash needs by half with mobile payments. Set up your Apple pay, Google Pay or Alipay before you leave. There is no need to exchange money anywhere, especially at airports. Get any cash you need at local ATMs, which are now everywhere. Use a card that does not charge, or reimburses, a foreign fee. 

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If you detect slightly more people moving in one direction over another, follow them. If you keep following this “gradient” of human movement, you will eventually land on something interesting—a market, a parade, a birthday party, an outdoor dance, a festival. 

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Splurge in getting the most recent version of a guidebook to your destination. It is worth the price of a lunch to get the latest, most helpful, reliable information. I supplement the latest guidebook research with recommendations suggested in travel forums online. Guidebooks have depth and breadth, while forums offer speed—results from a week ago. 

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If you are starting out and have seen little of the world, you can double the time you spend traveling by heading to the places it is cheapest to travel. If you stay at the budget end, you can travel twice as long for half price. Check out The Cheapest Destination Blog. In my experience, these off-beat destinations are usually worth visiting.

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In many parts of the world today motorcycles play the role of cars. That means you can hire a moto-taxi to take you on the back seat, or to summon a moto-taxi with an uber-like app, or to take a motorcycle tour with a guide doing the driving. In areas where motorcycles dominate they will be ten times more efficient than slowly going by car.

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Even if you never go to McDonalds at home, visit the McDonalds on your travels. Surprisingly, their menus are very localized and reflect different cuisines in a fun and easy way, with unexpected versions of familiar things. Very illuminating!

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Put inexpensive Apple AirTags into your bags, so you can track them when they are out of your sight. More and more airlines are integrating AirTags into their system to help find wayward bags. The tags work for luggage left in hotel storage, or stashed beneath the bus, or pieces you need to forward. 

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For the best travel experiences you need either a lot of money, or a lot of time. Of the two modes, it is far better to have more time than money. Although it tries, money cannot buy what time delivers. You have enough time to attend the rare festival, to learn some new words, to understand what the real prices are, to wait out the weather, or to get to that place that takes a week in a jeep. Time is the one resource you can give yourself, so take advantage of this if you are young without money.

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Being beautiful, or well crafted, or cheap is not enough for a souvenir. It should have some meaning from the trip. A good question you may want to ask yourself when buying a souvenir is where will this live when I get home?

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The best souvenirs from a trip are your memories of the trip so find a way to memorialize them; keep a journal, send updates to a friend, take a sketchbook, post some observations, make a photo book. 

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When asking someone for a restaurant recommendation, don’t ask them where is a good place you should eat; ask them where they eat. Where did they eat the last time they ate out?

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Here in brief is the method I’ve honed to optimize a two-week vacation: When you arrive in a new country, immediately proceed to the farthest, most remote, most distant place you intend to reach during the trip. If there is a small village, remote spa, a friend’s farm, or a wild place you plan on seeing on the trip, go there immediately. Do not stop near the airport. Do not rest overnight in the arrival city. Do not pause to acclimate. If at all possible proceed by plane, bus, jeep, car directly to the furthest point without interruption. Make it an overnight journey if you have to. Then once you reach your furthest point, unpack, explore, and work your way slowly back to the big city, wherever your international departure airport is.

In other words you make a laser-straight rush for the end, and then meander back. Laser out, meander back. This method is somewhat contrary to many people’s first instincts, which are to immediately get acclimated to the culture in the landing city before proceeding to the hinterlands. The thinking is: get a sense of what’s going on, stock up, size up the joint. Then slowly work up to the more challenging, more remote areas. That’s reasonable, but not optimal because most big cities around the world are more similar than different. All big cities these days feel same-same on first arrival. In Laser-Back travel what happens is that you are immediately thrown into Very Different Otherness, the maximum difference that you will get on this trip. You go from your home to extreme differences so fast it is almost like the dissolve effect in a slide show. Bam! Your eyes are wide open. You are on your toes. All ears. And there at the end of the road (but your beginning), your inevitable mistakes are usually cheaper, easier to recover from, and more fun. You take it slower, no matter what country you are in. Then you use the allotted time to head back to the airport city, at whatever pace is your pace. But, when you arrive in the city after a week or so traveling in this strangeness, and maybe without many of the luxuries you are used to, you suddenly see the city the same way the other folks around you do. After eight days in less fancy digs, the bright lights, and smooth shopping streets, and late-night eateries dazzle you, and you embrace the city with warmth and eagerness. It all seems so … civilized and ingenious. It’s brilliant! The hustle and bustle are less annoying and almost welcomed. And the attractions you notice are the small details that natives appreciate. You see the city more like a native and less like a jaded tourist in a look-alike urban mall. You leave having enjoyed both the remote and the adjacent, the old and new, the slow and the fast, the small and the big.

We’ve also learned that this intensity works best if we aim for 12 days away from home. That means 10 days for in-country experience, plus a travel day (or two) on each end. We’ve found from doing this many times, with many travelers of all ages and interests, 14 days on the ground is two days too many. There seems to be a natural lull at about 10 days of intense kinetic travel. People start to tune out a bit. So we cut it there and use the other days to come and go and soften the transitions. On the other hand 8 days feels like the momentum is cut short. So 10 days of intensity, and 12 days in a country is what we aim for. Laser-back travel is not foolproof, nor always possible, but on average it tends to work better than the other ways I’ve tried.

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If you work while you travel, or work remotely, you may enjoy our newsletter Nomadico, which is a weekly one-pager with four brief travel tips. It’s free. 

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(Thanks to early readers, Craig Mod, Derek Sivers, Chris Michel and Will Milne.)

• TIL: Why ancient Egyptian statues often had broken noses. Probably grave robbers hoping to kill the guardian gods by preventing them from breathing so they knock their noses off so they can’t exert revenge on the robbers. Why Are the Noses Broken on So Many Ancient Egyptian Statues?

• This surprising study showed that AI chat doctor was better than human Dr + AI. Not what we expected. Patients are going to use the chat Drs so once Drs figure out how to use them, they need to educate patients how to use them best. An AI Chatbot Outperformed Physicians and Physicians Plus AI in a Trial—What Does That Mean?