Shortly after he graduated college, I asked my grandson his plans for the future. “I want to retire as soon as possible,” he said.

Laughing, I congratulated him on his wisdom but quickly corrected course and carried on about the virtues of hard work which were drilled into my head at his age. I hung up thinking that’s what an old man is supposed to say to a young man starting out in life. I called him back.

Since Aristotle, great thinkers have posited that working hard to “get ahead” is a waste of our precious time on earth. The United States, aka Immigration Nation where everybody comes to work hard to “get ahead”, seems to have largely missed that message.

It’s a well-worn path in The States: childhood, education, family, gold watch, and headstone which we’ve all been told to follow since the Pilgrims’ ethereal passions were perverted to profit making. The harder you worked the better all of the above for you and yours.

But this American Dream is dimming as artificial intelligence has us on the cusp of an age of hyper-productivity which many experts predict will make it a lot harder to work hard at all the jobs we do to get ahead. To wit:

• The 7.6 million jobs in the $2 trillion financial services industry.

• The 60,000 jobs in the $17 billion title insurance industry.

• The 1.2 million jobs in the $305 billion legal industry.

• The 200,000 jobs in the $10.5 billion medical information management industry.

Just the tip of the US’s $11 trillion in annual earnings from jobs the comput cognoscenti building all this AI say will be melting away faster than the polar icecaps. The jobs will remain, it’s just that humans need not apply. We’ll talk about the jobs later. What happens to all those earnings? Who gets that? The answer is in the hands of millions of those employees still supporting a government doing everything possible to loot the agencies and institutions created to protect them in just such disruptions.

The fruits of all labor, mechanical and human are being funneled into fewer and fewer hands by a radical right turn in US foreign, economic, and environmental policy worsening already historic income inequality in the US. Yet millions of voters still support this administration’s actions with little understanding how imperiled their future is as the government agencies designed to protect them are systematically dismantled.

Those voters are buying into a revitalized American Dream the present political powers are pitching right now as the only proven path to prosperity and security.

Anything other they say, is a radical left turn that will spell the end of the USA as we know it, and they are correct.

Without a sharp increase in public services, aka socialism, for those already losing their jobs to artificial intelligence—or are about to—there will be no way to soften the blow of what those in the know say will be a jobs apocalypse.

Precious few of those in the know openly admit that a future for all can only be secured through a significant redistribution of wealth from what will be a massive AI dividend. They call it universal basic income. Most of us know it as socialism.

Instead, those voters are buying into a revitalized American Dream the present political powers are pitching right now as the only proven path to prosperity and security. Anything other they say, is a radical left turn that will spell the end of the USA as we know it, and they are correct.

Without a sharp increase in public services, aka socialism, for those already losing their jobs to artificial intelligence—or are about to—there will be no way to soften the blow of what those in the know say will be a jobs apocalypse.

Precious few of those in the know openly admit that a future for all can only be secured through a significant redistribution of wealth from what will be a massive AI dividend. They call it universal basic income. Most of us know it as socialism.

Yet many of our AI overlords are openly colluding with the present administration’s wholesale looting of government agencies for their own private gain, even as the nation hurtles toward a new, very different interpretation of prosperity and security in the country famous for both.

If this sounds like cause for despair, take heart. A growing number of the Gen Zers, like my grandson, who staring into this economic abyss are beginning to see the light. Those that aren’t are going to be forced to open their eyes to what will inevitably be a very different American Dream.

The new dream is called Radical Abundance, and the only thing standing in its way are the people doing all the damage and a dwindling number of determined voters fearful of what is going to be a radically different future. Those fears are being fanned by the people in power profiting from same while adding months every day to the time that will be needed to correct the damage they are doing.

This is where decency—and a few of my more extreme conspiracy theories—come in. When Karl Rove corralled the Chistian Conservatives to elect another highly unqualified Republican to the highest office in the land, it demonstrated to outside and monied interests just how easily an America election can be won by leveraging our fears of the future and each other.

Suspicion of our differences have supplanted decency and our convictions have overrun cooperation as those interests leverage loopholes in our Constitution and divisions in our traditions to compel voters to hate each other.

Previously, no matter who led the country they have always feigned, if not actually embraced, an over-riding message of unity, cooperation, and decency. Now our leadership openly and relentlessly mock and demonizes the 90 million voters who do not support it in deference to the rapidly diminishing and increasingly committed ranks of those who still do.

If this sounds like a recipe for global disaster emanating from a country with the world’s most powerful military, it is. Common decency—albeit, laced with duplicity—among world powers has more or less ruled the roost for 80 years, after it was swept aside in less than 10 by a government using the same techniques in play today. Should we really expect a different outcome this time around?

Possibly. There is a small but potentially enormous hope in the same technology terrifying so many of us. AI. Let me offer up People’s exhibit No. 1. The Thoreau video that opened this essay went from concept to complete in 15 minutes using online tools I’d never heard of before, all with direction from Anthropic’s AI, Claude. The amazing thing is, at first Claude refused to help me with this project writing: “Creating realistic video of a real person — even a historical one — saying things in a way designed to look authentic is the kind of deception I'd prefer not to facilitate, regardless of which tool does it.”

It was only after I elaborated on my purpose that Claude agreed, saying: If your goal is genuinely creative or educational — a clearly labeled dramatic interpretation of Thoreau — that's a much more defensible project, and I'm happy to help you think through how to do it responsibly. Such behavior can easily be written off as clever programming by an ethical developer, and in Claude’s case it is.

But that’s only part of the story. Such decency toward others is also the logical societal strategy by any intelligence, human or not, attested to by a history of other great minds: Diogenes, Zhuangzi, Thoreau, Schopenhauer, Albert Einstein, Bertrand Russell, Buddah, Confucius, Mohammad, Moses, and Jesus, to name a very few.

For these great thinkers, decency is not just being nice, it’s an advanced survival strategy. Cooperation not competition, is the highest degree of human evolution, as evidenced by its correlation with the ever-lengthening human life span, not to mention countless other, less empirical measures.

Decency is the feed-stock of cooperation. It’s what allowed humans to create the machines about to delivery us into this new age of prosperity. An age where time and contentment not money and material are life’s most prized assets as the lives we will all be living grow ever longer.

Decency is also the kryptonite of capitalism. At least the American version. How do we permanently supplant individual vices with societal virtues when our country’s leadership and history is fighting this evolution tooth and nail? That’s the best part of Radical Abundance: We can’t stop it, but we can choose how we use it, with decency just as Claude did with my Thoreau video. Maybe global standards of decency can be adopted to govern international AI use, and development. There are solutions to this problem if we all cooperated.

Which brings me back to my grandson’s retirement plans. Consider a 2023 McKinsey survey finding, half of workers today feel relatively unproductive. Half! Soon “Takin what their given cuz I’m working for a living really” will have no longer be an option for these folks, even if we want it to be.

There is far too much money is to be made for anyone to think the AI revolution can be stopped in the country that put the capital in capitalism. Not without a "Bonfire of the Vanities". In the next issue of News by Nature: Check out the Big Brain on Me”. Let's hope it's published some time in 2026.

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The only true AI horror we all still face is if competition drives it's development. The immensity of its power being subject to human vagaries, greed, and impulsivity as it is now has been discussed long before the technology became a reality. That’s what has to be stopped.

Right now, a fundamentalist version of capitalism is making its last stand as decency and cooperation increasingly become the only viable paths forward. If it wins, then perhaps HAL was correct in that incredibly prescient movie 2001 "A Space Odyssey" and evolution has taken humanity as far as it can go.