Yes, you, me, and everyone else will die. The amount of time we have is limited, and that is beautiful, because it gives us the opportunity to give meaning to our lives. But we must choose to do so, it’s not given for granted. If you don't choose someone else will do it for you: the market, the state, society, culture or even religion.

We live in times where the status-quo seems to be to become successful by accumulating wealth. We spend our youth studying to develop skills that can be used by corporations. Will we be doing that up until the day that we wake up in retirement being not much more than a mere resemblance of what we used to be? Or we will choose differently?

See, we focus on productivity and not so much on meaning. We stop dreaming and hoping and become ‘quasi-automata’, feeding the unsustainable and perishing ‘infinite growth machine’. This becomes evidently absurd when we realize the impact it has had on the environment. As the latest IPCC report says: act ‘now or never’, climate change will become ‘irreversible’ and the consequences will be catastrophic.

Furthermore, we have now created extremely precise machine learning algorithms that can replace the task of the ‘quasi-automata’, and thus making them obsolete and expensive. To give you an idea, Microsoft fired 10,000 employees and at the same time invested 10 billion dollars in OpenAI, the creators of ChatGPT.

ChatGPT grows so fast that we cannot compete in some tasks. For example, ChatGPT 3.5 barely passed the bar exam in the United States (already a major achievement). Two weeks ago, OpenAI published the technical report on ChatGPT 4, which performed among the top 10 percent in the bar exam and other standardized test. The time between that was only three months.

This is growing so fast that the regulations and ethics around it cannot keep track of it. Last week Italy banned ChatGPT and hundreds of scientists and tech leaders are asking to put a halt on it.

AI - wrongly called ‘intelligent’ as it does not follow reason, but rules and training data - has given us the chance to go back to the basics and to ask fundamental questions. It has opened up the opportunity to embrace the meaning of being human and to cherish the things that appear to be so far away, like profound love, childhood dreams, the beauty of a sunset, the intensity of a passionate kiss, the magic of romantic contact or deep questions like ‘what is time?’, and so on.

We have the opportunity to choose real meaning for our limited lifetime and stop being quasi-automata, and I believe we ought to do that.