Dustin@r0ck3t23
Jimmy Carr said something that should reframe how you think about the next twenty years of AI.
Carr: “Life has never been objectively better and subjectively worse. Because the nature of humanity is our desires are mimetic.”
One line. And it explains everything about what’s coming.
Carr: “No one had a hot shower until 50 years ago. So when you stand in a hot shower, just for a moment, just go, ‘Well, no one that you admire from a hundred years ago had this simple pleasure in life.’”
A Roman emperor couldn’t access what you use every morning without thinking.
Newton defined the laws of light. Never flipped a switch.
Lincoln ran a country by candlelight.
Einstein never made a video call.
The average middle-class life today would be incomprehensible to the richest person alive in 1900.
And nobody feels wealthy.
Carr: “There’s been a hundred billion people ever. We are in the top, top percentile in terms of the luck that we have had.”
The child survival rates. The medicine. The food supply.
The sheer volume of comfort surrounding every ordinary Tuesday.
By every measurable standard, this is the best time to be alive in the history of the species.
It doesn’t feel like it. It never will.
That’s not a flaw in the world. That’s the wiring.
Every gain gets absorbed into a new baseline.
What felt extraordinary last year feels ordinary now. What felt like luxury becomes expectation.
The goalpost moves without your permission. Every single time.
This is the part nobody is factoring into the AI conversation.
AI is already compressing the cost of intelligence toward zero.
Within a decade, medical diagnosis that once cost thousands will be instant and free.
Legal guidance that required a retainer will be available to anyone with a phone.
Education that demanded six figures will be personalized and free.
The abundance will be real.
And most people won’t feel it.
The generation that grows up with AI tutors won’t marvel at the technology. They’ll complain about the interface.
The generation that gets instant medical screening won’t appreciate the miracle. They’ll be frustrated it takes ten seconds instead of two.
Abundance doesn’t produce gratitude. It produces a new floor.
And from that new floor, people will find new things to want they couldn’t have imagined before.
You don’t build the next thing because you’re content. You build it because the current thing already feels normal.
Mimetic desire is the engine of civilization and the thief of satisfaction.
Simultaneously.
AI will give the species more than it has ever had.
The species will absorb it, recalibrate, and reach for more.
That’s not a failure of the technology. That’s the loop that built everything we already take for granted.
The question was never whether abundance would arrive.
It was always whether the hardware would let us feel it.
