This is the story they might tell about us.
For a long time, things mostly worked. You went to school, got a job, built a life. The deal wasn’t perfect but it was stable, and most people could count on it. You knew what the path looked like even if it wasn’t always easy.
Then, in the mid-2020s, the path started shifting. AI started doing the thinking jobs, and at first nobody thought much of it. But something else was happening underneath. The jobs that survived compressed. Small teams doing what entire departments did before, wiring their systems together into a shared brain, growing smarter every week. One person could do what used to take a department, then a whole company.
Then it reached the physical world. Cars driving themselves, warehouses running on their own, robots doing the rest.
Nobody quite knew what to make of it. A few people could do the work of many, but the many still needed to eat.
What even was money anymore? It had always been simple. You worked, you got paid, you survived. But AI was doing the work and that equation was changing faster than anyone could keep up with.
It was disorienting. Not just the jobs shifting, but the feeling that came with it. What happens next? People everywhere were asking the same question.
Herbert sketched the shape of it decades ago. In Dune, the Fremen ride the sandworm — the most powerful and dangerous force on Arrakis. They don’t try to conquer it. They learn its rules, move with it, and survive by sticking together: sharing knowledge, sharing resources, looking out for one another. And beneath it all is a hard truth: without the worm, there’s no spice — and without spice, the wider universe grinds to a halt. The thing that can swallow you whole is also the thing that makes the system run.
Nobody knew if the worm could be ridden. Some of the smartest people alive said it couldn’t — that it was too fast, too powerful, that it would swallow us before we learned. They might have been right. But the people who tried understood something simple: not trying was the one path where you definitely didn’t get a say in where it went.
AI could do extraordinary things. But it couldn’t tell you why you got out of bed in the morning. Without work to structure the answer, a lot of people lost the thread. Some for months. Some for years.
What brought them back wasn’t a policy or a breakthrough. It was one person with the right tools lifting the people around them. A teacher who amplified a kid’s mind instead of ranking it. A builder who made something a whole community gathered around. Someone who saw a problem and just couldn’t leave it alone. And then the people they lifted did the same for the next ones, and the next ones after that. People who’d spent years building ad servers and optimizing engagement metrics looked up and realized they could be building something that mattered. And once enough people chose, everything shifted.
We built a floor to stand on, and we built it with the same technology that had shaken everything loose. Healthcare that didn’t depend on a job. Energy for every home. Food on every table. Schools that amplified the mind instead of sorting it. Not luxuries — the minimum.
The old version of work, exchanging hours for money so you didn’t starve, AI took that. And it turned out nobody missed it much. The work that mattered, the work that had always mattered, was the kind that made you more yourself. Building something with your hands, teaching someone something that changed them. We’d just never given ourselves permission to see it as real.
No one left behind. That was the deal we made with each other, and we kept it.
I remember when my kids were small. Lying awake wondering what world they were walking into, what any of it would look like.
They’re grown now.
We rode the worm. We broke through to the other side. And we taught the ones who came after how to ride.
Maybe it happens exactly like this. Maybe it doesn’t. But if it could, isn’t that worth building toward?