The Scoreboard

About a month ago, I was listening to Elon Musk talk about the future of AI. I think it was the Moonshots podcast with Peter Diamandis, though he's been saying versions of this everywhere lately. His thesis is that AI and robotics will automate virtually all productive activity, work will become optional, money will lose its meaning, and scarcity will vanish. He referenced Iain M. Banks' Culture novels, where superintelligent AI provides for all human needs and money simply doesn't exist. "My guess is, if you go out long enough," he said, "money will stop being relevant."

He's not alone in this. Vinod Khosla wrote a whole essay called "AI: Dystopia or Utopia?" painting essentially the same picture. A post-scarcity consumer paradise where everything from healthcare to housing is delivered for near-free by machines. Sam Altman has been pushing universal basic income for years on the back of the same logic. There's a small but vocal cohort of tech elites who genuinely believe we're twenty years from a world where the fundamental economic structures that have organized human life for millennia simply dissolve.

Most people would feel excited hearing this. But I felt something I didn't have a word for at first. It sat somewhere between shame and regret. A quiet, creeping recognition that if the scoreboard I've been playing on my entire life suddenly disappeared, I might not like where I stood.

Let me take a step back.

I'm thirty-one. I'm a staff engineer and co-founder of a tech education company. I went to good schools, worked at good companies, and have spent essentially my entire adult life optimizing along the axes that society has traditionally used to measure people - how hard you work, how much you earn, and how prestigious your credentials are. I never stopped to question whether these were the right metrics. I just optimized.

I've also been painfully, sometimes annoyingly conscious of the fact that these aren't the only things that matter. I've tried to invest in friendships, in family, in being present. I moved to LA to double down on that and build a life outside of work. But there's always been a tension. And if I'm honest, the tension has usually resolved in favor of work.

That tension is why the thought experiment hit me the way it did. What Musk is really describing, whether he knows it or not, is a world where the scoreboard I've been winning on gets taken away. And the question it forces is simple. Without that scoreboard, who am I?

I sat with that question, and the honest answer was not great.

If you strip away career and credentials and income and work ethic, if you judge me purely on how good of a son I am, how good of a brother, how good of a friend, how present I am in the lives of the people I love, I am not in the same percentile. Not even close. I've been running a race I'm good at and using my performance in it as a proxy for my overall worth as a human being. The thought experiment just made that uncomfortably visible.

There's something I haven't told many people, and I'm not sure it belongs here, but it feels relevant. When I walk into a room, I feel a certain confidence that comes from professional success. Nobody in the room knows my title or my company or my background. I don't talk about that stuff, and I don't think anyone would know unless I told them. But I know. And that knowledge is like invisible armor. It lets me stand a little taller and fills in the gaps where other kinds of confidence might otherwise be.

The thought experiment strips that armor away. And what I found underneath was a person who has some serious work to do.

I don't think AI is going to make money irrelevant in my lifetime. I don't think work is going to become optional anytime soon. But I'm grateful for the question, because it's not really about AI at all. It's about using an imagined future to ask something I could have asked at any time but didn't. If everything I've built professionally evaporated tomorrow, would I be proud of the person that's left?

The answer, right now, is not yet. But I'd like it to be. And the thing about that particular scoreboard is that you don't need a technological revolution to start playing on it. You just need to decide that it's the one that counts.