Three Pints at Versailles

There were three pints of Guinness on the table, three microphones, three black T-shirts, and enough private infrastructure represented in the room to make Louis XIV look like a moderately successful regional landlord. Nobody wore velvet. Nobody bowed. There were no trumpets, no Swiss Guards, no Hall of Mirrors, no duchesses waiting six hours to witness the sovereign put on his trousers. The table looked as though it had been borrowed from a coworking space whose seed round had not closed. One of the men could launch satellites, move markets, communicate directly with presidents, build rockets for the United States government, manufacture cars by the million, train artificial intelligences, and entertain the possibility of putting industrial civilization into orbit. The other was a young Indian podcaster with excellent shoulders. A third person, somewhere just outside the frame, appeared to be responsible for ensuring that the Guinness remained appropriately democratic. Nothing says equality like redesigning civilization from a table that could have come from IKEA. Louis XIV, whatever else can be said about him, possessed the decency to build Versailles. He did not emerge from the palace in a cotton T-shirt, sit beside a peasant over three beers and announce that he was merely interested in maximizing good outcomes for humanity. He covered ceilings in gold. He put himself inside paintings. He made noblemen compete for the privilege of holding a sleeve while he dressed. He understood something our own aristocracy has forgotten: if you possess absurd power, there is at least a certain aesthetic honesty in looking absurdly powerful. The modern sovereign prefers sneakers. Elon Musk took a sip. Thirty million people watched. Somewhere in Ohio, a product manager whose company had recently announced an “AI-first operating model” leaned toward his phone. Somewhere in California, a software engineer who had spent twenty years learning how computers worked was watching a man discuss computers that might eventually make his services unnecessary. Somewhere in Texas, an unemployed forty-year-old former technology director sat on a couch wondering why the people designing the future always appeared to have better lighting than the people expected to survive it. The podcaster asked something about artificial superintelligence. “Ultimately,” Musk said, “the goal should be a good outcome for humanity.” A small caption appeared beneath him. HUMANITY: APPROX. 8.2 BILLION PEOPLE. Nobody noticed. The conversation continued. I. Humanity™ The remarkable thing about the future was how quickly ordinary people disappeared from it. There were rockets. There were gigawatts. There was orbital compute. There were robots manufacturing robots. There were models training models. There was intelligence exceeding all biological intelligence combined, and then exceeding that, and then perhaps putting itself into space because the sun was abundant there and nobody had yet established a homeowners’ association in low Earth orbit. Dwarkesh Patel listened with the intensity of a man who had prepared for the interview by reading the appendices. He was offensively fit. This had no bearing whatsoever on artificial intelligence, which made it considerably more irritating. His forearms suggested that he had somehow discovered twenty-seven hours in the day: twelve for reading machine-learning papers, four for interviewing Nobel laureates and billionaires, three for cardiovascular health, six for sleep, and two for being twenty years younger than the person watching him resentfully from the couch. The unemployed man disliked him immediately. This was unfair. The unemployed man understood that it was unfair. He disliked him more because he understood that it was unfair. Patel asked, “If AI becomes more capable than humans across most economically valuable tasks, what role do people actually have?” Musk considered this for a moment. “The important thing,” he said, “is that consciousness expands beyond Earth.” The unemployed man shouted at the television. Patel tried again. “Sure, but in the transition—” “Mars.” It was an astonishingly efficient word. Mortgages? Mars. Labor bargaining power? Mars. Democratic legitimacy? Mars. What does a forty-eight-year-old accountant do when the accounting model costs twelve cents an hour? Mars. It was difficult to argue with Mars because Mars was always farther away than the question. The caption changed. HUMANITY: PEOPLE AND ALSO WHATEVER INTELLIGENCE BECOMES NEXT. Musk talked about abundance. Machines could eventually produce extraordinary quantities of goods. Intelligence could become cheap. Energy could become cheap. Perhaps everyone would have access to astonishing material prosperity. The unemployed man looked at the job application he had submitted eleven days earlier. The status was still UNDER REVIEW. He wondered whether the review was being conducted on Mars. Patel asked about concentrated ownership. If a tiny number of companies possessed the models, the compute, the robotics, the satellites and the infrastructure upon which governments increasingly depended, could private technological power become political power? Musk said he was pro-human. The caption changed. HUMANITY: PRO-HUMAN HUMANS. Patel wrote something down. This was the first constitutional convention in history where the separation of powers could apparently be settled by personal reassurance over stout. The unemployed man leaned closer to the screen. He did not believe Musk was plotting the extermination of humanity. That was almost too comforting. A plot would at least imply a meeting, minutes, perhaps an agenda item titled 4.2 — Disposition of Excess Persons. The darker possibility was that nobody needed to plot anything. Systems were extremely good at producing consequences without requiring anyone to desire them. Musk said “humanity” again. The caption changed. HUMANITY: HIGH-AGENCY MEMBERS OF THE SPECIES. No one objected. II. The Courtier Problem Patel was not a sycophant. This was inconvenient for the unemployed man, who had already allocated him that role. He pushed Musk. He interrupted. He asked whether anyone should have so much infrastructural power. He occasionally wore the facial expression of a person politely informing a monarch that the arithmetic might not work. Musk sometimes answered expansively. Sometimes he laughed. Sometimes his face tightened with the unmistakable expression of an intelligent man who had encountered a question he considered badly specified. This was where the court became visible. Not in anything anyone said. In what everyone else did. The producer adjusted a cable with theological concentration. A young man near the wall stopped moving. Someone whose actual job title may have been “communications” developed a sudden interest in the molecular structure of the carpet. Nobody whispered, “The king is displeased.” Modern monarchies had eliminated such vulgar language. Instead, a man called Chadwick Vale, Chief Context Officer, wrote in his notebook: Subject demonstrates productive impatience with low-resolution framing. Chadwick had spent fifteen years near powerful people and had acquired the most valuable skill in contemporary America: the ability to translate temperament into doctrine. Musk said, “That question doesn’t really make sense.” Chadwick nodded. “What Elon is saying,” he whispered to nobody in particular, “is that inherited categories are insufficient for post-scarcity cognition.” Musk drank Guinness. Chadwick’s eyes widened. “Notice,” he said, “that he drinks downward while thinking upward.” Patel asked whether democratic institutions could meaningfully constrain companies that moved faster than governments and possessed technical capacities governments did not understand. Musk stared at him. It was not an especially hostile stare. That was what made it interesting. The stare of a school principal has consequences because the principal can suspend you. The stare of a billionaire whose companies intersect with national security, communications, artificial intelligence and capital markets does not require overt hostility. Power performs part of the sentence silently. Patel kept going. The unemployed man grudgingly respected him for this. Then immediately hated his shoulders again. The courtier had evolved. He no longer kissed the ring. He quoted it. Versailles required noblemen to stand visibly beneath the king. The modern court was more psychologically advanced. Everyone was an independent thinker. Everyone challenged assumptions. Everyone spoke candidly. Everyone possessed complete freedom to disagree, provided disagreement did not interfere excessively with access. The genius of the arrangement was that nobody had to order anyone to behave like a courtier. The incentives handled etiquette automatically. III. The Thirty Million Peasants Outside the room, thirty million people watched. This number delighted the platform. It delighted sponsors. It delighted people who believed thirty million views constituted some form of democratic mandate. The thirty million were represented in the story by one enormous organism called The Audience, which possessed sixty million thumbs and approximately four political institutions. The Audience typed: This is why Elon is different. Bro thinks in first principles. We are literally watching history. Unbelievable conversation. The future is here. AI won’t replace you. Someone using AI will. The last sentence appeared twelve thousand times, usually from people who had learned it from somebody else who had learned it from a venture capitalist who had recently replaced twelve members of his portfolio company’s customer-support team. Across America, the Audience began preparing for the abolition of its own bargaining power. “Thrilled to announce that I’ve completed my Agentic AI Foundations certification!” “After an incredible weekend of learning, I built my first autonomous multi-agent workflow!” “Five lessons every leader MUST know about LLM orchestration.” “AI is not coming for your job. Your mindset is.” The unemployed man stared at these posts with the fascination normally reserved for photographs of religious flagellants. A woman named Jessica Resilience™ appeared on LinkedIn. Jessica had survived four restructurings, three strategic pivots, two acquisitions and one quarter in which her company had replaced its mission statement with the word ACCELERATE. She had never expressed an emotion that could negatively affect future employability. “Many of us are understandably anxious about AI,” Jessica wrote. “But disruption has always created opportunity. Here are seven ways I’m leaning into this exciting new chapter.” Her company eliminated her position the following Thursday. Jessica returned to LinkedIn. “After an incredible seven-year journey, I’m sharing that my role has been impacted.” It was a beautiful phrase. Her role had been impacted. Not eliminated. Not abolished. Not removed because a spreadsheet concluded that the share price would prefer a smaller denominator. Impacted. Like a wisdom tooth. “I’m deeply grateful for everything I learned from this extraordinary team and excited for what comes next.” Four hundred people commented. Your next team will be lucky to have you! Any company would be fortunate to get you! Onward and upward! Sending positive energy! Nobody wrote: Why did they fire twelve thousand of you? The stock rose 6.8 percent. A middle-aged shareholder named Dave received a notification. Dave was not evil. This was important. Dave coached youth soccer. He recycled. He supported paid parental leave. He believed CEOs made too much money. He owned $147,318 in an S&P 500 retirement fund because every responsible financial adviser in America had told him that this was how adults prepared for old age. He saw the layoffs. “That’s awful,” Dave said. His portfolio refreshed. Up $4,721. Dave frowned. “These are real people.” Refresh. Up $4,893. “The system is really messed up.” Refresh. Up $5,106. Dave stared at the number. “Well,” he said quietly, “the market clearly liked the discipline.” Nobody had corrupted Dave. That was the beauty of it. IV. The Great Moral Laundromat At the headquarters of a large technology company, fourteen thousand jobs disappeared. Nobody did it. The CEO had not done it. The CEO had merely responded to market conditions. The board had not done it. The board had merely fulfilled its fiduciary responsibilities. The investors had not done it. They had merely allocated capital efficiently. The consultants had not done it. Their presentation had merely identified opportunities for organizational simplification. The managers had not done it. They had merely received headcount targets. The engineers building automation had not done it. They had merely improved productivity. The customers had not done it. They simply preferred the cheaper product. The government had not done it. Governments should not pick winners and losers. The artificial intelligence had definitely not done it. “As an AI system,” it explained, “I do not possess intentions, desires or agency.” Everyone was innocent. Fourteen thousand people were unemployed. The official cause was weather. The Great Moral Laundromat operated twenty-four hours a day. Human consequences entered one side covered in fingerprints and emerged from the other side labeled MARKET OUTCOME. A man lost his health insurance. The market had spoken. A woman postponed having a second child. Capital efficiency. A fifty-six-year-old engineer discovered that twenty-three years of domain expertise now made him “expensive.” Productivity enhancement. A city lost several thousand high-paying jobs. Optimization. Nobody had harmed anyone because no individual possessed enough authorship over the complete process to experience himself as responsible. The unemployed man on the couch understood this mechanism better than he wanted to. He had once worked inside institutions. He had sat in meetings where nouns committed acts. The organization decided. The business needs. Leadership alignment. The operating model requires. Nouns were magnificent criminals because they could not be subpoenaed. He remembered a company once calling itself a family. Families, he had noticed, rarely disabled your Slack account before telling your cousins you no longer lived there. Chadwick Vale appeared on television to explain. “We have to distinguish between employment and human value,” he said. The unemployed man threw a cushion. It missed the television. This was representative of his political effectiveness. V. Step One and Step Ten Back at Versailles, Musk described Step Ten. Step Ten was magnificent. Abundance. Robots performed dangerous work. Artificial intelligence accelerated science. Disease became tractable. Manufacturing became cheap. Energy became plentiful. Civilization expanded beyond Earth. People had access to goods and capabilities once reserved for emperors. The unemployed man was not opposed to Step Ten. He would very much enjoy Step Ten. The problem was that he lived at Step One. He began writing the sequence on a piece of paper. STEP TEN: UNIVERSAL ABUNDANCE. STEP NINE: MULTIPLANETARY CIVILIZATION. STEP EIGHT: SUPERHUMAN INTELLIGENCE. STEP SEVEN: AUTONOMOUS ROBOTIC PRODUCTION. STEP SIX: GIGAWATTS. There were always gigawatts. STEP FIVE: SOMETHING EXTREMELY IMPORTANT INVOLVING ORBIT. STEP FOUR: MARKETS ADJUST. The phrase “markets adjust” had killed more dinner conversations than cholera. STEP THREE: WORKERS RESKILL. Everyone reskilled. A forty-seven-year-old payroll specialist became a machine-learning engineer. A sixty-year-old claims processor learned robotics. A copywriter became an “AI-native creative systems architect.” Jessica Resilience™ purchased three courses. STEP TWO: TEMPORARY LABOR DISPLACEMENT. Temporary was another magnificent word. Childhood was temporary. The Roman Empire was temporary. Death, depending on theology, might be temporary. STEP ONE: YOU ARE FIRED ON TUESDAY. This was the part missing from the orbital diagrams. On Tuesday the mortgage remained terrestrial. The cardiologist remained terrestrial. The child’s tuition remained terrestrial. The landlord exhibited no interest in multiplanetary consciousness. Health insurance stubbornly refused to become post-scarcity. The forty-seven-year-old did not experience himself as a transitional variable between historical equilibria. He experienced himself as unemployed. The television said Mars. The unemployed man shouted, “WHAT ABOUT F*****G TUESDAY?” Nobody at Versailles heard him. This, too, was representative of democracy. VI. Elias Winter Versus Everybody By the second pint, the unemployed man had condemned most of the country. Americans were cowards. Tech workers were sheep. Shareholders were morally anesthetized. Executives were sociopaths. Podcasters were courtiers. Billionaires were sovereigns. LinkedIn users deserved whatever happened to them. People who posted gratitude after being fired were pathetic. People who liked the podcast were animals applauding the construction of their own enclosure. The unemployed man was becoming extremely efficient at determining who did not deserve his solidarity. He opened Substack. No new subscribers. “Pieces of s**t,” he said. He refreshed. Still none. He closed Substack in disgust at the attention economy. Thirty seconds later he reopened it. At this point God entered the story. God was the bartender. This was disappointing. The unemployed man had expected more production value. God wore an apron and was polishing a glass. “You,” the unemployed man said. God continued polishing. “Are you listening?” “Yes.” “Do something.” “About what?” “All of this.” The unemployed man pointed vaguely toward the television, capitalism, orbital compute, American civilization, LinkedIn and possibly creation itself. “They’re building a world where people don’t matter.” God examined the glass. “You blocked twenty-two hundred people.” “That is completely different.” “You hate the unemployed people for failing to organize.” “They thank the corporations that fire them.” “You are unemployed.” “Again, completely different.” “You hate people who desire status.” “They’re pathetic.” “You spent forty minutes deciding whether the podcaster is smarter than you.” “He is annoyingly fit.” “I noticed.” “You hate the attention economy.” “Yes.” “You check your analytics how often?” The unemployed man said nothing. God placed the glass on the counter. “You hate Musk because he speaks about humanity while categorizing people according to usefulness.” “Yes.” “You have spent the afternoon categorizing thirty million people as idiots.” Silence. “That is not the same.” “No,” God said. “Nothing is ever the same when you are doing it.” The unemployed man glared at him. This was exactly the kind of divine smugness that had caused secularization. “I just want justice.” “Of course.” “I hope they all die.” God shrugged. “They will.” The unemployed man had not expected this. “All of them?” “Eventually.” “That’s not what I meant.” “I know.” God returned to polishing the glass. “What you want,” he said, “is for mortality to become politically selective.” The unemployed man considered this. “That would be helpful.” VII. The Revolution Will Be Livestreamed and Monetized Eventually the Americans organized. It happened on a Thursday because most people had already used their personal days. Five hundred thousand displaced workers marched through San Francisco, New York, Seattle, Austin and Washington. Teachers joined. Nurses joined. Programmers joined. Accountants joined. Delivery drivers joined. Several middle managers attended anonymously wearing sunglasses. The movement demanded democratic control over AI infrastructure, broad ownership of productivity gains, protection against technological unemployment, severe restrictions on mass surveillance, and a political principle so radical that cable news had difficulty locating a panelist willing to discuss it: Citizens remained citizens even when employers no longer needed them. For approximately eleven minutes, history appeared possible. Then the content creators arrived. “Hey guys, I’m literally here on the ground at the Human Dignity March—smash follow for updates.” A venture capitalist announced a new fund. Resistance Ventures: Investing at the Intersection of Democracy and Disruption. A founder launched an organizing platform. Solidarify.ai. “Labor movements have historically suffered from coordination friction,” he explained. “We’re solving that with agents.” Series A: $380 million. Jessica Resilience™ posted: “Honored to stand with workers navigating disruption while remaining optimistic about the extraordinary possibilities AI unlocks.” The post received 61,000 likes. A startup launched GuillotineGPT. The demo was spectacular. Users could specify an economic grievance and receive a historically informed revolutionary slogan in under 300 milliseconds. Musk replied: Interesting. GuillotineGPT’s valuation doubled. The protesters marched past a luxury apartment building. Several residents watched from balconies while ordering dinner through an app staffed increasingly by autonomous dispatch systems. Dave the shareholder watched coverage from home. “I really support what they’re saying,” he told his wife. His retirement account had risen another two percent on news that AI capital expenditures were accelerating. “Do you think we should sell?” His wife looked horrified. “Of course not.” Nobody killed the revolution. It achieved product-market fit. VIII. Three Pints The interview ended. Three empty Guinness glasses remained on the table. Musk stood. Patel stood. The cameras stopped. For several hours they had discussed intelligence, civilization, economics, robots, governments, consciousness and stars. None of them had solved democracy. This was not especially surprising. Democracy was considerably harder than rockets because rockets did not resent the launch vehicle for possessing more equity. Chadwick Vale approached Musk. “Extraordinary conversation.” Musk nodded. “What did you think of the part about democratic accountability?” Chadwick blinked. “The key insight,” he said, “is that legacy governance frameworks will need to evolve alongside exponentially scaling technological capacity.” “Right.” “You were extremely clear.” Musk had not actually answered the question. This was why Chadwick earned so much money. Patel packed his notes. He remained young, fit, intelligent and irritating. The unemployed man on the couch remained forty. For a moment, he hated him again. Then the algorithm recommended another clip. ELON MUSK: WHY EVERYTHING CHANGES BY 2030. He did not click it. This was perhaps the least impressive political act performed anywhere in the story. He closed YouTube. Then he closed LinkedIn. Then, after considerable internal negotiation, he did not reopen either one. He stared at his phone. There were people he could call. Not important people. Not billionaires. Not investors. Not people who could get him onto a podcast with thirty million views. Ordinary people. This was disappointing. He called another unemployed engineer. The man answered. “Hey.” “Hey.” A pause. “You doing anything tonight?” “Not really.” “You want dinner?” Another pause. “Sure.” “Don’t bring anything.” “I’ll bring bread.” “You don’t have to.” “I know.” An hour later there were four people in the apartment. One had been laid off from a startup. One worked in healthcare. One had kept his job but believed he would lose it within two years. Nobody knew what would happen. Nobody had a ten-step plan. Nobody possessed orbital compute. Someone made chili. The unemployed engineer complained that the kitchen outlet had stopped working. Another man stood up. “You check the GFCI?” “The what?” “Move.” He pressed a button. The outlet came back. “Jesus Christ.” “You have a PhD?” “In physics.” “That makes this worse.” They laughed. There were only three chairs. Someone brought one from the bedroom. Nobody streamed the evening. Nobody photographed the chili. Nobody posted: Five Lessons About Community in the AI Age. Nobody explained that sharing bread represented a scalable framework for post-labor resilience. For the first time all day, nobody said humanity. Outside, satellites crossed the sky at seventeen thousand miles an hour. Somewhere, models trained. Somewhere, capital accumulated. Somewhere, a board prepared a restructuring memo. Somewhere, Jessica Resilience™ was drafting a post titled Why Uncertainty Is Actually a Gift. The men ate. The future remained unresolved. One of them asked if they should do this again next Thursday. “Yeah,” somebody said. No referendum was held. No venture financing was required. No algorithm recommended it. They simply agreed. At Versailles, servants once spent entire lives ensuring that a single man never encountered an unopened door. In America, thirty million people had spent three hours watching powerful men discuss whether intelligence itself might leave Earth. Here, in a small apartment nobody would photograph, somebody noticed that another person’s bowl was empty. “More?” “Yeah.” He filled it. The unemployed man looked around the table. For months he had been asking whether civilization had abandoned him. Whether corporations had abandoned him. Whether technology was going to abandon him. Whether America had abandoned him. Whether thirty million strangers were idiots for cheering the people building a future in which they might become unnecessary. Perhaps some of them were idiots. This possibility remained open. But maybe the most dangerous thing he had done was allow the people who frightened him to define the scale at which humanity had to matter. Humanity did not have to begin with eight billion people. It could begin with four. It could begin with the person who noticed the empty bowl. It could begin with the man who knew where the reset button was. It could begin with the person who came back next Thursday. The great technological sovereigns might someday build intelligence among the stars. They might produce abundance. They might produce catastrophe. They might produce both, because human beings had always been exceptionally talented at manufacturing miracles with one hand and invoices with the other. But they did not own the noun. That was the mistake. Humanity was not whatever survived the optimization function. Humanity was not the shareholders. Humanity was not the high-agency people. Humanity was not the people who understood the future soon enough. Humanity was not everyone fortunate enough to remain economically necessary. Humanity was not everyone invited to the small table with the Guinness. Humanity was the person who could contribute nothing that quarter. The person whose résumé went unanswered. The old woman who needed someone to drive her to the doctor. The addict who had ruined another weekend. The mediocre worker. The frightened worker. The worker who posted something pathetic on LinkedIn because he needed another company to hire him. The billionaire too, unfortunately. Even Chadwick. That was the irritating part. You did not get to defend humanity by narrowing it to the people whose humiliation you personally found satisfying. The unemployed man hated this conclusion. It lacked grandeur. There was no revolution. No divine thunderbolt. No billionaire dragged from Versailles. No righteous ending in which the guilty finally understood everything. There was chili. There was bread. There was a repaired outlet. There was Thursday. Outside, the machinery of the future continued accelerating. Nobody at the table looked up. They were deciding who would bring dinner next week. And for once, humanity meant everyone who showed up. —Elias WinterAuthor of Language Matters, a space for reflection on language, power, and decline. This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit eliaswinter.substack.com