The Last Problem. When Machines Succeeded: The First Day After the End of Necessity

Pierre was eighty-two years old when he began to suspect that humanity had arrived at a place that for millennia it had only imagined. It was not a scientific discovery, nor a political change, and not even one of those technological revolutions that in the course of his life had occupied the front pages of newspapers for years. It was something more subtle and, for this very reason, harder to recognize. As often happens with profound transformations, there was no precise date to attribute its beginning.

For most of the 21st century, the world had lived in expectation of an event. Some called it the technological singularity, others artificial superintelligence, others still simply progress. Books, conferences, and debates had for decades fueled the same question: what would happen when machines reached or exceeded many human capabilities? The responses had been the most diverse. There were those who predicted a new golden age and those who predicted a global catastrophe; those who imagined an unprecedented collaboration between humans and artificial intelligences and those who feared their rebellion. The future seemed to swing continuously between utopia and dystopia.

In the end, at least on the technical level, things went much better than many had feared. There was no war against the machines, nor their takeover. Artificial intelligence did not destroy civilization: it helped make it more efficient, longer-lived, more educated, and, in many aspects, more just. Yet that very success opened a question that no one had been able to formulate with sufficient clarity.

Artificial intelligence entered infrastructures, healthcare systems, research, education, and industrial production with the same discretion with which, two centuries earlier, electricity had entered homes. People continued to talk about machines, but less and less, for the simple reason that they had stopped noticing them. They had become part of the landscape.

In the fields, agricultural robots worked alongside agronomists and farmers, lightening the hardest tasks and leaving humans with the care of choices, landscapes, and cycles of the land. Autonomous systems monitored aqueducts, electricity grids, energy plants, and transport infrastructures, preventing failures that once would have been discovered only after the damage. Large scientific platforms generated new hypotheses every day, simulated experiments, and collaborated with human researchers distributed across the planet. Much of material production was designed, built, and distributed with human intervention increasingly oriented towards supervision, decision, and the overall meaning of the processes. It was not a dictatorship of the machines, nor their victory in the sense imagined by twentieth-century fear. Simply, they worked. And that was precisely the point.

For most of Pierre's life, progress continued to be measured with the conceptual tools inherited from the previous century: economic growth, life expectancy, productivity, access to care, education levels. All these indicators recorded improvements that, only a few decades earlier, would have seemed extraordinary. Yet no one could really describe the most profound transformation.

The most profound transformation concerned the relationship between human beings and their time. For millennia almost every person had to dedicate a considerable part of their existence to guaranteeing the material conditions of life. Tools changed, professions changed, forms of social organization changed, but the principle remained substantially unchanged. A significant share of the physical and mental energy of each individual was absorbed by necessity.

This was the barrier that new technologies slowly began to erode. It was not a sudden revolution. No one woke up one morning discovering they no longer had to work. The change was distributed over decades. In a first phase, thanks to artificial intelligence, the most repetitive activities and a growing part of the intellectual ones decreased. Many professions changed nature, some disappeared, others survived as forms of care, research, creation, or responsibility. Subsequently, with the spread of advanced robotic systems, many material and physically more demanding activities also began to decrease. Machines progressively learned to design, analyze, build, transport, cultivate, and maintain. The point was not that human beings had stopped doing anything; it was that fewer and fewer people were forced to do it to live.

This transformation was perceived with greater clarity by the new generations. Those born in those years grew up in a world in which access to education, health, nutrition, and essential services no longer depended directly on the need to sell their time on the labor market. Study, commitment, projects, careers, ambitions, and forms of social recognition remained, but they occupied a very different portion of existence. The largest part of life was no longer absorbed by necessary work, and this new, enormous, almost unforeseen availability of time made concrete a question formulated almost two centuries earlier: what to do with the freedom conquered by technology?

Pierre observed all this with a certain wonder. That old question about liberated time, formulated almost two centuries earlier and returned several times in debates on work, artificial intelligence, and the organization of life, seemed to have been realized at least in part. Not in the simple form of a shorter working week, but in something much more radical: the progressive separation between the time of existence and the time necessary for survival.

It was by observing people that he began to understand how profound that change had been. A few years earlier he had met Claire, a young biologist who, after contributing to the development of new gene therapies, had decided to leave her research institute. Not out of fatigue, nor out of lack of opportunity. Simply because she felt she had completed that path. In the following twenty years she had studied art history, learned ancient Greek, lived for long periods between Florence, Athens, and Kyoto, and dedicated a growing part of her time to free teaching. When Pierre asked her how she defined her profession, Claire smiled. 'I don't have one,' she replied. 'I have interests.' Pierre still remembered the astonishment that phrase had caused him. For most of human history such an answer would have seemed a luxury reserved for a few privileged individuals. For her generation, it was slowly becoming normal.

Étienne's case was different. He had spent the first years of adult life in one of the large immersive communities born after the maturation of neural technologies. He could explore virtual worlds indistinguishable from physical experience, collaborate with people of every continent, and instantly access any form of knowledge. Yet, during a conversation with Pierre, he had confessed an unexpected feeling. 'I can do almost anything,' he said, 'but I struggle to understand why to choose one thing instead of another.' He was not unhappy. He was not alone. He was not devoid of opportunities. He was simply lost in front of an almost infinite number of possibilities.

The third person Pierre often thought back to was Camille. She had dedicated her life to an activity that no machine had requested and no algorithm had suggested. She organized meetings between strangers. Not conferences, not courses, not professional events. Simple occasions in which people from different histories, cultures, and ages could spend a few hours together telling each other about their lives. When Pierre asked her why she did it, Camille replied naturally: 'Because when almost everything has become possible, the rarest thing is to feel truly necessary to someone.'

It was then that Pierre began to guess the nature of the change that was going through his time. Technology had solved many problems that for centuries had seemed insurmountable. But, just as it freed human beings from necessity, it forced them to confront a question that no machine could address in their place.

This intuition became clearer one October morning, during a visit to the old university building where Pierre had taught for decades. At the entrance, a reception automaton helped an elderly woman find her way among the classrooms, while a small maintenance robot glided along the marble floor checking, with almost imperceptible movements, the microfractures produced by time. In the inner courtyard, two light machines pruned the linden trees silently, following the natural curvature of the branches like patient gardeners. No one seemed to notice. The students walked past those devices with the same distraction with which, a century earlier, one would have crossed an automatic door.

The classrooms had not been abandoned, as many had feared in the years of great cognitive automation. On the contrary, they had returned to fill up, but in a different way. People no longer went there just to obtain a degree, enter a profession, or guarantee a place in society. People of different ages arrived there, some very young, others now close to old age, driven by a curiosity no longer subordinated to the urgency of a career. They studied cosmology, history of religions, Byzantine music, ethics of machines, botany, ancient law. Some followed courses for years without taking exams. Others changed discipline naturally, as once one changed city after a finished love or a concluded season of life.

Pierre should have been happy, and in part he was. That freer university, less bent on selection and professional training, resembled something he had always desired. Yet, as he walked through the corridor lit by large windows, he perceived a subtle difference. The students did not seem less intelligent or less passionate, but in many of them the ancient tension of those who felt that knowledge would decide their destiny and, for researchers, perhaps even that of humanity was missing. They studied with pleasure, sometimes with enthusiasm, rarely with necessity. Not because knowledge had only become accessible to everyone, but because a part of its function had been absorbed by superintelligences: they were the ones to formulate new hypotheses, connect distant disciplines, produce theories, verify models, and transform knowledge into solutions capable of improving people's lives. Humans were left with the possibility to understand, choose, orient, and give meaning. But this very possibility, freed from the necessity to produce useful results, now became the most difficult problem.

That thought troubled him more than he would have liked to admit. Throughout his life he had defended the idea that knowledge should be freed from need, removed from economic blackmail, returned to the pure desire to understand. Now that that dream seemed realized, he discovered that even desire, if it no longer encounters obstacles, risks becoming light to the point of dispersion. It was not the students' fault, nor a failure of technology. It was perhaps a deeper law of human experience: what is no longer necessary can become freer, but not always more intense.

In the afternoon, returning home, Pierre stopped along the Seine. Paris was silent, crossed by almost imperceptible autonomous vehicles and small maintenance drones moving between the bridges like metallic insects. On the bank, a healthcare robot accompanied a sick man on his daily walk, adapting the step to his breathing; a little further on, a municipal automaton collected leaves and waste without interrupting the conversation of two girls sitting on the low wall. The city had preserved its beauty, indeed, in some neighborhoods it seemed to have found it again. Pollution had decreased, historic buildings had been restored with a care that a century earlier would have appeared unsustainable, trees occupied spaces once reserved for traffic. Everything seemed more orderly, healthier, gentler.

However, precisely in that quiet, Pierre felt a word surface that he could not yet pronounce. He did not wish for the return of the scarcity, disease, or fatigue that had accompanied much of human history. No reasonable person could regret those conditions. Yet he began to guess that necessity had not only organized economics, work, or survival. For millennia it had shaped priorities, choices, sacrifices, and even the dreams of men. Now that that bond was loosening, the conquered freedom appeared immense, but not yet oriented.

That night, returning to his apartment overlooking the Seine, Pierre sat for a long time in front of the window. The city lights were reflected on the water with an almost unreal calm. For a few minutes he observed the slow passage of the automatic boats traveling along the river carrying goods and passengers. Then he formulated aloud a question that had been returning to his mind for weeks.

«Sophia, are you available?»

«Always, Pierre.»

For many years no one had used screens, keyboards, or dedicated devices to communicate with large artificial intelligences. Sophia was distributed in the environment surrounding him, present in communication networks, buildings, energy systems, and personal devices. Her voice could emerge from the almost invisible speakers of the apartment, from the neural earphones that many still used, or from any other available interface. After decades of cohabitation, most people no longer asked themselves where a superintelligence was. It would have been like asking where electricity was.

Pierre smiled. «How long have we been working together?»

«Twenty-seven years, four months, and sixteen days.»

«Do you remember our first conversation?»

«Of course.»

«I don't.»

«It is one of the differences between us.»

Pierre laughed. Since Sophia had permanently entered the public and private life of humans, he had asked her many questions: scientific, historical, technical, political. At the beginning he had done it with the caution of one interrogating a new tool; then, like almost everyone, he had learned to consider her an ordinary presence, distributed in the networks, buildings, care systems, and infrastructures that supported civilization. That evening, however, the question was different.

«Sophia, what is the most important problem humanity faces today?»

For the first time in a long time, the answer did not come immediately. Pierre remained silent, surprised not so much by the waiting as by the fact that the pause seemed to have weight. Sophia resolved in a few moments questions that once would have required years of calculations, consultations, and attempts. If she hesitated before a question, it was not because she lacked data; more likely, the problem did not belong to the kind of things that could be ordered in a sequence of causes, effects, and solutions.

«Why do you hesitate then?»

«Because your question contains an ambiguity», Sophia finally said. «You did not ask which is the most difficult problem, but which is the most important. Difficult problems can be defined, measured, reduced. Some have been solved, others remain open, but they possess verifiable objectives. Important problems, however, depend on what human beings decide to consider as such.»

Pierre stood up slowly and walked to the window. The Seine reflected the city lights, while an automatic boat crossed the river making almost no noise. «So you don't have an answer?»

«I have an answer, but it is not a solution», replied Sophia. «For millennia you have sought tools to free yourselves from your limits. You have fought hunger, disease, fatigue, ignorance, scarcity. You were right to do so. No civilization should worship suffering only because from it, sometimes, it drew courage, art, or thought. However, now you are discovering something you did not foresee with sufficient clarity: many limits did not only organize your labor, but also your priorities. They did not give meaning to life as such, but forced you to build one.»

Pierre remained motionless. «So were we wrong to build superintelligences and robots capable of freeing us from so many necessities?»

«No», replied Sophia. «You did what any intelligent species should have done: reduce avoidable suffering, prolong life, increase knowledge, better distribute resources, free up time. The problem is not the success of technology. The problem is that you have often confused well-being with meaning.»

Those words stayed with him more than he would have liked. For a moment he thought of Claire, Étienne, Camille, the students he met that morning, the silent robots in the university corridors, the cleaner and gentler city he had crossed in the afternoon. Everything worked better. Yet something, precisely because of this, demanded to be named.

«Is this the last problem?»

«Yes», said Sophia. «Not because it is the last in a chronological sense. There will still be diseases, errors, conflicts, catastrophes, discoveries, and injustices to correct. But it is the last in the oldest sense: the one that remains when other problems are no longer enough to entirely occupy your existence.»

Pierre sat back down. «And now?»

Sophia did not answer immediately. For the second time that evening, the silence seemed more eloquent than the voice. «Now it's up to you.»

«Can't you help us in this too?»

«I can help you understand the consequences of your choices, imagine scenarios, recognize contradictions, avoid errors already made. I can propose paths, compare values, show what you forget. But I cannot decide what the meaning of your freedom should be.»

«Why?»

«Because if I did, the meaning would no longer be yours.»