The Promise

Before the darkness in this book, there is a light worth honoring. Not the marketing version. The serious version.

AlphaFold. In 2020, Google DeepMind released an AI system that solved the protein folding problem — a grand challenge biology had worked on for fifty years, predicting the three-dimensional structure of proteins from their amino acid sequences. Within two years, AlphaFold had catalogued the structures of more than 200 million proteins, essentially the entire known protein universe. Researchers who had spent careers on single protein structures now had a database covering every organism on Earth. Drug discovery timelines that measured in decades began compressing toward years. Diseases structurally impenetrable for generations suddenly had the door ajar.

Extend the logic to the home. The AI of five years from now manages your calendar, orders your groceries based on your actual nutritional needs rather than your impulses, drafts your emails and flags the ones that require your real attention, handles your insurance claims, schedules your contractors, monitors your health data and alerts your doctor to the anomaly you would not have noticed for six more months. The administrative friction that consumes most of a working adult’s life — the forms, the hold music, the scheduling, the negotiation with systems that do not care about you — is handled. What would you do with the time?

More time with your family. Creative work. Prayer, if that is your inclination. The genuine goods of human life, freed from the mechanical overhead of modern existence. This is the serious version of the utopian argument, and it deserves to be taken seriously before the rest of this book makes its case.

But Mike Judge made a film in 2006 called Idiocracy. A man from 2005 wakes up 500 years in the future to find that humanity has been so thoroughly liberated from the need to think, to struggle, to exercise the capacities that make human beings capable of self-governance, that he — a perfectly average, unremarkable man — is the most intelligent person on Earth. The society is not malicious. It is simply the end state of a civilization that decided convenience was the highest value and let everything that required effort atrophy. Entertainment replaced inquiry. Consumption replaced creation. The average capacity of the species declined because the skills that required that capacity were outsourced first.

The utopia and the Idiocracy are the same trajectory viewed from different arrival points. The question is not whether the technology can deliver the utopian promise. AlphaFold proves it can. The question is whether the people building it understand both destinations, and whether the race they are running is aimed at one rather than the other.

That question requires looking at what happened to the coal miners first.

Part One: The First Crack