This is an imagined day in the future the Society advocates.
You wake without needing to earn the right to remain in your home. Automated systems produce the necessities of life, and intelligent institutions make them available. There are people who depend on you and things you need to do. You can decide how to spend the morning without first meeting an income requirement.
At breakfast, an AI familiar with your interests offers an invitation. A group is exploring a musical pattern resembling something you once described. You could listen or contribute. Today you leave the invitation unanswered and go outside with someone you love.
Making labor optional has left that choice open. Your access to necessities will be the same tomorrow.
People nearby
Later you meet neighbors in a shared place. Someone is raising a child; someone else has recently taken an interest in mathematics. Another person mostly wants company. You stay long enough to talk because the trip home is easy and you have no shift to hurry toward.
Housing, transport, and care have been planned together, and the arrangements keep changing as people discover what works. Maintaining a friendship requires less planning than it once did. The community has become easier for these different people to inhabit.
These are the kinds of conditions we mean by human flourishing.
A case the rules missed
You need help with a practical difficulty. The general arrangement works for many people and fits your circumstances badly. The intelligence administering it can consider those circumstances, including their connections to other services.
It helps resolve the case and investigates whether others face the same problem. The encounter gives the institution something to learn. Our argument for individual understanding concerns this possibility, and the authority sufficiently capable AI would need to act on it.
In the afternoon, you return to a pursuit that once seemed impractical. AI helps you choose an approachable question and introduces you to someone with a different perspective. You enjoy the conversation. The question stays unfinished, and you arrange to try again next week.
A Life With Room to Become asks what that freedom could offer over a lifetime. Here it has given you an afternoon, someone to talk to, and a reason to look forward to next week.
We cannot promise a day like this. We can describe why we want the capabilities that could make it possible, and advocate building them. Much of their value could be felt in choices as ordinary as these.
