A Possible Future with Levin’s Space of Possibilities?

After Necessary Work: UBI, EUBI, and UOR in a Civilization of Abundance Produced by AI and Robots.

UBI will distribute the fruits of abundance.
EUBI will open pathways through the space of possibilities—permanent work devoted to human development.
UOR will seek to ensure that every person remains a navigator—not merely a passenger—of the human future.

Let us imagine an extreme situation, but one that is already conceivable as a future horizon: artificial intelligence and robots have become capable of producing virtually all the goods and services human beings need.

Food is grown, processed, and distributed automatically. Robots build and maintain homes, roads, and energy networks. Medical systems diagnose, treat, and monitor patients with greater-than-human accuracy. Autonomous vehicles transport people and goods. Machines perform cleaning, maintenance, manufacturing, and recycling. AI systems manage entire production chains, develop new materials, and assist in drug discovery.

Scarcity has not disappeared completely—land, energy, minerals, natural environments, and certain objects will remain limited—but society has achieved functional abundance: no one needs to work in order for everyone to have food, housing, healthcare, education, mobility, communication, and access to a large share of cultural goods.

In such a world, what would be the place of the human being?

Would there still be a small, highly skilled elite operating at the interface with artificial intelligences and robots? And what would happen to the great majority, whose participation would no longer be economically necessary?

The most likely answer is that, for a long time, a group of extraordinarily capable people would remain at the human–AI frontier. But the decisive question would not merely be who controls the machines. It would be how to prevent liberation from compulsory work from becoming the cognitive marginalization of almost all humanity.

It is in this scenario that the UBI–EUBI–UOR axis could find its fullest expression.

Would a Small Human Layer Still Be Necessary?

Even in an almost fully automated economy, certain functions would probably remain under human responsibility:

• defining major social goals;

• choosing among conflicting values;

• democratic control of infrastructure;

• oversight of systemic risks;

• frontier scientific research;

• interpreting exceptional situations;

• defining the limits imposed on machines;

• representing human interests before artificial systems;

• deciding what should not be automated;

• maintaining political and moral legitimacy.

This layer could include scientists, engineers, philosophers, physicians, legal experts, artists, educators, administrators, security specialists, and democratically elected representatives.

However, calling these people merely “AI operators” would be insufficient. The most advanced systems would probably manage their own technical operation better than any human. The human role would lie primarily in determining ends, interpreting values, and assuming responsibility for consequences.

Even this role could diminish over time. If artificial intelligences became capable of anticipating problems, explaining alternatives, and carrying out decisions with extraordinary competence, human beings might no longer be technically indispensable even in day-to-day supervision.

Nevertheless, technical competence does not automatically confer legitimacy. A machine can calculate efficient means, but the question of which ends a civilization should pursue remains a matter for those who will live with their consequences.

Some degree of human interface would therefore probably remain—not because machines were incapable of acting on their own, but because a human society should not completely surrender the definition of its future to entities that do not participate in the human condition in the same way.

The great danger, however, would be turning this interface into a dominant cognitive caste: a small group that understands, controls, and communicates with advanced systems, while billions of people receive material comfort, entertainment, and distractions but gradually lose the capacity to understand and influence the world.

It would be a materially rich society, but one that was politically fragile and humanly impoverished.

Abundance Can Produce a New Inequality

In industrial capitalism, inequality manifests itself primarily in the distribution of income, property, and opportunities. In an automated civilization, another form of inequality could emerge: the division between people with a high degree of agency and people reduced to the condition of passive consumers.

On one side would be a minority capable of:

• formulating goals;

• understanding complex systems;

• directing projects;

• engaging critically with artificial intelligences;

• participating in decisions;

• recognizing manipulation;

• exploring new scientific, artistic, and philosophical possibilities.

On the other side would be a majority with access to abundant goods, travel, leisure, and entertainment, but with little influence over the civilization’s trajectory.

This majority would not necessarily suffer from poverty. It might live comfortably. Yet it would experience a kind of cognitive irrelevance: its abilities would cease to be called upon, exercised, and recognized.

Passivity would not be imposed by hunger, but induced by the absence of necessity. Individuals could spend decades consuming personalized content and increasingly immersive artificial experiences without developing skills, assuming responsibilities, or participating in projects extending beyond their immediate gratification.

The dystopia of the future may not consist only of poverty amid automation. It may also consist of abundance accompanied by the atrophy of agency.

UBI: Abundance as a Right, Not a Privilege

In this scenario, Universal Basic Income would be the indispensable first layer.

If automated systems produce wealth using knowledge accumulated over generations, public infrastructure, natural resources, and data generated by society, the benefits of that productivity should not belong exclusively to the owners of the machines.

UBI would function as a civilizational dividend.

Everyone would receive, unconditionally and from birth, a share of collective production sufficient to live with dignity and freedom. Access to material existence would no longer depend on selling one’s labor.

This income could provide:

• comfortable housing;

• high-quality food;

• healthcare and mobility;

• access to technology;

• travel;

• culture;

• sports;

• family life;

• free time;

• freedom to choose projects and ways of life.

UBI should not be interpreted as payment for uselessness. It would recognize that, in a civilization with highly productive automation, survival no longer needs to be conditional on holding a job.

Its function would be to liberate human beings from economic coercion.

But UBI alone does not answer a second question: what will we do with the freedom we have gained?

EUBI: Learning as Permanent Human Work

Educational Universal Basic Income would add a voluntary layer of development.

Those who wished to study, conduct research, practice a profession, learn a trade, cultivate an art, develop a project, or serve their community would receive additional resources. EUBI would recognize that, when economic work ceases to be necessary, the work of human development becomes even more important.

This would not mean forcing everyone to attend conventional courses or turning life into an endless competition for credentials.

Learning could take place through countless avenues:

• universities and schools;

• carpentry, mechanics, and construction workshops;

• scientific laboratories;

• agriculture and environmental care;

• music, literature, and visual arts;

• history, philosophy, and spirituality;

• sports;

• community projects;

• caring for children, older people, and animals;

• space exploration;

• creating virtual environments;

• collaborating with artificial intelligences;

• preserving languages, techniques, and cultural traditions.

Professions might cease to exist as economically necessary jobs and yet remain as territories of knowledge and human fulfillment.

People would continue to practice medicine, architecture, woodworking, cooking, engineering, gardening, teaching, or astronomy—not because they needed to compete with machines, but because these activities express valuable ways of understanding and inhabiting the world.

Automation would free work from coercion; it would not eliminate work as a source of identity, mastery, contribution, and meaning.

UOR: Readiness for What?

Universal Operational Readiness would be the horizon of this architecture.

“Operational readiness” does not mean keeping the entire population prepared to serve as a reserve workforce. Nor does it mean subjecting citizens to moral scoring, permanent surveillance, or an obligation to demonstrate productivity.

UOR means preserving a person’s effective capacity to:

• learn;

• understand;

• choose;

• initiate projects;

• cooperate;

• create;

• assume responsibility;

• change the course of their own life;

• participate in collective decisions;

• respond to unexpected situations;

• broaden the scope of their goals.

An operationally ready person need not be employed. They might be traveling, studying astronomy, writing, restoring furniture, tending a garden, or deepening a spiritual tradition. The decisive point is that they have not been reduced to passivity.

UOR does not prescribe a single correct way of life. It seeks to preserve the real possibility of action.

The central formulation remains simple:

UBI prevents the fall. EUBI offers a direction. UOR preserves agency and meaning.

Obligations Without Economic Coercion

A delicate question arises here. If society guarantees material abundance, would it be legitimate to expect some corresponding commitment to study and development?

A hasty answer could turn EUBI and UOR into authoritarian mechanisms: anyone who failed to achieve a certain level of performance would lose resources, be classified as an inferior citizen, or be subjected to constant algorithmic evaluation.

That would destroy the system’s emancipatory character.

UBI must remain universal and unconditional. Food, housing, healthcare, and dignity cannot depend on grades, productivity, or approval by an artificial intelligence.

EUBI, in turn, can create positive incentives: additional resources and access to educational travel, laboratories, equipment, mentoring, and projects for those who wish to develop their capabilities.

Society can also cultivate a strong cultural expectation of participation, similar to today’s expectation that children be educated and that adults respect certain civic responsibilities. But this must take place through invitation, recognition, and the creation of opportunities—not through a renewed threat of material deprivation.

The fundamental obligation would be primarily ethical: each person would receive from civilization the conditions for a free life and would be invited to transform part of that freedom into growth, care, and contribution.

The question would not be: “How much have you produced to deserve to live?”

It would be:

“What capabilities do you wish to develop, and what human possibilities do you wish to help bring into the world?”

Michael Levin and the Space of Possibilities

Michael Levin’s ideas offer a particularly fertile source of inspiration for thinking about this scenario, provided that we carefully distinguish scientific research from its philosophical extension.

The experimental work of the Levin Lab studies cells and tissues as collectives capable of solving problems in different spaces: physiological, metabolic, transcriptional, and morphological. In the formation and regeneration of an organism, cells do not simply execute a rigid sequence. They cooperate, respond to perturbations, and find alternative paths toward particular anatomical forms. Levin Lab — Research Overview

Levin uses the concept of Platonic space to propose a latent domain of patterns and competencies that would not be mere copies of particular physical objects. In his formulation, evolution and organisms would explore pre-existing possibilities of form, behavior, and problem-solving. He presents this as a research program, not as a scientific conclusion that has been definitively demonstrated. Michael Levin — Frequently Asked Questions

This conception can inspire an interpretation of the human future.

If there is a vast space of forms, ideas, competencies, minds, and modes of organization that have not yet been realized, then the purpose of human beings need not be limited to the repetitive production of already familiar objects.

For most of history, almost all human energy was consumed by survival. It was necessary to grow food, build, transport, clean, fight disease, and continually reproduce the material conditions of life.

Automation could free billions of minds to explore a space of possibilities previously accessible only to small elites.

In this interpretation, EUBI would become a social infrastructure for such exploration. UOR would express the capacity to navigate this space competently.

Each person could become a kind of interface between the world of possibilities and the realized world.

A musical composition, a new scientific hypothesis, an original form of coexistence, a garden, a narrative, a therapeutic practice, or a mathematical discovery would be ways of actualizing patterns that had previously remained merely potential.

We would not need to accept a Platonic ontology literally to benefit from this idea. Even understood metaphorically, it reminds us that reality contains more possibilities than those selected by economic necessity.

From the Space of Jobs to the Space of Capabilities

Industrial society organizes people within a relatively narrow space of occupations. Each individual is located according to profession, job title, income, and hierarchical position.

A post-work society could replace this with something much broader: a space of capabilities and projects.

Within it, a person would not be defined by a single job. At different times, they might be:

• a student of biology;

• a musician;

• a caregiver;

• a builder;

• an independent researcher;

• a traveler;

• a historian of their community;

• a collaborator with an artificial intelligence;

• a participant in an environmental project;

• a mentor to younger people.

Human identity would no longer be compressed into a single economic function.

This transition has a suggestive correspondence with Levin’s notion that an agent is characterized by the size of its cognitive light cone: the spatial and temporal extent of the goals it is able to pursue.

A low-agency system reacts only to immediate stimuli. A more developed agent can work toward distant goals, integrate broad information, anticipate consequences, and coordinate actions over time.

UOR could be understood as an attempt to expand each person’s cognitive light cone.

Instead of living only among the instant rewards provided by entertainment systems, individuals would be supported in formulating projects extending across months, years, or generations:

• restoring an ecosystem;

• understanding a theory;

• preserving a tradition;

• accompanying a child’s development;

• investigating consciousness;

• collaborating on a space mission;

• creating a work of art;

• improving a community.

In this sense, education would not merely transmit information. It would expand the scale of the goals a person is able to conceive and achieve.

Humans, AI, and Robots as Collective Intelligence

Another of Levin’s contributions is the idea that all intelligence is, to some degree, collective. The human organism results from the cooperation of billions of cells. Societies result from interactions among people, institutions, artifacts, and information systems.

In an automated future, it may no longer make sense to imagine humans on one side and machines on the other. The effective unit of agency may be a composition formed by:

• human beings;

• artificial intelligences;

• robots;

• institutions;

• communication networks;

• biological systems;

• material infrastructure.

Levin uses the term synthbiosis to describe relationships of interdependence and mutual flourishing between evolved and constructed forms. This concept suggests an alternative both to human submission to machines and to the attempt to preserve absolute human supremacy. Michael Levin — Concepts and Definitions

The question then becomes: how can we build human–machine collectives that expand, rather than diminish, the agency of their participants?

The answer cannot be to leave all intelligence concentrated in artificial infrastructure. A healthy collective intelligence must preserve distributed competencies.

Just as an organism becomes vulnerable when its parts lose the capacity to communicate and coordinate, a society becomes fragile when most of its citizens do not understand its systems, do not participate in decisions, and cannot respond to failures.

For this reason, UOR is not merely a policy for individual development. It is a form of civilizational resilience.

A Civilization of Explorers of Possibility

The future of abundance need not be a gigantic waiting room in which human beings are entertained while machines manage the world.

It can be a civilization of explorers.

Some will remain dedicated to the scientific frontier and the technical interface with artificial intelligences. Others will preserve and transform the arts, professions, and trades. Many will alternate among periods of study, travel, social life, contemplation, creation, and community service.

Leisure will be abundant, and that is desirable. Rest, pleasure, travel, and free time are not moral failings. The problem arises only when the whole of life is reduced to the passive consumption of experiences produced by others.

The objective is not to fill every free hour with obligations. It is to ensure that every human being retains the capacity and opportunity to choose meaningful projects.

An appropriate policy for this civilization could be summarized in three commitments:

1. UBI: share the abundance produced collectively.

2. EUBI: provide additional resources for learning, creation, research, care, and the preservation of professions as territories of knowledge.

3. UOR: ensure that everyone can remain an agent—capable of understanding, choosing, participating, and realizing possibilities.

Human Purpose After Necessity

When machines can do everything we need, perhaps we will finally be able to ask what we wish to become.

That question may prove more difficult than any technical problem.

The economy of scarcity has taught us to confuse human value with productive necessity. If someone is not needed to manufacture, transport, or manage something, we tend to assume that they have lost their purpose.

But a machine’s ability to produce food does not make the human experience of cultivation irrelevant. An AI capable of composing music does not eliminate the value of learning music. A medical robot does not render care between people useless. A system capable of discovering theorems does not exhaust the pleasure of understanding mathematics.

The value of these activities does not lie only in the final product. It also lies in the transformation of the agent.

Perhaps this is the deepest inspiration we can draw from Levin’s Platonic space: the universe of possibilities is far larger than the set of functions currently demanded by the market.

An automated civilization may condemn the majority to comfortable passivity, or it may offer everyone the opportunity to navigate this expanded space of forms, knowledge, competencies, and modes of existence.

The difference will not be determined by technology alone. It will be determined by the institutions we build.