Fernando Borretti — creator of the Austral programming language and longtime open-source contributor — argues that the standard techno-optimist answer to "what do we do after AGI?" collapses under scrutiny. The Culture novels' infinite vacation requires people who want to be around each other. Borretti contends the same forces that eliminate work also eliminate the social machinery that produces those people. The argument has three legs. First, the social processes that bring people together — workplaces, universities, open-source communities, even IRC chatrooms — are downstream of economic necessity. Remove the necessity and you remove the gathering points. Borretti offers himself as evidence: he built friendships through code contributions and technical blogging that would have been irrelevant if Claude Code had existed when he started. Young people entering a post-AI world don't inherit that pre-existing network. Second, the BATNA (best alternative to a negotiated agreement) for human company keeps improving. When AI-generated superstimulus is piped directly into your sensorium, the friction cost of arranging to meet another human — with all their inconveniences, scheduling conflicts, and mediocre conversation — looks increasingly unattractive. This isn't speculative; Borretti points to the TikTok-at-work pattern already visible today. Third, and most cutting: the people themselves degrade. Quoting Gregory Conti, Borretti argues that without struggle, striving, education, or accomplishment, the post-Singularity population will have nothing interesting to say. No skills, no stories, no hard-won perspectives. The UBI recipient who never learned to read is identical in material outcome to the PhD — and eventually indistinguishable in conversation. The essay's strongest move is framing social networks as a non-renewable resource. Even with radical life extension, attrition grinds down your pre-Singularity friendships through drift, ennui, accident, and the experience machine. New relationships can't form because the institutions that generated them are gone. This is a depletion model, not a scarcity model — the stock declines monotonically. What's missing is any engagement with counterfactuals. Humans have built social infrastructure under every previous technological disruption — the coffeehouse, the salon, the bowling league, the subreddit. Borretti assumes no new gathering mechanisms emerge, which is the weakest link in the chain. The piece also doesn't distinguish between different AI deployment speeds; a slow transition gives institutions time to adapt in ways a hard takeoff doesn't. Still, the core insight lands: post-scarcity optimism systematically ignores that the same automation which frees people from drudgery also removes the shared contexts that make freedom worth having. The question isn't whether people will have time to hang out. It's whether they'll have reasons to, and whether anyone will be worth hanging out with.
