The World We've Always Wanted

AI could be the best thing to ever happen to art and humanity

Prologue

There are dark paths from here…

AI as the infrastructure of authoritarian surveillance. Mass unemployment with no safety net to catch those who fall. Art reduced to algorithmic slop. Human connection hollowed out and replaced with simulation.

These are possible trajectories, and they deserve serious resistance.

But they’re not what I’m here to talk about. There are plenty of people imagining the dark paths, especially in my artist communities. The vast majority of the artists I know are almost exclusively imagining dystopias. The discourse in creative communities is overwhelmingly dark, shot through with anger, fear, and a bitter certainty that the worst version is the one that’s coming. There is a pervasive conviction that with AI our future is bleak, and that to maintain our humanity, we must shun the technology entirely.

I get it. The slop is real. The job losses are real. The feeling of something precious being cheapened is real.

And yet: I remain unabashedly optimistic.

The future I imagine is radically bright. I see a utopia unlike anything we’ve thought possible, bursting with abundance, fulfilment, and relief from suffering. This is not a prediction. This is a vision. A deliberate act of imagining how incredible the (very near) future could be. I see the dark paths, but I’m looking toward the bright ones. I believe we bring about the future that we look towards, like a self-fulfilling prophecy.

There are three possible paths forward. The first: actively reject AI and put all of our effort into fighting it. The second: choose not to engage in AI and let corrupt governments and corporations design the future for us, cementing the dystopia by default. The third: to see clearly what AI has the potential to bring about, take the reins, and steer it toward something incredible.

Path one is not really available. AI is here. You can’t stuff that genie back in the bottle. The only real choice is between paths two and three. Those who disengage, who shun, and resist, are not choosing path one. They are choosing path two.

This essay is for the artists who are skeptical of AI. Who see it as the start of the end for art and humanity. I want you to consider with curiosity: What if this is the start of the true beginning of humanity? When AI solves humanity’s material problems, the central challenge of human life will no longer be survival. It will be meaning. And that’s where the artists will come in.

Part 1: Quiet Miracles

Good news is quieter than bad news. It rarely stirs outrage or ignites viral memes. Catastrophe travels fast. Miracles travel quietly.

This is why most people know AI as the thing that enables deepfake scams, catalyzes suicidal psychosis, and threatens jobs. Far fewer know it as the tool that is ending disease, saving the planet, and freeing humanity from suffering.

In 2024, Google DeepMind was awarded the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for solving one of biology’s hardest unsolved problems: predicting the three-dimensional shape of proteins. This is a world-changing advance. Proteins are the enzymes that digest your food, the antibodies that fight infection, the receptors that let your neurons fire. For decades, determining the shape of a single protein could take years of painstaking lab work. Using AI, AlphaFold does it in seconds. Let’s look at some examples of why this is so revolutionary.

Antibiotic resistance is one of the most dangerous slow-motion crises on Earth. It threatens a future where common infections become untreatable and routine surgery becomes life-threatening. Researchers searching for new antibiotics used to spend a decade identifying which bacterial proteins were worth targeting. With AlphaFold, that same work can take about thirty minutes.

Consider Chagas disease, a parasitic illness affecting seven million people across Latin America, most of whom aren’t diagnosed until the parasite has already damaged their heart. Using AlphaFold, researchers mapped the proteins of the Trypanosoma cruzi parasite in detail for the first time, then screened thousands of existing drugs to see which might bind to those targets. They found promising candidates in weeks.

Or take apolipoprotein B-100, a protein at the center of heart disease, the leading cause of death on Earth. Its structure was too complex to fully map for years. AlphaFold solved it, opening the door to far more precise interventions.

Meanwhile, in American hospitals, something absurd is happening. In 2023, U.S. hospitals reported about $687 billion in administrative and operational costs (management, billing systems, paperwork, compliance, and other overhead) compared with only $346 billion spent on direct patient care services. We have built a system where the paperwork costs twice as much as the medical care. Similarly, physicians spend nearly twice as much time on desk work as they spend with patients. AI is rapidly shrinking that administrative burden. In the space that opens up, something overdue happens: doctors can pay attention to the people sitting in front of them. A survey from the American Medical Association found that 93% of physicians using ambient AI tools say they can now give their full attention to patients during appointments. AI is raising the level of humanity in medical care, not diminishing it.

AI is also improving diagnosis itself. A clinical AI tool trained on electrocardiograms can now identify coronary microvascular dysfunction, a heart condition that disproportionately affects women and has been misdiagnosed for decades, from a standard ten-second EKG.

The same transformation is happening at the planetary scale. Our planet is in a climate crisis that worsens each year. Critics often point to the water and energy use of data centers as proof that AI harms the environment. But AI may prove to be one of the most powerful tools we have for saving it.

One major obstacle to a clean-energy civilization is storage. Solar and wind power require batteries that can store energy. Lithium-ion batteries are currently our best option, but lithium extraction is environmentally damaging and geographically concentrated in ways that recreate the geopolitical fragility of oil. In 2023, Microsoft and the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory used AI to screen roughly 32 million potential battery materials. Within 80 hours, the system narrowed that list to 18 promising candidates. Scientists synthesized one of them, a solid-state electrolyte that uses roughly 70% less lithium than conventional batteries. Traditional screening at this scale could have taken decades. Our planet’s survival is on a tight deadline, and AI is accelerating our ability to move into a post-fossil-fuel world.

Nuclear fusion (the same process that powers the sun) has long been another dream of clean power: unlimited fuel, no carbon, no long-lived radioactive waste. The engineering problem that has kept it out of reach is one of the hardest in physics: containing plasma superheated to 150 million degrees Celsius, ten times hotter than the core of the sun, without it touching the walls of the reactor. The system is so volatile it must be adjusted thousands of times per second. No human can do it. In 2022, DeepMind trained an AI to control that plasma in real time inside a tokamak reactor, and it worked. We are on the doorstep of unlimited clean energy thanks to AI.

Regarding water, AI may return far more of it to us than it consumes. Yes, data centers do use significant water, with some devastating effects to surrounding communities. That is a problem. But it is a problem that AI is already solving. Google’s AI is improving its own cooling systems, requiring less and less water per unit of compute.

Beyond solving its own water consumption problem, AI is finding even more impactful ways to free up water on the planet. Agriculture accounts for roughly 70% of global freshwater withdrawals. AI-guided irrigation systems now combine satellite imagery, soil sensors, and weather forecasts to deliver water with a precision traditional irrigation never could. Some deployments have cut water use by 30–50%. At global scale, that is an incomprehensible amount of water returned to rivers, aquifers, and ecosystems.

Urban water systems leak staggering amounts as well. Many cities lose 20–30% of their water supply through damaged pipes before it ever reaches a faucet. AI systems analyzing pressure data and acoustic sensors can now identify leaks across entire networks far faster and more accurately than previous methods, recovering water that has been silently bleeding away for decades.

And then there’s hunger. Around one billion people are food insecure today. Climate change will make that worse. AI systems analyzing satellite imagery, soil composition, and weather data can predict crop yields months in advance, detect disease outbreaks in fields before they spread, and help farmers make planting decisions that can mean the difference between a harvest and a failure. In regions where a bad harvest triggers hunger, displacement, and conflict, that information can mean stability instead of collapse.

AI is also becoming an early-warning system for natural disasters. Major earthquakes have always arrived without warning. The best we have managed is seconds of notice, enough time to duck under a desk, not enough to evacuate. AI systems analyzing seismic networks are now issuing faster and more precise alerts than any system before them, and newer models are beginning to identify precursor signals that precede an event. Separately, a constellation of AI-powered satellites called FireSat can now detect a wildfire anywhere on Earth in near real-time, before it becomes an inferno. AI flood-forecasting systems already protect two billion people across 150 countries, giving communities hours of warning that didn’t exist a decade ago. New AI climate models can generate long-range climate simulations far faster than traditional physics-based models, compressing weeks of supercomputer computation into hours. As the planet is becoming less predictable, AI is becoming its early warning system.

According to the World Health Organization, depression is the leading cause of ill health and disability on Earth. More than 280 million people live with it. For decades, treating it has been a process of educated guessing. A doctor prescribes an antidepressant. The patient waits six to eight weeks to see if it works. If it doesn’t, they try another. And another. For people with treatment-resistant depression, this cycle can stretch on for years while the illness erodes relationships, careers, and the will to keep going. AI is beginning to change that. New models can predict which of several antidepressants is most likely to work for a specific patient before treatment even begins. And for patients for whom no drug has worked at all, Stanford’s AI-guided brain stimulation therapy, which maps each patient’s unique neural architecture to pinpoint exactly where and how to stimulate, has achieved remission rates approaching 80% in treatment-resistant cases, in five days. AI is giving people their happiness back.

All of this is the news that doesn’t trend. These are the miracles that travel quietly while the slop and the job losses and the fear travel loudly.

AI isn’t coming for art. It’s coming for suffering.

Part 2: The End of Money

Some people see the incredible things that AI is doing for biology and for the planet, and they feel the pull of the vision. But then a more immediate fear cuts through it: what about my job?

It’s a fair question. Yes, in the short term, the next one to three years, AI will eliminate jobs. A lot of them. It’s already happening. The economic disruption is real and the people caught in it aren’t wrong to be frightened.

But people are reading the transition as the destination. They’re looking at the mess and deciding it’s a verdict. It isn’t.

There is a longer story. It moves in three horizons. The fear lives in the first one. The vision lives in the third.

In the short term, the disruption is the story. Jobs disappear faster than new ones emerge. The safety net crumbles under the weight. Some people are caught badly. This is where we are now and it’s only going to get worse over the next couple of years. It will be genuinely painful. But it is not where we are going.

In the medium term, three to ten years, something else will begin to happen. The cost of being alive will start to fall, dramatically. Food will be produced by AI-optimized agriculture at a fraction of the current cost. Energy, when the machines are powered by fusion, solar, and new battery materials, will approach free. Healthcare, with AI shrinking the administrative overhead and accelerating drug discovery, will become an abundant public good. The things that your job was paying for will become cheaper, then very cheap, then essentially free. Losing your job stops being the catastrophe it currently is, not because the job market bounces back (I don’t think it will), but because the price of survival will have collapsed.

In the long term, the ten to twenty-year horizon, something more fundamental changes. Money itself begins to recede as the organizing force of human life.

Consider what money actually is. Money is a technology. One of humanity’s greatest inventions, in fact. It was a solution to the genuinely hard problem of coordinating complex exchange between strangers at scale. Before it: barter, clunky and limited to what you had and what someone else needed in the same moment. Money enabled trade, specialization, cities, civilization, and even art.

But technologies are just solutions to problems. And when the problem changes, or a better solution appears, the technology becomes obsolete. The scaffold comes down when the building is up.

The world that AI is constructing, where the machines that produce food and energy and medicine and shelter run largely without human labor, sustained by clean limitless energy systems AI itself has designed, is a world where the fundamental problem money was invented to solve simply doesn’t exist anymore. Its grip on everything loosens.

Part 3: A Renaissance of Art

So much meaningful art has gone unmade.

Financial realities get in the way. The gig falls through and the health scare arrives, and there is no safety net. The rent has to be paid, so we turn away from art. The world has always had an enormous appetite for art and almost no structural interest in keeping artists alive long enough to make it.

The artists we all know are not necessarily the best artists. They are the artists who survived the financial gauntlet. The ones with a partner who had a stable income, or a family with resources, or an ability to live on little for years on end juggling five side jobs to get by. Or who watered down their work to be more commercial and consumable by the masses. There is an entire parallel history of artists who burned out, gave up, or were simply never able to begin. Voices silenced not by lack of talent but by the cost of survival.

That world is ending. What AI is building, the post-scarcity world where the cost of being alive continues to fall, where the material foundations of survival are no longer the overwhelming organizing pressure of every life, is the world that artists have always dreamed of living in.

Billions of people will step out from under the weight of pure economic survival, into open space. Space they have never had before. And they will fill that space with artistic expression.

I know that when we look around right now, we see a lot of slop. This is the slop period. Cheap, disposable, indistinguishable content is flooding every channel.

But this has happened before. Every major creative technology in history announced itself the same way.

The printing press didn’t arrive and immediately produce Hamlet. It produced decades of pamphlets, political attacks, and religious tracts, most of it forgettable, long before the medium regularly produced the literature we celebrate today. Photography didn’t arrive and immediately produce Cartier-Bresson. It produced a flood of stiff portraits and novelty images before someone realized the medium had its own soul. Recorded music didn’t arrive and immediately produce Kind of Blue. It produced scratchy parlor songs and commercial jingles while the technology learned what it could become.

Every tool capable of transforming culture goes through a slop period first. The noise comes before the signal.

What comes after is a renaissance.

Every previous renaissance was limited by gatekeepers. The Italian Renaissance required Medici patronage. The literary revolution of the printing press required proximity to a press and access to distribution. The recording studio revolution required a label deal. Even the internet, which promised radical democratization, ended up concentrating creative power in a handful of platforms that decided what spread and what didn’t.

This renaissance will be different in a way that has never been possible before. The combination of accessible tools plus post-scarcity economics means something that has never existed: a renaissance that is genuinely open. Art made by every person who wants to make it, freed from both the technical barriers that required expensive equipment or formal training, and the economic barriers that made it impossible to survive while trying.

Think about what that means for the breadth of human experience that will finally find its voice.

The brief dark before this dawn is not evidence that AI destroys art. It is just evidence that transformation is sloppy in the middle.

Part 4: The Leaders of the New World

Let’s recap. By 2050, here is what I see. The climate has stabilized. We have unlimited clean energy. Cancer and HIV are no more troublesome than the common cold. No one is hungry or thirsty. All of our basic needs like food and shelter are met for free. A job is no longer required to live a comfortable and safe life. Art is flourishing, both the high-quality stuff of trained, dedicated artists and the everyday mom-and-pop stuff of humans simply enjoying the act of creating and expressing themselves.

On top of that, AI advancements will have extended human life by decades. Scientists have already demonstrated telomere reversal, cellular aging markers going backwards, not just slowing down. In 2025, Dr. Alexander Zhavoronkov said, “Within the next 20 to 30 years, we’re going to live in a world where aging is something that can be controlled.”

But a longer life is not automatically a better one. Science can add years. Only art can help someone figure out what to do with them.

This may be the central problem of the world AI is building.

When survival is no longer the overwhelming pressure organizing every human day, when the question of whether you can afford to eat, to heal, to shelter yourself no longer consumes the majority of your cognitive and emotional bandwidth, a different set of questions fill the space. More ancient ones.

Who am I? How do I want to live? What is this all for?

Humans have always needed to make meaning. Art is a major way we do that. It is how we process grief, celebrate joy, locate ourselves in time, understand people whose lives look nothing like ours, and make the unbearable bearable. In a world where AI can solve the material problems, art becomes not less important, it becomes the whole remaining project.

A world of material abundance without art is not a utopia. It is a very comfortable form of emptiness. Consider what happens when billions of people are suddenly liberated from the organizing pressure of economic survival. They will have time, more than any humans in history have had. They will have freedom. They will have choices that their parents and grandparents never got to make. And they will have no idea what to do with any of it.

Artists have been in that space their whole lives. They know its terrain. They know what it asks of a person. They know that more freedom doesn’t automatically produce more meaning. That you still have to choose, still have to build, still have to decide what matters and commit to it. They know how to make meaning, which turns out to be exactly the skill the species is going to need.

Scientists will enable the world that AI makes possible. Engineers will design its systems. Economists will figure out how it distributes its benefits. But none of them can answer the questions that will matter most to every individual human being navigating it.

Artists have been answering those questions for as long as there have been artists. That work has never been more necessary than it is about to become. Artists will be our leaders in the new world.

Part 5: The Shepherds of the New World

But we have to get there first, and it’s not guaranteed. At this point readers may be thinking, “Dennis, do you REALLY believe all of this is going to happen?!” What I believe is that it is possible. But we have to make the right choices now to secure that utopian future.

The world being built right now is being actively designed by people making choices about what it optimizes for, what it values, what it considers worth preserving and what it considers expendable. Those choices are happening in boardrooms and research labs and government offices. Artists are largely not in those rooms.

Most of the people who are in those rooms are not malicious. They are brilliant, thoughtful, and genuinely trying to build something good. But they have a particular kind of imagination, one trained on metrics, on efficiency, on what can be measured and optimized. They are very good at getting somewhere fast. They are less practiced at asking where we should be going. That is exactly the gap that artists exist to fill.

When artists disengage from a cultural moment, when they decide it is too compromised, too commercial to be worth their energy, the moment does not pause and wait for them to return. It continues. It gets designed by whoever shows up.

So let’s be honest about what resistance actually means in this particular moment. If we reject the technology, we will also slow the progress that could relieve enormous human suffering. We would be choosing to slow the path to curing the child with leukemia whose protein structure hasn’t been mapped yet. We would be making it harder for the farmer and their community whose crops will fail without better forecasting. The suffering that AI is moving to end is not abstract. It is specific, it is vast, and it is happening to real people right now. Resistance to the technology is resistance to the end of that suffering.

The question of whether the AI transition produces utopia or dystopia is not primarily a technical question. The hard questions don’t have an engineering answer. What are we building toward? What does a good life look like in this new world? What does dignity look like when machines can do most of what humans were paid to do? These are art questions. And they need answering now, while the architecture is still being drawn.

You cannot design toward a destination you refuse to imagine.

If artists…the people who have spent their lives imagining alternative realities, constructing possible worlds…refuse to engage with this moment, then the destination will be designed by people with a narrower imagination.

AI is the most powerful optimization engine ever created. But optimization requires a goal. The machines can get us anywhere with extraordinary efficiency, but they cannot tell us where to go. That is a human job. That is an artist’s job.

When the recording studio arrived, some musicians refused to enter. They decided it was a commercial contamination of authentic performance, something to resist on principle. Others walked in with their humanity completely intact, asked what the technology could do, and invented something that had never existed. The Beatles didn’t abandon their vision inside Abbey Road. They expanded it. The question they asked was not “should I engage with this?” It was “What can this become, in my hands?”

The utopia this essay has been describing doesn’t arrive fully formed. It gets built. Piece by piece, decision by decision, vision by vision. The difference between utopia and dystopia might be nothing more than who is in the room when those decisions are made.

What if instead of resisting AI, we as artists embrace and lead extraordinary and bold visions of the future into existence?

You have been practicing your whole life for this.

This is your moment.