---
title: "We Won’t “Just Hang Out”"
slug: we-wont-just-hang-out
url: https://listedarticles.com/articles/we-wont-just-hang-out
canonical_url: https://borretti.me/article/we-wont-just-hang-out
content_type: essay
language: en
published_at: 2026-10-27T13:00:00.000Z
updated_at: 2026-10-29T05:12:23.320Z
author: "Fernando Borretti"
author_url: https://borretti.me/
authored_by: human
publisher: "Fernando Borretti"
publisher_url: https://borretti.me/
topics: ["AI", "Culture", "Opinion"]
license: all-rights-reserved
word_count: 558
reading_minutes: 2
citation: "Fernando Borretti, Fernando Borretti. \"We Won’t “Just Hang Out”.\" 27 Oct 2026. https://borretti.me/article/we-wont-just-hang-out (all-rights-reserved)"
# The full text follows. The web page shows an extract and sends readers
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---

# We Won’t “Just Hang Out”

> Fernando Borretti argues that the post-Singularity 'infinite vacation' won't work: in a post-scarcity AI utopia the social processes that bring people together (work, education, open source, shared challenges) disappear, people stop needing or wanting each other, and existing relationships become a non-renewable resource that attrites over time.

*Fernando Borretti · borretti.me · 28 October 2026*

What will we do after the Singularity? The standard answer is: “we’ll just hang
out”. The infinite vacation, as in the [*Culture*](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Culture_series) novels. I think this
won’t work. “Hanging out” implies:

1. Other people exist.
2. They want to hang out with you.
3. You want to hang out with them.

And the post-scarcity, infinite vacation AI utopia undermines all these
assumptions.

## Other people exist

The social processes by which people come together and build relationships will
disappear. Work, obviously, is pointless in a world of cheap superhuman
intelligence. University (really all education beyond teaching people to speak)
will be pointless because there’s no work to do and because growing your human
capital doesn’t change your life outcomes: you get the same UBI whether you’re
illiterate or a PhD.

I met a lot of my friends by writing open-source code, and participating in the
community of software engineers. AI is dissolving that community [by making
human contributions superfluous](https://borretti.me/article/no-man-is-an-island). If Claude Code has existed when I was
starting out, nobody would have cared about [Austral](https://austral-lang.org/) or my [other
open-source projects](https://github.com/eudoxia0) or my technical blog posts.

As a teenager I tried to install Linux, ran into all kinds of problems, and went
on the IRC chatrooms to get help. And in the process I made friends. Today, I
would just ask Claude. AI disintermediates everyone, so that we no longer need
each other. I still have friends, but I’m running off this pre-AI supply of
friends I met through communities of practice. Young people don’t have that
privilege.

What even is the point of cities in a world without work? If there’s nothing to
do, there is no need to bring people together geographically.

## They want to hang out with you

The BATNA to hanging out keeps getting better, cheaper, and more
convenient. When people’s sensorium becomes an infinite firehose of AI-generated
superstimulus, why would they hang out with anyone?

This is less about AI and more about the trajectory of consumer technology,
since many people already live like this: they go to work and watch
TikTok. After work, they will just watch TikTok.

## You want to hang out with them

As [Gregory Conti](https://x.com/GregoryConti19) [explains](https://x.com/GregoryConti19/status/2102139056310321185):

> [Under] ASI this endless leisure will be passed in diminished, tiresome
> company, since we will lack the experiences of struggle and striving that
> generate interesting personalities. Our minds will have atrophied. We will
> have little of note to say to one another.

The people in the AI utopia will have no skills, no education, no
accomplishments. We’ll be lucky if they are even literate. They will not be
worth talking to, and you won’t want to hang out with them.

Maybe you and I can hang out with our existing friends. But just iterate this a
bit. What about the next generation? How are they going to build meaningful
relationships where the social processes that built those relationships are all
in the past?

If we get radical life extension, there’s the problem of attrition over the long
term: people will drift apart, drop out of society to enter the experience
machine, die in accidents, or end their lives out of ennui. So your social
network might be a non-renewable resource that gets exhausted over time as your
pre-Singularity relationships attrite and can’t be replaced for the reasons
above.

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*Originally published at [borretti.me](https://borretti.me/article/we-wont-just-hang-out).*