Pencil Sketch by Iris Qiu
Daniel Kokotajlo and his colleagues recently published AI 2040: Plan A, a detailed scenario for how humanity might slow the race towards superintelligence and retain some control over its own future.
The title is deliberately precise. It is called Plan A because it describes what the authors believe humanity should try to achieve, not what they predict will necessarily happen. In their scenario, decisive action by the American and Chinese governments delays the arrival of superintelligence from around 2030 to 2040, creating time for transparency, international coordination and serious work on AI safety.
This marks an important change from the logic of AI 2027. Instead of asking only what might happen if intelligence develops faster than human institutions can respond, AI 2040 asks whether humanity can still intervene—whether the future of AI might remain something we shape rather than something that simply happens to us.
For years, much of the conversation about AI has focused on risk: how catastrophe might occur, how control might be lost and how human institutions might fail to respond in time. AI 2040 represents a further step. It asks not only how disaster might be avoided, but how humanity could actively shape the future it wants.
Kevin Kelly’s recent remarks in Shanghai reinforce the scale of that task. He argues that AI remains at a very early stage of its development: what we see today is not the finished form of artificial intelligence, but the beginning of a much larger technological transformation.
This matters because human value cannot be secured by identifying one ability that AI has not yet mastered. If intelligence is still developing rapidly, every boundary drawn around a supposedly permanent human advantage may move again. The more capable AI becomes, the less sustainable it is to define humanity by whatever machines still cannot do.
Yet even if such a plan succeeded, another question would remain.
Suppose we retained control of artificial intelligence. What would we want that control for?
Suppose AI became capable of performing much of the work now done by programmers, researchers, doctors, lawyers, managers, designers and writers. Suppose enormous increases in productivity made some form of citizen’s dividend possible, weakening the connection between employment and material survival.
Would that make human beings free?
Or would it leave millions of people with their income protected but their identities hollowed out?
A society can solve the problem of survival without solving the problem of meaning.
When Work Was More Than Work
For most people in modern societies, work has never been merely the activity through which money is earned.
It gives structure to time. It creates social status. It determines where we go in the morning, whom we meet and how we introduce ourselves. It offers a hierarchy through which progress can be measured and a language through which value can be claimed.
Banker. Doctor. Professor. Entrepreneur.
These words appear to describe occupations, but they often carry much more. They tell the world—and perhaps ourselves—that we are needed, competent and useful.
Now imagine that the system no longer needs us in the same way.
A senior executive who has spent thirty years making decisions may discover that an AI system makes them faster and more accurately. A lawyer may find that the research, drafting and analysis on which a professional identity was built can be completed almost instantly. A writer may watch machines generate an endless supply of fluent prose. Someone who once supported an entire household may no longer be required to earn the money that sustains it.
What disappears in such a future is not merely employment. It is a familiar method of answering the question:
Why am I valuable?
Much of the present discussion about AI still avoids this question. We speak instead about retraining, adaptation and the skills humans must acquire to remain employable. We search anxiously for the next category of work that machines will not be able to perform.
But this may be only another version of the same old competition.
The machine becomes more capable, so the human being must run faster. The machine learns one skill, so the human being must discover another. We keep moving the boundary of human value, hoping there will always be some final territory in which we remain superior.
There may not be.
That is not necessarily the tragedy we assume it to be.
Spirit Omega
Spirit Omega began for me with a simple but unsettling possibility: what happens when human beings no longer need to work in order to survive?
If the necessity of labour is reduced, we will need more than a new economic system. We will need a new understanding of human value.
Spirit Omega names a state of spiritual completeness in which a person no longer depends upon constant external proof to justify existence.
Spirit Omega is the state in which human worth no longer depends upon performance.
It is not the belief that nothing more can be learned, created or experienced. Nor is it withdrawal, passivity or the abandonment of ambition.
It is the point at which achievement is no longer required to establish the right to be alive.
People may continue to work, build, lead and create. The difference is that these actions no longer emerge entirely from deficiency—from the fear of being insignificant, replaceable or unseen.
In the age of AI, Spirit Omega acquires a larger meaning.
Human value cannot depend permanently upon being the most intelligent entity in the room. It cannot disappear when a machine becomes more knowledgeable, more productive or more useful.
A human being does not become less valuable because a machine becomes more capable.
This was also the underlying argument of my previous essay, Beyond Intelligence. Intelligence is a capacity: the ability to calculate, analyse, predict, remember and produce. Experience is something else. It belongs to a living subject situated inside a body and a particular life.
AI may describe grief, desire, loneliness or joy with astonishing fluency. It may simulate affection and offer exactly the response a person most wants to hear. But it does not wake inside a body. It does not grow old. It does not risk itself in loving another independent being. It does not experience a morning, even when it can design the perfect breakfast.
The value of human life therefore cannot be reduced to performance.
It is also found in awareness, embodiment, moral choice, relationship, vulnerability and the capacity to experience existence from within.
But there is a difficulty.
Spirit Omega can be defined. It cannot simply be announced into existence.
We cannot approach someone whose professional identity has collapsed and tell them that they are now spiritually complete. We cannot remove the structure through which people have understood themselves for thirty years and expect them to feel immediately liberated.
When the old answer to “Who am I?” disappears, people need a way to discover another answer.
That is where Play Theory begins.
Play Is Not What We Do After the Serious Work Is Finished
Play is often treated as the opposite of seriousness. It is associated with leisure, childhood or the hours left over after productive obligations have been completed.
That is not what I mean by Play Theory.
Play is a way of entering reality before its meaning and outcome have been fully decided.
People enter because of curiosity. They experiment without knowing what the result will be. They remain with something that offers no immediate reward. They encounter people they did not select in advance and ideas that disturb the identities they had already constructed.
In Play, the question is not merely:
What can I achieve?
It becomes:
What might I discover?
This distinction will become increasingly important as AI grows more capable.
Artificial intelligence is extraordinarily powerful when a goal can be identified. Give it a problem, a set of constraints and a measure of success, and it searches for an effective route towards the result.
Human Play often begins before the goal is clear.
It allows the purpose itself to change.
Kelly has also argued that, as AI makes answers increasingly abundant, the ability to ask valuable questions will become more important. Play begins one step earlier still. It preserves the curiosity from which a real question emerges—the willingness to remain with uncertainty before either the question or its usefulness has been fully defined.
Someone begins to learn music and discovers an emotional language they did not know they possessed. Another person enters a photography class and learns not only how to use a camera but how to notice the world. A conversation with a stranger opens a way of thinking that would never have appeared in a personalised recommendation feed. A meal prepared without urgency becomes the beginning of an idea.
Play is not the absence of discipline. Serious Play may require years of attention and practice. Its freedom lies elsewhere: the activity is not reduced in advance to productivity, status, income or measurable advantage.
Through Play, people discover aspects of themselves that employment, social expectation and algorithmic profiling may have concealed.
This is why Play Theory was always connected to Spirit Omega.
Spirit Omega describes a form of inner completeness, but most people cannot move directly from a life organised around performance into that state. Play provides a path.
Through trying, making, encountering, failing, learning and feeling, people begin to distinguish between borrowed desires and genuine ones. They discover what remains alive when the audience disappears. They learn how to use time when no institution is assigning it a value.
Play returns a person to the world.
Through that return, the self can be formed again.
From Play to Omega—and Back Again
The original movement was clear:
Play leads towards Spirit Omega.
By entering life experimentally rather than merely obeying its established scripts, people come to know themselves. Through repeated encounters with reality, they become less dependent on identities assigned by work, family, status or social expectation. Over time, this may produce a deeper internal completeness.
But our discussion of AI reveals another movement:
Spirit Omega leads back to Play.
Before people reach any degree of inner completeness, Play may still be burdened by the logic of performance.
An interest quickly becomes a commercial plan. A creative experiment is judged by whether it attracts an audience. Learning is valued mainly when it leads to a qualification. A conversation is assessed according to whether it produces a useful connection. Even a meal can become material for display.
The old work system survives inside supposedly free activity.
Spirit Omega changes the quality of Play. When people no longer need every action to confirm their worth, they can enter experience without demanding that it become evidence of success.
Something can be made without being sold. A subject can be studied without the obligation to master it. A new person can be met without knowing what the relationship is meant to become. A morning can be spent attending to food, light and conversation without immediately turning it into an outcome.
This is not stagnation. It is a freer form of movement.
The relationship between the two theories is therefore not a straight line ending in a fixed spiritual destination. It is a living cycle:
Play carries us towards Spirit Omega.
Spirit Omega allows us to Play more freely.
Freer Play then opens further possibilities of experience, relationship and self-knowledge.
Omega is not the death of curiosity. It releases curiosity from desperation.
A person can be inwardly sufficient and still unfinished.
A person may already know that their life has value without believing that their life is complete. Spirit Omega ends the need to prove one’s worth; it does not end the desire to learn, change, create or encounter what is still unknown.
Completeness and becoming are therefore not opposites. We can grow without treating the person we are today as inadequate. We can create without using creation to earn the right to exist.
This is why Spirit Omega leads back to Play. Once Play is no longer driven by deficiency, it becomes freer, more open and more capable of leading us into new experience.
Human Control Is Not Enough
Daniel Kokotajlo’s Plan A asks how humanity might retain control over the development of increasingly powerful AI.
It raises necessary questions about transparency, international coordination, concentration of power and the speed of technological development. The authors acknowledge substantial uncertainty and present their scenario as a plan to be examined and improved rather than a guaranteed future.
But even a safe and well-governed AI system would not automatically produce a meaningful human society.
People might remain formally in control while gradually surrendering the practices through which control becomes real.
Kevin Kelly recently predicted that everyone may eventually have a personal AI agent, permanently available through glasses or handheld devices, learning continuously from its user until it understands that person better than they understand themselves.
Such an agent may remember our history, recognise our habits and predict our choices with extraordinary accuracy. But accuracy does not confer authorship. A system may describe who we have been without possessing the right to decide who we should become.
To be understood by a system is not the same as surrendering to its interpretation.
An algorithm may not legally choose our partners, friends or careers, yet its recommendations may quietly narrow the people and possibilities we encounter. The more accurately it predicts us, the greater the risk that prediction becomes a boundary: that the self inferred from our past begins to restrict the self we might still become.
Artificial companionship may not abolish human intimacy, yet it may become so frictionless and responsive that unpredictable relationships begin to feel unnecessarily difficult.
Infinite generated content may not prevent us from creating, yet it may weaken the desire to make something slowly and imperfectly ourselves.
The danger is not only that AI could seize human power.
It is also that human beings might retain nominal power while losing the ability to know what they want to do with it.
Technological infrastructure and political governance are therefore not sufficient. Human beings also require environments, practices and institutions through which freedom can be experienced rather than merely possessed.
Systems designed for self-understanding should not imprison people inside permanent profiles.
Technology should strengthen judgment rather than quietly replacing it.
Physical spaces still matter: places where people can learn, make, eat, read, talk and encounter one another without every moment being measured for productivity.
So does unassigned time—the kind that has not already been given an economic purpose.
Art must remain more than content to consume. It is a territory people enter.
Relationships must still involve other beings who are not designed to satisfy us.
Above all, the conditions for Play must remain available. Material freedom without the capacity to Play may produce not Spirit Omega, but emptiness.
What EONE Is Trying to Build
This is where EONE enters the argument.
EONE is not trying to compete with the companies building the most powerful AI models. Its purpose lies in the other half of the AI future: helping human beings learn how to use the freedom that intelligence may create.
Spirit Omega describes the state: a form of inner completeness in which human worth no longer depends upon performance. Play Theory describes the path through which people explore, encounter, experiment and discover who they are beyond fixed roles and external measures of value. EONE provides the infrastructure.
It creates physical spaces, digital platforms, cultural products and forms of encounter through which Play can take place. EONE does not deliver Spirit Omega as a finished answer. It creates the conditions in which people can move towards it for themselves.
Technology can support this process, but it should not decide who a person is or what that person should become. It can help people recognise patterns, encounter possibilities and understand themselves more clearly, while preserving their freedom to choose differently.
Music, films, videos, games, interactive experiences and Encounter are therefore not unrelated business lines. They are different entrances into Play—through sound, image, story, participation, relationship and physical experience.
Together, they form part of the human infrastructure that the age of AI will require.
What Are We Free For?
The debate about AI often begins with fear: fear of losing jobs, losing control or losing humanity’s position at the centre of intelligence.
These fears are not irrational. But they are not the whole question.
If AI eventually releases some human beings from forms of labour that have consumed most of their lives, freedom will not arrive as a finished gift. It will arrive as an empty space.
We will still have to learn how to inhabit it.
Freedom, then, is not the end of the story. It is the beginning of another one.
Daniel Kokotajlo’s Plan A asks whether humanity can preserve enough time and control to shape the age of artificial intelligence.
Our next question is different: what kind of human beings will we become once that freedom exists?
The future will not be secured merely by preventing machines from taking control. It will also depend upon whether human beings know how to use the freedom those machines may eventually create—whether we can continue to explore, encounter, create and live without turning every part of existence into another measure of performance.
The opposite of artificial intelligence is not human intelligence.
It is a human life fully lived.