I’ve been a fan of Guy Ritchie films since I watched Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels back in the late 90s. They’re not world changing, but there’s a rhythm and style to them that is easy to digest. Recently, I watched The Gentlemen, and it was exactly what I expected it to be; a quick cut crime film replete with sharp dialogue and a few pleasant twists. There was the distinct Guy Ritchie quality to it, like the familiarity of a McDonald’s burger, whether served in Tokyo or Dallas.

But before we get to that, let’s talk about chocolate. Today, in most of the world, chocolate of varying quality is easy to find and affordable for most people. Going back more than a 100 years this was not the case. In fact, a box of chocolates like you might find from Cadbury or Russell Stovers would cost a working class family in the UK a week’s salary. Going back further you can find chocolate was mostly consumed by a small slice of Western society, being those with the means to purchase it. For the average person chocolate would have been a luxury, and an experience they’d rarely, if ever, have.

Of course, this could be said about most things, from cars to electronics to silk sheets. Industrialization has made these experiences accessible to far more people, while the rich have continued to find other ways to distinguish themselves. But I’m not really interested in the divide between the haves and have-nots, as much as I am in the way people have experienced these things over time. How would a kid in the 1800s describe their experience with chocolate in comparison to a kid today? What about hearing music played on a record player, driving a car or even riding an elevator? When does rarity become mundane?

This brings us back to The Gentlemen, which, unlike a piece of chocolate is a somewhat more intangible experience. While TV shows and movies are certainly no longer a rarity, the experiences that certain directors and writers produce still are. But what happens when I can ask a machine to generate a film in the style of Guy Ritchie? What if I could have a new one every day?

How does it change the experience of watching a film when I know I can create a similar work with little or no effort? When do films become as forgettable as that last piece of chocolate you had? Now take this and expand it to every form of art we currently have, and imagine any new musical sound or artistic expression being immediately consumed and regurgitated in infinitely varying forms.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying that we should live in a world of scarcity, but I am wondering what post-scarcity will look like, and how we’ll adapt. What happens when we lose those shared moments from books and films and music because we’re each generating our own uniquely tailored ones?

Generalize this even further, and what happens to our cultures when we move from one which is shared to one of the individual? With globalization, our world became both larger in the sense of what was available to us, but smaller in that everything is more accessible. Yet most of the accessibilty is coming via other people. What happens when we replace that with AI?

Maybe we’ll develop systems where we join friend and family groups such our tailored material overlaps with others so we can have these shared jokes, memes and experiences. Perhaps These systems will allow those we care about to impact our lives in less obvious ways, but still create a cohesive shared culture.

The future is looking increasingly bizarre due to AI. It’s already changing the way we work and learn, but how will change our relationships to others? In a world where the tempation to cocoon ourselves in a bubble which gives us only what we want, how easy will it be for us to connect with others, and will we even want to?