ShareFacebookX (formerly Twitter)Historians of technology use a seasonal metaphor to guide their understanding of the ebbs and flows of enthusiasm about AI.There have been two widely acknowledged AI Winters. The first, in the late 1970s, was a response to disappointments about machine translation. The second Winter, in the early 1990s, was triggered by recognition of the limitations of rule-based expert systems. We seem now to be in an AI High Summer.Here I explore two implications for global disruption brought by AI highlighted by the seasonal metaphor.First, after Winter comes Spring. And after Summer comes Autumn and Winter. It is reasonable to expect that our current High Summer will be followed by a third AI Winter. Investors in AI seek to predict when the AI bubble will burst so they can precisely time their exit from the market. The seasonal metaphor suggests Winter is coming, even if we can’t say when.Second, it’s never Winter everywhere. We know that when it’s Springtime in Germany, it’s Autumn in Australia. Tech billionaires unashamedly link impressive gains for AI tech with losses for human workers who hope to get paid for doing things that AI can now do cheaply. Elon Musk predicts that soon “work will be optional. It’ll be like playing sports or a video game.” The seasonal metaphor suggests a future in which we won’t need to beg Sam Altman to pay us for playing Minecraft. Human workers inhabit the hemisphere opposed to AI chatbots and driverless taxis. The next AI Winter should bring High Summer for Humans.This year’s Spring is lovely even if, in objective terms, it is no better than last year’s. But after such a brutal Human Winter we should expect the third AI Winter to bring an especially sweet Spring for all humans.How to survive until the SpringIf all your retirement savings are invested in Big AI, then perhaps you should dread the onset of the third AI Winter. Many investors will lose their shirts. But we should not lose confidence in the meaningful work that Springtime for Humans will bring.Altman wants us to fixate on the impressive achievements of ChatGPT. Springtime will permit us to reacquaint ourselves with the things that humans can do that are entirely beyond the powers of any bot. The capacity to write essays on George Eliot that fool your professor into awarding an A+ suggests no ability to write Middlemarch for the first time. George Eliot was an impressive reader, but she fell far short of Claude AI’s power to ingest and analyse text. She had no option but to use the native human tech of the imagination to add unprecedented layers of psychological depth to human writing about other humans. It should be no surprise that Claude effortlessly mimics this.Want the best of Religion & Ethics delivered to your mailbox?Sign up for our weekly newsletter.Email addressSubscribeYour information is being handled in accordance with the ABC Privacy Collection Statement. It’s good news that Springtime for Humans is inevitable. But the seasonal metaphor stops short of telling us when Spring will arrive. We lack the kind of calendar that tells us that Spring in Australia starts in September. Many of us are enduring a brutal Human Winter with too many reminders of how wonderful the AI Summer is for those who’ve attached their prospects and investments to the machines. If you fear you’re about to expire, it’s not enough to be told that Winter cannot last forever.Even if the seasonal metaphor stops short of telling us when Springtime for Humans will arrive, it does offer some guidance. We can focus on indicators of the anticipated bursting of the AI bubble for signs that Autumn for the bots is nigh. The first green shoots of Human Springtime may be heralded by misfortunes for the trumpeted winners in the AI economy — headlines like “AI investor now just a multimillionaire again” or “Elon Musk loses trillionaire status as global tech rout hits SpaceX”.And if Musk recovers to continue his ascent to centi-trillionaire status? We should not lose hope that the Winter for Humans must break. The Earth and humanity have a finite capacity to support trillionaires.Focus on helping humans, not machinesThe idea that Winter for Humans will be followed by Spring is no reason for complacency. You won’t be able to enjoy that fruits of Spring if you lost heart or starved during AI’s High Summer. Here are some suggestions about how to emerge from the Human Winter with your integrity and morale intact.Some of us dazzled by High Summer for AI conclude that the only real option is to turn ourselves into adjuncts for the machines. But there is no long-term future in that. The machines are indecently mercurial. You can find temporary refuge and employment in serving the machines. But their needs change with each significant tech advance. If you expect to get paid for helping the machines, there are cost-savings in passing that work on to other machines. When these new machines arrive, human adjuncts end up being perfectly adapted to digital environments that no longer exist.AIs know that “frango” is Portuguese for chicken not because teraflops of compute enabled them to deduce that from first principles, but because humans taught them. There is gig work in reinforcement learning by human feedback (RLHF). The irony is that digital learners do not need refresher lessons. Once a model has learned that “peixe” means fish, the task vanishes. Human workers who build careers as teachers of machines must therefore keep finding new things to teach. If you know about fish in every human language, how about some Spinoza? It is a loser’s game trying to anticipate what tomorrow’s machines will need from us.The best advice for those who want to emerge into the Human Spring is to barely think about the machines at all and maintain faith in what humans can do for other humans. Teaching about philosophy has always been an essentially human activity. Socrates’s ideas come down to us today even if he didn’t write them down. They will survive processing by Claude AI.High Summer for Humans will need many philosophy teachers. If you find yourself resorting to work in hospitality to survive until the AI Winter, prepare yourself for Human Spring by spicing your latte deliveries with aphorisms from Nietzsche like: “One must still have chaos in oneself to be able to give birth to a dancing star.”Nicholas Agar is Professor of Ethics at the University of Waikato in Aotearoa New Zealand. He is the author of How to be Human in the Digital Economy and Dialogues on Human Enhancement, and co-author (with Stuart Whatley and Dan Weijers) of How to Think about Progress: A Skeptic’s Guide to Technology.Posted Fri 28 Aug 2026 at 11:07amFri 28 Aug 2026 at 11:07amFri 28 Aug 2026 at 11:07am, updated Fri 28 Aug 2026 at 11:19amFri 28 Aug 2026 at 11:19amFri 28 Aug 2026 at 11:19amShareFacebookX (formerly Twitter)What would Socrates say about the decline in basic skills?The AI disruption and the promise of the humanitiesDesirable difficulties: AI and the death of thinkingAI and the demise of critical thinking in universitiesWhen it comes to AI, appearances can be deceivingWhy AI won’t make universities obsoleteTo protect the humanities from Humanities, Inc., academics should stop writing like chatbotsAI, PhilosophyBack to top