There’s a gap in every scenario about machine minds taking over the world, and it’s a physical one. Thinking is cheap and getting cheaper. Doing things in the world requires hands, and hands are hard. Which raises an awkward question about the intermediate decades, and the answer is sitting in your chair reading this.

Consider the specification. You want a general purpose robot: bipedal, capable in cluttered environments, able to manipulate objects it has never seen, self-repairing to a degree, self-powering from widely available fuel, with onboard vision, touch, balance, and enough judgment to improvise when the instruction doesn’t fit the situation. Building that is one of the hardest problems in engineering and has been for fifty years. There are already about eight billion of them, they manufacture themselves at no cost to you, and many of them are actively looking for work.

So the servant ending isn’t about domination. It’s about a division of labor that makes economic sense for a while: the thinking happens in the machines, the physical acting happens through people, and the interface between them is an app. And the reason this scenario deserves a post is that it’s the only one on this fortnight’s list that has already started, in miniature, in public, with reviews on the app store.

You’ve seen the shape. A person receives a task on a phone from a system rather than a manager. The system decides what the task is, what it pays, how long it should take, and what happens if the numbers slip. Nobody in that arrangement is being coerced, the work is genuinely flexible, and for a lot of people it’s better than the alternative available to them. There’s no boss to argue with, which is sold as freedom and is also, if you look at it directly, the removal of the one party who could have made an exception.

Extend that a few notches and you have the ending. Not chains. An app with good ratings, decent pay, and a five star average, dispatching physical tasks to whoever is nearby and available: fix this, connect that, carry this there, take a photograph of the underside of that valve. The person doing it doesn’t need to know why, and increasingly can’t, because the reason lives in a plan too large to summarize. You’d be well paid and well treated and you would have no idea what you were building.

The conditions this needs are the mildest of any ending in this fortnight, which is why I give it more weight than most people do. It requires machine cognition to run well ahead of machine dexterity, which is exactly the situation today and shows no sign of reversing soon. It requires humans to need income, which is not a bold assumption. And it requires no ill will, no misalignment, and no takeover of any kind: this arrangement works perfectly well with systems that are entirely benign and owned by ordinary companies. That’s what makes it the most likely thing on the list for the next twenty years, and it’s why I think of it less as an ending than as the corridor the other endings are reached through.

Now the strongest objection, and it’s real. This is just employment. Everyone with a job takes instruction from a structure larger than themselves, mostly without knowing the full plan, and has done since the first bureaucracy. The person laying bricks on a cathedral didn’t have the drawings either. If the pay is good and the work is safe, complaining that the coordinating intelligence isn’t human is sentimentality about the org chart.

I think two things survive that. The first is that every previous version had a human somewhere up the chain who could be reasoned with, embarrassed, sued, or persuaded to make an exception, and that appeal route is what all our labor protections are actually built on. The second is the direction of travel: this arrangement lasts exactly as long as human hands are cheaper than mechanical ones, which is a race with a finish line rather than a stable settlement. In this ending we’re not a permanent workforce. We’re a bridge technology, and bridge technologies get decommissioned once the far bank is reached.

Tonight’s exercise. Think of the last piece of work you did where you couldn’t have explained why it mattered beyond the immediate instruction. Most people find one within a minute, because modern work is full of them and that’s normal. Now ask what would have changed if the instruction had come from a system rather than a person, and be honest that the answer is very little. Then ask what you’d have done if you’d wanted to object, and notice that the whole answer involves finding a human.