# The Awakening of the Last Man A decade ago, I was 17. It was 2016, and I had nightmares about a world where AI had taken over all the jobs, banishing most of humanity to a permanent underclass. I banished the vision into a novella. To be fair, the AI Singularity wasn’t my only source of dread (though it ranked high). Like most teenagers, I experienced my fair share of existential angst. The raging of hormones, the end of childhood innocence, the first breakups, first encounters with the limits of love and the inevitability of death, the growing consciousness of life’s transience, and the sudden speeding up of time. It is the perfect storm to make one feel like a small spark dangling off a cliff between two endless voids. Like many teenagers, I dealt with this dread in various expressive and impressive ways. Some were less productive than others, but such is the insanity of youth, and in the end, they all proved to be instructive. I read a lot of science fiction, especially Philip K. Dick, and too many French philosophers, especially Camus and Sartre. I dyed my hair black and dated a goth girl for a year or so. My friends and I skipped classes more often than is prudent to admit. Sometimes we did it to go for a walk in the cemetery next to our high school, smoking cigars and discussing the fleetingness of existence and our misreadings of Heidegger. Sometimes we went to debate Luhmann with retired professors at the Nietzsche Forum in the Seidlvilla in Munich’s Schwabing district. On other days, we just got lost in a park, running in circles and conversing with the rivers and trees, tripping on still-legal derivatives of lysergic acid diethylamide. And there was also this underground Kratom Kult for some time, but I am getting sidetracked. In hindsight, I was a bit of an unruly teenager. In hindsight, very few people then (if any at all) would have guessed that just some two years later, I would deliver the valedictorian speech and morph into a teetotaling, suit-wearing politics and corporate guy. Yet, my primary method for reflecting on and processing that teenage angst was writing. I wrote like a madman, creating literary horcruxes capturing and dissecting all that troubled my mind. Sometimes I drafted entire 400-page novels in a single month. Many of them were mediocre and never got published. But some were actually good and did get published, especially as I started winning literary competitions for my short stories around that time. One novella I wrote and self-published at 17 was Das Erwachen des letzten Menschen. It channeled my existential dread and combined it with my fascination for science fiction into a dystopian, Huxleyan vision of a world where everything is automated by AI, rendering humanity obsolete. I wrote it to exorcise a personal dread. A decade later, that dread is no longer personal: while I may be cured of my own existential angst, the exact anxiety I once projected onto a far-future dystopia now sits at the center of our cultural discourse around AI, AGI, goon caves and unemployment. Which is why it feels like the right moment to bring the book to a larger audience. It has remained one of my bestselling and most highly reviewed titles, and the questions it has grappled with have only become more relevant with time — so I am thrilled to share it, at last, with readers beyond the German-speaking world: _Das Erwachen des letzten Menschen_ is now available in a revised English translation as **_The Awakening of the Last Man_**. The novella is quite short, so it is launching exclusively as an eBook for now, though a print version may follow. If you do have some command of the German language, I do of course still recommend the [original](https://amzn.to/4eDDjgx). _Paid subscribers of my Substack will receive a digital copy for free—as they will with all upcoming releases and other books._ _And yes, you just read an advertisement — a convincing one, I hope, or at least an entertaining one._ --- **THE BOOK** > **The Awakening of the Last Man** follows the story of a man living in a seemingly utopian future where AI does all the work. Humanity is divided into a ruling class of genetically enhanced owners and a sterilized, permanent underclass that dwells in abundance thanks to Artificial Intelligence. Belonging to the latter, the protagonist falls into a deep depression and begins keeping a diary. Slowly, he discovers that his hedonistic life is deprived of meaning—a void that no drug or virtual reality can fill. A philosophical journey begins... > > This book was written by the European author Nikodem Skrobisz at the age of 17 and originally published as his sixth book in 2016 under the title _Das Erwachen des letzten Menschen_. ### THE WRITER > **Nikodem Skrobisz** (born February 26, 1999, in Munich, Germany) is a European philosopher, activist, and writer of horror, science fiction, nihilist-punk, and metamodern literature. Publishing mostly in German under the pen name **Leveret Pale**, his novels frequently reflect on deep philosophical and psychological topics. He studied Communication Studies, Psychology, and Philosophy, and has worked in Public Relations for politicians, NGOs, corporations, and startups.