Table of contents
ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE & SOCIETY
PART 7
You wake up on a Tuesday morning without an alarm.
Not because you are retired. Not because you are rich. Not because you called in sick. You just do not have a job to get to.
The house is already comfortable. Most of the food your family needs costs very little because farming, transportation, stocking, and much of the work between the field and your kitchen have been automated. Energy is cheap. Basic healthcare is available. Housing is not something you spend half your waking life terrified of losing. Machines and software do most of the repetitive work society once needed millions of people to do.
You make breakfast with your daughter. Later, you spend two hours learning Spanish because you have always wanted to. You meet a friend for lunch. In the afternoon you work on a table you have been building in the garage, not because anyone ordered it, but because you like making things with your hands. Your neighbor is taking an online physics course. Someone else down the street helps coach kids. Another person spends three days a week caring for her father. Nobody asks which of those activities is economically productive enough to justify the person’s existence.
There is still work. People still build things, solve problems, care for one another, compete, invent, teach, perform, explore, organize, and create. They just do not have to sell forty hours of their week in order to earn the right to eat.
Now imagine another Tuesday.
You wake up at 11:30 because there is nowhere you need to be. The companies that own the AI systems, robots, energy networks, warehouses, and production infrastructure are doing extraordinarily well. You are not. There are not enough jobs left to provide the income people once depended on, but the old rules never really changed. A small payment keeps you alive. It does not give you much control over your life.
Your screen knows exactly how to hold your attention. Entertainment is endless, personalized, cheap, and better at keeping you engaged than almost anything in the physical world. Yesterday disappeared into it. So did most of last week. Some people drink. Some gamble. Some live inside games and feeds. Some are simply lonely. The machines solved a lot of the problem of producing things. Nobody solved the problem of what people were supposed to build their lives around when a job stopped doing it for them.
The technology worked in both futures.
That is the part I think we need to understand.
The question is not just whether artificial intelligence and robotics will take jobs. The more important question is what kind of society we build if, eventually, we simply do not need most human labor anymore.
This future is not here. But it is getting easier to imagine.
I do not know whether most jobs disappear. Nobody does.
The International Labour Organization’s 2025 work on generative AI found that about one in four workers worldwide are in occupations with some exposure to the technology, while emphasizing that transformation is currently more likely than outright replacement.[1] The World Economic Forum’s 2025 employer survey projected both enormous job creation and enormous displacement through 2030, with a net increase in jobs rather than the end of work.[2]
That matters because there is a lazy version of this argument where somebody draws a straight line from today’s chatbot to ninety percent unemployment. I don’t buy that.
Technology has been killing tasks and creating new jobs for a very long time. We stopped employing armies of telephone operators. We created software engineers, app developers, cybersecurity analysts, content creators, and entire industries that would have sounded ridiculous a century ago. Human wants expand. New industries appear. People often find new things to pay other people to do.
The strongest case against a post-work future is history itself.
But AI is also different enough that I do not think history gives us permission to stop thinking.
The IMF estimated in 2024 that almost 40 percent of global employment was exposed to AI, with exposure around 60 percent in advanced economies. It also made an important distinction: in many jobs AI can make people more productive, while in others it can perform key tasks itself and reduce demand for human labor.[3] The ILO’s newer work makes the same caution clear. Exposure is not the same thing as unemployment.[1]
Now add robotics.
Software intelligence is one thing when it lives behind a screen. The equation changes when increasingly capable software can see the physical world, make decisions, and control machines that move through it. Warehouses, transportation, manufacturing, agriculture, construction, cleaning, food preparation, delivery, and other physical work become part of the same conversation.
Stanford’s 2026 AI Index describes another year of rapid gains across reasoning, language, vision, speech, agents, and robotics, including benchmarks that were designed to remain difficult being overtaken much faster than expected.[4] None of that proves a robot will replace your plumber next year. It does make the boundary between “work only a person can do” and “work a machine can do” worth revisiting more often than we used to.
Maybe we keep inventing new jobs forever.
Maybe there is always something another human being would rather pay you to do than ask a machine to do.
Or maybe we eventually reach a point where creating new jobs becomes something we do because our economic system requires people to have jobs, not because society actually needs that much human labor.
Those are very different things.
COVID gave us a small preview of the question
The pandemic was not a post-work society. For millions of people it meant more work, more danger, lost income, child-care chaos, grief, isolation, or all of those at once. I do not want to romanticize it.
But it did interrupt the routine hard enough that a lot of people started asking questions they had not had time to ask.
Why am I commuting two hours a day?
Why do I barely see my kids?
Why am I giving most of my waking life to something I do not care about?
What do I actually want my life to look like?
In a 2021 McKinsey survey, nearly two-thirds of U.S. employees said COVID had caused them to reflect on their purpose in life, and nearly half said they were reconsidering the kind of work they did.[5] Pew later found that workers who quit jobs in 2021 commonly cited low pay, lack of advancement, disrespect, child-care problems, and lack of flexibility. Among people who moved to new jobs, many reported better work-life balance and flexibility afterward.[6]
That was not humanity rejecting work. It was a disruption exposing how much of life we had organized around it.
For a lot of us, the pandemic broke the assumption that the way we were working was simply the way life had to be.
A future with far less necessary work would break that assumption much more completely.
We have confused work with a lot of other things
Work gives people more than money.
It gives structure to the day. It gives status. It gives us people to talk to. It gives us problems to solve. It gives some people a sense that they are useful. It gives us an answer when somebody asks, “What do you do?”
Those things are real.
But none of them require a paycheck.
Raising a child is meaningful work. Caring for an aging parent is work. Writing a novel nobody has bought yet is work. Learning an instrument is work. Coaching a team is work. Growing a garden is work. Getting sober and rebuilding a life is work. Helping a neighbor is work. Studying a subject because it fascinates you is work.
Our economy just does not pay equally for all the things that make a life valuable.
That distinction becomes important if machines take over more of the labor we currently do for survival. The loss of compulsory employment does not have to mean the loss of effort, ambition, challenge, contribution, or purpose.
It could mean we finally get to separate them.
Imagine what people might learn if education did not have to end when the bill became too high or the job schedule got in the way. Imagine how much art gets made when the artist does not have to squeeze it between shifts. Imagine how many parents get more than the exhausted edges of their children’s childhoods. Imagine how much care becomes possible when sitting with an aging parent is not treated as time stolen from economically productive work.
There are people who would still build companies. There are people who would still compete. There are people who would spend ten hours a day trying to solve a scientific problem because they cannot help themselves. There are people who would make furniture, restore cars, teach history, write software, grow food, explore the ocean, make music, or train for a marathon.
Humans did not invent curiosity because somebody put us on payroll.
The danger is not free time. It is empty time.
There is another side to this that I do not think the shiny versions of the future take seriously enough.
If you remove forty or fifty hours of obligation from a person’s week, something will fill those hours.
That something is not automatically purpose.
A 2025 systematic review of research on boredom and problematic technology use found a consistent relationship between boredom proneness and problems such as excessive internet, smartphone, social media, gaming, and other digital use. The relationship is complicated by loneliness, self-regulation, mental health, and other vulnerabilities.[7] That does not mean free time causes addiction. It means a society with vastly more discretionary time should take meaning, connection, structure, and healthy engagement seriously instead of assuming everyone will spontaneously become a painter and learn Mandarin.
We are already very good at building products that can consume every spare minute a person gives them.
Now imagine those products after another twenty years of personalization.
If the good future gives us freedom from compulsory work but we spend that freedom sedated by whatever algorithm knows us best, we will have solved the wrong problem.
The goal cannot simply be a society where nobody has to work.
It has to be a society where people have the security and the capacity to build lives worth being awake for.
How we prepare for it
The first problem is obvious: people still need to live.
If paid employment becomes less necessary to production, we cannot keep employment as the only reliable doorway to food, housing, healthcare, and basic security.
Universal basic income is one possible answer. It is not magic, and the evidence we have comes from a world where jobs still exist. In a large U.S. unconditional-cash study, recipients worked modestly less on average, about 1.3 fewer hours per week, and were about two percentage points less likely to be employed than the control group. Researchers also found that cash gave people more flexibility in employment decisions and improved some measures of financial resilience.[8]
That does not prove UBI can run a post-work civilization. It tells us unconditional cash does not automatically produce the cartoon where everybody stops participating in life.
But a monthly check by itself does not solve the deeper problem either.
Suppose a handful of companies own the models, robots, energy, factories, warehouses, and networks that produce most of what society needs. Those systems become extraordinarily productive. The owners capture most of the gains. Everyone else gets enough money to remain a customer.
Technically, nobody has to work.
I would not call that freedom.
The IMF has already warned that AI could increase inequality partly because returns to capital can become more important and those returns are concentrated among people who already own capital.[9] Its fiscal-policy work argues for stronger social protection and taxation that can broaden the gains, while also warning that simply taxing automation can create its own distortions.[10]
So yes, we should be willing to talk about taxes tied to AI, automation, capital income, or the extraordinary gains these systems create. We should talk about social dividends, broader ownership, public stakes in infrastructure, universal basic services, and other ways of making sure the productivity belongs in some meaningful way to the civilization that makes it possible.
I do not know which mix is right.
I am more certain about the principle: if machines eventually do most of the work, a tiny group of people should not get nearly all of the benefit simply because they own the machines.
Then there is the part no tax code can solve.
We have to get better at building meaning outside employment before employment stops being the thing that structures most adult lives. Community matters. Family matters. Service matters. Learning matters. Physical movement matters. Creating things matters. Being needed by somebody matters. Having a reason to get out of bed matters.
If we wait until millions of people no longer have a workplace and then ask what is supposed to replace the social structure, identity, challenge, and routine that workplace provided, we waited too long.
And then there is the bigger question
There is a point where UBI starts to feel like an answer designed to preserve a question we may no longer need to ask.
Think about it.
If nobody needs your labor, why should your survival still depend on a paycheck?
If machines can make most of what we need, who should own the machines?
If food, energy, manufactured goods, transportation, and eventually many services become dramatically cheaper to produce, what exactly do we still need money for?
Not everything becomes abundant. Land is finite. Beautiful places are finite. Human attention is finite. Energy and materials still have costs. Some things will remain scarce because people want the same thing at the same time. Automation does not repeal physics or human desire.
But it may force us to ask whether capitalism as we know it is the final structure or simply the structure that made sense for a particular stage of human development.
Capitalism is extremely good at answering certain questions in a world of scarcity, ownership, investment, wages, and exchange. But what happens if human labor stops being one of the scarce inputs?
Maybe capitalism adapts.
Maybe we keep markets for scarce things while guaranteeing broad access to essentials.
Maybe people receive dividends because the productive systems are owned more broadly.
Maybe some categories of life move beyond money altogether.
Maybe a future society develops an economic structure we do not have a clean word for yet.
I am not pretending I know how a post-money society works. I do not. I am not pretending scarcity disappears. It will not.
I am saying that if AI and robotics eventually change the basic relationship between human labor and production, we should be willing to question the institutions built around that relationship too.
The unimaginative future is today’s economy with robots doing the jobs and everybody else getting a check.
We can imagine further than that.
Back to Tuesday
So go back to that first morning.
You wake up without an alarm.
Your daughter is already in the kitchen. You make breakfast together. You are not calculating whether the hour with her is costing you money. Later, she disappears into whatever she is learning that month. You spend part of the afternoon building the table. It is taking longer than it should because you keep changing the design. Nobody cares.
A friend messages you about dinner. Your neighbor needs help moving something. There is a class you want to take next week. You have been thinking about spending a month somewhere you have never been.
None of this feels like retirement.
It feels like life.
The machines are working somewhere in the background, but they are not the center of the story. That is probably the best sign that this future went right.
The center of the story is what people did with the freedom.
AI may eventually give us the ability to produce far more with far less human labor. If it does, that will not answer the question of what society should become. It will hand the question back to us.
Who gets the abundance?
What do we owe one another when survival no longer requires most of us to spend our lives working?
What is a human life for when a job no longer gets to answer for us?
I hope we are brave enough not to spend the future inventing unnecessary work just because we are afraid of those questions.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is AI actually expected to eliminate most jobs?
No credible evidence establishes that most jobs will disappear on a specific timeline. Current research finds substantial exposure to AI but often expects jobs to be transformed rather than eliminated. This article is about a plausible longer-term future created by continued advances in AI and robotics, not a claim that mass unemployment is already inevitable.[1][2][3]
Would universal basic income make people stop working?
Existing cash-transfer evidence does not support such a simple conclusion. One large U.S. study found modest reductions in employment and hours worked alongside greater flexibility in how recipients made employment decisions. A post-work economy would be a much larger change than any current UBI experiment, so those studies cannot tell us exactly what would happen.[8]
Would a world with less work automatically be better?
No. Greater freedom could create more time for family, learning, creativity, care, and exploration, but economic concentration, isolation, loss of structure, and compulsive forms of entertainment or addiction could also make a high-automation future worse. Technology does not decide how its benefits are distributed or how people build meaning.
Does this mean capitalism has to end?
Not necessarily. The article asks whether an economic system built partly around wages and human labor would remain the best structure if human labor became far less necessary. Capitalism could adapt, mixed systems could expand, or new structures could emerge. The point is to make the question discussable before technological change makes it urgent.
Could society really become post-money?
That is much more speculative. Automation can reduce the cost of many goods and services, but it cannot eliminate every form of scarcity. Land, energy, materials, human attention, desirable locations, and some services would remain limited. A future society could reduce the role of money in access to essentials without eliminating money entirely.
References
[1] International Labour Organization. “Generative AI and jobs: A 2025 update.” May 20, 2025. https://www.ilo.org/publications/generative-ai-and-jobs-2025-update
[2] World Economic Forum. “The Future of Jobs Report 2025 — Jobs outlook.” January 7, 2025. https://www.weforum.org/publications/the-future-of-jobs-report-2025/in-full/2-jobs-outlook/
[3] International Monetary Fund. “AI Will Transform the Global Economy. Let’s Make Sure It Benefits Humanity.” January 14, 2024. https://www.imf.org/en/blogs/articles/2024/01/14/ai-will-transform-the-global-economy-lets-make-sure-it-benefits-humanity
[4] Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence. “The 2026 AI Index Report — Technical Performance.” 2026. https://hai.stanford.edu/ai-index/2026-ai-index-report/technical-performance
[5] McKinsey & Company. “Help your employees find purpose—or watch them leave.” April 5, 2021. https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/people-and-organizational-performance/our-insights/help-your-employees-find-purpose-or-watch-them-leave
[6] Pew Research Center. “Majority of workers who quit a job in 2021 cite low pay, no opportunities for advancement, feeling disrespected.” March 9, 2022. https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2022/03/09/majority-of-workers-who-quit-a-job-in-2021-cite-low-pay-no-opportunities-for-advancement-feeling-disrespected/
[7] “Connected by Boredom: A Systematic Review of the Role of Trait Boredom in Problematic Technology Use.” 2025. PubMed Central. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC12384929/
[8] OpenResearch. “Unconditional Cash Study — Employment and Income Findings.” July 21, 2024. https://www.openresearchlab.org/findings/key-findings-employment-and-income
[9] International Monetary Fund. “Gen-AI: Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Work.” January 14, 2024. https://www.imf.org/en/publications/staff-discussion-notes/issues/2024/01/14/gen-ai-artificial-intelligence-and-the-future-of-work-542379
[10] International Monetary Fund. “Broadening the Gains from Generative AI: The Role of Fiscal Policies.” June 11, 2024. https://www.imf.org/en/publications/staff-discussion-notes/issues/2024/06/11/broadening-the-gains-from-generative-ai-the-role-of-fiscal-policies-549639