For a long time humanity has dreamed about a life free of toil, spent largely in leisure, learning and pleasure.
Now that AI has arrived, what if it wasthe thing that finally delivers us into a post-work future?
While there are many pressing concerns and disruptions thrown up by AI, I find it interesting that more of us aren’t asking: if we no longer had to work, or needed to work as much, what would we do with all that free time?
For the sake of a thought experiment, let’s presume there will be some form of universal basic income in the wake of mass joblessness. (In the past 12 months, this has moved to a policy discussion, at least in the UK.) And let’s imagine that AI is run – as OpenAI was originally intended to – as a not-for-profit enterprise.
If the issue of subsistence was able to be sorted, the big questions would be more philosophical, rather than economic.
What would we do with ourselves? How would we find meaning? Fill time? Not go insane from the lack of structure? With God dead, the nuclear family in decline, and the need to work removed – what would hold us together?
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Thinkers from the past have grappled with this idea of time abundance.
In ancient Greece, Epicurus and a close group of friends spent their days learning and debating philosophy. They strove to be content with the basics, so as not to live in anxiety about scarcity (though it should be noted this idyll didn’t occur without labour – Epicurus had a slave Mys, among others, who managed the house and garden).
Thomas More’s 1516 book Utopia depicts an imaginary island society governed by reason, communal property, universal labour and no money.
Karl Marx, in a section of his early notebooks, Grundrisse, argued that the transition to a post-capitalist society combined with advances in automation would allow for significant reductions in labour needed to produce necessary goods. In this post-scarcity age, people would have significant amounts of leisure time to pursue science, the arts and creativity.
(In Capital, Marx later abandoned this view, believing that capitalism could continually renew itself unless overthrown.)
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In economist John Maynard Keynes’ 1930 essay Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, he predicted in 100 years’ time there would be such abundance that people would barely need to work, as their basic needs would be taken care of thanks to technological advances. Only four more years to go!
And the hippies of the 1960s “tuned in and dropped out” – experimenting with psychedelics, commune living and eastern religions, with the aim of flourishing in the way that Epicureans were also trying to flourish, outside the bounds of work and family.
There was an optimism to these experiments, with the common goal being a world where we didn’t have to work, allowing for a collective flourishing and creativity.
Yet somehow humanity has found itself increasingly working more, not less – as a result of our phones making us always on – with the ancient goals of flourishing slipping further out of reach.
Geoffrey Hinton, the Nobel prize-winning physicist known as the godfather of AI, predicted in 2025 that AI would “replace everybody” doing mundane intellectual labour. In a more recent interview he said: “If you make lots and lots of people unemployed, even if they get universal basic income, they’re not going to be happy. Because they need purpose … they need to feel they’re contributing something.”
Diary of a CEO host Steve Bartlett, in another conversation with computer scientist Stuart Russell, envisioned a post-scarcity society that is focused on entertainment, which was why a number of tech entrepreneurs were looking to buy sports teams.
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“It’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism,” was a phrase popularised by the cultural theorist Mark Fisher in his 2009 book Capitalist Realism.
He asked: how can we plan for a different world if we can’t even conceptualise it? Capitalism has completely colonised our worldviews, so that we literally cannot imagine a world where we are not assigned an economic value.
The British thinker – who died by suicide in 2017 – nailed why we have so much trouble imagining a future without work.
He argued that capitalism is to its subjects today like water is to fish. We are in it, and we cannot see beyond it. The best we can do is imagine ourselves as passive subjects of capitalism.
In Keynes’ times, in the 1930s, there were other systems that were viable challengers to capitalism – namely communism and socialism. Imagining a very short work week was easier then, because the system hadn’t so fully captured the imaginations of humans.
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In Fisher’s last (uncompleted) work before his death, Acid Communism, he had begun to articulate how we might start to conceive of life beyond work and capitalism.
Fisher’s answer is that the consciousness required to enjoy abundance is itself something that has to be built, and right now, capitalism actively prevents that consciousness from forming, because it is not in that system’s interests for us to operate outside it.
But that could change if we no longer needed to work.
If so, the shift would be profound. It would be, by necessity, spiritual in nature, requiring a complete reorganisation of the conception of ourselves and our place in the world. This includes how we see nature, money, time, family, community and ourselves.
In a post-scarcity society, dignity would not be found in work but in our actual personhood, through our very existence and place in the cosmos.
We would exist without economic value, because we were no longer required to provide economic value.
Instead we could try to regain our place in the natural order, rather than sitting outside it, in a system that is designed to exploit nature.
This is close to the vision described by ancient philosophers and sages who saw humans flourishing through friendship, sex and intimacy, harmony with nature, enjoyment of food and wine, ritual, good talk and company.
It might seem unlikely at this moment, but under the right conditions, the abundance that AI promises to deliver would represent an enormous and radical opportunity – a chance to reconnect with the ancient project of how to live. In this there is the promise of nothing less than the total shift from a human doingto becoming a human being.
