Harvard Business Review

The vast majority of humans throughout history worked because they had to. Many found comfort, value, and meaning in their efforts, but some defined work as a necessity to be avoided if possible. For centuries, elites in societies from Europe to Asia aspired to absolution from gainful employment. Aristotle defined a “man in freedom” as the pinnacle of human existence, an individual freed of any concern for the necessities of life and with nearly complete personal agency. (Tellingly, he did not define wealthy merchants as free to the extent that their minds were pre-occupied with acquisition.)

The promise of AI and automation raises new questions about the role of work in our lives. Most of us will remain focused for decades to come on activities of physical or financial production, but as technology provides services and goods at ever-lower cost, human beings will be compelled to discover new roles — roles that aren’t necessarily tied to how we conceive of work today.

Part of the challenge, as economist Brian Arthur recently proposed, “will not be an economic one but a political one.” How are the spoils of technology to be distributed? Arthur points to today’s political turmoil in the U.S. and Europe as partly a result of the chasms between elites and the rest of society. Later this century, societies will discover how to distribute the productive benefits of technology for two primary reasons: because it will be easier and because they must. Over time, technology will enable more production with less sacrifice. Meanwhile, history suggests that concentration of wealth in too few hands leads to social pressures that will either be addressed through politics or violence or both.

But this then raises a second, more vexing challenge: as the benefits of technology become more widely available — through reform or revolution — more of us will face the question, “When technology can do nearly anything, what should I do, and why?”

Particularly since the Industrial Revolution, technology has transitioned a widening portion of humanity away from the production of life essentials. While many people remain trapped in a day-to-day struggle for survival, a smaller percentage of humans are thus burdened. As AI and robotic systems become far more capable and committed, work will increasingly hum along without us, perhaps achieving what John Maynard Keynes described in Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren as technological unemployment, in which technology replaces human labor faster than we discover new jobs. Keynes predicted this would only be “a temporary phase of maladjustment,” and that within a century, humankind might overcome its fundamental economic challenge and be freed from the biological necessity of working.

This is an immensely hopeful vision, but also a winding, perilous path. Keynes cautioned, “If the economic problem is solved, mankind will be deprived of its traditional purpose… Yet there is no country and no people, I think, who can look forward to the age of leisure and of abundance without a dread.”

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