AI is here to help. It shops for us, orders our food, plans our diets, writes our reports, answers our emails, and preps our meetings. It’s becoming the world’s most efficient secretary, strategist, therapist, friend and manager, all rolled into one sleepless digital brain.
Bill Gates predicts that by 2035 Ai will replace “most things” and we’ll have a 2-day work week. A world of planned abundance: job-sharing, increased leisure, flexible hours or even Universal Basic Income. A lifestyle with more “you time.” No more hustle, no more grind. Paradise, right?
But imagine what might happen if it came true.
Let’s suppose you’re among the fortunate ones, still employed after the AI redundancy wave hits. On paper, that’s a win. But what happens when there’s almost nothing left for you to actually do? What if your office is reduced to a few overseers and algorithms and you sit at home on a salary or on UBI watching AI do all your emails?
It’s possible that we’re not ready for this. Not culturally. Not psychologically. And behind the joy of newfound freedom an unspoken terror may lurk – what is the value of our lives when we’re no longer really needed?
Or the biggest question of all: what is the meaning of life?
We’ve been drowning that huge question in deadlines, grocery lists, and calendar alerts likely for most of our lives. Take away all the busyness, and we’re left with something far more terrifying. Maybe there is no meaning. Maybe we’re just bio-machines, creating other machines, eating, reproducing, and waiting to die.
Welcome to Thursday afternoon’s existential meltdown in the fully automated world.
Dostoevsky once wrote: “Man is sometimes extraordinarily, passionately, in love with suffering.” Maybe because the struggle gave us purpose. Or maybe work was a distraction from the absence of a real purpose. Or – horror of horrors – maybe humans just aren’t designed for having nothing to do. As the old saying goes, “idle hands are the devil’s playthings.”
Would we go mad with the freedom we once claimed we wanted?
Think of all that spare time we would have to fill. With what? Gym sessions? Music? Netflix, books, hobbies, dating, diets, a new language to learn or a new degree to study for?
Would we amuse ourselves with art – possibly made by AI? Would we be, as Neil Postman warned, “amusing ourselves to death”?
We can only run so many miles. Only drink so much wine. Only try so many dopamine hacks. Eventually, the mirror stares back: more is not the answer.
The automation revolution isn’t just coming for our jobs. It’s coming for our sense of worth.
Yes, this future is a thought experiment that may never happen. But just in case it does, it might be worth asking what you would do if you were suddenly given all that free time. You could maybe start planning now – not just for the automation of your work, but the automation of your worth.
And whatever you do, don’t ask your AI the meaning of life.
It might tell you the truth.
