In 1930 John Maynard Keynes made one of the most famous predictions in economics. Technological progress, he thought, would make his grandchildren so productive that they might need to work only 15 hours a week.
The prediction is usually remembered because it was wrong. People became vastly richer, but they continued to work.
Less often remembered is that Keynes was not entirely relaxed about the alternative. If technology eventually solved what he called the economic problem, humanity would encounter another one: what to do with its freedom. People had been trained for generations to strive, he argued, and might prove surprisingly bad at doing anything else. Those with money but few duties or ties did not strike him as particularly encouraging examples of life after work.
Two years later, in an Austrian village called Marienthal, researchers stumbled across a darker version of the same problem.
The village’s textile mill had closed, leaving most families dependent on unemployment support. Poverty obviously dominated what followed, which makes Marienthal a poor model for an affluent automated future. But something else happened that fascinated the researchers. Time itself seemed to change.
The unemployed men walked more slowly. Many stopped repeatedly while crossing the village. Most no longer wore watches. Library borrowing fell rather than rose. Presented with an abundance of time, people did not automatically fill it with reading, hobbies or civic life. The structure that had made time useful had disappeared.
Nearly a century later, artificial intelligence raises a much larger version of Keynes’s question.
Most discussion about AI and employment is understandably economic. Which jobs disappear? How quickly does productivity rise? Who owns the machines? How should the income they generate be distributed?
But suppose, eventually, that those problems can be solved. Imagine a society rich enough to provide people with comfortable lives even when relatively little human labour is required.
What will everyone actually do all day?
For most adults, work occupies roughly eight hours of every weekday. For children and teenagers, school does much the same. Add commuting, preparation, homework and the mental space occupied by both, and a remarkable proportion of human existence is organised around the requirement to be economically useful.
Now imagine that requirement begins to disappear.
Not because useful things no longer need doing, but because machines can do more of them, more cheaply and eventually better. They diagnose illnesses, write software, analyse businesses, prepare contracts, design buildings and teach mathematics. If robotics makes comparable progress, much physical labour may follow.
Intelligence becomes a utility. Eventually labour may begin to resemble one too.
The economic consequences would be enormous. The psychological consequences may be stranger.
Work does much more than produce income. It tells people when to wake up. It supplies colleagues, deadlines, routines and mild competition. It creates achievements and disappointments. It provides status and identity. It gives someone a reason to leave the house and, perhaps most importantly, gives other people reasons to expect them to arrive somewhere.
School performs a similar function for the young. It is supposedly an institution for transferring knowledge, but it is also a machine for structuring childhood. It puts several hundred young people in the same place at the same time. It forces them to coexist, encounter people they did not choose, play sport, sit examinations, perform plays, make friends, lose arguments, cope with boredom and occasionally discover that they are good at something they had never considered trying.
Remove much of work and school and society does not merely lose two institutions.
It loses much of its timetable.
Retirement gives us the closest existing approximation. Someone reaches sixty or sixty-five and, often quite abruptly, discovers that the institution which has organised much of adult life has disappeared.
Some flourish. They have family, friendships, travel, voluntary work, sport and projects waiting for them. Others discover that work had quietly been supplying much of their social world and sense of identity.
But a person retiring at sixty five has had four decades to work out who they are. They have accumulated relationships, interests and obligations. With luck, they know what gives shape to a Tuesday when nobody is paying them to be somewhere at nine o’clock.
An eighteen year old has not.
That may be the harder problem.
If an eighteen year old enters a world in which employment is optional, scarce or simply unnecessary, what exactly are they supposed to do with the next seventy years?
At that age most people have barely begun to discover what they care about. School, university and work provide tracks to follow while identity gradually forms. They impose sequence. Study this. Qualify. Find work. Become better at something. Change direction. Perhaps raise a family. Eventually retire.
Remove the tracks and society may give young people unprecedented freedom before they have developed the judgement required to use it.
The immediate alternatives are not wholly reassuring.
An enormous industry already exists whose purpose is to capture unclaimed attention. Social networks, games, streaming services and personalised entertainment compete continuously for spare minutes. If work releases another eight hours a day, some of the richest companies in history will have every incentive to occupy them.
The technologies will also become better at the job. AI will be able to create endless games, stories, relationships and virtual worlds tuned precisely to the psychology of one individual. Boredom may become technologically obsolete.
A society could therefore achieve something close to material abundance while millions of people spend much of their lives inside experiences optimised to stop them leaving.
Yet boredom may not be the deepest difficulty.
Decades of research into unemployment suggest that employment supplies several things besides pay: structure to time, social contact, status, regular activity and participation in a collective purpose. Marie Jahoda, one of the researchers at Marienthal, later called these the latent functions of work. Modern research still finds links between these functions and mental wellbeing.
But there may be something underneath all of them.
People want to matter.
Psychologists use that word in a fairly precise way. Mattering means not simply believing that your life has purpose, but feeling significant to other people. One component is dependence: the knowledge that somebody relies on you. Another is the feeling that your actions genuinely make a difference.
This suggests that the usual discussion about the end of work may be asking the wrong question.
We ask what people will do.
Perhaps we should ask who will need them.
There is an important difference.
I can decide that learning Portuguese is my purpose. I can spend five years becoming an excellent pilot. I can go to the gym every other day, ride horses or study astronomy. All could make my life richer.
But if I decide not to do any of those things tomorrow, nobody necessarily suffers.
Work is different because it often makes our actions consequential to other people. A patient expects the doctor. A pupil expects the teacher. A customer expects the plumber. Your colleague needs the report because she cannot finish something until you do.
Even an ordinary job embeds a person in a small network of dependence.
The uncomfortable possibility is that AI does not merely make us less necessary to the economy. It makes us less necessary to one another.
If an AI can teach the child, diagnose the patient, repair the machine, give the legal advice, drive the passenger and perhaps eventually provide companionship, many of the practical reasons humans have historically had to depend upon other humans begin to weaken.
Materially, this could be wonderful.
Socially, it presents a peculiar problem.
A world in which nobody needs to do very much for anyone else may be comfortable while also making it harder to answer one of the oldest human questions: where would there be a hole if I disappeared?
AI could even simulate the answer. An artificial companion could tell you that it missed you. A game could give you a vital mission. A virtual organisation could provide status, promotion, difficulty and praise.
But there is a difference between being told that you matter and knowing that something outside yourself actually depended upon your turning up.
That distinction may become increasingly valuable.
The same is true of time.
Work and school do something so familiar that we barely notice it: they synchronise millions of lives.
Monday morning means roughly the same thing to everybody. Evenings are when many people stop working. Children have school holidays together. Saturday afternoon works as a social institution because large numbers of people are available at the same time.
Research into time use shows that this synchronisation matters. Couples actively coordinate working hours to create shared leisure, and people whose routines are badly out of step with society often pay a social cost.
This leads to a curious possibility.
A post work society could have an abundance of individual free time and a shortage of common time.
If everybody is free whenever they like, everybody may choose differently. The rhythms that currently coordinate us could weaken along with the jobs that created them.
Saturday means something partly because Monday exists.
This is why simply building more leisure facilities does not quite solve the problem.
A future rich in sports centres, parks, workshops, libraries and virtual worlds might offer people an extraordinary range of activities. But activities are not the same as obligations, and private leisure is not the same as shared life.
The institutions that matter most may therefore be those that create two things work currently supplies almost accidentally: mutual dependence and common time.
A football team does this. Training is on Wednesday because everyone has agreed that Wednesday is when they train. If the goalkeeper does not appear on Saturday, ten other people notice.
An orchestra does it. So does a theatre company, a voluntary organisation, a scientific project, a community garden, a care network or a group restoring a woodland. Their value is not simply that they keep people busy. They create roles in which other people rely on you.
Perhaps that is the infrastructure a post-work society would actually need.
Not organised leisure, exactly. Something closer to organised significance.
It would need institutions capable of creating what might be called voluntary necessity: commitments freely chosen, but real enough that once chosen they impose duties.
There is a paradox here. We imagine freedom as the removal of obligations. A society liberated from compulsory work might discover that a satisfying life requires putting some obligations back.
The difference is that people could choose which ones.
Instead of being compelled by economic necessity to spend forty hours a week doing whatever the labour market happens to reward, people might have much greater freedom to choose the communities, skills, causes and people to whom they wish to become useful.
That could be one of AI’s more attractive consequences.
It might allow societies to distinguish for the first time at scale between what is economically necessary and what is humanly necessary.
Looking after an elderly neighbour may generate little GDP. Raising children, maintaining a community garden, mentoring a teenager or helping run a local charity can be economically marginal while being deeply consequential to the people involved.
Our present economy often gets this backwards. Some of the activities people consider socially valuable are poorly paid, while some highly paid work leaves those doing it wondering whether anything would change if the job disappeared.
AI could deepen that absurdity, or help us escape it.
Education would then have to change too.
If an infinitely patient AI tutor can teach algebra, chemistry or French, schools may need to spend less time transmitting information and more time teaching young people how to participate in human institutions.
How do you become someone others can rely upon? How do you cooperate, lead, lose, persist, make friends, resolve conflict and keep a commitment after the enthusiasm that produced it has disappeared?
These are not secondary skills in a post-work society. They may become the central ones.
A good school might still teach history and mathematics, but its deeper task would be to help a young person discover not merely what interests them but where they can become useful to others.
That is harder than teaching algebra. Algebra has a syllabus.
A life does not.
There is good reason nevertheless to be optimistic.
Human beings have never shown much enthusiasm for doing nothing. When released from necessity they repeatedly invent difficulty. They run marathons, climb mountains, become obsessive gardeners, learn musical instruments, compete at sport and spend years mastering skills with almost no economic value.
The problem is not that humans lack the desire to strive.
It is that the market has spent several centuries performing the useful function of connecting that striving to a social structure.
The next task may be to make those connections without requiring a wage.
That is why retirement is an incomplete model for the future. A sixty five year old often enters retirement already embedded in a lifetime of relationships and obligations. There may be children, grandchildren, old colleagues, clubs, neighbours and interests accumulated over decades. Work disappears, but the person does not start again from nothing.
An eighteen year old may.
So perhaps the most important question raised by a post-work society is not how an eighteen-year-old fills seventy years of leisure.
It is how, over those seventy years, they become entangled in the lives of other people.
For most of human history necessity did much of that work for us. Families depended upon one another because survival demanded it. Communities depended upon cooperation. Employers needed workers. Workers needed wages. Scarcity forced humans into relationships of mutual reliance whether they liked it or not.
AI may loosen some of those bonds by solving the scarcity that created them.
That should still be welcomed. There is nothing intrinsically noble about drudgery, poverty or having no choice about how to earn a living.
But removing economic necessity does not remove the human need to be consequential.
If anything, it makes that need more visible.
The deepest challenge of the AI age may therefore turn out not to be finding enough things for humans to do. Machines and entertainment systems can provide endless things to do.
The harder task will be constructing a society in which people still have reasons to need one another.
For most of modern history we have asked young people: what can you learn to do that somebody will pay you for?
An eighteen year old in an age of abundant intelligence may face a much larger question.
Who will you choose to become useful to?
A good society would make sure there are many answers.
