Celebrating a jobless future? Fine if you're Bill, Sam or Elon...
Many of the leading tech entrepreneurs have predicted a world without employment. They see artificial intelligence as ushering in a new era, in which everything happens at a touch of a button or is delivered by a robot.
Bill Gates predicts a two-day week within 10 years, Sam Altman thinks 95% of marketing can happen without humans and Elon Musk says that we’ll only have to work if we want to pursue a hobby.
It’s this bizarre and somewhat crazy vision that I explore in my extended essay AI and the redundant human (published by yours truly in May 2025 and soon available from all good online bookshops etc).
I use the words bizarre and crazy, because work is actually fundamental to every aspect of modern human society. It has been essential to the formation and growth of businesses and is also usually touted as the most worthwhile product of that growth.
When a company invests, we’re always told how many jobs they are going to create. And why does that matter? Because jobs is what pays the bills, folks.
Yes, believe it not - despite the outpourings of corporate loyalty and bravado on LinkedIn - most people work to earn money. They then use that money to buy food and clothes and to pay rent. And they become customers of businesses. And they pay taxes.
So we’re immediately facing a bit of a conundrum. If there are no jobs and no money, will we have suddenly and unexpectedly entered a socialistic utopia in which everyone has access to everything they need for free? Or will we actually live in a society where a few people have got obscenely rich and everybody else has no jobs and no money?
While I still do have a bit of money left, I’d choose to put it on the latter scenario.
But perhaps we need to take a step back. Maybe the pronouncements of Bill, Sam and Elon should be taken with a large pinch of salt. Are they are hallucinating as wildly as the generative AI their businesses champion? Because many people will tell you that AI could never replace them.
If you’re a postal worker, a karate instructor or a police officer, my bet is that your job is pretty safe for the moment. That’s because while robots might theoretically be able to stick mail through letterboxes, kick people across a dojo or nick villains, the physical and financial investment to make it happen is rather off-putting. If it does take place, it’s a generation away at least and we’ll need to have taken leave of our collective senses in the meantime. (Watch this space.)
If, however, you’re an illustrator, accountant, journalist, programmer or customer service assistant, things don’t look quite so rosy. My contention - which again I explore in greater depth in my essay - is that a huge amount of cognitive, administrative and creative work is set to disappear if AI continues to advance at its current pace. (Remember the six-month moratorium the tech community disingenuously advocated a couple of years ago? Sadly, neither do they.)
Everyone is in denial about the disappearance of work because it hasn’t happened yet at any scale and it’s something we don’t want to think about. In this way, there’s a strong parallel to the ‘Don’t Look Up’ phenomenon afflicting humanity over environmental catastrophe.
The denial takes different forms.
People say that AI will simply help us become more efficient. It will free us up to do the stuff that’s really important. The assumption seems to be that we’re currently all focused on a lot of nonsense that isn’t our real job and that if we free up hours of time, we’ll be able to do the stuff that is our real job.
This may well be true in some instances. My wife works as a contractor in UK local government, where everyone is working flat out and there are ever-diminishing budgets. She could add more value if extra time were freed up through AI.
But if you’re a copywriter, your job is copywriting. And if the AI writes the copy, how exactly are you filling the rest of your week? And who’s paying you to do it?
If you’re an accountant in a small-scale, local firm and you find that what used to take you 35 hours can be done in seven, let’s not kid ourselves that the four days you’ve liberated will be spent offering ‘strategic advice’ and pearls of wisdom to nearby dental practices and plumbers. You’ll be told you’re needed one day a week.
Other AI denialists say that, ok, yes, jobs will go. But don’t worry! They’ll be replaced by other jobs! Ones that we can’t quite imagine yet. Sit tight.
This is a very beguiling argument, because it has of course always been true in the past. When cars replaced all the horses and carts, some of the stable lads probably got jobs as mechanics. Someone who worked booking holidays in a pre-internet travel agency might have got a job in the lastminute.com call centre.
What’s different this time, I would argue, is that we are looking at a technology that won’t just replace specific jobs. It will be better than us at everything. It will know more about engineering than someone with a PhD. It will write more accomplished market reports than anyone who’s been through business school. And, yes, despite what we see right now, it will almost certainly write code quicker and more seamlessly than any techie.
And what jobs exactly will this technology spawn that can’t also be done better by AI than humans? We might find completely new avenues of work, scientific inquiry and business opportunities are created, but why would we suppose these tasks will require us, any more than our erstwhile jobs did?
In the preface of AI and the redundant human, I make a point of saying that I’m not attempting to predict what will happen, but rather issue a warning of what might. I think the downside of the technology in terms of human redundancy is plausible enough to start having some serious discussion about what this means for the economy, society and human psychology.
With literal redundancy comes another type - a kind of cognitive, spiritual and creative void, in which humans may feel they can contribute very little. Where their education and expertise counts for next to nothing, as it will always be outshone by the machine.
In this Substack, I’m going to be looking at the impact of AI on our working lives and all the implications it has for our lives outside. I anticipate a mix of news, video and commentary as we get the show on the road. Please do join in!