Adaptation is not a given
So here’s why I think AI is going to take everyone’s job. There’s the classic and comforting belief that “humans’ adapt.” That’s been true. There’s been some technological breakthrough that makes an old class tools useless, and so a whole generation pivots to a new class of tools. But AI is an innovation in tool and worker. AI, when it gets cheap, commoditized, and agentic enough, will be a supply shock to the labor market.
This might happen in addition to unimaginable productivity and abundance (if not destruction), and many utopians are calling for a “post-scarcity world” where everyone gets UBI. This will be a techno-luxury marxism. We won’t have economic value, but we’ll get paid to exist? We won’t understand how the machinery of culture works. It’s the next frontier of infantilism, and our parents aren’t human.
This leads to a leisure revolution and simultaneous meaning crisis. No one will be able to “escape from freedom” anymore. We’ll look back at full-time jobs as a form of slavery, and yet also, be paralyzed by a fear of the infinite possibilities in our lives. Best case, the average middle class person has no other option but to learn to become an artist.
This is of course a cartoon vignette, but fuzzy futurism is useful to the degree that it gets you to adapt to the present. Maybe that won’t come true, but if you assumed it true, how would you act today, and does that actually serve you in today’s timeline?