Somewhere between utopia and doom
The future has never felt less clear to me than it does right now. I work at a fintech startup, purchased my first home over a year ago, I have a three-year-old, and another on the way. Every time I try to picture what the economy, or the job market, or daily life will look like by the time my kids are old enough to care about any of it, I get mentally stuck. The pieces don’t fit together the way they used to.
So I wanted to sit down and think through the most extreme version of this. If AI can handle any digital work, and robots can achieve any physical work, what happens to the rest of us? It’s easy to jump to the extremes. Elon says “sustainable abundance.” The doomers say it’ll be a complete dystopia. But defaulting to either pole is intellectually lazy, because the extremes are the easy answers. The hard part is being realistic about what actually happens, instead of black and white. The future is almost certainly grey. Not bleak, but uncertain. And trying to make that grey even slightly clearer, which is a truly impossible task, requires more nuanced thought than either camp is offering. Spoiler alert: I’m going to get a lot of this wrong. That’s fine. This piece isn’t a prediction, and I’m not saying this extreme version is the most likely outcome of the future. I’m just trying to walk through how it would play out if it did.
AI isn’t the bubble, it’s the pin
I’m starting to think the AI bubble will pop and the stock market will take a significant hit within the next few years. Not because AI misses expectations, but because it meets or exceeds them. AI isn’t the bubble. It’s the pin that pops the employment bubble.
A lot of current valuations are built on the assumption that the consumer economy keeps running the way it always has: employed people with wages, spending those wages on goods and services, some of which flow back into the companies whose stocks are priced for growth. If AI lives up to the hype, the employment shock arrives faster than any adjustment mechanism can catch up. The wage base underwriting all of that spending takes a hit before new job categories, universal basic income (UBI), or any other policy has time to kick in. A world where AI modestly improves productivity over a decade is fine. A world where it actually does what its builders say it will is the one where the market has to reprice the assumption that consumers have the ability to consume. The bubble isn’t in AI stocks specifically. It’s in everything downstream of employment, which, last I checked, is most of the market.
When thinking about this in terms of decades, that’s the short-term market take. The question that outlasts any market dislocation is what happens to the people whose jobs are disappearing. That’s the question I actually get stuck on if this plays out in the best and worst way.
The paradox nobody has answered
If a lot of people lose wages, who buys the stuff AI is now producing?
The optimistic version is the historical pattern. Every prior automation wave triggered this exact fear and none produced permanent mass unemployment. Agriculture went from 40% of US employment to 2% and the displaced workforce eventually moved into categories nobody in 1900 could have predicted. UX designer, yoga instructor, podcast editor: none of these were concepts your great-grandfather would have recognized as a job. When goods get cheaper, real purchasing power rises, and new wants absorb the freed-up labor. The catch is that the transition is always brutal for the specific group that gets displaced.
The pessimistic version is that this time is different. Previous waves replaced tasks and people moved up the ladder to cognitive work. AI replaces the cognitive work itself. If there’s no “up” to move to, profits concentrate in whoever owns the AI and robotics.
The most likely outcome is neither in pure form. It’s a split economy. One side is the AI-and-robotics economy where software, content, digital services, and physical labor get dramatically cheaper. The other side is the human-presence economy: live experiences, trust-based services, artisanal and handmade goods, and anything where the point is that a person did it. Think about why a $15,000 handmade mechanical watch exists in a world where a $30 Casio keeps better time. The answer has nothing to do with function. It’s about craft, story, and the knowledge that someone’s hands made the thing. That instinct doesn’t go away in a post-AI world. It gets stronger. When everything mass-produced becomes trivially cheap, the things people made by hand become status symbols precisely because they’re inefficient. The handmade furniture, the small-batch ceramics, the bespoke suits. Scarcity of human effort becomes its own form of luxury.
The human-presence economy will be real, but it won’t be big enough. There aren’t enough artisan watch jobs, live performance slots, and trust-based service roles to employ the majority of the workforce. The split economy absorbs some people, but it leaves a lot of others without a clear economic role.
UBI solves the wrong problem
If the issue is “people don’t have wages to spend,” the best solution I can think of is to transfer them cash. Tax the AI-driven profits, distribute the proceeds, close the demand loop.
A lot of people will live on UBI as their sole income, and that has to be okay. But UBI isn’t meant to be a ceiling. It’s a floor. Plenty of people will earn above it through creative projects, investments, or whatever else the new economy makes possible. The stock market will almost certainly take a hit during the transition, but markets have survived every prior disruption by eventually repricing around the new reality. Once AI-driven productivity is fully reflected in earnings, the people who held through or bought during it will benefit enormously. The real question is whether the floor is high enough to live on and low enough to not break everything else in the process.
Getting that right is harder than it sounds. AI and robotics won’t replace every job overnight, which means there’s a long, messy transition where the economy still desperately needs people to work, especially in the physical sectors robots haven’t reached yet. The common objection that UBI kills the incentive to work is actually aimed at traditional welfare, which phases benefits out as income rises and creates a nasty poverty trap. UBI needs to be universal by design, every dollar you earn stacks on top, so the plumber making $80k still makes $80k plus UBI. That said, set UBI too high and you pull people out of the workforce before robots are ready to take over their jobs. Set it too low and you haven’t actually solved the problem.
There’s also an inflation risk. UBI funded by taxing AI profits is better than stimulus checks because it redistributes existing value instead of printing new money, and expanding AI supply should dampen price pressure over time. But during the transition, when production hasn’t caught up and the pipeline is still being built, housing, food, and healthcare are still going to get more expensive.
Even if UBI successfully solves the wage problem, a society where a large fraction of people don’t work at all might just be bad for people regardless of whether they have money. The money isn’t the hardest part. The hardest part is what work was providing besides money, and we’ve systematically underestimated it. Work provides structure, identity, social connection, problems to solve, a story to tell about yourself, and a reason to get out of bed on Tuesday. Remove all of that and you don’t get leisure. You get the psychological state of long-term unemployment, which the research on is uniformly grim even when material needs are met.
The preview is already visible. Prime-age male labor force participation in the US has been declining for 50 years, and the men who dropped out are not, on average, flourishing. They’re not writing novels or building communities. They’re watching TV, playing video games, reporting high pain levels, and dying earlier than their employed peers. Deaths of despair are concentrated in exactly the places where work disappeared. South Korea and Japan are another version: materially comfortable societies where young people have checked out, fertility has collapsed, and a pervasive sense of stuckness has set in. Neither is post-work yet. They’re just further down the “material comfort without clear purpose” road, and it’s not obviously working.
The strongest counter to all of this is that the long-term unemployment research is confounded. Those people weren’t just out of work. They were out of work in a society that still valued work, they were financially stressed, they felt like failures, and they were often isolated from peers who were still employed. A universal post-work world wouldn’t carry the stigma or the financial stress, and the retiree data, which is a closer comparison, looks meaningfully better. People are certainly more adaptable and resilient than the grim version of this argument credits.
So the problem to solve isn’t “how do we make sure people have money.” In theory, that’s solvable with policy. The problem is “how do we make sure people have structure, identity, community, and a reason to get out of bed.” That’s harder, and nobody has answered it the way it’s currently being asked. Which brings me to the reframe I find clarifying, and it has nothing to do with money.
The answer has been in front of us since kindergarten
We already have one mass institution that successfully occupies people with structure, cohort, and meaning during the years we don’t have productive work for them. It’s school. And the honest version of what school provides isn’t mainly the education.
Most of what gets taught in K-12 and college is forgotten within a year, and a lot of it wasn’t that useful to begin with. The average working adult couldn’t pass the tests they aced at 17. Compulsory schooling didn’t emerge because society suddenly cared about algebra. It emerged because industrialization needed children out of the home so their parents could work in factories, and school was the institution that solved that problem. College extended the same bargain by four years and added sorting and credentialing on top, with a beautiful student loan bow. A lot of what school is, stripped of the pretense, is a socially agreed-upon way to hold people during years when we don’t know what else to do with them, dressed up in a story about learning that everyone believes on the surface.
This isn’t an insult to school. It’s actually a compliment, because what school does in addition to the teaching is enormously valuable. School provides a place to go every day. A cohort of peers at the same life stage. An annual structure imposed from outside so you don’t have to generate it yourself. Forced exposure to people and ideas you wouldn’t have picked. A socially legitimate answer to “what are you doing with your life” that doesn’t require you to have figured it out yet.
Adults need most of these things too, and in a post-work world they’ll need them even more. The assumption baked into modern life is that by your mid-twenties you’re supposed to have self-assembled all of this out of your job, your friendships, and your hobbies. Some people manage it. A lot don’t, even now. Strip away the job and the built-in workplace community that comes with it, and that gap gets significantly wider. A lot of people are going to find themselves searching for the scaffolding school used to provide, with nothing currently set up to replace it.
Extending the blueprint
Let me start with, nobody should be required to participate in any of this. If you want to spend your days on your own projects, your own hobbies, your own terms, that’s the whole point of a post-work world. But for the people who need structure, the opportunity should exist. The solution isn’t one institution, and it isn’t solely school. There will be groups that share the same interest coming together to hone their craft. There will be volunteer work to help make our communities better. And of course, educational institutions will still exist, probably looking a lot like what we have now.
Picture a 45-year-old former middle manager two years into a local furniture-making collective. She eats breakfast with her kid, heads over to the workshop for the morning alongside a handful of people she’s grown close to, volunteers at the community garden a few afternoons a week, and is home for dinner like any other parent. She earns a stipend from the program, on top of UBI. Her 12-year-old thinks it’s cooler than whatever she used to do in an office. Multiply that by ten thousand programs at every life stage on every scale, and you have the outline of something that could actually work.
Here’s the part that isn’t intuitive: nobody pays to be in these programs. The programs pay you, on top of UBI. Think of it as a second layer of government policy. UBI covers the baseline, and stipends tied to enrollment in recognized programs layer on top for anyone who opts in. In a post-AI-abundance world the money exists, the question is just distribution. Tying stipends to enrollment instead of handing out more pure cash gives you a mechanism that does double duty: it closes the income loop for participants and it anchors them to a structure. You’re paid because you’re in the cohort, not just because you’re alive. The cash still flows but it flows through institutions that give it meaning, which is exactly what cash alone can’t do.
The reason I think this framing is more realistic than the alternatives is simple: most people aren’t great at filling their own time with purpose when nobody is asking them to show up anywhere. That’s not a criticism, it’s just a reality. What works is a structure that people can opt into, with enough flexibility that it doesn’t feel like a job but enough scaffolding that it doesn’t feel like nothing. We already know how to build that. We’ve been building it for kids for decades. We just never extended it to everyone else.
Having a school-like structure also solves the status problem UBI can’t. “I’m in my second year at the local furniture collective” is a legitimate answer to “what are you doing with your life” in a way “I’m on UBI” never will be, and status is something people will fight for whether we think they should or not. We already see this playing out in non-work environments. In schools, it’s being popular. In retirement communities, it’s the pickleball wizard. The status void left by the disappearance of career titles will get filled by excelling at your craft, whether that’s a sport, a literal art, a civic project, or anything else where effort is visible and improvement is measurable. The post-work world won’t lack hierarchy. It’ll just build it around different things. Oh, and I hate to say it, we’re going to see a ton of cults.
Three shades of grey
My actual guess is that the population sorts roughly into thirds. About a third of people construct genuinely good post-work lives on their own terms, because they already had rich interior lives, strong relationships, creative hobbies, and the disposition to build structure for themselves. For them it’ll be a golden age. Another third take advantage of the school blueprint, the cohort programs, the stipend-funded projects, the structured communities. They might not have found their way on their own, but with the right scaffolding they’ll build lives that are genuinely meaningful. The remaining third don’t opt into any of it. They live comfortable but somewhat diminished lives, spending more time than they’d like on screens, occasionally feeling the absence of something they can’t name. If you’ve seen WALL-E, you know the image: perfectly comfortable people floating through their days on reclining chairs, every need met, every screen within reach, and not a single one of them doing anything that could be described as living. That’s not dystopia. It’s just not a life anyone would design on purpose, and yet if you squint, a lot of us are already slowly getting there on any given Sunday.
Reading this piece back, I realize it can come across as dark. That’s not the intent. A lot of what I’ve described feels heavy because it’s change, and change is uncomfortable, especially at this scale. But I genuinely believe this transition can be good if we’re thoughtful about it.
Here’s the way I think about progress. Almost every generation has lived better than the one before it. If you pulled someone from 1926 into today, they’d describe what they saw as utopian. They’d marvel at the life expectancy, the plumbing, the access to information, the fact that a middle-class family can fly across the country for a long weekend. And if we got dropped into 1926, it would feel like a dystopia. No air conditioning, no antibiotics, polio, 60-hour workweeks for most people.
Utopia and dystopia aren’t fixed destinations. They’re relative to when you happened to be alive. They’re moving targets. But the direction is clear: the past generally looks more like dystopia, and the future generally looks more like utopia. I don’t think that trend is stopping.
By 2126, the world I’m describing here will probably look pretty good to us, even if the people actually living in it will be complaining about post-work problems the way we complain about first-world problems today. That’s just how progress works. You identify problems, some serious and some not, and you try to fix them. This piece is my attempt to identify some of the ones I think are coming.
What I think about when I think about my kids
The part I keep coming back to isn’t the economics or the institutions. It’s my kids.
My toddler just turned three. My second is about to be born any day now. By the time either of them are old enough to think seriously about what they want to be when they grow up, the question “what do you want to be” might not mean the same thing it did when I was a kid. Work as identity might be a frame that doesn’t translate. The jobs I’d have instinctively steered them toward, the same kind of path I built a career on, might not exist in any recognizable form.
What I find myself hoping for them is that they develop the skills that make post-work life enjoyable: the internal compass, the deep friendships, the physical health, the natural interests and curiosity, the ability to generate structure when the world isn’t handing it to them.
I don’t know if any of us are ready for what’s coming. I don’t know if the institutions that could prepare our kids even exist yet, or if we have enough time to build them before they’re needed.
The one thing I’m sure of is that no one has this figured out. I wrote this because I certainly don’t but I’m trying to. If you got this far, you’re probably trying to figure it out too. I hope some of this helps, for the kids who are going to inherit whatever we end up building. Or at the very least, whatever the robots don’t build first.
