What Will Humans Do When A.I. Takes All the Jobs? 🤖

We can finally stop working for a living and actually LIVE

Designer from Copilot

The artificial intelligence takeover is upon us!

Accountants? Adios.

Songwriters? Sayonara.

Graphic designers? AI whipped up the cover photo for this very article.

Article writers? Oh hey, half the “writers” on Medium!

Web developers? I can already clone any website with the click of a button.

Imagine trying to start an app or platform today… you fundraise millions in capital, you hire a team of university-trained geniuses, you spend years building and launching the sickest and slickest app or platform imaginable… and then some kid on his phone just clones it in seconds.

The price of TVs has come down 95.4% over the past fifty years.

In 1971, storing 1 GB of data would have cost nearly $250 million. Today it costs $0.03 — 8 billion times cheaper in less than 50 years ago.

Friends, the cost of all things digital is about to go to zero.

I saw a great Tweet (X?) the other day.

It said something like,

“I don’t want AI to do my art and music so I can do my dishes and laundry; 
I want AI to do my dishes and laundry so I can do my art and music.”

Right on, girl.

But Silicon Valley technocrats don’t give a damn what this woman wants.

They want compounding shareholder profits, so they’ll make what’s profitable, not what’s necessary (what people need), or even what people want. 

Why do you think Netflix makes so many crappy shows?

Only once creating digital stuff is profitless will technologists fully unleash their AIs on the physical world.

Again, they’ll start with stuff we don’t need and didn’t ask for, because it will be the most profitable (warfare, autonomous drones, robot soldiers, facial recognition patrol dogs, etc.)

But eventually, prices will come down in the physical world for things we actually want:

• When 24/7 robots are building skyscrapers in a matter of days, houses will cost less than a current year’s rent.

• Food will be farmed at peak efficiency, with zero losses to birds as defensive drones keep them at bay (this is already increasing retained fruit yields massively.)

• Sweatshops will finally shut down, as print-on-demand custom clothing gets sewn and directly delivered 24/7/365.

• Every home is equipped with a full-body atomic scanner. Feeling sick or sore or injured? Just hop in your tanning-bed-shaped diagnostic tool and learn what’s wrong in seconds. Then click the green button and let the machine set your broken arm, inject stem cells in your arthritic ankle, or filter the cancer cells right out of your bloodstream.

But here’s a catch.

Robots doing all the jobs + pricing dropping through the floor = mass unemployment = mass homelessness, poverty, and hunger.

Societies will riot.

Government retribution — now delivered by soulless robots instead of morals-atrophied humans — will be swift and brutal.

But the two sides — the hyper-elites and the 99% — will eventually reach a settlement:

Automated luxury communism.

Forget Universal Basic Income —when the cost of everything goes to pennies and robots can do every job better than humans, money economies get tossed on the scrap heap of irrelevant inventions.

When robots are self-replicating and able to do every single task better than all humans, the toil-and-money game is just over.

Instead, robots will make us eco-houses, organic food, and sustainable clothing, and deliver them to our doorstep. 

No drama, no politics. Expect a blockchain to auto-deliver equality to all.

Then, eventually — way down the line, and hopefully not too late — our AIs will figure out how to deliver said automated luxury communism in a way that’s actually sustainable for the planet. What a day that will be!

Another wonderful benefit of the end of corporate will be the decrease in the fracturing of society. Without marketers blowing hundreds of billions to convince people to buy stuff they don’t need, social media platforms will wither and die. Without algorithms incentivized to foment conflict, we can re-align them for understanding and community.

So the real question is:

What the heck will humans do with themselves?!

24 Hours In A Toil-Free Money-Free World

While it will obviously vary from person to person, here’s how I suggest we should more or less spend our wonderfully short lives:

10 hours — rest. 
Americans used to average ten hours per night prior to Edison’s light bulb, so I say we get back to getting a full night’s rest. Plus an afternoon nap. The mental house gains are unfathomable.

2 hours — reading. 
In hammocks in the shade. On a blanket in the grass. Cozied up by the fire with a steaming pot of tea. Silently in a roomful of friends, our dopamine firing at the gorgeous sound of turning pages.

2 hours — exercise. 
Everyone plays a daily sport (soccer, basketball, Spike ball, etc) and everyone starts training (MMA, dance, tennis, cycling, etc.) We all get super healthy and sexy and maximize our healthspan while making new friends.

2 hours — hobbies. 
Gardening with fellow green thumbs. Movies with cinephiles. Sun-soaking at the beach. People will serious mental problems will take up camping. Tons of people will start making music and writing books, except now it will be for pure pleasure. The quality of music and books will massively improve as no one is even bothering to try to figure out what’s commercial and what will make money because there will be zero money to be made in writing and music. 

3 hours — meals with friends and family. 
Breakfast, lunch, and dinner will be long, leisurely, social affairs. No rushing off to catch the morning train or getting back home to see if the boss has any late-night demands. Food quality will skyrocket, too — no more revolting boxed sandwiches, seed oil soups, or grab-and-go coffees. Meals are the new main event.

2 hours — personal growth. 
Classes, courses, lectures, debates. Self-improvement. Relational health. We’ll finally have the time to invest in knowing ourselves and learning to get along civilly with others.

3 hours — working, serving, and helping others. 
We won’t need to toil, of course. It won’t be “efficient” to do so. But we’ll do it anyway. Why? Because work and service are, ultimately, just ways that human beings express love for one another. Sure, my aging mother will have a robot to fold her laundry, but every once in a while we’ll spread a load of warm socks on the kitchen table and laugh and chat while we match pairs and marvel over the fact that one sock somehow lost its partner.

So there’s our 24 wonderful hours.

The end of the toil-and-money economy will cause a massive global value re-orientation.

We’ll re-discover an ancient truth:

Your worth was never determined by what you produced in terms of investor profit.

Right now, the world worships money and those who have it. Society’s silent highest values are shareholder profit, personal hoarding, and compounding gains.

Oh, you’re “just” a mom?

Oh, you take care of your aging parents or your handicapped child?

In the future, people will value the things that actually matter.

Motherhood.

Fatherhood.

Sonship.

Sisterhood.

Friendship.

Neighboring.

Global citizenship. 

No, global familyhood.

Instead of profit, we’ll care about people.

Once greed eats itself, love wins.

That’s one possible outcome, anyway.

Jared A. Brock is the director of documentaries about slavery and trafficking and the author of a biography about Jesus’s politics, economics, and philosophy.