AI Might Give Us Everything, and Leave Us With Nothing to Live For

In 1930, John Maynard Keynes predicted that within a hundred years, technology would make us so productive that his grandchildren's generation would only need to work about fifteen hours a week. Oddly, he didn't think the hard part would be getting there. He thought the hard part would come afterwards, when humanity faced its real problem for the first time: what to do with itself once the struggle for survival was over. His deadline is four years away. He may have got the timing wrong, but I'm starting to think he got the problem exactly right. The most overlooked consequence of AI isn't unemployment, economic collapse, or machines becoming smarter than us. It's what happens to the human sense of purpose when there's no longer anything we need to do. Humans aren't made happy simply by having things. A huge part of happiness comes from working towards something, overcoming difficulty, developing skills, and eventually enjoying what our effort produced. Imagine spending three years building a business. You struggle, make mistakes, sacrifice your time, learn, and eventually succeed. Now imagine an AI builds the exact same business overnight and hands you the same amount of money. The outcome is identical. The experience is not. In the first version, you gained confidence, competence, memories, and the knowledge that you earned it. In the second, you received the reward and skipped everything that made it mean anything. You can see this in small, everyday ways too. Finishing a difficult DIY project, fixing something yourself, cooking a meal from scratch. There's a particular satisfaction in standing back and thinking, "I actually did that." Psychologists even have a name for it: the IKEA effect. People consistently value things they've built themselves more highly than identical things built for them, even when their own version is worse. The effort isn't a cost we tolerate to get the reward. The effort is part of the reward. And that's exactly what we're at risk of losing. Three years ago, what AI can do today would have sounded like science fiction. It's already automating increasingly complex intellectual work, and as robotics catches up, there's a plausible future where machines can do virtually everything humans currently do, mentally and physically. No more driving. No more shopping. No more cleaning. Eventually, perhaps, no more jobs. At first this sounds like utopia. Everything taken care of. Nobody has to work. Everyone gets to enjoy life. But enjoy what, exactly? There's a difference between being free from responsibility and having no responsibility worth taking on. Look at retirement. People spend decades dreaming of the day they never have to work again, then find themselves restless and directionless once it arrives. Not because they miss their particular job, but because they miss structure, goals, and a reason to get up in the morning. There's an even starker example. In the 1930s, researchers studied Marienthal, an Austrian village where almost the entire workforce lost their jobs when the local factory closed. What they found wasn't rebellion or anger. It was something quieter and stranger. People walked more slowly through the streets. Men stopped wearing watches, because there was no longer any reason to know what time it was. Days lost their shape. The village didn't explode; it simply wound down. The researchers called it "the weary community." They were describing a few hundred people who'd lost their purpose. We may be building the conditions for it on a global scale. And it goes deeper than having nothing to do. Imagine dedicating years to becoming an exceptional programmer, artist, architect, or musician, knowing an AI can produce something better in seconds. You could still do it as a hobby, but what happens to your motivation when your effort is no longer necessary, or particularly valued? We've already seen a preview of this. Computers have beaten the best human chess players for decades. Then, in 2016, an AI beat Lee Sedol, one of the greatest Go players alive, at a game many believed machines wouldn't master for another decade. Three years later, Lee retired. His reason was that even if he became the best human player in the world, there was now something that simply could not be beaten. He'd spent his life climbing a mountain, and someone had built a higher one overnight. Now imagine that happening to every intellectual and creative pursuit. Every skill you could spend a lifetime mastering, already surpassed by something that acquired it effortlessly. Achievement isn't only about personal satisfaction. It's about contributing something, being recognised for your abilities, feeling like you have something unique to offer. If anyone can generate an extraordinary novel, film, or piece of software instantly, what happens to the significance of making one yourself? And here's where I have to make a confession. I wanted to write this post myself. Instead, I handed the work to an AI, because it could organise my thoughts more clearly than I could. Then I asked it to rewrite its own draft to make it more compelling. The words you're reading right now about the loss of human effort are, in large part, not the product of human effort. I didn't plan for the essay to prove its own point. It just did. And we're barely at the beginning. We're gradually removing every incentive to struggle, learn, practise, and create for ourselves. Not because we're incapable, but because doing it ourselves is becoming increasingly inefficient compared to asking a machine. For almost all of human history, our lives have been structured around obstacles: hunger, danger, scarcity, ignorance. Overcoming them gave us our skills, our communities, our stories, our sense of who we are. We're now building technology whose ultimate promise is to remove those obstacles entirely. Maybe the greatest irony of AI is that in trying to eliminate everything that makes life difficult, we might also eliminate much of what makes life meaningful. What scares me isn't that AI will become better than us at everything. It's that one day we might wake up in a world where we're no longer needed for anything. And I genuinely don't know what that does to the human mind..