AI is proving a 100-year-old prediction true

The combination of innovation and compound interest would solve the problem that had dogged humanity since Adam and Eve: how to make ends meet. Our grandchildren would be able to meet all their material needs by working 15 hours a week. But this would leave what Keynes called "the permanent problem of the human race." How to use the resulting freedom from economic necessity to live a good life — or as Keynes put it "how to live wisely and agreeably and well."

Keynes" work on the problem of leisure has not been treated with the same reverence as his work on solving the problem of the great depression (he published his "General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money" in 1936). Many successful people work 60-plus hours a week. Over 80% of Americans report "never having enough time." Keynes clearly underestimated the extent to which people would define the notion of "enough" ever upward or generally prefer work to leisure.

Yet Keynes was not as wrong as work-obsessed elites imagine. The Nobel Prize-winning economist Robert William Fogel demonstrated that the average number of lifetime hours that people worked for pay dropped from 182,100 in 1880 to 122,400 in 1995 — a 33% decline in an era of increasing lifespans. From 2000 to 2019, per capita hours worked in the US fell from 926 hours to 885. Fogel also demonstrated that whereas 74% of consumer budgets went to necessities (food, shelter and clothing) in 1875, 68% went to leisure activities by 1995.

Moreover, AI may be about to prove Keynes spectacularly right just in time for his century deadline. The AI revolution is beginning to do for knowledge work what the combine harvester did for agricultural jobs and the factory did for mechanical jobs — mechanizing routine tasks that were once reserved for human beings before moving remorselessly up the value chain. Numerous knowledge-intensive companies are eliminating middle-management jobs and cutting back on hiring new graduates. Yascha Mounk, a political scientist, has just shown that AI can produce a perfectly respectable (I would say above average) political theory paper.

What are we to do about this potential job apocalypse? Most commentators have addressed this problem in narrow economic terms. How can we ensure that the losers have enough money to live on? And how can we preserve demand in a world in which workers are surplus to requirements? Silicon Valley has been pushing the idea of a universal basic income. Some progressive economists like the idea of taxes on robots or IT systems. But, as Brink Lindsey argues in his timely new book The Permanent Problem: The Uncertain Transition from Mass Plenty to Mass Flourishing, an equally urgent problem is Keynes" problem of how to ensure that people use their increased leisure well rather than destructively.

Perhaps the biggest problem with job destruction is that jobs are not merely ways of making a living. Jobs provide people with a combination of psychological benefits: social connections, pride and self-worth, a sense of accomplishment and, not to put too fine a point on it, meaning. The most difficult things about jobs are often the most rewarding. We complain about having to master tedious things (complicated cases if you are a lawyer or copy-editing if you are a publisher). But at the same time, we form profound bonds with our contemporaries and, in the long term, prepare the ground for our greatest career triumphs.

The question of the non-economic rewards is perhaps more pressing when it comes to knowledge work. The reason knowledge workers burn the midnight oil is that they invest so much of themselves in their work. They not only derive personal satisfaction from exercising their brainpower. They derive social satisfaction and prize the status that comes from being a highly regarded lawyer or academic.

Keynes warned that the transition from mass work to mass leisure might produce "a general nervous breakdown" as people lost their traditional anchors in the productive economy. This has already happened across the post-industrial world. Centrists such as Bill Clinton and Tony Blair calculated that they could solve the problem of post-industrial capitalism by taxing the winners in, say, London and New York to compensate losers in, say, Scunthorpe or Scranton. But they failed to realize how much of people"s self-respect is tied up with making a living. The resulting discontent produced both an epidemic of "deaths of despair," as people drank or drugged themselves to death, and the Brexit and Trump revolts.

The next "general nervous breakdown" will grip knowledge workers. We are already seeing signs of this breakdown among the young: for example, the "lie flat" movement in China, as young people realize that their hard work at school will not guarantee them respectable jobs, or the surge in support for the Green Party in Britain. But this is only a taste of what is to come as AI really kicks in: For AI not only destroys knowledge jobs, it also distorts the wider knowledge economy, reducing attention spans, deepening polarization and spreading epistemic chaos. We should take it as a warning that the most deranged characters in literature, such as Raskolnikov in Dostoevsky"s Crime and Punishment, or the most repulsive figures in history, such as Stalin and Mao Zedong and Pol Pot, were all alienated intellectuals.

How can we avoid the Raskolnikovisation of our knowledge class? The beginning of wisdom lies in recognizing that people need more than income to take the place of jobs. They need purposeful effort. This must start with reorganizing the central institution of the knowledge society: the university. Too many universities have abandoned their traditional function — producing roundly educated human beings — in favor of producing experts of various kinds (and, in the humanities, experts in deconstruction rather than appreciation). This needs to be reversed. Universities need to put more focus on the problems of leisure rather than production — helping people to appreciate greatness in both art and human affairs and cultivate their creative faculties. They need to stop thinking of themselves as primarily preparing people for the world of work and instead focus on providing a lifetime of learning. Today"s ivory towers-cum youth tanks need to become beacons of civilization for all. We need to combine the transformation of the university with repairing the voluntary organizations that provide us with both fulfilment and social connection.

This might sound as utopian as the 1960s fashion for dropping out and living in communes. But the groundwork for a new Keynesian revolution is already being laid. Far-seeing academics such as James Hankins and Allen Guelzo are putting the study of human greatness back at the heart of the humanities. Book festivals and book groups are flourishing. The world"s great museums report record attendance. And information technology can be used to advance civilization as well as distract attention: Duolingo, which helps people to learn languages, has more than 50 million daily active users.

Keynes was wrong to think that we would one day solve the problem of necessity: Governments are rightly preoccupied by the problem of low growth and the shortage of basic commodities such as houses. But he was nevertheless right that the permanent problem of how to live well will loom ever larger as technology does its wonderful work of expanding leisure time.

Adrian Wooldridge is the global business columnist for Bloomberg Opinion. He was previously a writer at the Economist. His latest book is "The Aristocracy of Talent: How Meritocracy Made the Modern World."

Previously:

• At Davos, Canada's PM speech had a big hole in it
• The West is facing five fearsome new giants
• 11/07/25: A risky revolution, spreading?
• 10/30/25: The cult of Charles de Gaulle is growing
• 08/05/25: Britain is in the midst of one long, hot, nervous summer
• 07/08/25: The Middle Ages are making a political comeback
• 06/23/25: The arc of history does not simply bend toward justice
• 04/01/25: Making America healthy should be a bipartisan challenge
• 11/27/23: If you want more globalization, build better walls
• 09/06/23: CEOs must soldier on even as AI anxieties loom
• 08/31/23: The incredible shrinking global sea powers
• 06/20/23: If neoliberalism did not exist, we would have to invent it
• 05/02/23: Disruption will always be capitalism's secret sauce
• 05/02/23: What science says about the coronation of Charles III
• 01/04/23: Who are the nepo babies among us?
• 07/13/22: Boris Johnson's fall is populism's latest act of self-destruction
• 06/21/22: The West is facing a followership crisis
• 05/25/22: The 1970s had a big bright side, too
• 05/10/22: Young Americans aren't as woke as you think
• 05/04/22: The furor facing Disney in Florida is a warning that capitalism won't regain its legitimacy by alienating

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