What if the most important work was never a job?

In a group chat recently someone asked, “what problems would remain after AGI and what would be left for humans?” The phrase “left for us” stayed with me. It got me thinking and now, writing this article.

A common theme i've been hearing float around my timeline & conversations lately is this question of what jobs AGI will leave for humans. I find it rooted in a belief that the future will belong to machines and humans will compete for whatever tasks remain.

This premise assumes machines get first claim on our future. So then we'd be scrambling to find the shrinking set of tasks that machines can't do. I'd like to reverse this premise entirely.

The future should be organized around what humans want to do for one another and what among these needs a humans touch to improve our society, culture, and future generations.

I think we should have more faith in ourselves. I strongly believe that machines can help us prosper, live in abundance, travel farther than we ever could have done alone, and live longer. Of course it's not lost on me that getting there safely and keeping control are serious problems. I'm thinking here about what we should do if we get those things right.

So if AGI makes intelligence & production abundant, we should be directing more of our human time and energy towards care, family, community building, beauty, culture, and exploration.

Jobs will disappear; work won't

Let's separate what a job is from what work is.

In my understanding, a job is an economic structure. Someone pays you to produce something.

Work is more intrinsic than that. Work is raising children, caring for sick parents, helping a friend through grief, beautifying and rebuilding our communities, coaching a team, hosting a dinner, making music with each other.

So I started thinking, “what does this type of human work have in common?” Most of it is the work that holds society together. Much of it is unpaid, underpaid, or invisible.

We don't need to invent meaningful post AGI work. What we need to do now is recognize and support the meaningful work people already do and focus on building more careers and opportunities in those spaces right now, today.

I think AGI is going to expose how poorly todays market measures human value. Some of the work most necessary to human life is work our economy barely pays for at all.

What's “human necessary” work?

I wanted to take a moment to touch on this. Of course, it's subjective. I'll give my definition of what this means to me.

Human necessary work doesn't mean work AI is incapable of doing. AGI may become a capable tutor, therapist, designer, pastor, or event planner. But should we hand over those roles entirely? Personally I wouldn't want that.

I'd hate talking to an AI therapist in place of a person. I can understand why someone else might want to, especially if they can't access human care. But for me, being known, supported, and being looked in the eye by another person is part of what I'd want from that relationship.

Human necessary work describes the kind of work where another person's presence changes the meaning of the outcome. Sometimes we don't only care that something was done, but who chose to do it.

A machine can help create a beautiful park design. But the neighbors shaping and caring for that park creates ownership, community, and purpose. They get to know each other through doing it. They have something they care about together.

In human necessary work, the person isnt an inefficient part of the process. The person is an integral part of the result.

More room for this kind of work

When I answered the question in the group chat, I thought about beautifying cities, raising families, mental health, and more in person events and festivals. These are things I'd actually like to see more of.

People having enough time & support to raise the children they want. Having more children if they want larger families, without feeling like they have to sacrifice everything else to make it possible. And more support for the people already raising them.

I'd like to see more people able to care for their parents as they get older. More teachers who have time to get to know their students. More people doing work that helps someone else through a hard period in their life.

With cities, I think about gardens, public art, cleaner streets and places where people can spend time together. We could pay more artists, gardeners, and craftspeople to make our surroundings beautiful and take care of them.

And more festivals! More neighborhood dinners, sports, clubs, live music. More opportunities for people to meet each other in person, and enough time outside of work to actually go.

AI can help organize these things. It can handle bookings, schedules, paperwork, whatever makes them easier to put together. But the people coming together are what I care about.

I also agree with the person in the chat who said it could be an incredible time for exploration and discovery. Even if a machine discovers something before we do, I'd still want to experience learning about it myself. We could have more people participating in science, traveling, creating things, or trying something they've never had the time or resources to try.

I dont expect everyone to want the same things. But I think we'd have plenty to do.

AGI can't settle what life is for

I was watching a recent conversation with Dwarkesh Patel and AI researchers about the path to intelligence. One idea from it was that the human role that lasts longest may be defining objectives.

Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PrSf7IOYu-I

So even if AI performs the technical work, someone must decide what the work is meant to achieve. AGI may answer more “how” questions than any human could, but it doesn't remove our responsibility for the “why.”

A system can optimize a city for traffic, cost, safety, or beauty. It can help us choose among those goals too. But I don't think it should have the final authority over how people live. The people who live there should have a say.

The same applies to education, health, family life, public spaces, and distribution of resources.

We could very well successfully optimize for convenience and productivity while losing belonging, agency, beauty, and purpose. That's what worries me about a “false utopia.” We could get what we asked for and still find that we left out things we needed.

More intelligence doesn't automatically produce a better civilization.

AGI can totally help us get what we ask for. But it can't spare us from deciding what is worth asking for.

Economic effects post AGI

None of this happens automatically. Technology can create abundance without distributing it.

If a few companies own the productive systems, then abundance for society may still mean insecurity for individuals. Care and community work simply can't flourish if people have no income, time, or control.

Someone who loses their job still needs to pay rent. Having more time doesn't mean much if they're spending it worrying about how to support their family.

The post AGI plan should address who owns the machines. Who receives the gains. How humans gain economic security outside of conventional employment. How care and civic work receive money and status.

I dont have one complete policy system for how we achieve this. But we need to be honest that this is a political and economic design problem too. If we want more people doing this kind of work, we need to make it possible for them to live that way.

What will be left for us?

Humans shouldnt inherit the scraps of economic value that machines fail to capture. We also don't need artificial tasks to remain busy or feel purposeful.

We can decide that some work deserves more human time because it helps humans flourish. There's already so much of it to do.

Post AGI abundance wont answer what makes a good life worth living. But it might finally give more of us the freedom, and force us, to answer that question for ourselves.

The goal isn't a world with nothing left for us to do. It's a world with more room to do what was human all along.

~ Ashley