Have the robots come for your job yet? If not, it may only be a matter of time. But when the so-called AI Revolution begins to affect employment, it doesn’t need to be bad news – it all depends on how the change is handled. In the near future we might genuinely all have more free time, while still finding meaningful occupation.

More than just another tech upgrade

In some ways, the acceleration of AI, and its adoption into our lives, feels like nothing so very different from previous developments. Just as our infrastructures changed to accommodate the invention of the motor car, and society changed its habits with the coming of the World Wide Web, you could argue that once more, we’ll learn to adapt: artificial intelligence is just another new technology that will slot easily and conveniently into our world.

Of course, new technologies have always incurred casualties. How many people today earn their living as a blacksmith, or by selling encyclopaedias? But by and large, these obsolete jobs have been replaced by newer ones: we’ve simply moved on to a world of car mechanics and website developers, instead.

This time, though, it might be very different.

One difference is the sheer scope of the impact that AI is likely to have, spanning a wider range of industries and affecting jobs at every level. The technology this time around is capable of affecting both low-skilled, repetitive jobs like data entry and (traditionally) prestigious, knowledge-based and skill-dependent professions such as law and accounting. For the first time, it seems, a new technology is not simply replacing jobs here and there, but wholesale, across the board. With up to 40% of jobs projected to be affected, AI could be about to fundamentally disrupt the economic and social order.

Robotic judges and AI-authored masterpieces: are humans so easy to replace?

It’s a typical day in court: your attention is waning, your wig is itching, and the case is over-running so you’re late for lunch. Perhaps it’s understandable that under these conditions, you may not be in the best condition to make a fair judgment. The impact of these all-too-human factors has in fact been documented, with research finding that judges make more favourable decisions at the start of the day, or after a meal break.

Would you like to be subject to the vagaries of a human’s body clock, when your sentence depends on it? Or perhaps you’d rather put your faith in a specialist legal AI that never gets tired or hungry. Yes, AI can be biased, too, depending on how it is trained, but there’s a case to be made that it could be a better arbiter of justice. In 50 years’ time, we might look back in horror at the trust we once put in the capricious decision-making of flawed and hungry humans.

Perhaps art is the one area that will be sacred. The whole point of creative pursuits, after all, is to forge a deep and profound human connection. But AI is already encroaching on the way in which artists earn their livings. Creatives including visual artists and musicians are suing AI companies for scraping their work from the internet and using it, without permission, to train generative AIs. Meanwhile, other artists seem to be giving in to “progress”: writers are selling their names and actors are licensing their voices, Black Mirror style, so that their likeness or literary style can be used without their direct input.

I think there is a limit to how far we as a society will accept AI-generated art. When I listen to my favourite music, one-off originals like BC Camplight and Jeffrey Lewis, what gets me is their humanity: I feel there is a connection there. But I also think many people employed in the creative industries are doing things manually that I might not miss if an AI did them instead: composers of incidental music for corporate training videos, for example, could probably be replaced without significant protest.

The dawning of a Keynesian Age of Leisure

So, if AI takes our jobs, what are we going to do?

Back in 1930, John Maynard Keynes predicted that improvements in technology would reduce the hours we all needed to work. He envisaged a 15-hour work week, enough to give us a sense of purpose but also to enrich our lives and “live wisely and agreeably and well”(Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren). That didn’t happen, largely because capitalism ensured that there was always something more to work towards.

Today, however, a significant proportion of British workers find themselves in jobs that feel meaningless. The four-day week has recently become a successful reality for some. Perhaps the appetite for “busy work” – work for the sake of work – is finally on the wane.

So, could AI be the catalyst that finally brings Keynes’s vision to life? As AI continues to automate tasks across industries, it raises the possibility of a future where work is no longer the primary driver of human existence. We may enter a new era of leisure, where each of us has more time to pursue our passions, perhaps learn new skills, and contribute to society in meaningful ways.

It would be a major societal shift, that’s for sure; but does that mean it couldn’t happen? We saw during the COVID-19 pandemic, after all, how working life could be transformed. In the space of a day, we progressed beyond the age of commuting, to a new way of doing things – and now remote and hybrid working is the norm for many desk-based workers.

As AI advances, we could be faced with a similar transformation. Unprecedented levels of redundancy will force us to think carefully about the very nature of work itself, and, perhaps, undergo a paradigm shift. In the absence of sufficient employment, we could adopt a Universal Basic Income to ensure that everyone has enough money to live.

A fundamental human need

Not everyone is lucky enough to love their job. But many people do. They find meaning, connection and purpose in getting up each day and going to work. They enjoy the status; the stimulation; the physical or mental challenges. And even if we don’t feel like it’s a good thing at the time, a moderate amount of stress is beneficial for our health.

If all that was taken away, wouldn’t this be disastrous for human wellbeing? The promised life of leisure could just as well leave us bored, unfulfilled and depressed.

Well, not all human endeavour will be curtailed by AI. We’ll still need people in jobs like health and social care, counselling and sales – fields in which a human touch is needed. And even if the robotic judges arrive and take over, it’s likely that some human experts will still work side by side with them, providing valuable input, detecting nuance in a way that AI can’t always do, and providing oversight.

Meanwhile, perhaps we can look closer to home for our fulfilment, spending time within our communities and working together on shared projects to keep our neighbourhoods thriving. There’s are also the small matters of climate change, poverty and conflict – things that we might finally find enough time and energy to overcome.