Getting ready for the end of labor
What Will We Do? The Four Answers to Automation, and Why All of Them Depend on Something We Need To Build
Introduction
Sometime in the next decade or two, a significant portion of the work that currently organizes human life will be done better and cheaper by machines than by people. We have been here before in partial ways: the loom displaced the weaver, the combine displaced the farmhand, the spreadsheet displaced the actuary. Each time, new work emerged to absorb the displaced. The standard reassurance is that it will happen again — that we cannot predict what new jobs automation will create, just as no one in 1900 could have predicted the social media manager or the UX designer.
This reassurance may be wrong in ways it has never been wrong before. Previous waves of automation displaced specific categories of physical or routine cognitive labor while leaving untouched the broader domain of human judgment, creativity, and social intelligence. What is arriving now is different in kind: systems that can write, reason, diagnose, design, compose, argue, care, and learn, at costs that fall toward zero. The question of what humans will do is no longer a question about which new job categories will emerge. It is a question about what human activity is for when the economic justification for most of it has been removed.
Culture Has 4 Answers
The public conversation about this question is embarrassingly thin. Four answers circulate widely, and each, on close examination, inadequate in ways that matter. [1] We will all be artists. [2] We will look after each other. [3] We will contemplate and philosophize. [4] We will play games and inhabit virtual worlds. This essay takes each of these answers seriously, reviews the substantial research literature on human motivation, meaning, and flourishing that bears on them, and shows why all four fail — not because the activities they propose are unworthy, but because they share a common error: the assumption that meaningful engagement with any of these activities is a default human capacity that free time will unlock.
The research on when and how that cultivation happens contains the most important and least discussed fact in the entire automation debate: the window for forming people for genuine engagement with the activities that might give their lives meaning is early, consequential, and closes. The adults who will be displaced over the next twenty years are already formed. The people for whom the question is still genuinely open are children — in schools right now, being prepared for a world of work that may not be waiting for them, and not being prepared for the world that will be.
This essay ends with a tentative answer and an open invitation for critique. The answer is not a fifth activity to add to the list. It is an argument about what any answer requires, why those requirements are not being met, and what building them would actually look like.
Answer 1: We’ll all be artists
Most great art was produced under conditions of patronage, constraint, commission, and economic pressure — not leisure. Bach wrote cantatas because he had a weekly deadline and a choir to feed. The Romantic myth of the artist as pure self-expression free from external demand is a bad description of how serious creative work actually gets made, and a worse description of what most people will do with unstructured time. The research on artistic motivation is quite clear: a study of nearly 675,000 Brazilian university applicants over two decades found that among artistic career applicants, intrinsic factors such as personal taste and fulfillment were between 10 and 28 times higher than extrinsic motives — a ratio dramatically higher than any other occupational group. Neurological evidence reinforces this: patients who lose the ability to communicate through language actually increase their artistic output, suggesting that artistic motivation is not a response to circumstance but a stable, domain-specific drive present in some people and not others. The participation data confirms the cascade: more than half of American adults engage in some artistic activity, but only 2% center their lives on it, and the gap between those numbers is not explained by economic barriers. It is explained by the presence or absence of a motivational drive that free time cannot install. Automation gives the dabbling 50% more time to dabble. It leaves everyone else with the more urgent question of what replaces the mastery, structure, and social recognition that work previously organized — and that question is not answered by handing them a paintbrush.
(Artists are intrinsically motivated, not culturally conditioned, and only 2% of people center life on art.)
Answer 2: We’ll live the contemplative life
The contemplative life is the ancient answer to the question of what free people should do with their freedom — think of Socrates wandering Athens asking what justice and virtue really are, or the medieval monk whose days were organized around prayer, study, and philosophical reflection, not being economically productive.
What the literature says
The data on contemplative and intellectual life follows the same cascade as art — broad surface engagement and thin serious commitment. In 1992, 61% of Americans had read a book for pleasure during the previous year, but by 2022 only 48.5% had done so — the lowest level on record. Within that already shrinking pool, the median reader finished just two books in a year, while 19% of Americans accounted for the majority of books read. Philosophy as a reading category barely registers in genre surveys. Political engagement tells a similar story: aside from voting, relatively few people take part in other forms of political and civic participation, and when broken down by genuine depth of engagement, only about 20% of young Americans qualify as genuinely civically engaged — those who follow politics closely, belong to a party, and participate beyond voting. Contemplative practice shows the most apparently encouraging numbers — meditation use among US adults reached 18.3% in 2022, up significantly from 2002 — but this figure conflates ten minutes of guided breathing on a smartphone app with anything resembling the sustained, tradition-embedded contemplative life the post-work optimists have in mind. The pattern across all three domains is identical: broad dabbling, shallow commitment, serious engagement confined to a small and often shrinking minority.
(Very few people engage volitionally and seriously in politics, reading, and philosophy.)
Why the contemplative life might not be the answer
The deeper problem is not merely that few people currently pursue the contemplative life, but that the capacity for it is not a latent human potential waiting to be unlocked by free time — it is a cultivated disposition requiring specific formation. Aristotle understood this: scholē, genuine leisure, was not idleness or the mere absence of work, but a positive capacity for self-directed activity that had to be developed through education, practice, and habituation within a community that modeled and sustained it. The research confirms this classical intuition in empirical terms — serious reading, political engagement, and contemplative practice all correlate strongly with education, social capital, and existing cultural formation, not with available time. People who are already readers read more when given time; people who are not do not become readers simply because the workday disappears. More troubling still, the research on idleness shows that humans have a deep aversion to unstructured time — people have two concurrent, paradoxical desires: they dread idleness and desire busyness, but need reasons for their busyness and will not voluntarily choose busyness without some justification. Work, for most people, is not an obstacle to the contemplative life — it is the structure within which any life, contemplative or otherwise, is motivated. Remove it without replacing it with equally strong structures of meaning, community, and obligation, and you do not produce philosophers. You produce — and we already have evidence of this — screen addiction, status anxiety, and the frantic performance of busyness that fills the vacuum where genuine activity used to be.
(Philosophy, politics and reading aren’t default interests, but have to be cultivated by cultural institutions that we have destroyed or devalued. Screen addiction, anxiety and performative busyness have been set up for us by our dominant institutions, instead.)
Answer 3: We’ll all focus on taking care of each other
What the literature says
The care work answer has stronger empirical grounding than the art or contemplation answers in one crucial respect: demand for it is structurally guaranteed. Aging populations in every developed economy are generating demand for eldercare that dwarfs current supply, and the intimacy required by care relationships — bathing, feeding, sitting with someone in pain or confusion — has resisted automation in ways that radiological diagnosis and legal drafting have not. The research on meaning in care professions supports the intuition behind this answer: people who work in nursing, social work, and childcare consistently report high levels of meaning even under conditions of low pay and high physical demand, suggesting that care generates what philosophers call internal goods — goods that are constituted by the practice itself rather than separable from it as external rewards. Weil’s account of attention — the complete, self-forgetting orientation toward the reality of another person — finds its most natural home in care work, and the tradition from Aristotle through the Christian moral tradition converges on something close to care for particular others as among the highest activities available to human beings. Unlike art, care work is not the province of a motivationally specific minority: the capacity for genuine attention to others, while unevenly distributed, is not a domain-specific drive in the way artistic or philosophical motivation appears to be.
Why this answer fails
The failure of the care work answer is not that care work is insufficiently meaningful — it may be the most meaningful activity available to human beings in ordinary life. The failure is in the universalization, and it operates at two levels. The first is the automation frontier itself: the same studies that established care as uniquely human found that in some contexts, chatbots generate responses rated as more empathetic than human ones, which means the premise that care is automation-proof is already eroding. The second and deeper problem is that genuine care — Weil’s attention rather than its simulacrum — is among the most demanding moral activities humans undertake, requiring the consistent subordination of your own needs and projections to the reality of another person, and this capacity requires formation just as serious artistic or philosophical capacity does. A post-work society that simply declares care as the universal human vocation without building the institutional infrastructure to form people capable of genuine attention will not produce Weil’s moral ideal. It will produce what already exists wherever care is assigned by default rather than chosen by vocation: burnout, compassion fatigue, the resentful performance of attention by people who have nowhere else to go. The parallel with art is precise:
just as the existence of free time does not install artistic motivation in people who lack it, the elimination of other options does not install the capacity for genuine care in people who have never developed it. Care chosen freely from genuine attention to another person is among the highest things humans do. Care assigned as the residual occupation of the displaced is something categorically different — and treating them as equivalent is not an elevation of care but a misunderstanding of what makes it meaningful in the first place.
Answer 4: We’ll all play games and live in virtual worlds
The most intellectually serious version of the gamified reality answer comes from philosopher John Danaher, whose Automation and Utopia — published by Harvard University Press — makes the case that free from need or want, we can spend our time inventing and playing games and exploring virtual realities that are more deeply engaging and absorbing than any we have experienced before, allowing us to achieve idealized forms of human flourishing. The psychological research on games is genuinely compelling: Csikszentmihalyi’s concept of flow — the state of complete absorption in a perfectly calibrated challenge — finds its most reliable modern instantiation in game design, which has spent decades engineering the precise balance between skill and difficulty that produces deep engagement. Video games are designed to satisfy the three core psychological needs of autonomy, competence, and relatedness, and the satisfaction of these needs explains large amounts of the variance in game enjoyment. Games provide what the real world increasingly fails to provide — clear goals, immediate feedback, objective measures of progress, and the experience of genuine mastery. The research broadly confirms that the extent to which play is enjoyable and intrinsically motivated rather than extrinsically motivated is a consistent predictor of players’ wellbeing. On this account, the post-work future is not a tragedy but a liberation: finally freed from drudgery, humans can inhabit environments specifically engineered to make them feel competent, connected, and purposeful.
Games aren’t a perfect answer either—Because meaning is more than a feeling
The problem with this answer is not that it is wrong about games. It is that it mistakes the feeling of meaning for meaning itself. Gaming addiction involves the fulfillment of unmet social or psychological needs through gaming — using it as a substitute for finding healthy ways to build self-esteem in immediate relationships. The clinical literature is clear that gaming functions as a powerful surrogate for genuine engagement with the world — effective precisely because it mimics the structural features of meaningful activity without requiring the costs that make meaningful activity meaningful. A game provides the experience of mastery without the resistance of the actual physical world. It provides the feeling of community without the obligations of genuine relationships. It provides clear feedback without the genuine stakes of actions that matter beyond the game itself. This is not a limitation that better game design can overcome — it is constitutive of what games are. The warehouse manager who finds meaning in logistics finds it because the warehouse is real, the trucks arrive on schedule or don’t, and other people’s livelihoods depend on getting it right. Simulate that environment perfectly and you have not preserved the meaning — you have replaced it with something that produces the same neurological signature while eliminating the thing that made it matter. Someone who uses gaming to build self-esteem will start to see that he is using the game to satisfy needs that are not being fulfilled in real life — which is precisely the admission that games are answering a question the real world has failed to answer, rather than constituting an answer in themselves. Danaher’s virtual utopia is the most honest of the post-work proposals precisely because it does not pretend the substitution isn’t happening. But honesty about the substitution is not a defense of it. EBSCO
The balance answer, and why it fails
The intuitive response to the cascade of failures documented above is that no single activity needs to bear the full weight of post-work meaning — different people will find their own balance between care, craft, art, contemplation, and civic life, and the aggregate will look like a flourishing society. This is appealing, and as a description of what a good post-work society might look like from the outside, it is not obviously wrong. But the evidence assembled in this essay shows precisely why it cannot happen automatically. Every activity that genuinely generates meaning — art, craft, care, contemplation, civic participation — requires formation that most people in modern societies have never received. And the research is unambiguous about when that formation must happen: the longitudinal data on reading shows that attitudes formed by late adolescence explain a third of the variance in adult reading behavior forty years later. Arts exposure research shows that even a single serious encounter with art in early childhood produces measurably different orientations toward artistic engagement. Civic education in adolescence produces higher political participation decades into adulthood. The window for formation is early, consequential, and it closes. The adults who will be displaced by automation over the next twenty years are already formed. Their relationship to art, dialogue, craft, and civic life is largely set. The people for whom this question is still open are children — in schools right now, being formed or not formed for a world their educators have not been asked to prepare them for.
What we are actually doing to those children
We are running an educational system optimized for producing workers at the precise historical moment when producing workers may be the wrong goal entirely. And the things being cut from that system — arts education, humanities, philosophy, civic formation, unstructured time for genuine play — are precisely the things the evidence suggests people need to have encountered seriously, young, if they are to have any chance of flourishing in the world that is coming. Only 14% of 13-year-olds read for fun almost every day in 2023, down from 27% in 2012. Arts education in schools has been declining for decades. Civic education has been hollowed out. Philosophy for children programs exist but are marginal. The formation that would prepare a generation for genuine engagement with art, craft, care, contemplation, and dialogue is being systematically disinvested from at precisely the moment when its importance is becoming existential. This is not an abstract policy failure. It is a civilizational choice being made by default, without anyone quite deciding to make it, in thousands of school board meetings and budget cycles where the question of what human beings will do with their freedom is never on the agenda.
The Goodhart problem applied to meaning
There is a second structural problem that runs deeper than the formation gap. Every time a society has tried to answer the question of what humans should do by designating a category of activity as the official answer — the Soviet worker, the Maoist peasant, the Protestant calling — the designation has corrupted the activity. Meaning cannot be assigned. It can only be found, within genuine practices that have their own internal standards of excellence, by people with the formation to engage with those practices seriously. The moment care work or artistic expression or civic participation becomes the designated answer to the post-work question, it will begin to generate the bureaucratic, performative version of itself — the therapy industry rather than genuine care, the content creator rather than the genuine artist, the activist rather than the genuine citizen. This is Goodhart’s Law applied to human flourishing: when meaning becomes a target, it ceases to be meaning.
What needs to be built, and when
The argument of this essay is therefore not that we need more art, or more care, or more philosophy. It is that we need institutions capable of forming people — and especially young people, while the window is open — for genuine engagement with any of these activities, before the displacement has fully arrived, before the AI has filled the vacuum, and before another generation passes through childhood without encountering the practices that might have given them somewhere to take their lives. Formation takes generations. Institutions capable of providing it take decades to build. The time to build is now, not because we know exactly what a flourishing post-work society looks like, but because the alternative is that the question gets decided by default — by the logic of the market, the algorithm of the platform, or the output of the AI — and we accept the answer because we have no institutional resources to generate a better one.
What I am trying to build — and what remains
I should be transparent about my own position in this argument. I am attempting, in a small and early way, to do something about one part of it. The Institute for Classical Dialogue is an educational organization built around the premise that serious engagement with the Western intellectual tradition, practiced through genuine Socratic dialogue rather than lecture or passive consumption, forms people differently than conventional education does — more capable of sustained argument, more comfortable with difficulty and ambiguity, more oriented toward the common questions of civic life than the private acquisition of credentials. The Better Argument is a public magazine built on the adjacent premise that serious public argument is both possible and necessary, and that the Western tradition contains resources for navigating the present moment not available in the shallower registers of contemporary media. Together they represent an attempt to instantiate, at small scale and early stage, one form of the formation this essay has argued is missing.
[I am doing this work in New Mexico, and it has been very hard. Most of all because New Mexico teenagers are extremely illiterate → only 44% of middle and highschoolers are reading at grade level. I have considered pivoting entirely to teen literacy, because there are scalable, evidence based methods for improving literacy [see Reading Quest.]
The essay has shown that the capacity for serious intellectual and dialogical engagement is, like artistic motivation and contemplative practice, a domain-specific drive that characterizes a genuine minority of people. The Socratic seminar is not the answer for the warehouse manager whose meaning came from mastery of complex logistics, or the plumber whose engagement with the physical world is tactile and embodied, or the nurse whose vocation is constituted by attention to particular people in their vulnerability. To claim otherwise would reproduce exactly the error this essay has criticized — the substitution of one educated class’s preferred form of meaning-making for an honest account of human diversity.
What these institutions are, perhaps, is a proof of concept for a principle that extends far beyond their particular form. The underlying claim of this essay is not that everyone needs Socratic dialogue. It is that everyone needs formation — cultivation within a community that has genuine standards of excellence, real stakes, shared practices, and a tradition of transmission from those who know to those who are learning. The Socratic seminar is one instantiation of that principle. The craftsmen’s guild is another. The competitive sporting league, the volunteer fire department, the community choir, the serious amateur orchestra — these are all institutions that provide what work previously provided and what a post-work society will need to rebuild deliberately: structure, mastery, community, and the experience of being genuinely accountable to something beyond yourself. Crawford’s motorcycle repair shop is as much an institution of formation as any seminar room. It simply forms different people for different excellences. And it needs to reach children before they become the adults who have run out of time to be formed at all.
The urgent task is therefore not to scale what I am building. It is to understand the principle well enough that people with different competencies, different communities, and different relationships to the full range of human motivational diversity can build analogous institutions — in craft, in care, in sport, in music, in the hundred other practices through which human beings have historically found that their lives matter — and build them now, with children, before the window closes.
Some major weaknesses of this post worth admitting to:
A major critique of “formation-based” solutions is that they are notoriously “thick” and hard to scale. It’s easy to scale a Universal Basic Income (UBI) algorithm; it is very hard to scale a Socratic mentor or a master craftsman.
If meaning-making requires “communities of excellence,” we face a massive talent constraint. I haven’t yet solved the question of how we produce enough “formative mentors” to meet the needs of billions of displaced workers without the quality collapsing into the “performative bureaucracy” I warned about in the Goodhart’s Law section.
One might ask: How is this different from simply funding more humanities departments? The distinction I’m trying to draw is that current humanities education is often optimized for credentialing (becoming a “worker”), whereas I am arguing for habituation (becoming a “human”). However, I concede that the “institutional form” this takes—whether guilds, leagues, or seminars—remains under-defined.
I’m particularly interested in hearing from people working in Cause Prioritization: If we accept that AI will eventually solve the “production” side of the human equation, how much should we be spending now on the “meaning-formation” side? Is this a neglected cause area, or a “soft” problem that we shouldn’t touch until Alignment is solved?