In 1930, economist John Maynard Keynes famously predicted that within a hundred years, the work week would be only fifteen hours long. He thought that humanity’s greatest challenge would be what to do with all that free time. While it hasn’t happened yet, it’s starting to look like it might become a possibility.

We’re seeing swift expansion of the role of AI in the world of work. As its capabilities improve, people may find themselves largely replaced by machines that do advanced cognitive labor efficiently and effectively around the clock.

Tens of thousands of layoffs are happening across the United States this year, due to factors ranging from increased use of AI to economy-crushing wars. And with Baby Boomers reaching retirement age en masse, companies will face a lot of pressure to adopt AI technologies to manage knowledge and work processes.

It’s only just begun. Right now, the biggest changes are happening at software companies, but if you look at how far AI has come in less than five years, its impact will eventually encompass most of the economy.

Keynes’s question about our leisure is an important one. For many, work gives a sense of purpose, something that traditional retirees must replace after leaving the workforce. In the future, younger retirees will have the advantage of their health, which research has suggested is one of the primary factors in post-retirement psychological well-being. But the question remains as to what we’re going to do with all that downtime.

Those who enjoy their work may be unable to remain competitive in the AI-driven economy. I imagine that in a post-work world, “going to the office” may become a type of entertainment. Work would become a nostalgia-fueled game, a sort of Westworld where people can live out fantasy lives of generations past.

In an AI-dominated economy, there may still be a market for “human-generated” content (like this site, maybe?). Blog websites like the Johnny Decimal blog advertise themselves as “written by humans.” To fill our vast amounts of leisure time, we may all become content creators, searching for a human connection that technology once mediated but has since replaced.

On the economic side, losing our competitive edge in business and even politics to AI, we may see programs like universal basic income become both feasible and politically palatable. Kulveit et al.’s recent pessimistic paper on gradual disempowerment suggest that as we become dependent on AI or the government for our needs, we will be handing over a significant lever of power to political institutions that may no longer be beholden us. They argue that at best, we will become prosperous cattle subject to the manipulations of AI-powered institutions competing for dominance, and at worst we’ll face extinction, no longer able to meet our basic needs.

AI will indeed cause a seismic shift in the makeup of the economy. For me, it has significantly changed what work looks like both as a language teacher and a data analyst. I tend to believe that AI will bring more positive changes to human quality of life, as philosopher Nick Bostrom suggests in this paper. For those people living in an Office Space hell, AI might be just the tool they need to liberate themselves.

Further reading

This topic is still germinating in my mind, and I’m probably wrong about it, but below are some of the sources that shaped my current understanding of the issue.

• Bostrom, N. (2026). Optimal Timing for Superintelligence. https://nickbostrom.com/optimal.pdf
• Kaplan, S. A., Aitken, J. A., Allan, B. A., Alliger, G. M., Ballard, T., & Zacher, H. (2025). Revisiting Keynes’ predictions about work and leisure: A discussion of fundamental questions about the nature of modern work. Industrial and Organizational Psychology, 18(1), 1–22. https://doi.org/10.1017/iop.2024.58
• Kulveit, J., Douglas, R., Ammann, N., Turan, D., Krueger, D., & Duvenaud, D. (2025). Gradual Disempowerment: Systemic Existential Risks from Incremental AI Development (arXiv:2501.16946). arXiv. https://doi.org/10.48550/arXiv.2501.16946
• Shipman, M. (2026, March 23). Researchers Pioneer New Technique to Stop LLMs from Giving Users Unsafe Responses. NC State News. https://news.ncsu.edu/2026/03/new-technique-addresses-llm-safety/