The Aristobots

For centuries, we defined ourselves by work. Artificial intelligence is making that less plausible. This substack, Ask Questions Later, offers a seditious — but possibly useful — proposal

Small wonder, when a widely cited analysis by Goldman Sachs has estimated that artificial intelligence could soon affect as many as 300 million full-time jobs globally, and everyone understand such numbers will likely increase to the point where AI could transform or eliminate a significant share of the work performed by educated professionals. If that proves even partly true, it’ll create more than an economic challenge, forcing us confront a deeper question: what happens to a culture that has built its identity around work when work isn’t needed?

After all, for a couple of centuries now, modern societies have organized themselves around the odd idea that work defines us. The question “What do you do?” has become a reasonable way to start a conversation, allowing strangers to situate one another in the social world. Occupation signals competence, status, identity, and sometimes even moral worth. A person who lacks work — or whose work seems trivial — can feel socially invisible (read: struggle to find a mate).

Most tenuous has been the assumption that the market economy (plus governments, yes) would somehow produce enough jobs for all the people seeking work, minus a “natural” unemployment level reflecting people changing jobs or out of work temporarily for various reasons. This belief seems almost religious – it would be quite a coincidence! Indeed, the anthropologist David Graeber argued provocatively that large segments of the modern service economy consist of what he called “bullshit jobs” — roles that exist less because they’re needed but because societies feel morally compelled to keep people employed. This whole arrangement is quite strange.

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We tend to forget that for much of human history, the highest ideal was not work but freedom from it. In classical Greece, Aristotle argued that the purpose of society was to enable citizens to live lives of virtue, contemplation, and participation in public affairs. He believed that the activities that make life meaningful — philosophy, politics, art, friendship — require leisure. The Greek word scholē, from which we derive the word “school,” literally meant leisure, because intellectual cultivation was something one pursued when freed from necessity. Work was a condition to be escaped; it attached to necessity only.

The aristocratic cultures of early modern Europe retained echoes of this worldview. A “gentleman,” in the classic British sense, was someone who did not have to work for a living. His income (yes, that was the pronoun, usually) came from land, inheritance, or investments. This independence from economic compulsion was not merely a privilege but part of the definition of his social role. Freed from the need to earn wages, he was expected to devote himself to public life, learning, estate management, military service (oddly enough), or patronage of the arts. The Brits are a breed apart – but versions of this appeared all over Europe: commerce and labor were essential to society, but not its highest calling.

In Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility, the character Edward Ferras relates without embarrassment that he has had “no necessary business to engage me, no profession to give me employment.” His dignity came from independence. Hugh Grant gave this character vivid life in the 1995 film. Imaging this twitchy and stuttering aristocratic layabout answering to an even more useless boss, or even answering an email, really does seem wrong, like caging a gazelle.

For a variety of reasons, good or bad, modern society inverted this hierarchy: instead of admiring freedom from work, it came to treat work itself as the primary source of identity, dignity, and meaning.

The notion of the work-free nobility began to unravel with the religious and economic transformations of early modern Europe. One of the most influential explanations for the change was offered by the sociologist Max Weber in his famous study The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. Weber argued that certain strands of Protestant thought, particularly Calvinism, reinterpreted ordinary labor as a kind of spiritual calling. The German word Beruf, which Weber discusses at length, carries both meanings at once: profession and vocation — a subtle but important distinction. In this view, diligence in one’s worldly work could be a sign of inner grace. Industry, thrift, and discipline became moral virtues. Idleness, once the mark of aristocratic status, began to appear suspicious.

Over time, this religious reinterpretation merged with the economic logic of capitalism and the organizational needs of industrial society. As economies grew more complex, individuals came to be defined by their place within an elaborate division of labor. The French-Jewish sociologist Emile Durkheim described modern societies as systems in which social cohesion arises precisely because individuals occupy specialized roles. One becomes a lawyer, a teacher, an engineer, a journalist — and these roles are not merely jobs but identities.

By the 20th century, the transformation was complete. Work was no longer simply a necessity; it was the central axis around which social life revolved. Education prepared people for careers. Social status followed occupational success. Entire lives were organized around the trajectory of professional advancement. “What do you do?” in some contexts replaced “How do you do” as a greeting.

In Daybreak, Friedrich Nietzsche observed this change, remarking that modern societies increasingly seemed organized around a restless religion of work: “One is ashamed of resting; long reflection almost causes a bad conscience. One thinks with a watch in one’s hand… ‘One must do something.’”

The psychological weight placed on work grew even heavier in recent decades, when societies began to insist that employment should not only provide income but also meaning. People were encouraged to “follow their passion,” to seek careers that expressed their deepest selves. The ideal job would simultaneously deliver financial stability, personal fulfillment, social status, and moral purpose.

For most of history, no one imagined that the activity required to pay the rent should also satisfy one’s spiritual longings. That, after all, would be another amazing coincidence. Farming, craft labor, trade, or administration were simply ways of sustaining life. The modern belief that work should also be personally fulfilling is an unusually demanding cultural invention. I like eating pepperoni pizza, drinking rose wine, playing pool and publishing on Substack. Imagine if these happened to pay the rent!

It was a remarkable expectation which was very rarely satisfied, leading to waves of unhappiness all around the Western world. How smart an organizing principle is that? And now, in an odd historical twist, AI may be pushing us back toward that older idea of freedom, which is also, viewed a certain way, more practical.

The idea that technology should put an end to this work obsession is not entirely new. The philosopher Bertrand Russell, writing as early as 1932 in his essay In Praise of Idleness, argued that technological progress should allow people to work far less and devote more time to creativity, curiosity, and civic life. Russell believed the real scandal of modern society was not that people were idle but that so many were forced into unnecessary labor simply to maintain the social prestige of work. “I think that there is far too much work done in the world, that immense harm is caused by the belief that work is virtuous,” he wrote.

The philosopher Hannah Arendt also anticipated something like this paradox in The Human Condition. She warned that modern civilization had elevated labor to such an extent that it risked in which people psychologically formed by the discipline of work were living in a world where less of it is required.

As this unfolds, one possibility to minimize unemployment would be keeping more people on staff, but part-time. The economist John Maynard Keynes, in his 1930 essay Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, predicted that technological progress might eventually reduce the workweek to fifteen hours.

But if even part-time work evaporates, then we must readjust. And viewed through the prisms of Russell and Arendt, the danger looks less dire. Instead of fearing it, we might adopt this approach and conclude it fixed a problem. In effect, technological development will have made ladies and gentlemen of us all.

This requires a mind-shift, though: we must ditch the idea that we are our work. Societies may need to rethink the foundations of identity. The assumption that meaningful lives must revolve around employment may turn out to be a historical aberration rather than a permanent feature of human civilization. Obviously, this will be tough; a generation or two may have to pass. Some people — especially young men, I fear — will be disconsolate and even violent.

And there’s another problem: the old aristocracy at least had wealth — that, in fact, was their identity. One possibility that is being discussed is for society to provide universal basic income – an unconditional, regular cash payment from the government to all citizens to ensure financial security. Presumably, since the bots are creating value, that money will exist. I propose a tweak: universal high income. That could create an inflationary cycle; capitalism may need reconfiguring.

Even high income may clash with our dark side. Many humans want not only to possess much but specifically more than their fellows. That is their identity. This has been intensified by social media, which creates psychological pressures surrounding work and success. Platforms that constantly display curated glimpses of wealth and luxury have vastly expanded the range of comparison.

The economist Thorstein Veblen, writing about “conspicuous consumption” in The Theory of the Leisure Class, said people often consume not for utility, but to display wealth as a marker of status. Today those displays circulate globally through the small glowing screens — driving status that provides advantage in our social pursuits in all their forms. Big jobs are a shortcut that can achieve this purpose (I once had some of these and can attest that it is so). When employment was a reliable thing, such greedy competitive impulses pushed us, perhaps, to excellence. Now it might bring fistfights.

So what will tell the object of your pursuit that you have very special value? One possibility is that creativity becomes more central. After all, the German artist Joseph Beuys once declared that “everyone is an artist”.

He did not mean that everyone should paint canvases; he meant that creativity is a universal human capacity that extends far beyond professional art. I have some doubts about this, envisioning very bad poetry, terrible jokes, and excruciating “installations.” But it may be worth trying.

Seinfeld foresaw this, like so much else, in the 1990s. When the perpetually underemployed Jerry and George were pitching the president of NBC on their show-within-a-show, about their own lives, they were asked what a typical episode would show them doing. “Nothing!” declares George. When pressed on the point he doubled down: “Nothing happens on the show. It’s just like life!”

“Well, why am I watching it?” asks the executive. “Because it’s on TV!” rejoices George. “Not yet,” the executive replies, with acid indifference.

And, of course, the whole thing is on TV. Now that is creativity! You cannot put a price on it. And it may actually give you status.

In an unsettling gesture, Russia reveals its list of targets in the United Kingdom