Alvin, what a magnificent essay. Thank you, thank you, thank you! I am a bit surprised you did not include Karl Marx, and the process of alienation. AI does promise to improve the common good, if we have concern for the common good in mind. As far as I can tell, abundance and it's hierarchy has never been shared broadly without violence of some kind. So, I agree with your principles, and the need for a new vision but I think the political reality is where the real next steps will be. I think we should be implementing anti-trust, property rights -- because the big models "stole" a lot of IP, and the creation of investments and institutions of the common good. Every single industry in the US that is globally competitive received many factor subsidies -- land grand colleges like Ohio State, etc.; the investment in science through the military, integrated circuits, nuclear power, genetic medicine, even modern management systems were designed in the "gift culture" not just the paid culture. We are now seeing way, way to much private appropriation of public good -- with no feed for the goose laying the golden eggs. Again thank you!
Thanks for the kind feedback. And yes policy makers do need to step in and protect more of the public goods and social wellbeing. 💯
Agree with your assessment but we do need to advocate for peaceful ways to address the issues mentioned. And give hope vs apathy to the world.
On Marx, agree his views are relevant but it’s a bit sensitive to associate ideas with him as there’s quite a bit of negative baggage due to a lack of understanding of his actual writings.
Alvin, this is a great read. I particularly enjoyed your return to Aristotle and the distinction between poiesis and praxis; the potential to liberate humanity from necessary labour so that we can pursue flourishing. It also struck me how much it complements an article I recently published on Substack on the history of workplace surveillance. We both begin with Aristotle and human flourishing, but from opposite directions. You ask what AI might free us for; I ask what organisations increasingly seek to know about us as AI becomes embedded in work. I argue that we've moved from observing workers, to measuring them, to inferring who they are and who they're likely to become, and that this expanding organisational knowledge steadily erodes the private sphere Aristotle believed was essential to human flourishing.
Another point that particularly resonated was your observation that "the difference was never the technology. It was always the organisation." That feels remarkably close to the central thesis of my own paper. I argue that the history of the workplace is too often told as a history of technological innovation, when the deeper story is really about changing forms of organisational knowledge and managerial control. Observation, measurement and now AI inference are all enabled by technology, but what transforms work is how organisations redesign processes, redistribute knowledge, redefine managerial authority, and expand what they believe they are entitled to know about workers. In both our essays, the critical variable isn't AI itself; it's the institutional choices humans make about how it is deployed.
I think our two essays are especially complementary in their treatment of the relationship between privacy and human flourishing. Your essay argues, drawing on Self-Determination Theory, that flourishing depends on autonomy, the freedom to author our own lives rather than define ourselves through labour. My concern is that AI's growing capacity to infer who workers are and who they are likely to become risks quietly undermining that very autonomy. When organisations increasingly act on algorithmic predictions, privacy is no longer simply about keeping information secret; it becomes the condition that preserves the space for people to deliberate, change, make mistakes, and become someone other than what the model expects. In that sense, privacy is not just a civil liberty. it is a prerequisite for self-determination.
Perhaps that is where our arguments ultimately meet. AI undoubtedly creates the possibility of a post-labour society, but whether that leads to genuine human flourishing will depend not only on who owns the machines and how their benefits are distributed, but also on whether we preserve meaningful limits on what organisations seek to know about people. Without those limits, there is a risk that AI optimises us before it truly liberates us.
Thank you for such a thoughtful essay. It gave me a great deal to think about, and I suspect we are engaged in different parts of the same conversation.
My husband and I have just retired, and we're both puzzled by all the people who keep asking us, "But what will you DO with your time?" It's as if without work, we'll fade into intolerable irrelevance and just sit there, slack-jawedly staring at the wall. Nothing could be further from the truth! Our retirement is where we plan to finally be most fully ourselves, devoting ourselves to the Praxis of the hobbies and activities that speak most deeply to our souls, without the limitations of (often ultimately meaningless) work tasks that Poiesis brings. But it's taken us each a lifetime of hard work to reach this glorious pinnacle of what our individual beings are capable of. What you're showing here is that AI, properly used and properly distributed, has the potential to guide us all towards the self-actualization of Praxis without having to first spend decades strapped to the wheel of Poiesis. As you so correctly note, this is the true promise of AI - but we have to break out of so many self-imposed mental cages (work = worth, leisure = laziness, etc) in order to realize it.
I'm here to tell you that it's a beautiful world when you locate your worth in your personal craft rather than in your paid labor, and it's very much a world that I hope AI can guide us all to. It won't happen by accident, though, and that's why I'm so grateful that you're here to spread the word.
What a fantastic paper! I read a great deal on the future of AI but I found this piece to be one of the most thoughtful and compelling. Thank you for sharing.
Thanks for your continued efforts, Alvin. I firmly believe we are approaching a turning point where the ‘fiction’ in science fiction is merging into a new reality before our very eyes. We are building a digital layer or infrastructure that will render perception into a form of communication and consciousness that is beyond our current comprehension.
Here is a quote from one of humanity’s greatest thinkers, dreamers, and doers.
“Our heritage and ideals, our code and standards - the things we live by and teach our children - are preserved or diminished by how freely we exchange ideas and feelings.”
Thank you for this. The reorientation is the right fight. Putting the givers on the cover, aiming desire at better models, measuring greatness by what a person unlocks in others rather than what they hold. The bonobo is the right image for it.
But pause and notice who you could actually name. Picasso, Tesla, Nobel, Carnegie, Rockefeller, and the one woman in the pantheon, MacKenzie Scott, there for what she did with twenty-six billion dollars. The status you want to build is made of integrity, compassion, and the willingness to serve when no one is making you. Yet every hero you reach for is someone the old scoreboard already counted, because money is the thing that scoreboard was built to see.
The teaching, healing, restoring, and tending you name as the new heroism has been performed at civilizational scale for centuries, mostly by women, and it almost never leaves a named hero, because it it doesn't carry a number and was intentionally left outside the border of what we call the economy. That is the labor that holds societies up, and it is the most reliably invisible. The hard work ahead is not deciding to admire the givers like those on your list. It is learning to see the giving, the child-rearing, the elder-care, the kin-keeping that holds families together, everything that has never before been valued enough to leave a name.
Yes agree. We need to celebrate actions from all races, genders and nationalities. Thanks for pointing that out and let’s uplift more of those that have improved lives.
Another wonderful and insightful essay, Alvin. I found it especially ironic to be reading it while trying to squeeze in an early lunch.
For thousands of years, human beings have been taught, rewarded, disciplined, and ranked according to the work they perform, as though labor were the clearest evidence of worth. We inherited civilizations that needed work in order to survive, and then we began to mistake the necessity of work for the measure of the person.
Sometimes work and impact beautifully overlap. In the luckiest lives, what a person does each day becomes a true expression of what they value, whom they serve, and what they leave better than they found it. There are people whose labor is also their ministry, their art, their form of love in public.
But that overlap should be understood as grace, not proof. It shouldn't become the moral standard by which every life is judged. There are systems at play, and not everyone has equal access to work that is meaningful, dignified, fairly compensated, or connected to the impact they hope to have. Not everyone is fortunate enough to measure their days by the good they create.
A life can be full of motion and thin in meaning. It can be economically productive and morally diminished or emotionally / psychologically draining. It can satisfy every external demand while leaving untouched the question that pulls at one's hear: did this day enlarge love, reduce suffering, create beauty, protect dignity, strengthen a community, or help ourselves or another person become more free?
I have a quote on my wall that I look at daily, often attributed to Howard Thurman: “Don’t ask what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive, and go do that, because what the world needs is people who have come alive.”
I believe that. And yet, it often feels painfully out of reach. Even when I try to use my work to create better outcomes for the people around me, that is probably not what most people imagine “coming alive” looks like or feels like. It may not look ecstatic or liberated from the outside. It may look like responsibility, endurance, stewardship, problem-solving, care, and a long fidelity to work that matters even when it is not easy.
And if more people were able to do what makes them come alive, how would that change our communities, our societies, and our economies?
These are things I especially think about as I prepare to enter my third life.
We see a version of atrophy as some people, once separated from the vocation or role that organized their days, (like retirement, sickness or even wealth without a calling), seem to accelerate toward a decline because purpose, contribution, structure, and social relevance are challenged. They have free time, but not always a mental or practical framework for meaning. Without that, people can atrophy.
So this is not only an economic issue or a technological issue. It is also a profound global and cultural change-management issue, one that may take generations to work through as people are born into a different imagination of the future, one where vocation is not the primary architecture of identity.
The question is not whether people will still work. Many will, and many will want to. I want to work for as long as I am able, though the nature of my work is already changing. The better question is whether work will remain our dominant language for dignity.
“Hello, nice to meet you. What do you do?” is one of the first social rituals. It is efficient, but it is also revealing. We ask about function before we ask about the person.
So perhaps the deeper transition is not from work to leisure, but from work as identity to work as one possible expression of a life. The measure of a person should be larger than employment. It should include the love they carry, the care they give, the courage they practice, the communities they strengthen, and the good they leave behind long after the work is done.
If AI forces us to ask these questions more honestly and earnestly, then the disruption may carry a moral possibility as well as an economic impact. We may have to admit that usefulness is not the same as worth, productivity is not the same as purpose, and a human life should never have needed a job title, a vocation, or an externally recognized function to prove its value.
That said, I don't know that I can believe AI will naturally lead to an age of human flourishing. I can absolutely see the opportunity. But every day I also see a widening divide between those with access to these systems and those without, and that divide is not driven only by economics. It is driven by awareness, confidence, training, imagination, social capital, and even desire. Some people are racing toward these tools. Others have no idea how much the ground beneath them is moving. Others may know, but do not want their lives mediated by another layer of technology.
I also think the practical reality of what makes the world function is often underrepresented in utopian visions of the future. The world is not only ideas, code, strategy, and knowledge work. It is pipes, roads, wires, ports, farms, hospitals, rigs, kitchens, warehouses, bridges, roofs, waste systems, water systems, power grids, and all the unglamorous maintenance that keeps civilization from falling apart. Many people speaking about the future of work seem remarkably distant from the physical reality of how the world is built, repaired, cleaned, moved, fed, powered, and sustained. And do we really want to live out our future days surrounded by technical devices on our landscapes, in our yards, on our waters, in our skies, throughout our homes?
To take care of the world and everything in it, would we need millions of special-purpose AI robots? Perhaps. We are already seeing robots designed for oil rigs, warehouses, hospitals, elder care, agriculture, security, logistics, and infrastructure inspection. But each of those applications carries its own cost-benefit tradeoff, safety profile, maintenance burden, liability question, and moral complexity. The fact that something can be automated doesn't mean it will be automated well, equitably, affordably, or wisely.
So I come away with both hope and caution. AI may give us a chance to loosen the ancient bond between labor and worth. It may help us reimagine dignity, contribution, access, and human flourishing. But that outcome won't arrive simply because the machines become powerful, skilled or even omnipresent. It will depend on whether we are humble enough to understand the full texture of human work, honest enough to see who is being left out, and wise enough to build systems that serve life rather than merely accelerate production.
Forgive my ramble. I likely could've organized these thoughts better with more time, but alas, I have a meeting in 4 minutes! // irony again. So my final thoughts are that the opportunity is real, for sure. And while the flourishing is not guaranteed, I DO hope it comes to fruition ... for everyone.
Thanks for such a thoughtful comment. Agree! And I believe what you describe is possible. It’s just that it’s not the default. So we have to take collective action to push for it.
Alvin, what a magnificent essay. Thank you, thank you, thank you! I am a bit surprised you did not include Karl Marx, and the process of alienation. AI does promise to improve the common good, if we have concern for the common good in mind. As far as I can tell, abundance and it's hierarchy has never been shared broadly without violence of some kind. So, I agree with your principles, and the need for a new vision but I think the political reality is where the real next steps will be. I think we should be implementing anti-trust, property rights -- because the big models "stole" a lot of IP, and the creation of investments and institutions of the common good. Every single industry in the US that is globally competitive received many factor subsidies -- land grand colleges like Ohio State, etc.; the investment in science through the military, integrated circuits, nuclear power, genetic medicine, even modern management systems were designed in the "gift culture" not just the paid culture. We are now seeing way, way to much private appropriation of public good -- with no feed for the goose laying the golden eggs. Again thank you!
Thanks for the kind feedback. And yes policy makers do need to step in and protect more of the public goods and social wellbeing. 💯
Agree with your assessment but we do need to advocate for peaceful ways to address the issues mentioned. And give hope vs apathy to the world.
On Marx, agree his views are relevant but it’s a bit sensitive to associate ideas with him as there’s quite a bit of negative baggage due to a lack of understanding of his actual writings.
Alvin, this is a great read. I particularly enjoyed your return to Aristotle and the distinction between poiesis and praxis; the potential to liberate humanity from necessary labour so that we can pursue flourishing. It also struck me how much it complements an article I recently published on Substack on the history of workplace surveillance. We both begin with Aristotle and human flourishing, but from opposite directions. You ask what AI might free us for; I ask what organisations increasingly seek to know about us as AI becomes embedded in work. I argue that we've moved from observing workers, to measuring them, to inferring who they are and who they're likely to become, and that this expanding organisational knowledge steadily erodes the private sphere Aristotle believed was essential to human flourishing.
Another point that particularly resonated was your observation that "the difference was never the technology. It was always the organisation." That feels remarkably close to the central thesis of my own paper. I argue that the history of the workplace is too often told as a history of technological innovation, when the deeper story is really about changing forms of organisational knowledge and managerial control. Observation, measurement and now AI inference are all enabled by technology, but what transforms work is how organisations redesign processes, redistribute knowledge, redefine managerial authority, and expand what they believe they are entitled to know about workers. In both our essays, the critical variable isn't AI itself; it's the institutional choices humans make about how it is deployed.
I think our two essays are especially complementary in their treatment of the relationship between privacy and human flourishing. Your essay argues, drawing on Self-Determination Theory, that flourishing depends on autonomy, the freedom to author our own lives rather than define ourselves through labour. My concern is that AI's growing capacity to infer who workers are and who they are likely to become risks quietly undermining that very autonomy. When organisations increasingly act on algorithmic predictions, privacy is no longer simply about keeping information secret; it becomes the condition that preserves the space for people to deliberate, change, make mistakes, and become someone other than what the model expects. In that sense, privacy is not just a civil liberty. it is a prerequisite for self-determination.
Perhaps that is where our arguments ultimately meet. AI undoubtedly creates the possibility of a post-labour society, but whether that leads to genuine human flourishing will depend not only on who owns the machines and how their benefits are distributed, but also on whether we preserve meaningful limits on what organisations seek to know about people. Without those limits, there is a risk that AI optimises us before it truly liberates us.
Thank you for such a thoughtful essay. It gave me a great deal to think about, and I suspect we are engaged in different parts of the same conversation.
Thanks for the thoughtful feedback and deep read. So glad we’re aligned from different directions. 🤝
Awesome stuff!!
Thanks for the encouragement. Please share with others.
My husband and I have just retired, and we're both puzzled by all the people who keep asking us, "But what will you DO with your time?" It's as if without work, we'll fade into intolerable irrelevance and just sit there, slack-jawedly staring at the wall. Nothing could be further from the truth! Our retirement is where we plan to finally be most fully ourselves, devoting ourselves to the Praxis of the hobbies and activities that speak most deeply to our souls, without the limitations of (often ultimately meaningless) work tasks that Poiesis brings. But it's taken us each a lifetime of hard work to reach this glorious pinnacle of what our individual beings are capable of. What you're showing here is that AI, properly used and properly distributed, has the potential to guide us all towards the self-actualization of Praxis without having to first spend decades strapped to the wheel of Poiesis. As you so correctly note, this is the true promise of AI - but we have to break out of so many self-imposed mental cages (work = worth, leisure = laziness, etc) in order to realize it.
I'm here to tell you that it's a beautiful world when you locate your worth in your personal craft rather than in your paid labor, and it's very much a world that I hope AI can guide us all to. It won't happen by accident, though, and that's why I'm so grateful that you're here to spread the word.
Thank you for this essay and your many others!
💯 Thanks for leading by example. Enjoy your new found freedom 😁
What a fantastic paper! I read a great deal on the future of AI but I found this piece to be one of the most thoughtful and compelling. Thank you for sharing.
Thanks for taking the time to read it. 🙏
Thanks for your continued efforts, Alvin. I firmly believe we are approaching a turning point where the ‘fiction’ in science fiction is merging into a new reality before our very eyes. We are building a digital layer or infrastructure that will render perception into a form of communication and consciousness that is beyond our current comprehension.
Here is a quote from one of humanity’s greatest thinkers, dreamers, and doers.
“Our heritage and ideals, our code and standards - the things we live by and teach our children - are preserved or diminished by how freely we exchange ideas and feelings.”
Walt Disney
Let’s push for a positive version of the fiction ahead.
Thank you for this. The reorientation is the right fight. Putting the givers on the cover, aiming desire at better models, measuring greatness by what a person unlocks in others rather than what they hold. The bonobo is the right image for it.
But pause and notice who you could actually name. Picasso, Tesla, Nobel, Carnegie, Rockefeller, and the one woman in the pantheon, MacKenzie Scott, there for what she did with twenty-six billion dollars. The status you want to build is made of integrity, compassion, and the willingness to serve when no one is making you. Yet every hero you reach for is someone the old scoreboard already counted, because money is the thing that scoreboard was built to see.
The teaching, healing, restoring, and tending you name as the new heroism has been performed at civilizational scale for centuries, mostly by women, and it almost never leaves a named hero, because it it doesn't carry a number and was intentionally left outside the border of what we call the economy. That is the labor that holds societies up, and it is the most reliably invisible. The hard work ahead is not deciding to admire the givers like those on your list. It is learning to see the giving, the child-rearing, the elder-care, the kin-keeping that holds families together, everything that has never before been valued enough to leave a name.
Yes agree. We need to celebrate actions from all races, genders and nationalities. Thanks for pointing that out and let’s uplift more of those that have improved lives.
Another wonderful and insightful essay, Alvin. I found it especially ironic to be reading it while trying to squeeze in an early lunch.
For thousands of years, human beings have been taught, rewarded, disciplined, and ranked according to the work they perform, as though labor were the clearest evidence of worth. We inherited civilizations that needed work in order to survive, and then we began to mistake the necessity of work for the measure of the person.
Sometimes work and impact beautifully overlap. In the luckiest lives, what a person does each day becomes a true expression of what they value, whom they serve, and what they leave better than they found it. There are people whose labor is also their ministry, their art, their form of love in public.
But that overlap should be understood as grace, not proof. It shouldn't become the moral standard by which every life is judged. There are systems at play, and not everyone has equal access to work that is meaningful, dignified, fairly compensated, or connected to the impact they hope to have. Not everyone is fortunate enough to measure their days by the good they create.
A life can be full of motion and thin in meaning. It can be economically productive and morally diminished or emotionally / psychologically draining. It can satisfy every external demand while leaving untouched the question that pulls at one's hear: did this day enlarge love, reduce suffering, create beauty, protect dignity, strengthen a community, or help ourselves or another person become more free?
I have a quote on my wall that I look at daily, often attributed to Howard Thurman: “Don’t ask what the world needs. Ask what makes you come alive, and go do that, because what the world needs is people who have come alive.”
I believe that. And yet, it often feels painfully out of reach. Even when I try to use my work to create better outcomes for the people around me, that is probably not what most people imagine “coming alive” looks like or feels like. It may not look ecstatic or liberated from the outside. It may look like responsibility, endurance, stewardship, problem-solving, care, and a long fidelity to work that matters even when it is not easy.
And if more people were able to do what makes them come alive, how would that change our communities, our societies, and our economies?
These are things I especially think about as I prepare to enter my third life.
We see a version of atrophy as some people, once separated from the vocation or role that organized their days, (like retirement, sickness or even wealth without a calling), seem to accelerate toward a decline because purpose, contribution, structure, and social relevance are challenged. They have free time, but not always a mental or practical framework for meaning. Without that, people can atrophy.
So this is not only an economic issue or a technological issue. It is also a profound global and cultural change-management issue, one that may take generations to work through as people are born into a different imagination of the future, one where vocation is not the primary architecture of identity.
The question is not whether people will still work. Many will, and many will want to. I want to work for as long as I am able, though the nature of my work is already changing. The better question is whether work will remain our dominant language for dignity.
“Hello, nice to meet you. What do you do?” is one of the first social rituals. It is efficient, but it is also revealing. We ask about function before we ask about the person.
So perhaps the deeper transition is not from work to leisure, but from work as identity to work as one possible expression of a life. The measure of a person should be larger than employment. It should include the love they carry, the care they give, the courage they practice, the communities they strengthen, and the good they leave behind long after the work is done.
If AI forces us to ask these questions more honestly and earnestly, then the disruption may carry a moral possibility as well as an economic impact. We may have to admit that usefulness is not the same as worth, productivity is not the same as purpose, and a human life should never have needed a job title, a vocation, or an externally recognized function to prove its value.
That said, I don't know that I can believe AI will naturally lead to an age of human flourishing. I can absolutely see the opportunity. But every day I also see a widening divide between those with access to these systems and those without, and that divide is not driven only by economics. It is driven by awareness, confidence, training, imagination, social capital, and even desire. Some people are racing toward these tools. Others have no idea how much the ground beneath them is moving. Others may know, but do not want their lives mediated by another layer of technology.
I also think the practical reality of what makes the world function is often underrepresented in utopian visions of the future. The world is not only ideas, code, strategy, and knowledge work. It is pipes, roads, wires, ports, farms, hospitals, rigs, kitchens, warehouses, bridges, roofs, waste systems, water systems, power grids, and all the unglamorous maintenance that keeps civilization from falling apart. Many people speaking about the future of work seem remarkably distant from the physical reality of how the world is built, repaired, cleaned, moved, fed, powered, and sustained. And do we really want to live out our future days surrounded by technical devices on our landscapes, in our yards, on our waters, in our skies, throughout our homes?
To take care of the world and everything in it, would we need millions of special-purpose AI robots? Perhaps. We are already seeing robots designed for oil rigs, warehouses, hospitals, elder care, agriculture, security, logistics, and infrastructure inspection. But each of those applications carries its own cost-benefit tradeoff, safety profile, maintenance burden, liability question, and moral complexity. The fact that something can be automated doesn't mean it will be automated well, equitably, affordably, or wisely.
So I come away with both hope and caution. AI may give us a chance to loosen the ancient bond between labor and worth. It may help us reimagine dignity, contribution, access, and human flourishing. But that outcome won't arrive simply because the machines become powerful, skilled or even omnipresent. It will depend on whether we are humble enough to understand the full texture of human work, honest enough to see who is being left out, and wise enough to build systems that serve life rather than merely accelerate production.
Forgive my ramble. I likely could've organized these thoughts better with more time, but alas, I have a meeting in 4 minutes! // irony again. So my final thoughts are that the opportunity is real, for sure. And while the flourishing is not guaranteed, I DO hope it comes to fruition ... for everyone.
Thanks for such a thoughtful comment. Agree! And I believe what you describe is possible. It’s just that it’s not the default. So we have to take collective action to push for it.