Work Will Always Matter

The AI and jobs debate misses a deeper question.

Of the many philosophical questions the age of artificial intelligence has foisted onto our attention, perhaps none is more urgent for policymakers than the nature and meaning of work.

Work, we are told, may soon become distressingly hard to find. Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei famously predicted in 2025 that AI would eliminate “half of all entry-level white-collar jobs—and spike unemployment to 10-20% in the next one to five years,” a prospect Axios described as a “white-collar bloodbath.” Even blue collar work may prove no refuge. Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang suggested, also in 2025, that we would know AI was truly ubiquitous “when, literally, humanoid robots are wandering around, which is not five years away. This is not a five-years-away problem, this is a few-years-away problem.”

When that happens, Jensen added, the robots “ought to go to factories first.”

Eventually, our tech leaders say, all work may become optional, as AI delivers a post-labor reality with little need for any human employees at meaningful scale. “It’s hard to say exactly what that moment is, but there will come a point where no job is needed,” Elon Musk said back in 2023. “You can have a job if you wanted to have a job for personal satisfaction. But the AI would be able to do everything.”

Whether anything like this will in fact transpire remains to be seen. But even the prospect of such an outcome is prompting real anxiety in the American workforce. A mass political revolt by white collar workers angry that their credentials no longer secure middle class stability, for example, is a serious and sobering prospect.

Thus even the idea of a post-work future forces confrontation with a basic philosophical question: what, really, is work good for? Broadly speaking, there are two theories on offer.

The first, from sources as divergent as the Marxist and neoliberal market-fundamentalist traditions, holds that work is an unpleasant necessity, away from which each of us strives to escape as best we can. It is most archetypically represented by the Biblical passage from Genesis, still cited daily in funeral rites around the globe, in which Adam and Eve are expelled from Eden and condemned to hard toil as divine punishment for sin’s introduction to the world:

Cursed is the ground because of you;
through painful toil you will eat food from it
all the days of your life.
It will produce thorns and thistles for you,
and you will eat the plants of the field.
By the sweat of your brow
you will eat your food
until you return to the ground,
since from it you were taken;
for dust you are
and to dust you will return.

The Hebrew word used to represent work here is telling: itstsabon, meaning hard labor, pain, or sorrow.

Economic orthodoxy tends to agree with this grim view of labor. The neoclassical labor-leisure choice model posits that each of us seeks to maximize our utility (i.e. our happiness) by optimizing the tradeoff between the consumption of goods and services we want (which require money, which requires us to work), and the leisure we also want (which requires us not to work). U = f(C, L), where U is “utility,” “C” is consumption, and “L” is for leisure, sums it up nicely. The model has a genuine predictive value: it is indeed true that if I am paid $5 an hour, I will likely prefer to take the marginal hour off and relax, whereas if I’m paid $1,500 an hour an extra hour of work might seem like a good tradeoff.

The implication is, of course, that the optimal state is to have as much money as I need to enjoy every good and service I could want without having to work at all. This, too, seems to reflect an intuitive truth. Who among us, theoretically, would not wish to be born a prince, freely enjoying everything the world, the flesh, and the devil have to offer without laboring for any of it? This view, fronted by many of our AI overlords, offers a post-work society of limitless abundance, in which we want for nothing and need not earn any of it.

The Marxist tradition agrees. For the Marxist, work is not so much the bad thing you do to get the good things you want but the bad and exploitative thing you are made to do to get the things you need. When it comes to automation, this exploitative dynamic holds the seeds of its own demise.

At least according to contemporary Marxists like the British author and political commentator Aaron Bastani, Marx himself thought that by ruthlessly pursuing labor-replacing technological advancements, capitalism would unintentionally undermine itself. Marx’s “Fragment on Machines,” for example, seems to anticipate Elon Musk’s prediction. It argues that capital cannot help but seek to replace human labor with machines—and that it will eventually succeed, which “will redound to the benefit of emancipated labour, and is the condition of its emancipation.”

The vision of thinkers like Bastani, as outlined in his 2019 book Fully Automated Luxury Communism, is to realize this aspiration for liberation-via-automation:

[Even] socialism for Marx was a stepping stone to something else: communism and the realm of freedom. This, by contrast, was marked not only by an absence of economic conflict and work but by a spontaneous abundance similar to the Golden Age of Hesiod or Telecleides, or the biblical Eden…With the arrival of communism any distinction between mental and physical labour would vanish, with work becoming more akin to play.

The human condition, then, according to Marxism and Econ 101 alike, is that we are each of us yearning to return to the workless Eden; if AI can take us there, hallelujah and amen.

But there is a second option, and reflecting on it illuminates why Marx and Econ 101 are both wrong, and why we will always need meaningful work.

This view teaches that in addition to its obvious necessity under conditions of scarcity, there is also something inherently good about work. The classic ur-text for this view also comes from Genesis—one chapter earlier, in which God creates human beings not for limitless leisure, but to place them “in the Garden of Eden to work it and take care of it.”

In this interpretation, work is constitutive of human thriving and inherent to human happiness. As my colleague Daniel Kishi likes to say, labor is not punishment but purpose—calling rather than curse. J.R.R. Tolkien called this the theory of the human being as sub-creator. To be fully human is to actively shape the world we are given. “We make in our measure and in our derivative mode,” Tolkien wrote, “because we are made: and not only made, but made in the image and likeness of a Maker.”

This taps into a philosophical tradition dating back at least as far as Plato. In the Republic, Plato delineates categories of goods. Some goods are good in themselves but do not have much instrumental use—harmless pleasures, for example. Other goods have instrumental value but are hard to call good in themselves, like surgery.

But some things are good in both senses at the same time: good because they have utility, and intrinsically good in themselves, like the act of knowing, or of seeing. As the philosopher Jeffrey Hanson explains, work is exactly this kind of good. Like knowing and seeing, it is good for its results, but also intrinsically good. In fact, work is itself a way of knowing and seeing:

[A] job is for Plato a kind of knowing. It is not the whole of knowledge and cannot be, but it is a mastery of some part of reality and a constructive response to it that repairs a genuine need and secures a worthwhile good. The carpenter, for example, knows wood, what it can bear, how it can be shaped and cut and joined in order to produce a worthwhile object that in its small but inimitable way partakes of the eternal verities of form and beauty.

The Catholic tradition similarly teaches that work “is a good thing for man—a good thing for his humanity—because through work man not only transforms nature…but he also achieves fulfilment as a human being and indeed, in a sense, becomes ‘more a human being’.” The impulse to act on the world—in other words, to work—is intrinsic to the human spirit, and it will profit us nothing to gain the whole world if we lose it.

If America wants to survive whatever level of automation our AI future delivers, we need to embed Option Two in our societal source code—with urgency.

The loss of meaningful, dignified work has already visited immense damage on millions of American families. The response of America’s technological barons is not encouraging—like the argument venture capitalist Marc Andreesen is said to have made when pitched on the idea that struggling local communities might merit saving: “I’m glad there’s OxyContin and video games to keep those people quiet.” Video games, that is, to offer the simulacrum of mastery and autonomy, and opioids to anesthetize the felt need for it.

Channeling George Orwell’s fight with his own socialist compatriots, the sociologist Musa al-Gharbi draws a bright line under the nightmare of Andreesen’s post-work society:

[A society] wherein machines have largely eliminated not just privation and disease but also obviated the practical need to work…would be hell. We can see this…in workers who are unable to work but have their material needs provided for: they aren’t happy. They’re often quite miserable. And the reason that they’re miserable is that the desire to be useful, to produce, to transform, to add value – these are fundamental human drives that people satisfy through various forms of labor….[without that] people would likely have a void in their life where there used to be meaning and purpose. They’d try to fill it getting high or getting drunk, through gluttony, sexual licentiousness, and other forms of hedonism, or by playing games or consuming ever-more entertainment just to fill up their hours. But spending one’s life just killing time in this way is a horrible way to live — empty and unsatisfying.

Video games and Oxy, indeed.

It is intrinsic to our nature to want to encounter the world directly—to address ourselves to it, take it in hand, and exercise agency on it. Something important to our own flourishing is lost if we abandon that impulse. We risk turning inward, away from reality and toward the self-involved gratification and self-anesthetization that the Andreesens of the world envision for us.

This is already a feature of our economic model. The social segmentation of blue-collar and white-collar work, the motorcycle mechanic and philosopher Matthew Crawford argues, has exacerbated the tendency of “knowledge” workers to overestimate how well they do in fact know the world. “The moral significance of work that grapples with material things,” Crawford writes, “may lie in the simple fact that such things lie outside the self.” He goes on to denounce the arrogance of a narcissistic laptop class that mistakes its abstractions for true knowledge.

Francis Fukuyama puts it even more bluntly: “most forms of real knowledge, including self-knowledge, come from the effort to struggle with and master the brute reality of material objects — loosening a bolt without stripping its threads, or backing a semi rig into a loading dock.” This kind of knowing through encounter, leading to real agency, is a central element of human thriving. Research on the psychology of human happiness routinely finds that a sense of agency (or self-efficacy, or mastery, or competence) correlates strongly with a sense of well-being.

It is also a prerequisite to being useful to other people—or to being in genuine relationship with them at all. Other people, too, are external to ourselves, and encountering them means turning outward rather than inward. The shared project of useful work, in which we discover our mutual interdependence, is fundamental to learning to respect each other as fellow citizens and members of a shared society.

When the book of Genesis describes God creating human beings to “care for and work” the garden of Eden, it does not use the term for “sorrowful toil” that is introduced later. Here, the Hebrew term evokes agency and reverence—of causing something to happen and of rendering worship, a double meaning perhaps best captured in English by the word service. Societies work when we encounter the world with agency, each other with respect, and both with an eye toward useful service.

If the social structure of work becomes even more a matter of societal and political choice than it already is, because economic necessity no longer plays a shaping role, there will be nothing more important than what beliefs guide that choice. Forestalling a future in which we further lose touch with the concrete realities of our own world—and thus with our own best selves and with one another—requires reclaiming an understanding of work as good in itself, as fundamental to human nature, not just as a bulwark against scarcity.

Otherwise we risk letting slip entire ways of knowing, seeing, and realizing our capacity to engage the world, becoming sedated and passive rather than active and alive, dependent on machines we have forgotten how to build.