Writing during the Great Depression in 1930, John Maynard Keynes (1883-1946) pushed back against what he called a “bad attack of economic pessimism.” In his famous essay, “Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren,” he predicted that within one hundred years, rising productivity and compounding growth would usher in a new era of leisure, marked by 15-hour work weeks and plenty of time left over to pursue passion projects.
In a strange sense, he worried that leisure itself might prove the harder adjustment. “For the first time since his creation,” Keynes wrote, “man will be faced with his real, his permanent problem — how to use his freedom from pressing economic cares.”
Today, AI is on the cusp of realizing Keynes’s seemingly dystopian vision. It’s worth asking, as he did in 1930, whether techno-pessimism is warranted. His fear was that the increase of “technical efficiency” (what we might today call productivity) would be so great that government would need to step in to help displaced workers find meaning in a fully automated world.
Those concerns follow the same logic as today’s growing fears that AI will displace work and disrupt society — fears that are fueling heavy-handed approaches to AI governance that could hamper this life-enhancing technology for decades.
For example, Anthropic’s own CEO has predicted that AI could drive unemployment to 20 percent. World-renowned scholars join with tech investors calling the coming age of AI “nothing short of civilizational.”
New television shows like Apple TV’s acclaimed series Pluribus posit a potential future in which humans join a “hive mind,” conjuring themes from Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, where people prefer to sacrifice their agency in pursuit of perpetual bliss. Critics have drawn parallels between the show’s omniscient hive and the modern lure of AI, with some cultural figures like Joe Rogan musing about the potential integration of AI with human bodies, or “the gentle singularity,” to use Sam Altman’s phrasing.
Cultural anxieties around AI are real. But, similar to the furor around past breakthrough technologies like the printing press, they are misdirected and often overblown.
Throughout history, new innovations have expanded the scope and scale of what it means to “work,” creating new roles in vibrant industries. The steam engine, for example, moved workers from farms to factories and accelerated wages in the process. The internet sparked new industries in digital sales and advertising. AI holds the same promise of creative disruption, but only if we foster the conditions that enable it to thrive.
A survey of 6,000 chief executives across four countries found that they expect AI to reduce employment by only 0.7 percent over the next three years. An analysis of over 12,000 European firms reported that AI adoption increases worker productivity and has little measurable impact on employment levels. More telling still: industries more exposed to AI have experienced greater wage gains than less-exposed ones, a sign that AI is complementing labor rather than substituting for it.
Rather than take a back seat, workers want to harness AI through new skills and tools that allow them to practice greater judgement, creativity, and human connection in their everyday work — traits that AI still sorely lacks. One MIT study found that low-skilled workers stand to gain even more than their more experienced counterparts, another sign that generative AI empowers America’s workforce and can narrow critical skills gaps.
But let’s consider what companies are already doing on the AI frontier. Zach Stauber, a support agent manager at Salesforce, oversees a fleet of AI agents handling customer support, sales, and marketing tasks. Not only have AI agent managers like Stauber kept their roles alongside these tools, but they have also become vastly more productive and, in many cases, found greater meaning in their work.
The emerging position of the “agent manager” fits a pattern that creative destruction has woven throughout history: Work becomes both more productive and more meaningful, as new roles blossom across industries that were once on the edge of stagnation.
To cite another example, hospitals report that physicians equipped with AI spend less time on charting and more time with patients. Schools document AI tutors accelerating literacy gains. New startups are hiring to build around AI’s capabilities rather than retreating from them.
Despite this reframing, there are serious counterarguments to consider.
The economist William Baumol (1922-2017) observed that productivity gains tend to cluster in manufacturing sectors, while service industries like education and healthcare grow more expensive relative to everything else. For instance, a string quartet takes the same four musicians and 45 minutes it did in Beethoven’s time. That explanation could explain why college tuition and hospital bills keep outpacing inflation even as consumer electronics get cheaper every year.
While concerns of AI widening this “Baumol gap” make sense on their face, they fail under deeper inspection. AI has the unique ability to seep into practically every field, including ones that have yet to be discovered. Think AI tutors and planners, who are liberating teachers from hundreds of hours preparing lesson plans. Or the AI legal research assistant, who frees up more time for attorneys to spend with clients or take on new ones.
But can an AI-driven workforce make us happier, not just more productive?
According to Arthur Brooks, the answer is yes. “AI … has freed us from a huge amount of our most tedious, quotidian complicated problems,” he writes, “for example, what we need to do to support our families, but certainly wouldn’t do if we didn’t have to.”
AI, in other words, doesn’t replace our capacity to reason or think. It grants us more time to explore the questions that make life worth living.
That’s not to say that AI can’t unravel society in destructive ways. AI-steered social media algorithms are causing measurable harm to younger generations worldwide. Those dangers deserve serious attention. But they shouldn’t unilaterally govern our response to technology that could unleash unimaginable spurts of economic growth and prosperity.
Keynes made his prediction during the height of the Great Depression, when Americans were rightly pessimistic about their future. But Keynes struck an optimistic tone based on economic deduction. He believed that abundance would eventually shrink the “economic problem” down to a specialist concern rather than civilization’s main preoccupation.
According to this line of thinking, he quipped, “If economists could manage to get themselves thought of as humble, competent people, on a level with dentists, that would be splendid!”
In no uncertain terms, AI is this century’s greatest technological breakthrough. If we want to usher in Keynes’ era of abundance, we must clear the runway for AI to transform our everyday lives — and do so without fear.
