What would our lives look like if we no longer had to work? As a thought experiment I tried to imagine | Brigid Delaney

For a long time humanity has dreamed about a life free of toil, spent largely in leisure, learning and pleasure.

Now that AI has arrived, what if it was the thing that finally delivers us into a post-work future?

While there are many pressing concerns and disruptions thrown up by AI, I find it interesting that more of us aren’t asking: if we no longer had to work, or needed to work as much, what would we do with all that free time?

For the sake of a thought experiment, let’s presume there will be some form of universal basic income in the wake of mass joblessness. (In the past 12 months, this has moved to a policy discussion, at least in the UK.) And let’s imagine that AI is run – as OpenAI was originally intended to – as a not-for-profit enterprise.

If the issue of subsistence was able to be sorted, the big questions would be more philosophical, rather than economic.

What would we do with ourselves? How would we find meaning? Fill time? Not go insane from the lack of structure? With God dead, the nuclear family in decline, and the need to work removed – what would hold us together?

Thinkers from the past have grappled with this idea of time abundance.

In ancient Greece, Epicurus and a close group of friends spent their days learning and debating philosophy. They strove to be content with the basics, so as not to live in anxiety about scarcity (though it should be noted this idyll didn’t occur without labour – Epicurus had a slave Mys, among others, who managed the house and garden).

Thomas More’s 1516 book Utopia depicts an imaginary island society governed by reason, communal property, universal labour and no money.

Karl Marx, in a section of his early notebooks, Grundrisse, argued that the transition to a post-capitalist society combined with advances in automation would allow for significant reductions in labour needed to produce necessary goods. In this post-scarcity age, people would have significant amounts of leisure time to pursue science, the arts and creativity.

(In Capital, Marx later abandoned this view, believing that capitalism could continually renew itself unless overthrown.)

In economist John Maynard Keynes’ 1930 essay Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, he predicted in 100 years’ time there would be such abundance that people would barely need to work, as their basic needs would be taken care of thanks to technological advances. Only four more years to go!

And the hippies of the 1960s “tuned in and dropped out” – experimenting with psychedelics, commune living and eastern religions, with the aim of flourishing in the way that Epicureans were also trying to flourish, outside the bounds of work and family.

There was an optimism to these experiments, with the common goal being a world where we didn’t have…