Replace or Reshape: How AI Could Change the Way We Work

In 1930, in the depths of the Great Depression, John Maynard Keynes wrote a short essay called Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren. It is often remembered for one striking prediction: by 2030, people in wealthy countries might only need to work about 15 hours a week.What Keynes imagined was a society advanced enough to solve what he called the “economic problem” of basic material provision. If technology kept improving, and societies kept growing richer, then fewer hours of human labor would be needed to produce the necessities and comforts of life.Nearly a century later, that old prediction has returned in distorted form amid the AI boom. Tech executives, investors, and many politicians speak as if a new wave of intelligent machines is about to transform labor—automatically and at a planetary scale. While many warn of mass unemployment, some promise liberation from drudgery—that AI will free up time for workers to do as they please. And then, others make the opposite claim: that AI’s efficiency will create more work, not less. Drawing on the Jevons paradox—the idea that when a technology becomes more efficient and cheaper to use, total demand for what it enables can rise rather than fall—this view posits that the routinization of cognitive work will expand the need for “relational work,” and the amount of human communication and coordination organizations want to do.Underpinning all of these competing forecasts is the same false assumption: that technological capability itself determines social outcomes. AI may be able to automate tasks, generate new demand,…

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