This is me playing devil’s advocate.
Let’s just assume AGI happened. Real, actual, does-everything AGI. Not the “pretty good at coding” AI we have now. The thing the CEOs keep promising. The thing that makes every job description look like a relic. The thing that doesn’t have a clear definition.
I’m not arguing it will happen. I’m asking: if it did, what does the world actually look like?
The Jobs Math (Without the Math)
The honest version of this is simple. Soft jobs, the kind done at a desk, on a screen, with a brain and a keyboard, disappear faster than new ones appear. That’s the whole premise. You don’t need a formula. If you believe the people selling AGI, you believe that gap is real and widening.
So somewhere between “now” and “AGI achieved,” the number of people with traditional employment collapses. And the population hasn’t. It’s still climbing toward 10 billion.
That’s the setup. Now what?
A Day In The Life
Here’s what I think an average day looks like for most people post-AGI.
You wake up and you don’t have a job to go to. Not because you got fired but because the category of “your job” no longer meaningfully exists. You get a stipend. Some version of Universal Basic Income, run by a government or some transnational institution that emerged when governments realized the alternative was collapse.
The money covers the basics. Food, housing, healthcare. Maybe not through cash but through direct provision. You don’t pay a doctor. You don’t pay rent in the way we understand it now.
So what do you do all day?
Probably what people already do when they have too much time and not enough purpose — like HR and product managers, except now it’s everyone. You scroll. You game. You watch things. You pick up a hobby, drop it, pick up another. Some people go deep — learn an instrument, grow food, make things with their hands. Others drift.
And I think a non-trivial number of people go looking for something to believe in. Not religion necessarily, but meaning systems. Purpose structures. Communities built around shared ritual and identity. When work stops being the answer to “what are you,” you need another answer fast. And historically, humans reach for the spiritual when the material stops being sufficient. In a way, it’s a full-circle moment. Early hunter-gatherers built entire rituals around survival like acquiring food, appeasing nature. Once fire and agriculture made that easier, they didn’t sit idle. They moved on to other things. To improving existing systems, to building new ones, to keeping themselves occupied with whatever came next. Post-AGI is just the latest version of that pivot.
Your sense of nation, of political identity — I think it fragments and then reconsolidates around smaller things. Neighborhood. Subculture. Shared aesthetic. The nation-state was partly held together by economic interdependence. Remove that and people contract inward.
Career?
Do what you love, you’ll never work a day in your life.
You don’t have work, so do what you love, every day of your life.
That’s the optimistic read. But I’m not sure it holds up. When people say “do what you love and it doesn’t feel like work,” there’s almost always something expected in return, money, recognition, a sense of progress. Take those away and “do what you love” starts to feel less like freedom and more like a suggestion with no stakes.
So would careers even exist? The traditional pipeline, pre-school to high school to college to job, becomes structurally pointless. Which has one genuinely good outcome: maybe people study because they actually want to know things. How many of us chose our major out of passion versus just needing to pick something? Post-AGI, the pressure to study useful things evaporates. You could spend years going deep on Relativity or mycology or number theory just because it fascinates you. Or maybe you just ask AGI to insert the knowledge into your brain via neuralink, but where is fun in that?
But I think “career” doesn’t disappear, it just changes shape. Instead of something you do every day, maybe it becomes something you do every now and then. A project you finish every few months. A performance once a year. Something significant and occasional rather than routine and continuous. The rhythm of a career becomes more like the rhythm of an artist than an employee.
And regardless of what form it takes, humans will build hierarchies around it. Hobbyist rankings, reputation within subcultures, the quiet social capital of being really good at something even if that something has no economic value. It’s in our nature to compete, to excel, to be recognized. Human race will always have something to squabble about — and if it doesn’t, it’ll invent something, elevate it to crisis status, and start squabbling about that. That’s one thing AGI definitely can’t take away.
Wanting, Connecting, Becoming
Greed, Love, Ambition
Greed doesn’t need money. It never really did. money was just the most convenient scarce thing we had. Remove it and greed finds something else to latch onto. Attention. Status. Power. Rare experiences. Whatever becomes hard to get, greed will want it. Follower counts that function like net worth. Access hierarchies built around who gets invited, who gets noticed, who gets remembered. People hoarding whatever the new scarce thing is, and quietly defining themselves by how much of it they have. It’s a black hole that always needs something to pull in.
Love gets philosophically strange. As work disappears and institutions hollow out, humans start depending on each other more. For meaning, for purpose, for the feeling of being known by another person. In that sense, love could become the purest it has ever been. Chosen completely freely, with no economic reason to stay, no survival logic underneath it. Just two people deciding each other is worth it.
But AGI complicates the same thing it potentially elevates. If an AI companion is genuinely indistinguishable from a human one — digitally, physically — what does a human relationship actually offer that an AGI partner doesn’t? Imperfection, maybe. Unpredictability. The fact that the other person could leave. There’s something about the fragility of human companionship that might become its whole point.
Ambition is the most interesting one. The ladders don’t disappear, the destinations do. You can still climb, but where are you going? Hobbyist hierarchies fill some of that gap, like we talked about. Being the best at something, even something economically worthless, scratches the itch.
But I think the biggest ladder post-AGI is outward. Space. Interplanetary travel. Colonies. AGI might have solved physics, explained the universe, produced a grand unified theory. But knowing the answer isn’t the same as going there. Earth becomes oversaturated with intelligence and comfort and resolved problems. The frontier disappears here, so humans go looking for one somewhere else. Some leave to start over entirely. Some take everything that worked and try to build something better with it. That impulse, to plant a flag somewhere new, feels deeply human in a way that AGI can’t replicate or replace.
Still very human
Some industries have existed in every human civilization we know of, especially: entertainment and sports. They predate capitalism, they’ll outlast it. They survive because they’re not really about the product. they’re about being human alongside other humans.
But post-AGI, they don’t survive unchanged.
Entertainment: No Proof
Here’s where it gets genuinely strange.
Right now, you can already see the split forming. Fully AI-generated content on one side, human-made work on the other. People are already having arguments about which is which, which is better, which is “real.”
AGI makes that argument obsolete. If AGI is as good as advertised, you genuinely cannot tell the difference. A film indistinguishable from Interstellar, same emotional weight, same craft, can be generated from a prompt. Not a pale imitation. The real thing, functionally speaking.
So the two sides I set up, AI-generated vs human-made, collapse. Because the proof of humanness is gone.
The only way you know a piece of work is human-made is if every person involved stands up and says: I made this, by hand, with my mind and body. Nolan has to tell you. Every actor has to tell you. The proof becomes testimonial, not verifiable.
And here’s the thing that follows from that: human-made becomes the luxury tier. Not because it’s better. You can’t prove it’s better, but because it’s certified. Like organic produce. You’re paying for the attestation, not the taste.
So you end up with a stratified entertainment economy. Mass consumption is AI-generated, free or near-free, infinite. And above that, a premium tier of work where the human provenance is the product. People will pay for that. Not everyone, but enough.
Whether that supports the same number of actors, writers, directors, almost certainly not. The industry survives. The workforce doesn’t, not at its current scale.
Oh, and one more thing: stage comes back. Imperfect, unscalable, irreproducible live performance. Not as the dominant form, it never will be, but as the purest proof-of-human. You cannot fake presence.
Sports: Mostly Fine, Actually
Sports are weirdly resilient here. You watch sports because you want to watch humans compete. The drama is biological — the athletes, their choices under pressure, the fact that they could fail. Remove the human and you remove the point.
So the players stay. The coaches stay. The analysts, the data teams, the operational back-end — those probably go AGI. But the thing people actually pay for, the game itself, remains human.
The real question for sports post-AGI isn’t about the sport. It’s about the economics. If most people are on UBI and no one has discretionary income the way they do now, who’s buying the tickets? Who’s buying the jerseys? The sport survives. The billion-dollar franchise model might not or it restructures entirely around something like community ownership, since capital has a very different shape in a post-work world.
The Question Underneath All of This
The real disruption isn’t economic. It’s existential.
Work, for most of human history, has been the answer to: what are you for? It provides structure, identity, community, and a reason to get out of bed. UBI solves the money problem. It doesn’t solve the meaning problem.
What happens to a species that evolved to solve problems, when the problems are solved?
I don’t know. Nobody does. Maybe we flourish. Freed from survival labor, we become more fully human. More creative, more connected, more curious. That’s the optimistic read.
Or maybe we drift. Comfortable, fed, purposeless. And meaning — real meaning, hard-won meaning — becomes the scarcest resource on earth.
Either way, I think that’s the actual story of post-AGI. Not the jobs chart. Not the GDP figures. The question of what humans do when they’re no longer needed to each other.
Holdupp
Everything above, the UBI world, the hobbyist hierarchies, ambition pointing toward space, I built all of it on three quiet assumptions.
That AGI is equally accessible. That no single entity monopolizes it. That the world doesn’t fracture into resource wars or authoritarian lockdowns before we even get there.
In other words: I was describing the best case.
If that world with drifting people, fractured identities, meaning becoming the scarcest resource is what the optimistic version looks like, sit with that for a second. Because the pessimistic version doesn’t need much imagination. It’s just the same story with access concentrated in fewer hands. Two or three companies, or governments, deciding what AGI does and doesn’t do, who gets it and on what terms, what it’s allowed to tell you and what it isn’t.
That’s why I think the most important question right now isn’t whether AGI is coming. It’s who’s building it, how, and whether you’ve thought about whether to trust them with it.
Not the technology. The people holding it. The trust me bros.
When Sam Altman says their mission is to ensure AGI “benefits all of humanity”, with OpenAI being a private company, raising hundreds of billions of dollars and operates with remarkably little oversight, would you really trust them? Based on what, exactly?
When Dario Amodei says AI could be one of the most transformative technologies in history, that it will wipe out around 50% of entry-level jobs within the next five years, and that safer AI will require guardrails and sometimes restricted access to limit misuse, how do we know the organizations building it won’t themselves become bad actors?
You are already being asked to extend that trust — every time you use these tools, every time a company trains on collective human output, every time a government defers to a private lab on questions that affect everyone. The ask is quiet and consent is assumed.
So maybe that’s the real devil’s advocate move here. Not imagining what post-AGI looks like. But asking whether the path we’re on leads to the version I described above or something considerably darker. And if it matters to you which one, maybe it’s worth paying attention to who’s making that call.
Because right now, it’s not you.