This is me playing devil’s advocate.
Let’s just assume AGI happens.
Real, actual, does-everything AGI.
Not the “pretty good at coding” AI we have now. Not autocomplete with a personality. I mean the thing the CEOs keep promising. The thing that makes every job description look like a relic. The thing that somehow everyone talks about, but nobody can define cleanly.
I’m not saying it will happen.
I’m just asking: if it did, and if it went well, what would the world actually look like?
Because even the best-case version feels a little unsettling to me.
The jobs part
The honest version is pretty simple.
A lot of soft jobs disappear.
By soft jobs, I mean the kind done at a desk, on a screen, with a brain and a keyboard. Writing, planning, analyzing, coding, designing, coordinating, managing, reviewing, reporting, whatever.
If you believe the people selling AGI, then you kind of have to believe this gap is real.
The jobs disappear faster than new ones appear.
That is the whole premise.
You do not need some complicated chart for it. Somewhere between now and “AGI achieved,” traditional employment starts breaking down for a lot of people.
And the population has not disappeared. It is still climbing toward 10 billion.
So that is the setup.
Now what?
A normal day, maybe
Here is what I imagine an average day looks like for a lot of people post-AGI.
You wake up and you do not have a job to go to. Not because you got fired. Because the category of “your job” does not really exist anymore.
You get some kind of stipend. Maybe Universal Basic Income. Maybe something else that does the same thing. Maybe it is run by a government. Maybe by some transnational institution that appeared once governments realized the alternative was collapse.
The money covers the basics.
Food. Housing. Healthcare.
Maybe it is not even money in the way we think of it now. Maybe it is direct provision. You do not pay a doctor. You do not pay rent in the normal sense. Your survival is handled, more or less.
So what do you do all day?
Probably what people already do when they have too much time and not enough purpose.
You scroll. You game. You watch things.
You pick up a hobby, drop it, pick up another. Some people go deep. They learn an instrument, grow food, build furniture, paint, make things with their hands. Others just drift.
And I think a lot of people go looking for something to believe in. Not religion necessarily, though maybe religion too.
More like meaning systems.
Communities. Rituals. Identity. Some structure that tells you who you are and what you are doing here.
Because once work stops being the answer to “what are you?”, you need another answer pretty quickly.
Historically, humans seem to reach for the spiritual when the material stops being enough. Early humans built rituals around survival — food, nature, weather, death, whatever they could not control. Then fire and agriculture changed survival. People did not just sit around doing nothing after that. They built more systems. Better tools. Bigger stories. New problems.
Maybe post-AGI is just another version of that pivot.
The material problem gets easier. The meaning problem gets louder. I also think identity gets weird.
Your sense of nation, politics, belonging — all of that might fragment and then reconsolidate around smaller things. Neighborhoods. Subcultures. Aesthetics. Online groups. Local rituals. Shared taste.
The nation-state was partly held together by economic interdependence. Remove enough of that and people might contract inward. Not disappear from the world.
Just look for belonging somewhere smaller.
Career?
Do what you love, and you’ll never work a day in your life.
You do not 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 does not feel like work,” there is usually still something expected in return.
Money. Recognition. Progress.
A sense that you are building toward something. Take those away, and “do what you love” can start to feel less like freedom and more like a suggestion with no stakes.
So would careers even exist?
The traditional pipeline — preschool to high school to college to job — becomes kind of pointless. Which honestly has one good outcome: maybe people study because they actually want to know things.
How many of us chose a major because we were deeply curious? And how many of us just needed to pick something that seemed useful?
Post-AGI, the pressure to study “useful” things evaporates. You could spend years learning relativity or mycology or number theory just because it fascinates you. Or maybe you just ask AGI to insert the knowledge into your brain through Neuralink or whatever, but where is the fun in that?
I do not think career disappears though. I think it changes shape.
Maybe it becomes less like something you do every day and more like something you return to every now and then. A project you finish every few months. A performance once a year. A thing you make because you care enough to make it. 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 of course, humans will build hierarchies around it. We always do.
Hobbyist rankings. Reputation inside subcultures. The quiet social capital of being really good at something, even if that something has no economic value. It is in our nature to compete, to excel, to be recognized.
Humans will always have something to squabble about.And if it does not, it will invent something, elevate it to crisis status, and start squabbling about that.
That is one thing AGI definitely cannot take away.
Greed, love, ambition
I kept coming back to these three things.
Greed, love, ambition.
Not because they are the only human drives, but because they feel like the ones that would get strangest in a world where survival and work are no longer the center.
Greed does not 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. Access. Being invited. Being noticed. Being remembered.
Maybe follower counts start functioning like net worth. Maybe private communities become the new country clubs. Maybe people hoard whatever the new scarce thing is and quietly define themselves by how much of it they have.
Greed is a black hole. It just needs something to pull in.
Love gets philosophically strange.
If work disappears and institutions hollow out, humans might depend on each other more, not less.
For meaning. For purpose. For the feeling of being known by another person.
In that sense, love could become purer than it is now. Chosen freely, with no economic reason to stay, no survival logic underneath it. Just two people deciding that the other person is worth it.
But AGI complicates the same thing it might elevate. If an AI companion is genuinely indistinguishable from a human one — digitally, physically, emotionally — what does a human relationship offer that an AGI partner does not?
Imperfection, maybe. Unpredictability.
The fact that the other person could leave. There is something about the fragility of human companionship that might become the whole point.
Ambition is the most interesting one to me.
The ladders do not disappear. The destinations do.
You can still climb, but where are you going?
Hobbyist hierarchies fill some of that gap. Being the best at something, even something economically worthless, still scratches the itch.
But I think the biggest ladder post-AGI is outward. Like Space. Interplanetary travel. Colonies. New frontiers.
Maybe AGI solves physics. Maybe it explains the universe. Maybe it gives us a grand unified theory and wraps the biggest questions in a neat bow.
But knowing the answer is not the same as going there. Earth could become oversaturated with intelligence, comfort, and solved problems. The frontier disappears here, so humans go looking for one somewhere else.
Some leave to start over. Some take everything that worked and try to build something better with it.
Still very human
Some things have existed in basically every human civilization we know of.
Entertainment. Sports.
They predate capitalism. They will probably outlast it too. Because they are not really about the product. They are about being human alongside other humans.
But post-AGI, they do not survive unchanged.
Entertainment
This is where it gets genuinely strange.
You can already see the split forming right now. AI-generated content on one side. Human-made work on the other. People arguing about which is better, which is real, which has soul, which counts.
AGI makes that argument kind of obsolete. If AGI is as good as advertised, you genuinely cannot tell the difference.
A film with the same emotional weight as Interstellar, the same craft, the same feeling, could be generated from a prompt. Not a cheap imitation. Functionally, the real thing.
So the split between AI-made and human-made collapses, because the proof of humanness disappears.
The only way you know a piece of work is human-made is if everyone involved stands up and says:
I made this, by hand, with my mind and body.
Nolan has to tell you. The actors have to tell you. The crew has to tell you.
The proof becomes testimonial, not verifiable. And here is what follows from that: human-made becomes the luxury tier.
Not because it is better. You cannot prove it is better. But because it is certified. Like organic produce.
You are paying for the attestation, not necessarily the taste.
So entertainment probably becomes stratified. Mass consumption is AI-generated, free or near-free, infinite. Above that is a premium tier where human provenance is the product.
People will pay for that. Not everyone. But enough. Does that support the same number of actors, writers, directors, editors, designers, and everyone else? Almost certainly not. The industry survives.
The workforce probably does not, at least not at its current scale.
Stage comes back. Live performance. Imperfect, unscalable, irreproducible. Not as the dominant format. It probably never will be. But maybe as the purest proof-of-human.
You cannot fake presence.
Sports
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. The fact that their bodies have limits. Remove the human and you remove the point.
So the players stay.
The coaches probably stay.
The analysts, data teams, operations, back-end machinery — a lot of that probably goes AGI.
But the thing people actually pay for, the game itself, stays human.
The real question for sports post-AGI is not whether sports survive. They do.
The question is the economics.
If most people are on UBI, and discretionary income does not exist the way it does now, who is buying the tickets? Who is buying jerseys? Who is funding billion-dollar franchises?
The sport survives. The current franchise model might not.
Or maybe it restructures around community ownership, local identity, patronage, or some new version of capital that makes sense in a post-work world.
I do not know.
But I feel pretty confident people will still want to watch other people try to win.
The actual problem
The real disruption is not just economic. It is existential.
Work, for most of human history, has been one of the main answers to: what are you for? It gives structure. Identity. Community. A reason to get out of bed.
UBI solves the money problem. It does not solve the meaning problem. So what happens to a species that evolved to solve problems, when the problems are solved?
I do not know. Nobody does. Maybe we flourish.
Freed from survival labor, maybe we become more fully human. More creative, more connected, more curious. Maybe people finally have the time to become who they would have been if survival did not keep interrupting.
That is 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 is the actual story of post-AGI.
Not the jobs chart. Not the GDP numbers.
The question of what humans do when they are no longer needed in the same way.
Holdupp
Everything above, the UBI world, the hobbyist hierarchies, ambition pointing toward space, human-made art becoming luxury, sports surviving, all of it rests on three quiet assumptions.
That AGI is broadly accessible.
That no single entity monopolizes it.
That the world does not fracture into resource wars, authoritarian lockdowns, or corporate feudalism before we even get there.
In other words, I was describing the best case.
And that is the uncomfortable part.
If the optimistic version still has drifting people, fractured identities, and meaning becoming the scarcest resource, sit with that for a second.
Because the pessimistic version does not need much imagination.
It is the same story, except access is concentrated in fewer hands.
Two or three companies. Or a few governments.
Deciding what AGI does and does not do. Who gets it. On what terms. What it is allowed to tell you. What it is not.
That is why I think the most important question right now is not just whether AGI is coming.
It is who is building it, how, and whether we have actually thought about what it means to trust them with it.
Not the technology. The people holding it. The trust me bros.
When Sam Altman says OpenAI’s mission is to ensure AGI benefits all of humanity, while OpenAI is a private company raising enormous amounts of money and operating with very little public oversight, are we just supposed to trust that?
Based on what, exactly?
When Dario Amodei talks about AI being one of the most transformative technologies in history, wiping out a huge chunk of jobs, and needing guardrails or restricted access to prevent misuse, how do we know the organizations building it will not become the bad actors themselves?
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. Consent is assumed.
So maybe the real devil’s advocate move here is not imagining what post-AGI looks like.
It is asking whether the path we are on leads to some sort of utopia, or something considerably darker.
And if it matters to you which one we get, maybe it is worth paying attention to who is making that call.
Because right now, it is not you.