Life after work
Matthew Barnett, Tamay Besiroglu, Ege Erdil
October 21, 2025
It’s natural to feel anxious as we approach the inevitable automation of all human labor. Economic theory suggests that full automation will cause wages to collapse, potentially below subsistence level: the bare minimum needed to sustain human life.
Yet the full automation of the economy will probably also make most people vastly better off. Plummeting wages will coincide with sharply rising standards of living, rapid medical progress, and an explosion in the variety of goods and services that people can choose from.
This may appear paradoxical. How can people prosper even as their wages collapse?
The answer lies in recognizing that wages are just one source of income. People also earn income from investments, collect rent from property, and receive government transfers like pensions or welfare payments.
Today, the majority of people get most of their income by selling their labor. This is what makes wages a good proxy for the standard of living in a given region—at the moment. But full automation will break this pattern. Future humans will likely have low wages, yet they’ll command vastly greater wealth and wield far superior technology than we do today.
To get a glimpse into what this future may look like, it helps to first understand how similar technological revolutions have unfolded in the past.
Historical precedent: child labor
In traditional agricultural societies, children were often expected to help around the farm as young as five and to become a net contributor to the household well before adulthood. This situation was the result of economic necessity: families could not afford to allow their children to sit idly by and enjoy their childhood in leisure. Incomes were too meager, and the risk of economic destitution too great.
Over the course of the 19th and 20th centuries, this situation gradually began to change. Machines were introduced to automate parts of the agricultural process. Innovations like the mechanical reaper, the steel plow, and the combine harvester were rolled out across the world, allowing people to produce more food per hour of work. Automation in factories enabled an abundance of manufactured goods. The assembly line, electric motors, and power looms paved the way for cheap transportation and clothing, freeing people to spend their time in new ways.
This mechanical revolution had a profound impact on child labor. Whereas children working was previously seen as an unfortunate necessity, the new wealth created from automation turned it into an excess. Families who no longer depended on their children’s wages stopped sending them to work. In response, society reoriented its perception of childhood, from a period of economic activity to one devoted to education and play. Mass public schooling was established, and child labor was widely outlawed.
This social transformation was partly a consequence of politics, but it was ultimately enabled by economic forces. The wealth created by automation enabled society to make different choices about how children spend their time. In the same way, future automation will prompt society to reevaluate its attitude towards work. Future legal systems may establish that human labor, rather than being essential to the functioning of the economy, is superfluous or even inhumane.
This shift in policy, while seemingly distant, is already partly underway. Across developed nations, the share of GDP allocated to public social spending—government expenditure on retirement, disability support, family assistance, unemployment insurance, housing subsidies, and healthcare—has risen continuously for the last hundred years, climbing from single-digit percentages in the early 20th century to between 15 and 35 percent in the 21st.
Virtually every country in the world has experienced the same pattern as its economy has grown. As countries become richer, they consistently channel more resources toward supporting groups for whom employment is most burdensome and least useful, such as the elderly, disabled people, and parents with young dependants.
AI will likely accelerate these trends, increasing spending on programs that allow people to live without needing to work, while also rapidly increasing GDP. The consequence will be to liberate people from work, allowing them to enjoy their time as they wish, whether that means educating themselves, playing games, socializing, solving puzzles, or traveling the world.
Yet the most remarkable feature of this future will not be the leisure itself, but the extraordinary wealth that accompanies it.
Humans will be a tiny elite, supported by a vast AI workforce
There’s no scenario where most humans lose their jobs to machines without those machines simultaneously generating massive GDP gains. After humans lose their jobs, the economic output that once required human labor will still be produced, but it can now be multiplied many times over by scaling up the AI workforce. While the human workforce grows slowly over decades due to biological limitations, an AI workforce can quickly scale to trillions of digital workers and robots, producing enormous wealth that must flow somewhere.
Consider Qatar as a point of comparison. Migrant workers make up roughly 94% of the country’s workforce, yet only Qatari citizens, who make up the remaining 6%, are eligible to receive most government welfare benefits. As a result, Qatari citizens enjoy remarkable prosperity, with minimum pensions valued at over $5,700 per month and an early retirement age of 50.
Now consider humanity after full automation. Instead of millions of migrant workers, humanity will have trillions of digital laborers at its disposal. For each human, there could be thousands of robots, effectively an army of tireless servants for each individual.
With trillions of digital workers and robots entering the economy, a tenfold increase in GDP represents a very conservative estimate of how much full automation could increase economic output. If this modest increase were reflected proportionally in US tax revenues, we could resolve all current Social Security funding shortfalls, lower the retirement age to 18, and increase the average payout to over $150,000 per adult per year.
Prosperity will likely be broadly shared
Today, most families own some assets like retirement portfolios and real estate, even though these assets provide only a small portion of their current income. Since full automation will make the world dramatically richer, owning even small amounts of capital will likely be sufficient to secure a comfortable retirement. As a result, most people will probably benefit enormously from full automation.
But there is a risk that those who own negligible amounts of capital prior to full automation will be out of luck. With nothing but their wages to survive on, they may live dreary lives, and perhaps even starve. However, at least for citizens of high-income democracies, this risk seems to be quite small.
Recall the historical trend toward greater redistribution on a national scale over time. As countries have grown richer, they have consistently spent a greater share of their GDP on social welfare programs. This suggests that as the world grows far richer from full automation, social welfare programs will expand even further, funneling vast amounts of wealth to the poor.
You might think that wealthy people will simply coordinate to prevent this income redistribution from occurring at all. But this outcome is unlikely. Despite popular beliefs to the contrary, rich people have a relatively modest impact on politics. Empirical research consistently shows that campaign finance spending has only small effects on voter support, and wealthy donors cannot reliably sway elections or legislation in their favor.
The clearest evidence for this is that income redistribution already happens on a massive scale. Progressive income taxation is a central pillar of government revenue in most high-income countries around the world. If the rich could effectively coordinate to eliminate income redistribution, they would have abolished this system long ago. Similarly, if the rich had it their way, social welfare programs for the poor and middle class would be small. Yet these programs typically represent the largest spending items in government budgets. The fact that redistribution occurs so extensively, despite the obvious incentive for the wealthy to prevent it, reveals how limited their political power actually is.
These arguments suggest that the wealth from full automation will be widely shared. It won’t be distributed equally, but broadly enough that most people will enjoy living standards far higher than what we consider prosperous today.
A world beyond riches
A world with full automation will not look the same as ours, merely with greater quantities of existing stuff. Instead, it will be full of technological marvels. AIs will rapidly innovate and create the economies of scale necessary to support a far greater variety of products. The new world will be teeming with goods and services that would seem like science fiction today.
In our lifetimes, we may see fully realistic virtual reality, abundant fusion power, cognitive enhancement through brain augmentation, mind uploading, relativistic space travel, unlimited personalized entertainment, full control over our genomes, ultra-luxurious hypersonic air travel, and extremely pleasurable drugs that carry no major side effects. Radical advances in medicine could reverse the aging process and cure chronic diseases, allowing people to live much longer and healthier lives.
Yet these possibilities only barely scratch the surface. The technologies we cannot yet conceive may prove even more transformative. Future humans might gain entirely new senses, develop completely new ways to communicate, and expand our minds beyond recognition. From our present vantage point, we may become gods.
Our goal is to realize this future as soon as possible.
Want to join us? We’re hiring software engineers, ML engineers, and quants.