Beware the AI leisure class Free time won't translate into real freedom

Consider the dreamy tranquillity of Vermeer’s muse The Milkmaid as she pours milk from a terracotta jug. While there is nothing to envy in her domestic servitude, there is something beguiling about how lost in thought she is while engaging in a mindless task. Her thoughts seem away: perhaps on a lover, or perhaps she has just struck upon the idea of oat milk. Such moments of serene reflection are vanishingly rare nowadays, as we whip out our phones to kill time as we sit on a train or wait for the kettle to boil.

Yet it’s not just our thoughts we are surrendering to technology; it’s our memory too. When my grandfather was a child, he was made to learn great chunks of poetry by heart. I by contrast, like my whole generation, have outsourced my memory to my phone, where I set reminders, keep phone numbers and compile vast to-do lists. Why bother to remember the words of the Bard — or even my new postcode — when I can look them up in an instant? And you can forget about learning a foreign language once we each have our very own Babel fish.

I hear of small acts of defiance: one acquaintance is memorising everything that matters to him, from phone numbers and flapjack recipes to the most elegant of maths theorems. It might seem foolish — resistance is a little futile at this stage. But just because we can delegate our duties to machines, does that mean we should?

Unlike a human, AI can’t find fulfilment in the fruits of its labour. The sense of pride, identity and community so familiar to Philip Roth’s glove-cutters in American Pastoral is alien to the machines that replace them: “Though they considered themselves to be men more aristocratic than anyone around, including the boss, a cutter’s working hand was proudly calloused from cutting with his big, heavy shears. Beneath those white shirts were arms and chests and shoulders full of a workingman’s strength — powerful they had to be, to pull and pull on leather all their lives, to squeeze out of every skin every inch of leather there was.” These noble men were the last of their kind, soon to vanish into the pit of industrial decline.

But maybe there are finer ways to fill your days than a vocation. While AI doomers fear an age of melancholic unemployment, others preach a glorious utopia of unlimited leisure. In this future paradise, we will be liberated from the drudgery of work and chores. Our working days could be shortened, leaving us time to devote to higher things: family, culture, nature, charity, contemplation, amusement. We could revive and democratise the ancient Roman concept of otium, cultivated leisure practised by the elite. And thanks to a generous form of Universal Basic Income — supposedly to be procured through Sam Altman’s iris-scanning crypto Orbs — every one of us could become a lady or gentleman of leisure. It would be an aristocracy for all.

In this Eden, AI could bring an end to the tyrannical rule of Lord Time, which began with the chiming of medieval church bells and intensified during the Industrial Revolution with the invention of railway timetables, factory shifts and the working week. It was not long before every human breath was commoditised, deployed for maximum utility in the labour market. And rest became strictly defined and heavily regulated. Now, however, we could simply clock off.

But free time doesn’t necessarily translate into actual freedom. Who can afford to recreate the charmed existence of a Roman philosopher — all splendid villas and strutting peacocks? It’s more likely we morph into WALL-E-style consumerist marshmallows — all Deliveroo meals, Hinge and TikTok reels. We would live for dopamine kicks and little else.

How, then, might we balance the human desire for meaningful work with the need for AI-fuelled economic growth? Already, PwC has predicted that global GDP could be up to 14% higher in 2030 as a result of AI. Perhaps, with AI to grind away on our behalf, work will become a dalliance. Much as the appalling KidZania allows children to pay to spend the day pretending to work “jobs” for corporate sponsors in Westfield shopping centre, similar capitalist playgrounds might emerge for adults; we would pay for the satisfaction of doing a good day’s work: blowing glass, bricklaying, or writing a chapter of a novel.

We may, however, never reach such fantastical extremes. But the trick with AI is sensing when to stop. We should hold up every aspect of our lives to the light and wonder where AI could enhance or degrade our humanity. While inaction is the bête noire of humanity, it can sometimes be the wisest course; as Pascal wrote in 1654, “all of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone”. For every AI innovation we discover, we should consider: what, exactly, are we saving all our time and effort for?

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Olivia Ward-Jackson is a Commissioning Editor at UnHerd.

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