Let’s face it, the idea of full-scale AI automation isn’t just some cyberpunk fever dream anymore. Big tech has been pushing this narrative, (creating some AI anxiety in job markets), and honestly, it feels like we are moving straight toward it, whether we want to play or not. It’s everywhere: in books, in movies, in Elon Musk interviews where he paints a picture of “great prosperity”, universal basic incomes, everything delivered to your door, and your only worry being: what do I do with all my free time? Who wouldn’t sign up for this ride? I’d totally punch that ticket. The tempting promise: a world where all our needs are churned out by robots, AI, and maybe an arms race of universal revenue systems. It sounds awesome—a quality life on autopilot, no strings attached.
But Who Gets to Stop Working First?
Just because this AI-fueled paradise looks close enough to taste doesn’t mean everyone gets a slice at the same time—or ever. The path there is paved with some pretty gnarly challenges:
Economic Shockwaves – The real pain resides in the transition, as this utopia will take time to reach. In the meantime, universal revenue is not a sine qua non option, and job markets will be disrupted: some people will lose their jobs along the way, and poverty may increase before the ultra-productivity on the other side of the coin manages to balance out the loss in consumers. This path seems rather painful at first.
The Energy Dilemma – All this automation needs serious juice. The dream relies on things like nuclear fusion, and although tremendous progress has been made in this direction, fully democratized fusion energy is not around the corner. In the meantime, nuclear fission can do the job, but this requires tremendous investments, and only a fraction of the world has access to such technology, which, on top of that, carries strategic implications and may not be shared easily. In short, very few countries have the resources to power a mostly AI-autonomous economy with nuclear fission.
Mode Collapse – As I explain here, AI has inherent and serious limitations that can hinder its development. Maybe this ideal of a fully automated society isn’t even reachable in the next decades. However, some recent developments—namely, Absolute Zero Reasoning—may enable AI to emancipate from its dependence on data, so mode collapse might not be an issue in the future.
The Green Problem – Even with AI helping, ecology isn’t a solved puzzle. Even though nuclear energy is relatively clean, even with fission, the production and deployment of such infrastructure comes with environmental costs. Waste management, mining for raw materials, and large-scale energy transport remain unsolved or only partly solved problems. We can’t simply wish away the ecological debts that come with building “clean” AI-powered utopias.
Security Soup – Quantum computing threatens to make any safeguard, even blockchain, obsolete—and with AI controlling everything, that’s a recipe for disaster. On top of that, the Skynet narrative has already begun, with initiatives like OpenAI for governments as part of the Stargate project. The very tools designed to manage AI could be the ones to spiral out of our control.
The Epic Divide: Techno-Utopia, Meet Techno-Have-Nots
What is the real issue? The technology itself? Well, algorithms can be open source. Talent is everywhere. In fact, the bottleneck is physical: energy. The first societies that crack the AI-energy combo are gonna rocket ahead. The rest? Well, they might find themselves not just left behind, but stuck in a new kind of underworld. Forget just being poorer—the whole definition of purpose changes when people somewhere don’t have to work at all, while you’re still clocking in. Imagine waking up and realizing it’s not about the paycheck anymore, it’s about your very human condition.
What Should We Do Then?
So, how do we avoid this biblical allegory of “AI ascension” where some societies head for the clouds and others just stay in Hell, working? I don’t know. Nobody really does—we are just on the verge of everything ahead, if that makes sense. Nevertheless, openness matters—a lot, as open source levels the playing field, at least when it comes to knowledge. Global cooperation is also a requirement, but let’s face it: geopolitics is rarely about sharing, and every country has its own dreams of being the one pushing humanity (or themselves) to the next level.
To Cite This Article
@misc{SadouneBlog2025d,
title = {The Grand Dream: AI for Breakfast, Lunch, and Dinner},
author = {Igor Sadoune},
year = {2025},
url = {https://sadoune.me/posts/the_end_of_work/}
}