What Comes After Intellectual Work?

This conceptual question occurred to me recently in light of reading several books involving the evolution of work in human society…

What will humans do with their time after machines start to do most of our thinking for us?

The latter is also starting to be replaced in large part, much of the intellectual industry — areas such as journalism, marketing, accounting and finance, government economics and other forecasting and budgeting processes…

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So what comes after intellectual work? What will humanity focus its time on when much of this intellectual work is either done away with entirely or done by machine?

From roughly 1900–1950 Western economies were focused on transitioning from agrarian societies to machine based manufacturing.

Then we started getting into an “information age” where we produced more and more goods at less cost, through economies of scale, automation and increased efficiency.

So these big industries like steel, auto manufacturing etc. required fewer people and increased their output at the same time.

We are now seeing the same thing with intellectual labor. Computer and AI systems are beginning to replace much of the “busy work” of these industries, the research &…

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