The End of Work As We Know It?

As developments in AI gather speed, we have to confront the question of just how much our lives will change. As AI tools become more intelligent and self-sufficient, employment will be one of the first areas where they will have an impact. Many kinds of jobs will be replaced, and it will take time for new types of jobs to emerge.

?And it is by no means certain that there will be jobs for everyone.

In this context, we find ourselves facing an intriguing paradox. The very system that reduces our role in production simultaneously demands our active participation as consumers. The idea of growth, upon which most prevalent economic models operate, depends on ever-increasing consumption.

?If jobs are no longer available in plenty, but consumption is still needed, then there needs to be a rational way for this money to be earned. The Universal Basic Income is certainly a starting point, but this will put greater pressure on governments to find funding for what will be an expensive exercise, and given rising levels of AI-induced unemployment, avenues for generating tax revenue will become more limited.

?One possibility—and it is just that, a possibility—is that consumption itself will become a profession. This is not as outlandish an idea as it sounds at first glance. We already see glimpses of this future: A significant number of people are earning a living by being ambassadors of consumption. Their seemingly mundane act of consumption becomes a performance that generates economic value. Tastemakers, curators of experiences, navigators of new options, critics, and reviewers who help us sift out the desirable from the mediocre—these are all the faces of this emerging phenomenon.

?Even as consumers, we spend far more time choosing what to consume. It matters which restaurant we go to, what is our next travel destination, which new brand speaks our kind of language and so on. We invest an enormous of time in researching products before we buy them, making sure that we evaluate options and go through ratings. Implicitly, we are already thinking of consumption as productive labour. In a fundamental sense, we are beginning to define ourselves more by what and how we choose to consume rather than what act of production we engage in—we are foodies rather than accountants, cinephiles rather than stockbrokers.

?Let us extend this thought experiment further. At a fundamental level, basic economic theory tells us that price is determined by demand and supply. Today, human attention is already one of the scarcest resources available. Why shouldn’t consumers be paid to confer their attention on anything with commercial value? If businesses pay intermediaries (media houses), why should they not pay the end user?

?Consider an even more radical possibility: What if every cup of coffee you consumed translated into fractional ownership of the café chain, every ride-share into micro-shares of the mobility company, and every social media post into ownership units of the platform? This isn't mere fantasy—we're already seeing embryonic forms of such systems in loyalty programs and customer rewards. The loyal customer who visits a store weekly could gradually become a meaningful shareholder. The engaged user who helps build a platform's community would own a slice of its growing value.

Every time our data is accessed by a business for its gain, consumers should get a share. Businesses today are getting consumer data for free; if they are willing to pay the intermediaries for this, why not the actual consumer? This isn't merely about getting paid for our data—it's about recognising that in an AI-driven economy, human attention, preference, and choice become increasingly valuable commodities. When machines can produce everything, the ability to influence choices, to create meaning, to generate trends—these quintessentially human capabilities acquire new economic significance. The shift we're witnessing is subtle but profound. Just as the Industrial Revolution transformed human physical labour into standardised units of work-time, the AI revolution might transform human existence itself into quantifiable units of economic value. Every moment of our lives—our choices, our attention, our social connections, and our cultural participation—becomes potentially remunerative, not just in terms of immediate compensation but in terms of accumulated ownership.

One could argue that this is a fairer system than the current one, for it delivers value to those who create it - the people. It creates a measurable, rationally defensible way of distributing value in a world that is not generating enough work for people.

?Yet this imagined future raises deeply troubling questions. The first is whether this is at all feasible. While the technology for distributing micro-payments exists, the complexity of implementing such a system at scale is daunting. More fundamentally, what about the level of surveillance that this will entail? If every action needs to be tracked and measured, we might end up accelerating and magnifying the problem of loss of privacy.

?The questions of inequality are equally concerning. In India, 40% of women do not currently have access to a smartphone. Embedding one's livelihood in a technology that so many do not have complete access to could well be a recipe for disaster.

?At a philosophical level, we must ask: Is this the kind of world we want? Is our final destiny that of being passive consumers—taking what technology gives us, and hoping that it has our best interests in mind?

These are all extremely relevant questions. And yet, they run the risk of confusing what should be with what could be. As things stand, the rise of AI is unstoppable. We will need to find new answers within the framework of what is possible.

?The challenge before us is not just technological but imaginative—can we envision economic structures that recognise and distribute value in radically new ways? The answer to this question might determine not just our economic future but the very nature of human society in the age of artificial intelligence.

(This is a version of an article that has previously appeared in the Times of India)

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