Who Wants to Work Anyway? - by Daniel Schreiber - Dan’s Den

Daniel Schreiber

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Who Wants to Work Anyway?<br>“The future is not a forecasting problem but a design problem.” — Joshua Cohen

Daniel Schreiber<br>May 28, 2026

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Mass unemployment engenders alarm. It calls to mind breadlines, despair, humiliation, wasted lives, social collapse. That’s why the prospect of AI putting millions out of work is everyone’s nightmare.<br>Then again, it is also one of humanity’s most enduring dreams.<br>Homer imagined a god who forged himself metal attendants. Aristotle wrote that “if the shuttle could weave by itself and the plectrum pluck the lyre, masters would have no need of slaves.” Folklore is full of genies who do our bidding, apprentices delegating chores to enchanted brooms, and elves who work while we sleep. And a modern comic strip gives us Calvin’s cardboard-box Duplicator: a machine to send a copy of himself to do the boring work while he goes off to play with Hobbes.<br>The question of the day seems to be: how many jobs will AI destroy, and how many will it create? That matters. But it is a spectator's question. The deeper question is more unsettling: might we want AI to take our jobs?

“The goal of the future is full unemployment, so we can play” — Arthur C. Clarke

The familiar has a strong pull. Resist its grip for a minute, and it’s easy to see both the appeal of Calvin’s Duplicator, and how his fantasy could become a real political choice.<br>Imagine you had a digital twin that you sent to work in your stead. It answers your emails, writes your memos, handles your spreadsheets, attends your meetings. Your boss doesn’t notice the switcheroo, so your paychecks keep coming. Back at the ranch, you’re sleeping more, lifting more, traveling more, reading more, volunteering more, and spending more time with family and friends.<br>Would you call that unemployment? More probably you’d call it magic.<br>Your employer might call it magic too. For the same salary, they now get a version of you that is lower maintenance, while working faster, longer, and smarter. Everyone wins.<br>Dwell on that. You are not working, yet your employer’s productivity is up. You are drawing a wage for doing nothing, yet no one is out of pocket. How come?<br>Well, in classic unemployment, if you’re not working, the work isn’t getting done. Society is making less, so there’s less to go around. Cue the breadlines and social collapse.<br>When your digital twin takes your place, you’re not working but your work is getting done, and then some. Production is decoupled from your exertion. So although you’re working less, society is making more, and there’s more to go around.<br>The thought experiment shows that when we’re replaced by a more productive technology, there’s enough money in the system to pay everyone a generous wage, without anyone losing out. Taken ad extremum, that logic holds even at 100% unemployment. Cue abundance.<br>So why does the prospect of AI agents working instead of us feel less like deliverance and more like disaster?

“You’re fired.” — The Apprentice

The way things are going, your digital twin may, in fact, soon do your job and increase output — but you won’t own your digital doppelgänger. Your employer will. Now your salary becomes their margin. You don’t get leisure. You get a severance package.<br>Same digital stand-in. Same growing pie. Different distribution. Opposite social outcome.<br>That is the thing we fear. Not that machines will work instead of us. That they will work for someone else.<br>Left to market forces, we do not have to strain to imagine how that plays out. Most succinctly, the AI revolution can be summarized in three words: capital displaces labor . Great if you have capital earning for you. Less great if you sell your labor for a living.<br>I understand that “distribution” is a loaded term, and “redistribution” can be triggering. When I talk about the AI surplus, people quickly reach for bludgeons like “socialism” and “communism.” Let me try to parry those.<br>I am a capitalist. I think markets, entrepreneurship, competition, private ownership, and the profit motive have done more than anything to boost humanity’s lifespan and quality of life. The AI era does not call on us to abandon capitalism. It calls on us to notice when elements of its machinery start to warp.<br>The wage economy has been central to capitalism. Its bargain is simple: people work because they are paid. Because people work, society produces more and there’s more to go around. Everyone is better off.<br>That bargain has not only been productive. It has been morally powerful. It underwrites meritocracy: work hard, develop useful skills, take risks, create value, and you deserve to keep a meaningful share of what you produce.<br>But the bargain rests on a formula: human labor is central to production, and a share in production — wages, bonuses, stock options — is the best motivator for human labor.<br>If production becomes decoupled from humans and their...