Let me ring my alarmist bell. If your job is knowledge-based - which is to say, if its inputs and outputs can be expressed digitally, if it is work that is done through a computer - then it is short-lived in this world. This describes roughly 70% of labor in the United States.

AGI (Artificial General Intelligence) is coming. There are different ways of defining what AGI will look like, but most straightforwardly it refers to an artificial intelligence system capable of performing any and all cognitively demanding tasks that a human can. Among experts in this area, the debate is no longer about if this will happen, but when. Near-term forecasters place its arrival at around a year from now. More conservative estimates push that timeline out to four or five years. Either way, this is not far off.

Such AGI systems will be self-improving and self-replicating, and in such a climate knowledge-based contributions will very quickly shift from being insignificant, to incidental, to a net negative. In other words, this kind of human labor moves from having value, to having no value at all, to then actively detracting from the system.

There are wide-ranging implications to this, representing a level of social disruption far greater than that caused by the Industrial Revolution. It will reshape what we do, how society is structured, and how we think about meaning, purpose, and our place in the world. The way we conceptualize hierarchy, both consciously and unconsciously, will change; the value of education will change; our relationship to time will change; and the moral landscape of the Western world will shift dramatically.

From our vantage point in history, it makes little sense to frame these changes as either negative or positive, though that framing will be irresistible to many. My sense is that sentiment is already pretty low, and I suspect in the coming year or two anti-AI feelings are going to grow and no doubt become increasingly politicized. It is easy to fixate on negative anecdotes, and harder to perceive systemic improvements as they emerge, even when the pace of change is historically rapid.

To some extent, I don’t think the rise of artificial intelligence is creating a meaning problem; rather, it is exposing one that is already here. Where meaning was once carried by religion, community, and tradition, it is now largely borne by the wage labor we perform. For many - perhaps for most - our self-identity, our place in society, our relationships with others, and even our sense of purpose have become synonymous with our professional role.

Something I have written about and thought about a great deal in the past is time - specifically, our relationship to the clock. When I completed my Jungian Studies master’s dissertation in 2020, a major focus of that work was the dehumanizing effect of clock-time: the way time, in such a system, ceases to be something we inhabit and instead becomes something we are managed by, divided into units of productivity, efficiency, and loss. For Jung, the most meaningful moments in human life occur precisely where linear succession breaks down and lived time thickens into presence.

Modern life is organized almost entirely around work-time: the workday, the workweek, the career arc, the promise of retirement. Even our rest is defined in relation to labor, carved out as recovery or leisure. When wage labor collapses, it is not only income that disappears, but the temporal scaffolding that quietly structures everyday life.

What follows from this is not, at least initially, a flowering of freedom, but a period of disorientation. When the workday loses its authority, time no longer arrives pre-structured. Hours stretch, compress, or lose their distinction altogether. Many people already experience this in miniature during unemployment, illness, or retirement, where the absence of external necessity produces not ease but anxiety. The problem is not an excess of time, but a lack of orientation within it.

This helps explain why the prospect of a post-work future provokes such unease. Work has not only organized our days; it has justified them. It has told us when to wake, when to rest, when effort is required, and when it has been earned. In the absence of that structure, individuals are confronted more directly with questions that modern life has allowed us to defer: what deserves attention, what calls for care, what is worth doing when nothing is demanded.

Seen in this light, the coming disruption is less a technological crisis than a spiritual and temporal one. If clock-time and wage labor have together acted as a kind of secular discipline - imposing order, hierarchy, and meaning from without - then their collapse forces a reckoning with forms of time that are qualitative rather than quantitative, inhabited rather than spent. This is uncomfortable terrain. It cannot be optimized, outsourced, or automated.

None of this tells us what a meaningful post-work life must look like, nor should it. Perhaps counterintuitively, in a far more automated future we can no longer assume that meaning will be supplied automatically. Whether this results in despair, renewal, or something uneven and unfamiliar will depend less on the intelligence of our machines than on our capacity to relearn how to live within time itself - to move beyond the facade and encounter ourselves.