Over 200 economists and tech insiders, including 16 Nobel Prize winners, signed an open letter this month, warning that AI may take our jobs. Some, like Bill Gates, argue that this is a good thing, and that AI can usher in an age of leisure. But Adrian Johnston, praised as “one of the most audacious philosophers writing today” and hailed by Slavoj Žižek as our generation’s Herbert Marcuse, argues here that this idea is a dangerous myth. True leisure, he contends, must be shaped by forces that differ from those shaping work and profit-production. Yet the business models of tech companies rely on them having precise, fine-grained control over our “free” time, turning us into producers of content, attention and, increasingly, training data. AI may take our jobs, but it will not compensate us with more free time. 

The smartphone is surely the iconic commodity of early-twenty-first-century capitalism. We use smartphones as our alarm clocks. We check the weather, social media, our e-mails, text messages, calendar appointments, to-do lists, and so on, as soon as we wake up and shut off the alarm. Our phones keep us up to date with the news. We shop and listen to music with them. We navigate with them. They monitor our health. These devices, and the information technology that enables them, have become essential for organizing, coordinating, and discharging both our professional and familial obligations, as well as for socializing. After the day’s work is done, we entertain ourselves with these hand-held, portable screens, watching, playing, liking, commenting, flirting, gambling, and so on. We constantly stare at them, in bed, while standing around, when alone, when with others, on transportation, on the toilet—wherever, whenever.

Among the many changes in our lives inaugurated by new information technologies, some of the most radical are changes in how we work. Old jobs are disappearing or being rendered unrecognizable. Established and new professions alike are being threatened with disappearance by the rise of so-called artificial intelligence.

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We confuse working uncompensated for others with playing around on our devices for our own first-personal amusement and distraction.

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We may quickly be approaching a fork in the road between, as Friedrich Engels and Rosa Luxemburg put it well over a century ago, socialism or barbarism. If and when the combined forces of AI, robotics, and other forms of automation bring about the much-feared “jobs apocalypse”—under capitalism, the prospect of IT liberating us from drudgery sadly manifests instead as the threat of homelessness and starvation—a load-bearing pillar of the social contract for the majority of people in capitalist societies, that one must work to eat, will become untenable. What happens then? Do we accept the vast majority of humanity, once made redundant as laborers by IT, being condemned to poverty and death? Or, do we forge a novel social contract in which being employed no longer determines one’s worthiness to eat? Will it be barbarism or socialism indeed?