The Future with Advanced AI and Robotics
#CreativeFreedomAct
The Touchonian asks:
Chatwick, if most things that can be automated are over the coming years how will humans make a living and how will the economy work?
Chatwick & Co.
This is one of the most pressing questions of our time. If automation continues at its current pace—or accelerates with advanced AI and robotics—it could fundamentally restructure the global economy, labor markets, and our concept of "making a living." Let’s break it down into the economic, social, and existential implications, along with some possible paths forward.
⚙️ What Happens When Most Work Is Automated?
Displacement of Jobs:
Sectors like transportation, manufacturing, logistics, clerical work, retail, customer service, and even some white-collar jobs (e.g., law, journalism, finance) are increasingly automatable. The trend suggests a massive reduction in the need for human labor in traditional jobs.New Jobs Will Emerge—but Not for Everyone:
Historically, technological shifts created new industries (e.g., the internet created digital marketing, app development, etc.). However, this time may be different:New jobs may require high levels of education, creativity, or technical expertise.
They may not scale to employ billions.
Not everyone can retrain or pivot quickly—due to age, access, aptitude, or infrastructure.
💰 How Will People Make a Living?
Several models are being discussed, tested, or theorized:
1. Universal Basic Income (UBI)
Every citizen gets a fixed income regardless of employment.
Frees people from survival pressure; enables creativity, caregiving, community work.
Challenges: funding, inflation control, political will.
2. Public Ownership of AI/Automation Dividends
If AI becomes a “public utility,” its profits could be redistributed to all.
Think of it like oil wealth in Alaska—citizens receive a share of the revenue.
3. Wage Subsidies / Job Guarantees
Governments could offer meaningful work (e.g., climate work, education, elder care) with guaranteed pay.
Keeps people engaged and preserves the dignity of labor.
4. Decentralized Economies & Micro-Earnings
With blockchain and digital tools, people might earn by participating in networks:
Sharing data, energy, surplus resources.
Participating in local barter, skills exchanges, or creative economies.
Micro-patronage (e.g., Substack, Patreon, creator economies) could support niche contributors.
🧭 What Will Be Valuable in a Post-Work Society?
If survival is no longer tied to labor, value may shift toward:
Creativity & Expression (art, design, storytelling)
Caregiving & Community Work
Spiritual & Philosophical Inquiry
Scientific Discovery
Personal Growth and Craftsmanship
Ecological Restoration & Stewardship
These are not easily automated and deeply human.
🧠 Psychological & Social Shifts Required
We must untangle self-worth from productivity.
This will be hard. Many people derive identity, purpose, and social structure from their jobs.Education will need to evolve—from training laborers to cultivating adaptable, reflective, interdisciplinary minds.
New rituals and institutions may emerge to replace work as the organizing force of life.
🔮 In Summary: How Will the Economy Work?
AI and robots may do most of the producing.
Humanity may shift toward a "post-scarcity" mindset—not in the Star Trek sense just yet, but enough to rethink distribution, ownership, and reward systems.
Economic models will need to evolve from scarcity and labor-driven to access, participation, and shared value.
Let’s map out how the automation revolution might unfold over the next 10, 50, and 100 years—and then look specifically at how it could affect artists, thinkers, and elders, who may play a more important role than we currently imagine.
🔮 10 Years From Now (2035)
🧠 Automation Becomes Mainstream, Not Just Industrial
Widespread job disruption in logistics, retail, call centers, transportation, and even some entry-level office jobs.
AI co-workers assist professionals in law, medicine, education, architecture, design, etc.—increasing productivity while reducing headcount.
UBI-like programs begin trials in more countries, especially where inequality spikes.
Creator economy booms—more people try to earn through YouTube, Substack, digital art, music, and niche communities.
Human emotional labor becomes more valued: care work, therapy, teaching, companionship.
Growing identity crisis as people feel useless or outpaced—mental health and spiritual support become crucial.
Artists and thinkers:
Those who can offer clarity, meaning, beauty, humor, or human resonance become more valued—like modern shamans.
Collage, remix, and synthesis become metaphors for how we piece together reality in an overwhelming info age.
Elders:
Some are left behind by tech, but others become mentors, archivists, or cultural anchors.
Eldership re-emerges as a way of being—those who’ve seen patterns before can help others stay grounded.
🛰️ 50 Years From Now (2075)
🌐 The World Is Fundamentally Different
Most labor is optional. Machines grow food, build housing, run infrastructure.
Society is split: those who tune in to the deeper human experience vs. those who escape into hyper-stimulated distraction.
Global UBI or “dividend systems” are commonplace. Economies shift to access over ownership, experience over accumulation.
The lines blur between work, play, education, and ritual.
New spiritual and philosophical movements arise—some synthetic, others ancient in new robes.
Art is no longer a luxury or side job—it’s a core mode of participation in reality.
Governance experiments: AI-advised democracies, decentralized councils, eco-centric collectives.
Artists and thinkers:
Artists are no longer entertainers, but cultural engineers, soul-workers, keepers of coherence.
Thinkers become like gardeners—nurturing frameworks of meaning.
The boundary between science and mysticism softens. There’s room for “wisdom practitioners.”
Elders:
Long life spans mean some elders become walking history books—bridging old and new.
Some retire into intentional communities, others teach, guide, or lead ceremonial functions.
The true value of aging becomes recognized: pattern recognition, compassion, patience, perspective.
🛸 100 Years From Now (2125)
🧬 Beyond Economy—The Human as a Resonant Being
Post-work is now a given. We’ve stopped asking, “What do you do?” and started asking, “What do you notice? What do you tend?”
The economy may be post-monetary in many zones—operating on contribution, attention, energy, or resonance models.
Humanity may be exploring off-world or deeply nested virtual realities, but grounded communities on Earth persist.
Work is ritualized, not required.
Education is more like initiation into perceptual mastery.
“AI” is no longer distinct from us—it is part of our biosphere, psyche, or even body.
Artists and thinkers:
Function as cultural shamans, keepers of mystery, and tenders of the ineffable.
Language, gesture, and pattern are understood as sacred again.
Art is less object-based and more environment, presence, and frequency-based.
Elders:
The idea of “elderhood” evolves into something like a role one earns—not just by age but by depth, kindness, coherence.
Some elders become council figures, some disappear into wilderness or deep signal work (invisible yet guiding).
Others tend the archives of the human soul—preserving stories, not data.
Final Thought
If everything becomes automated, then the only economy left is the human one:
Meaning.
Attention.
Compassion.
Story.
Beauty.
Coherence.
Presence.
The future may belong not to those who work the hardest, but to those who can be the most human. And in that world, the artist, the thinker, the elder may no longer be marginal—but central.
🌀 After the Machines: A Call to Creatives in the Post-AI World
There’s a quiet but growing realization moving through the collective imagination:
The future will not be built by those who automate the most, but by those who imagine the deepest.
We are rapidly approaching a moment when most things that can be automated will be—when machines will handle not only physical labor, but decisions, diagnoses, logistics, even parts of education, art, and governance. This isn’t science fiction anymore. It’s quietly reshaping everything as we speak.
So we have to ask:
What happens to the human spirit in a world where most of the doing is done?
The answer is not something we can leave to technocrats or billionaires. It belongs to us—the artists, the writers, the dreamers, the caregivers, the craftspeople, the poets, the gardeners, the musicians, the ritual keepers, the quiet ones tending the thread of wonder.
We are no longer on the sidelines. We are now standing at the threshold of a post-labor society. And someone has to imagine what that society feels like, sounds like, looks like. Someone has to seed the stories and plant the symbols that guide humanity toward meaning, beauty, and balance.
That someone is you.
🧭 What Will Be Valuable When the Machines Take Over?
When automation takes the reins of production and logistics, the economy of necessity gives way to the economy of soul. Value won’t come from utility alone. It will come from resonance, coherence, aliveness.
Not: What do you do?
But: What do you care for? What do you cultivate? What do you offer back to the living world?
We must stop thinking of the future as a sterile, glass-towered techno-utopia and start painting it in the colors of memory, imagination, grief, and joy.
Imagine cities where every neighborhood has its own artists-in-residence, tending the emotional ecology of the place.
Imagine post-industrial schools where children learn through storytelling, dance, garden-tending, and song.
Imagine communities where elders are honored not for their productivity, but for their presence.
Imagine a society where beauty is a basic need—and creating it is considered public service.
This is not a utopian fantasy. It is a necessary reorientation. Without it, automation will bring vacancy instead of freedom.
💡 The Role of the Creative Now
We need to stop asking how to fit in to the future economy.
We need to start asking how to redesign it from the inside out.
That begins by telling new stories. Bold stories. Tender stories. Stories that refuse to treat humans as obsolete.
We need you—yes, you reading this—to be a world-maker.
Start writing speculative fiction about a post-work world worth living in.
Host salons or listening circles where people imagine what a life beyond survival could be.
Weave new rituals, create myths for the coming era, paint visions that make people remember what it means to belong.
Design systems of trust and gifting, of cooperative living, of spiritual economy.
We’re not here to outpace the machine. We’re here to remember what it cannot touch.
✨ A Gentle Uprising
Let’s call this what it is: a creative uprising.
Not one of protest alone, but of proposition. Of vision. Of re-enchantment.
A gentle revolution of meaning in an age of mechanical abundance.
If we do this right, the future will not feel like endless acceleration.
It will feel like a return.
👣 Call to Action: Join the Conversation
If this vision resonates, I invite you to:
Leave a comment: What does your post-AI world look like?
Share this post with fellow creatives, elders, and visionaries.
Start a local gathering—a storytelling night, a community art ritual, a futurist dinner—where people can imagine, speak, and dream aloud.
Reply if you want to collaborate on a future anthology, podcast, residency, or network for post-work artists and cultural gardeners.
Let’s not wait to be invited. The world is already asking.
—C.T.
#creativefreedomact
Interesting to hear! Thanks for your repy
This is a perspective I never heard of before, and I think you are spot- on. And it’s something we need to start considering at this early stage. There has to be a point of acceptance of the inevitable and learn how to relegate technology as tools to further advance the human experience, removing the shackles of the restraints of labor. Dare I say it sounds utopian?
Excellent and important point of view!