Matthew Barnett, Tamay Besiroglu, Ege Erdil
October 21, 2025
It’s natural to feel anxious as we approach the inevitable automation of all human work. economic theory suggests that full automation will cause wages to collapse, potentially below the subsistence level: the minimum necessary to sustain human life.
However, full automation of the economy will probably also greatly improve the situation for most people. Falling wages will coincide with a sharp rise in living standards, rapid medical progress and an explosion in the variety of goods and services from which people can choose.
This may seem paradoxical. How can people prosper even when their salaries plummet?
The answer is to recognize that salaries are only one source of income. People also earn income from investments, collect property rents, and receive government transfers such as pensions or welfare payments.
Nowadays, most people make most of their income by selling their work. This is what makes wages a good indicator of the standard of living in a given region, right now. But full automation will break this pattern. Humans of the future will probably have low salaries, but they will have much greater wealth and will wield technology far superior to what we have today.
To get a glimpse of what this future will look like, it’s helpful to first understand how similar technological revolutions have played out in the past.
Historical precedent: child labor
In traditional agricultural societies, children were often expected to help on the farm, five year old and become a net contributor to the household long before adulthood. This situation was the result of economic necessity: families could not afford to allow their children to sit idly by and enjoy their childhood in leisure. The income was too little and the risk of economic misery too great.
Throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, this situation began to change gradually. Machines were introduced to automate parts of the agricultural process. Innovations such as the mechanical reaper, steel plow, and harvester were implemented around the world, allowing people to produce more food per hour of work. Automation in factories allowed for an abundance of manufactured products. The assembly line, electric motors, and power looms paved the way for cheap transportation and clothing, freeing people to spend their time in new ways.
This mechanical revolution had a profound impact on child labor. Whereas child labor was once considered an unfortunate necessity, the new wealth created by automation has made it excess. Families who no longer depended on their children’s wages stopped sending them to work. In response, society reoriented its perception of childhood from a period of economic activity to one devoted to education and play. Mass public education was established and child labor was widely prohibited.
This social transformation was partly a consequence of politics, but was ultimately made possible by economic forces. The wealth created by automation allowed society to make different decisions about how children spend their time. Likewise, future automation will prompt society to reevaluate its attitude toward work. Future legal systems may make human labor, rather than essential to the functioning of the economy, superfluous or even inhumane.
This policy change, although seemingly distant, is already partly underway. In developed countries, the share of GDP assigned Public social spending (government spending on retirement, disability support, family assistance, unemployment insurance, housing subsidies, and health care) has increased continuously over the past hundred years, rising from single-digit percentages in the early 20th century to between 15 and 35 percent in the 21st.
Virtually every country in the world has experienced the same pattern as its economy has grown. As countries become richer, they consistently channel more resources toward supporting groups for whom employment is more burdensome and less useful, such as the elderly, disabled people, and parents with dependent young people.
AI is likely to accelerate these trends, increasing spending on programs that allow people to live without needing to work, while rapidly increasing GDP. The consequence will be to free people from work, allowing them to enjoy their time as they wish, whether that is educating themselves, playing games, socializing, solving puzzles or traveling the world.
However, the most notable feature of this future will not be leisure itself, but the extraordinary wealth that accompanies it.
Humans will be a small elite, supported by a vast artificial intelligence workforce.
There is no scenario in which most humans lose their jobs to machines without those machines simultaneously generating massive GDP gains. After humans lose their jobs, economic production that once required human labor will continue to occur, but can now be multiplied many times over by increasing the AI workforce. While the human workforce grows slowly over decades due to biological limitations, an AI workforce can rapidly scale to billions of digital workers and robots, producing enormous wealth that must flow somewhere.
Let’s consider Qatar as a point of comparison. Immigrant workers make up approximately 94% of the country’s workforce, but only Qatari citizens, who make up the remaining 6%, are eligible to receive most government social benefits. As a result, Qatari citizens enjoy remarkable prosperity, with minimum pensions valued at more than $5,700 per month and an early retirement age of 50 years.
Let us now consider humanity after total automation. Instead of millions of migrant workers, humanity will have billions of digital workers at its disposal. For every human, there could be thousands of robots, effectively an army of tireless servants for each individual.
With billions of digital workers and robots entering the economy, a tenfold increase in GDP represents a very conservative estimate of how much full automation could increase economic output. If this modest increase were reflected proportionately in U.S. tax revenues, we could resolve all current Social Security funding shortfalls, lower the retirement age to 18, and raise the average payment to more than $150,000 per adult per year.
Prosperity will likely be widely shared
Today, most families own some assets such as retirement portfolios and real estate, although these assets provide only a small portion of their current income. Since full automation will make the world dramatically richer, owning even small amounts of capital will likely be enough to ensure a comfortable retirement. As a result, most people will likely benefit greatly from full automation.
But there is a risk that those who held negligible amounts of capital before full automation will be out of luck. With nothing but their salaries to survive on, they can live boring lives and perhaps even starve to death. However, at least for citizens of high-income democracies, this risk appears to be quite small.
Let us remember the historical trend towards greater redistribution on a national scale over time. As countries have become richer, they have consistently spent a larger proportion of their GDP on social welfare programs. This suggests that as the world becomes much richer thanks to full automation, social welfare programs will expand even further, channeling large amounts of wealth to the poor.
You might think that the rich would simply coordinate to prevent this income redistribution from occurring. But this result is unlikely. Despite popular belief to the contrary, the rich have a relatively modest impact on politics. Empirical research consistently sample that campaign finance spending has only small effects on voter support, and that wealthy donors cannot reliably influence elections or legislation in your favor.
The clearest evidence of this is that income redistribution is already happening on a massive scale. Progressive income taxation is a central pillar of public revenue in most of the world’s high-income countries. If the rich could coordinate effectively to eliminate income redistribution, they would have abolished this system long ago. Similarly, if the rich had their way, social welfare programs for the poor and middle class would be small. However, these programs typically represent the largest spending items in government budgets. The fact that redistribution occurs so widely, despite the obvious incentive for the rich to prevent it, reveals how limited their political power really is.
These arguments suggest that the wealth of full automation will be widely shared. It will not be distributed equally, but it will be distributed widely enough for most people to enjoy standards of living much higher than those we consider prosperous today.
A world beyond riches
A world with total automation will not be the same as ours, simply with greater quantities of existing material. Instead, it will be full of technological wonders. AIs will innovate rapidly and create the economies of scale necessary to support a much greater variety of products. The new world will be full of goods and services that today would seem like science fiction.
In our lifetimes, we can see totally realistic virtual reality, abundant fusion power, cognitive enhancement through brain augmentation, mind uploading, relativistic space travel, unlimited personalized entertainment, complete control over our genomes, ultra-luxurious hypersonic air travel, and extremely pleasurable drugs that do not carry major side effects. Radical advances in medicine could reverse the aging process and cure chronic diseases, allowing people to live much longer and healthier lives.
However, these possibilities barely scratch the surface. Technologies we cannot yet conceive of may prove even more transformative. Future humans could gain entirely new senses, develop entirely new ways of communicating, and expand our minds beyond recognition. From our current point of view, we can become gods.
Our goal is to make this future a reality as soon as possible.
Do you want to join us? we are hiring software engineers, ML engineers and quantifiers.
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