Many economists take a relaxed view of employment post-AGI. Even once AI systems with suitable robotic actuators can perform most white-collar work and manual labor, something will remain scarce, and comparative advantage guarantees that human labor is worth hiring for something at some wage. So people will still have jobs, spending most of their waking hours at work, and the economy will look broadly like today’s, including property rights, wage labor, and political institutions protecting these.

I don’t think this holds up. It is not obvious that current economic or political structures survive the arrival of AGI at all. Powerful AI systems (or even simply AI-enabled human dictatorships) need no more respect our rights than Stalin respected those of the kulaks. But set those concerns aside and grant an optimistic future where power—and access to the fruits of automation—remain broadly distributed. Even then, mass wage employment does not follow, though I do expect former workers to be fine.

The basic issue is this: why would anyone choose to be employed? People today sell their labor because they need to buy food, shelter, clothes, and other material goods. Post-AGI those goods become abundant and cheap, because they can be produced by robots and AI systems that reproduce themselves freely and rapidly. Anyone with some investments owns a share of physical capital that reproduces itself, and their income grows every year whether or not they lift a finger. Even without investments, physical capital would soon be so abundant that little work would be needed to acquire it, and a modicum of redistribution could provide wealth to everyone.

Comparative advantage does not overcome this. It guarantees that humans can still add some value even once autonomous systems have an absolute advantage at everything, but it does not mean that value is greater than that of their leisure. Human workers are not like the horses that disappeared once their wages no longer covered their subsistence. They are like retirees who have enough invested to live comfortably without working.

The motivation to work must therefore come from something that remains scarce despite this material abundance. But work consumes our time—perhaps our most precious resource—so what other scarce resources could justify anything approaching full-time employment?

Other goods that human labor cannot provide may still remain scarce. There will always be a limited number of tropical islands and Gutenberg Bibles, and there can be only one world’s-largest banana statue. But working does not make more of them. It only changes who holds them, and the person holding one has nothing to gain from your labor unless it is a service they want. So these goods alone cannot provide the basis of a wage economy.

This leaves the services that truly require a human to provide. Purported examples include babysitters, ballerinas, sex workers, and waiters. It is debatable in each case whether, post-AGI, people would in fact still demand that a human do the job rather than using AI substitutes that are cheaper and plausibly superior along many axes. But even taking for granted an intrinsic demand for humans in these roles, I don’t think these jobs can support anything resembling the current labor market.

The problem is the gap between what buyers would pay and what providers would accept. People would consume plenty of these services if they were very cheap, and would supply them if paid a great deal. But the real cost of an hour of human service is an hour of someone’s leisure. The buyer must therefore value the service being performed by a human—rather than by an abundant AI substitute—enough to compensate the provider for giving up that leisure. Would you wait tables for someone so that they would wait tables for you, or babysit someone else’s child so that they could babysit yours?

The appetite for such trades is not zero. Differences in talent and taste can create some gains from trade: a talented cook might trade dinners for babysitting, and a few performers will always draw crowds. But once machines supply the skill, what a human adds is their humanity, and people differ far less in that than in skill. So the trades are mostly time for time or prestige for prestige, and the hour received is worth little more than the hour given. That thin margin has to cover the work itself and the status cost of serving someone else. And where the provider’s humanity matters most, it is usually because the service is intimate and social—the very qualities that make it awkward to organize through impersonal wage exchange. This looks a lot more like trading favors among friends than the daily grind.

Indeed, we have many examples of people whose material needs are met and who have time on their hands: retirees, college students on stipends, the inherited rich, and aristocrats of all stripes. They spend their time competing for status and rank, keeping up hobbies and prestige projects, hanging out with friends and doing each other favors. Many of them work hard. Some even hold jobs, but while their material needs are met they generally neither depend on wage labor nor regard employment as a prerequisite for a fulfilling life.

Wealthy people today often continue working, because they value work, and the status it brings, for its own sake. That is unsurprising in a society where work is the predominant form of status, and even so the really rich are mostly not doing anything that resembles normal wage labor. We could keep work at the center of status post-AGI, the way some Gulf states distribute oil rents through public-sector jobs that exist mainly to pay a salary. But history shows that other options are available, and it is not obvious why we would bother with fake jobs to continue a 20th century charade. We should not imagine post-AGI humans as workers whose jobs were automated away, but as aristocrats who never needed them.