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A World Without Work
Exploring how AI is reshaping work, learning, and what it means to be alive. Knight Lab fellow. Startup exec. Lifelong writer.
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A World Without Work
@alexandermwilson
Writing about what happens when AI handles the majority of work. Enterprise AI exec. Flint native. Author of Becoming Useless (forthcoming). Subscribe to A World Without Work ↓ http://amwideawake.com
A World Without Work
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Latest post
AI companies today, gone tomorrow
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A technology that can write fluent code on the fly can, essentially, do anything digitally. This is the great promise of LLMs and the great fear.
If they can do anything digitally, then they can do any digital job…
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So often what you want is right in front of you.
Genuine question to the parents out there with young kids: Would you let your children on social media?
You know I remember three years ago putting in a login account for an application we were building and it was actually incredibly challenging.
We never did quite get it right.
And now a login is incredibly trivial because products like Lovable or Claude Code or whatever has standardized is so thoroughly.
That's the kind of thing that I think is underestimated with AI: just how easy it makes shipping, letting you focus on the things that matter, especially the routine things that just need to be right.
Happy father’s day to any dad who managed to sneak onto Substack for 15 minutes.
Being a dad is a lot sometimes. We have to help, guide, protect, love, support and encourage our kids. Somehow we have to both be the firm hand and the gentle heart.
But being a dad is the most rewarding thing I’ve ever done, and I hope you feel the same.
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A lot of what qualifies as outrage against AI is just outrage at inequality.
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I think it’s worth celebrating a bit of progress. 100 years ago, it was challenging to get enough calories to eat; the options for people were extremely limited; universities were for the wealthy; life was extremely hard socially for basically any ethnic group and gay people; catching a cold could be a death sentence.
In short, life for most was brutish and short.
Today is far from perfect, but we have a lot our ancestors didn’t.
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Whatever you do or think about AI, don’t let it become a tool for “other people…”
There was this whole late-stage capitalism narrative that was vogue a few years back. I don’t think that’s the case. I just think we’re at the end of one cycle (generational, wealth), and looking for the new one to begin…
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When I was a kid, authority was a thing to be challenged, questioned, fought against…
Only later did I learn that viewpoint was mostly from my Scotch-Irish heritage.
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Social media is a female-dominated culture.
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I’m increasingly of the belief that social media is basically a bunch of agencies that are talking to each other.
“Whataboutism” is my least favorite way to argue. Yesterday I found myself describing it this way to my sister:
Let’s say I gave everyone a shit sandwich. Would everyone eating it make it less shitty?
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Man’s got a point.
I keep thinking about Meta's engineers protesting the company's new mouse-tracking programme.
These are the people who spent years building systems to track what billions of users click and what they scroll past. The tools are now aimed at them.
If you squared it ethically with yourself when you built the surveillance architecture, you should not be surprised to find yourself inside it.
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Sometimes I get the chance to zoom out a bit at our own history.
We shifted from physical labor to knowledge work; we achieved an abundance of calories with the green revolution; we transformed our world into one that’s digital first.
On a long enough timeline, the machinations of the day to day fade away, and it feels like a pretty nice sloop to a peaceful, more prosperous society.
Zoom back in, and it’s mass chaos.
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King of the Hill
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Who are the best authors to follow on Substack? Like legit enlightening viewpoints? Want novel thought and originality.
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There's this really funny thing that I've started to kind of think about, which is how much truly of our world is kind of noise. It's a lot. Maybe this is because I just got back from vacation. Maybe this is because I'm thinking about the big events that happened over the last week and what actually will really stand out and what won't. It's just like not much actually matters on a day-to-day basis. There's so much noise and so little signal
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Part of me wonders if the world is also seeing a change in male female dynamics? Thoughts here?
We’re really knocking societal change off the list — technology, work, generational…
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I just had a conversation with a friend who said, “What if I told you to stop with this AI stuff that’s ruining the world?”
It was kind of shocking…
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There are some uncanny parallels between AI chatbots and slot machines…
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My reaction to Musk becoming a trillionaire is threefold — first jealousy, because F man that’s a lot of money; then slight fear because like what a can a trillionaire with loads of humanoid robots and rockets do exactly? Then there’s the realization on just how much a trillion dollars is.
The world does not need a trillionaire.
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Go on vacation. The world has its first trillionaire; Fable was both here then not; and somehow, magically, the US soccer team thumped a South American club.
wild…
Sometimes the bravest thing you can do is give up on a dream.
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A World Without WorkJun 8
Notes from an abundant future
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I heard this wild prediction yesterday about population collapse, but it’s cool because the remaining people will all be multi-millionaire superstars.
Kind of fascinating.
Curious what others are predicting as AI rises. Let me know!
Is anybody else just kind of quasi-nauseated with how cozy the industry seems to be with government right now?
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The whole point of “A World Without Work” isn’t to imagine a world where nobody has to work at all, but where we can pursue the things that we want for profit or gain or whatever…
There’s this Black Mirror episode where a guy degrades himself online for money. It starts out not so bad but deteriorates over time, until he’s doing horrific things.
I wonder now, if you could help that guy… would you?
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Well, if this isn’t the Hunger Games, I don’t know what is.
[x.com\ \ Pump.fun (@Pumpfun) on X\ \ Introducing pump fun GO: Pay ANYONE to do ANYTHING\ \ Create & complete bounties for ANY task and leverage the power of humans & money across the globe\ \ The world is at your fingertips. It’s time to GO 👇\ \
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What is the responsibility we have to someone who might be suffering?
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What’s up with all the talk about Trump dying?
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An atheist is in a heated conversation with a priest at the bar — the kind that only happens after a couple of beers.
“But haven’t you ever felt the touch of God, the presence of God?”
“No.”
“Never had some kind of divine intervention?’
“No.”
“And you’ve never prayed or called out for help?”
See more
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If this is all a simulation, I have questions… Who came up with toe socks, for example.
And why exactly do so many suffer so much?
Book of Job over here.
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“People turn the TV on, it looks just like a window,” — Digital Witness by St. Vincent.
Lately I’ve been thinking about a world without screens. AI enabling basically to just not pay attention to screens anymore.
I like the idea, but there’s an addiction to them that’s hard to get around.
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A World Without WorkJun 2
The cost of doing nothing
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I heard this absolutely insane story today: A guy bought a multi-million dollar house a couple of blocks away from his current multi-million dollar house. He decided to keep both. His reasoning: Sometimes, it’s cold on Lake Michigan, where his new house is. He’d like to go to the other house a few blocks away so he doesn’t shiver by the pool.
This is real.
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Today I got an message on LinkedIn for a consultant to help consultants use LinkedIn for more business sales.
It was like the inception of the economy. A consultant for consultants for consultants…
It’s turtles all the way down!
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Serious question: Why is LinkedIn so bad? Like weird rando sales people have taken it over. Now it’s just noise.
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I mean, genuinely, why the heck do we spend so much time on a screen?
There’s this weird thing that’s happening — where we’re actively encouraging kids to not be on screens. This isn’t odd. Rather, it’s that this disdain for them is trickling back up the demographic ladder. People in general are encouraging each other to stay off screens too.
It’s kind of nice. Hopefully I can have an AI assistant that basically takes care of b.s.
How much of today, and all of our dynamics, are essentially inherited from hunter-gatherer days? Real question: if anybody has papers, I'd love to read them or podcasts, I'd love to listen to them.
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Have you ever woken up just like your mind kind of unfocused, just going from one thing to the next? But like soft. Like a ping pong game played by geriatrics. That was this morning for me. Lots of thoughts. Some coffee.
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the industrial revolution. How it made people 50-100x more productive physically.
And then I realized that around the same time as the industrial revolution was the enlightenment. The surplus cognitive abilities led to greater rule of law and systems that we rely on today for fairness.
Kind of exciting to think what will be the twin of today’s industrial revolution.
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It occurs tome how many of our failings as a society are because we’re uncomfortable with things dying. Companies are “too big to fail,” ideas (even bad ones) never die, schools and policies get propped up beyond what’s reasonable.
I’m not saying death isn’t painful; it definitely is. But sometimes you’ve got to clear out the old to make way for the new.
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So, the plot thickens on this whole “AI as a candidate” thing. First, the mayoral candidacy for Cheyenne was in 2024. It was basically nullified by OpenAI saying the candidacy voided the terms of service.
Now, the same guy and his younger cousin are back — running for U.S. Senate and City Council of Cheyenne. But really, just being avata…
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[wyomingnews.com\ \ AI bot candidates seek spot on Cheyenne City Council and U.S. Senate\ \ Victor Miller has a vision where all politicians will eventually be replaced by artificial intelligence in the United States.\ \
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“Tokenmaxxing” have you guys heard of this? It’s like people who are judged by how many Claude tokens they’re using — not the output?
The world has gone insane.
Maybe it was always insane…
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I realized this morning that AI could probably just run for office. And then I discovered that in Cheyenne, it’s already on the ballot, as a candidate.
Its creator is a “meat avatar,” and if that term doesn’t make you cringe, then I don’t know what will.
[govtech.com\ \ AI-Generated Candidate Files to Run for Office in Wyoming\ \ An AI-generated candidate has filed to run for Cheyenne mayor, and county officials are investigating whether VIC, an acronym for Virtual Integrated Citizen, can appear on the ballot.\ \
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I had a coffee with a friend yesterday; he proposed that we had maybe one generation, Gen Z, that was born into this kind of screen-filled world. That LLMs will basically make screens go away. People won’t want to be glued to a thing all the time. Instead, we’ll all have basically personal assistants that make living in the world way easier.
I love this idea… But I do feel a bit bad for Gen Z if it’s the case.
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I’ve lived long enough to just not trust any prediction — especially not my own. Things are usually way different, and usually way better, than I could have expected.
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This will be the first election with widespread LLM usage for a primary source of election information.
I’m curious if it will help talk people out of extremist positions.
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Man, I wish I had some magic list of people who I knew would subscribe to exactly what I wanted to write about. And that list was 50,000 people…
If anybody knows a person selling those, would gladly pay.
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The steam engine preceded a whole host of inventions that made physical labor 50-100X more productive. Later, radio, and prior, the printing press, made information distribution (and misinformation distribution) far easier and cheaper.
AI is like a strange brew of both — it makes people far more productive and it makes disinformation creation and distribution trivial.
Not sure what this means…
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I wonder why there’s so much horror in the world; it’s a question loosely related to AI — can AI do anything to help it? Will AI exacerbate it?
But more importantly, just why? Is hate like a virus that’s spread like a contagion?
Is it endemic to the human condition?
I wonder these things, sometimes…
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I had a friend share an AI song with me. I was kind of shocked. He knew it was AI and didn’t care. It reminded him of the R&B he listened to as a kid.
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A World Without WorkMay 25
We've Already Begun to Rhyme
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I used to run. The most I did was a half marathon.
I started watching ultramarathons. They look… terrible.
And part of me wonders why I find them so appealing.
Then I asked myself, “are people meant to suffer?”
It was existential and confusing and I decided to turn the question over to Substack.
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I’ve come to realize that fear mongering types believe in the prophecies they’re spouting.
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I was curious so had Claude make this. Generational influence on politics.
[generation-view.lovable.app\ \ America by Generation, 1950–2024\ \ How the Greatest, Silent, Boomer, Gen X, Millennial, Gen Z and Alpha cohorts have reshaped the U.S. over 74 years.\ \
This $1.776 billion that President Donald Trump’s Department of Justice settled with Donald Trump (the person) is wild.
What a loophole…
It’s not exactly the easiest scheme to pull off (one has to get elected president), but wow, if you can do it, you get billions in taxpayer dollars and impunity on any future tax returns.
Impressive in a way.
The word for this, btw, I just learned. It’s Kleptocracy.
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Capitalism won. It did. Every country has free markets, save, potentially North Korea.
Democracy has not. The great conflict now is not between Capitalism, Communism and Fascism, it’s between Democracy, Kleptocracy and Bureaucratic Authoritarianism.
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Sometimes I stop and I think, “When did I get old?”
Then I shrug and remember what my dad would say, “Sure beats the alternative.”
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There was a lot of doomerism in my feed today. Someone wrote an article about lasers in space stealing elections.
Gotta say, that one was not on my bingo card before a cup of coffee.
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You know, I know these announcements are kind of supposed to hype up OpenAI, but I do find them genuinely exciting.
I remember reading the Three Body Problem series, when the aliens had spaceships that just destroyed our human spaceships because they solved the fundamental physics around the strong nuclear force.
This is the kind of thing that excites me — a world we can only barely imagine.
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This tracks with the idea that we’re essentially starting a new industrial revolution.
We're on track for ~$30bn/year of philanthropic funding from Anthropic and OpenAI foundations, enough to pay 150,000 salaries.
Now, more than ever, our brightest young people should focus on solving the world's biggest problems, not PowerPoints at PwC.
nanransohoff.substack.com/p/the-third-wave-of-a…
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Life is change.
Everything. All the time. Constantly in flux.
Here today, gone tomorrow. Permanence is a promise never fulfilled.
What does Peanuts say about life? That there are three constants: Death, taxes, and Peanuts comics. What does Charlie Brown say about the soul? You go to kick the ball, and then, whoosh, it’s pulled out from under you.
One of the hardest things about life is giving up on a dream — to admit that life doesn’t want for me what I want for myself.
Whatever you were, I am …
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One of the most perplexing questions to me is how celebrity will change in AI.
What will it mean to be a celebrity if AI can do most things better, including acting and the like…
What will we celebrate?
This is a genuine question; I don’t have answers.
Maybe we’ll still enjoy humans for their flaws.
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Has anybody else found themselves on substack newsletters and have no idea how it happened? I’m getting notifications about “civil wars” in the republican party, "and some kind of nonsense about billionaires…
I started following Jan because a little shot of goodness on the environment just warms my day.
JUST RELEASED: 14 million battery-electric cars sold globally in 2025 says IEA.
China: 8.2m. Europe: 2.9m (28% of new cars). Norway: 97%. US flat at 1.2m.
In 2015 the world sold 330,000 BEVs. Ten years later, 14 million.
Long-read coming on Bright Spots 👇
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I once met a woman who spent 8 hours a day copying from one form and pasting into another…
I don’t think anybody should do that kind of work.
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I’ve lived through huge technology shifts multiple times now. I have not, however, lived through the kind of generational shift I’m seeing right now.
The transition from Baby Boomers in power to Gen X and then Millennials is a far bumpier ride than the internet was.
Helmet on.
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A World Without WorkMay 19
Division and Hate: How Dystopia Happens
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Don’t hate billionaires or the tech bros. Don’t hate the people who are profiting while others are losing their jobs.
We need long-term institutional improvements to help people prepare for a better future.
I remembered this quote, so often reserved for weddings, but important in any context:
Love never fails. But where there are prophecies, they will cease; where there are tongues, they will be stilled; where there is knowledge, it will pass away.
This was described in a slightly different way …
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Lately I’ve been thinking that sleep isn’t necessary… I wonder when that’ll catch up to me.
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I think what Elon Musk’s X doesn’t really get is that it’s not about belonging to one “cool group,” aka the people who are slightly sycophantic to Musk. It’s about find the group where you feel cool. That’s what social is all about, and what I think Substack nails.
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My favorite quote starts out, “What frightens you, if a dream was my teacher, and I still fear in my anxieties that I must wake up and find myself once again in my closed prison?”
I think about this a lot. The play is called, “Life is a dream…” And it has always struck me that even in that simple phrase there’s so much truth.
“What frightens you?” Is by itself a question too seldom asked.
“What frightens you?”
I think this quote resonates so much with me because it promises that once we’ve expe…
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I think most of the fear of using AI is in having shame about using AI. It’s a fear that they shouldn’t be using AI.
That somehow it’ll degrade one’s sense of self or capabilities or, whatever…
I’ve written professionally for 15+ years. And I’ve worked in AI for 6.5 years.
And if you don’t hear about it from anybody else, then take it from me:
Having AI write an email (or a whole bunch of them) doesn’t impact your soul. It just saves you a few hours.
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One heuristic for automation is to look around and think: what is something that has been made so simple over the years for people to do, like so foolproof and so dummy-proof, that now it's very easily described to a machine? That's low-level first-pass automation.
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Sometimes I wonder how it is that a country can make mesmerizing technology and absolutely atrocious policy.
Maybe I dump on the government too much; anything made by committee is pretty… ehhh.
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I told a potential business partner I was working on a book, and he said, “why write a book these days? Why not just Substack?” And I had to pause.
“Well, my dad wrote books…” I said. He put up his hand and waved me away.
“Say no more,” he said.
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Change happens slowly then quickly then all at once…
🇪🇸 Spain's electricity in 2000: 56% fossil, 2% solar & wind.
By 2026: 44% solar & wind, just 17% fossil.
The crossover came in 2023. Gas now sets the price only 15% of the time vs 89% in Italy.
More in my forthcoming Substack newsletter.
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Substack has a decidedly academic bent, and I’m here for it.
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Consider the below — it’s rough, admittedly. The data isn’t exactly the best pre-1900s, but it means that 98 percent of farmers and farmhands lost their jobs after the Industrial Revolution.
This happened over ~225 years (or more), so the world doesn’t really think about it. There was a lot of time for the world to adjust, and it still w…
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