Yesterday, we focused on the death of the American way of work. But today the news on the AI front isn’t quite as dire. According to the New York based economic historian Dror Poleg, AI will be too busy to take your job. That’s the provocative thesis of Poleg’s upcoming book focused on the radical opportunities in our AI age. He argues that AI's massive energy consumption will actually preserve human employment, as society redirects computing power toward critical tasks rather than simply replacing human labor with algorithms. Unlike Yuval Noah Harari's pessimistic "useless class" prediction, Poleg cheerfully envisions a future where everyone becomes valuable through constant experimentation and human connectivity. He believes we're entering an era where work becomes indistinguishable from leisure, interpersonal skills command premium value, and the economy depends on widespread human creativity and feedback to determine what's truly valuable in an increasingly unpredictable world. That’s the electrifying truth about our AI era. For Poleg, AI represents something even more transformative than electrification itself—a utility that will flow like water and affect everything, reshaping not just how we work but the very nature of economic value and human purpose.
1. AI's Energy Demands Will Preserve Human Jobs
"Energy is too valuable to waste on tasks humans can do... we as an economy, as a society, will basically want to throw as much electricity as possible at the things that matter up to the point that maybe automating different tasks that human can do... we'll decide to take electricity away from today's computer, even from people using Excel today and saying, Okay, that electricity is more valuable somewhere else."
2. AI Is More Transformative Than Electrification
"I would say it's more significant... I think it's at least as significant as electricity and electrification. And in many ways... it is more of a utility than anything else for better or worse. So it will flow like water and it will affect everything."
3. Everyone Will Become Valuable Through Experimentation
"My view of the future is actually exactly the opposite [of Harari's useless class]. I think that in the future everyone will be valuable and almost any activity would be valuable because we will not have any idea what is or who is valuable... as a society we will need as many people as possible to constantly do whatever they feel like, create whatever they want to create."
4. Work Will Merge With Leisure and Human Connection
"The general trend that I see is that work will become increasingly indistinguishable from leisure if we're looking long-term... we'll see more of these types of jobs, basically giving each other attention, helping each other know that we exist and sharing with each other more and more specialized and granular types of... service that only we can give to each other."
5. Physical, In-Person Interactions Will Become Premium
"If you wanna know if something is true, the only way to know that is to be there or to know someone who was there... I think that also pushes us back towards offline. In-person physical interactions that will be at a premium."
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