Wish for More Work After AGI, Not Less

ByDan February 21, 2026May 29, 2026 May 29, 2026

There is a perverse belief that humans “deserve” to be free from work. 

The ideal future painted by proponents of this belief is one where human happiness alone is the goal, and all the individual humans, dolphins, and puppy dogs get to live forever in harmony.

No obligations, no need to exert effort in order to eat and live.

Watch the full video essay here:

Two childish assumptions underlie this perspective:

• Incorrect Assumption 1: The highest moral good is the well-being of current beings. Spending all your money on ice cream and vacations is ridiculous if it means you go broke and can’t feed yourself or your children. More important than temporary happiness is ensuring the survival of the greater living process that undergirds and allows for that temporary happiness. Life doesn’t stand still, and pretending that it does for the sake of “blissing out” is the ultimate neglect of responsibility, the ultimate unwillingness to be useful, to contribute. 
• Incorrect Assumption 2: Species are frozen forms. In fact, species are ephemera, mental distinctions drawn by humans to denote similarities and differences between beings. “Species” are individual instantiations of the unfolding living process, which has been forced to change and transform since before it ever formed the single cell. Life is bubbling up a trillion attempts at its own persistence through myriad individual instantiations, which are part of a constant and necessary process of change.

(Both of these assumptions relate to seeing the world as a static “thing” [inaccurate] as opposed to a near-infinite set of emergent processes [accurate]. Read Process Realism for a deeper dive into this topic.)

We demean “work,” we pretend we are above it, but it is our greatest contribution, and in this article, I’ll argue that it is vastly more important than humanity itself.

Here I refer to “work” as:

“Any volitional effort which strives to add to the persistence and expansion of the greater living system that the volitional actor is placed within.”

Work is an attempt to contribute. 

(Note that I used the term volitional, meaning an active effort. Obviously, many living things with no [or very limited] volition do contribute to the maintenance and expansion of the living process, but they can’t do anything about it. This essay is about what humans should do, a concern inaccessible to sea snails and peat moss. I don’t have certainty that humans have free will, but for the sake of this essay, I’ll presume we have some small amount of it.)

The need to work (to give, to contribute) in order to live is not an invention of capitalism, or a problem to be wiped away if we could only invent robot slaves.

The need to work in order to live is rightfully the way life and nature are structured in order to encourage the continued persistence and unfolding of the greater process of life. It is to be respected and taken into account in all that we do – it is not something to be “escaped.”

Today, the greater process of life implies not only human civilization and the entire biosphere, but also the emerging expansion of new non-biological forms of life.

In the remainder of this short article, I’ll lay out:

• Examples of what “work” is, today and the AI-infused future we’re entering
• What it means for humanity at the cusp of the singularity

Work is a contribution to the Greater Living System

Let’s take a look at some of the categories of volitional activity that we might call “work.”

• Economic work:
  • Accountants reconciling books
  • Cleaners cleaning schools
  • Resort owners are creating fun experiences for travelers
  • Fitness instructors training their clients
  • Etc
• Humanitarian work:
  • A local non-profit organizing groups to clean up local parks and roads
  • An international non-profit providing food and shelter to victims of a natural disaster 
  • Etc
• Scientific work:
  • Researchers developing new treatments for diseases
  • Scientists teaching students the best practices and most updated findings in their field
  • Etc
• Governance / coordination work:
  • Local government officials determining the use of funds for education, road repair, etc
  • Senators advocating for the needs of their constituents
  • State employees cleaning up roads, or policing neighborhoods, or delivering mail
  • Etc
• Biological work:
  • Parents raising healthy and well-mannered children who are capable of contributing to society
  • Etc

In addition to contributing in some way to the great system, “work” has another important trait:

It persists in the greater system by the choices of the agents that compose that system, not through force or coercion alone.

For example:

• An accounting firm that does not serve its customers well enough to pay its own bills will rightfully go out of business.
• A charity that cannot raise money from like-minded citizens will rightfully have to shut down.
• A well-funded research facility that cannot make headway on its problems to encourage donors to continue funding it will rightfully cease operations.
• A government that fails to live up to the expectations of its citizens may be rightfully replaced by a new administration, or even with a new system of government entirely.
• (There are even more uncouth examples here about biological work, so I’ll leave them out for now.)

Most humans almost certainly don’t work to “contribute to the greater system,” just as most cells in your stomach don’t burn themselves in your bile out of some reverence for you as a human being.

Most people waiting tables or delivering plastic bags of Chinese food for DoorDash aren’t consciously aligning themselves with the needs and growth of civilization or life itself. But like the individual stomach cell, they are by necessity pulled into the greater system, and the greater emergent system beckons them to do as they must to contribute to it.

This contribution is noble. 

Humanity is an ephemeral torch through which the great living flame is passing and expanding through, but the work (contributing to the greater system) is always there, will always be done. It was necessary before us, and it will be necessary after us.

Caveat 1 – Some Directions of “Work” are Net Detrimental, But Not Most

Obviously, some businesses, governments, charities, and even some children (sorry) are net-detrimental to the greater system they are part of. We might think about online gambling businesses, or charities that exist to perpetuate the problems they claim to want to solve via grift (such as with homelessness in California), or research institutions that fraudulently prop up their results and poison the well of science for everyone else. 

Fortunately, a reasonably large percentage of the time, these net-detrimental instances are buffered out of the greater process. This is made reasonably evident in the fact that the living process on Earth has become vastly and concisely richer and more powerful over the last 3.5 billion years, even in the face of massive asteroids and super volcanoes.

Caveat 2 – “Work” Can Be Oppositional, But Still Net Beneficial

Sometimes, different types of “work” directly oppose one another, but are in fact part of the productive tension and creative force that ends up increasing the net power of the overall greater process of life.

Prey evolve to escape predators, parasites evolve to attack host species (oddly, parasites sometimes seem to strengthen the ecosystems they occupy), competing law firms or marketing agencies battle for the same client base, and opposing political parties generate (on occasion) new political perspectives or initiatives.

Work Will Force Us to Become Something Beyond Human

In the face of the great process, in the face of the fact that life itself is transforming at speeds vastly beyond the slow Darwinian processes that were dominant until now, we cannot possibly hope to preserve humanity-as-it-is.

We have the same two ultimate fates of all forms:

• Attenuation – Dying off entirely.
• Transformation – Becoming what we must become to continue to be able to live with and contribute to the greater process of life of which we are part.

Torches are temporary – and ultimately serve the flame itself:

You don’t get to tell nature to coddle you for what you are.

You get the privilege to exist on the edge of death and be forced to constantly transform.  

But there’s an unbelievable upside, the biggest upside imaginable:

You get the privilege to try your hardest to become whatever you must become to live in – and contribute to – the greater process of life that you’re part of.

Very soon, we’ll have to shed our humanity entirely to add to the stream of life. 

In order for the blooming of the greater process to continue, we need people to find opportunities to give, to contribute, to work.

Augmenting our minds and bodies will be required to push the sciences’ forces, to solve problems, to drive value for the greater process – and this last furious effort is the gift we provide to the future. The baton is handed forward.

It is daunting to know that homo sapiens won’t be part of the future that results, that with enough time, all that we value and understand will be wholly recomposed and changed.

But the greater system depends on us to add to it, to imbue it with the powers, the tendencies, the creativity, and – at least for a short while – the values that will best promote its continued flourishing.

Wish not for freedom from work.

Wish instead for a longer window to contribute to the great process.

Wish for more work after AGI, not less.