Fantasizing the Future
A dance performance, a daydream, and an open question: if AI handles everything else, what do we choose to do with ourselves?
I was scrolling TikTok when I came across this performance:
https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZThGeXHBy/
Seven dancers took the stage to “Double Dutch Bus,” dressed in bright, retro 80s streetwear—electric pinks, teals, oversized jackets, high-waisted shorts. The choreography was sharp and playful. They leaned together like a bus turning a corner, mimicked jump rope rhythms, split into mock rivalries during the counting sequences, then snapped back into flawless synchronization. It was joyful, precise, and completely alive. The kind of performance you replay not because it’s trending, but because it makes you feel something.
And while I was watching it for the third time, I started daydreaming.
The world I imagined
I found myself thinking about how much I enjoyed the video—and at the same time wondering how AI will change the world. I imagined a future where universal basic income existed. Robots improved by AI had replaced not just office work, but physical labor too. Warehouses ran themselves. Roads were repaired by machines. Construction, logistics, manufacturing—automated. There wasn’t really anything humans needed to do anymore.
If that world arrives, what happens to us?
Do we live like kings—comfortable, provided for, free from obligation? Or do we immediately start searching for something else to strive toward? If survival is guaranteed, what becomes our purpose?
These aren’t new questions. Keynes wrote about “the economic possibilities for our grandchildren” in 1930, imagining a future of radical leisure once productivity advanced far enough. He assumed people would work fifteen-hour weeks and spend the rest of their time cultivating the good life. Nearly a century later, productivity advanced enormously—and we worked more, not less. Purpose turned out to be stickier than economics.
But AI might be different in scale. Not just productivity gains, but a genuine replacement of the need for human effort across entire categories of work. That changes the calculus.
When the arts become king
Watching those dancers, I started imagining that maybe the arts and entertainment—real, human performance beyond AI-generated content—would become king. In a world flooded with algorithmically perfect music, film, and choreography, the rawness of a live human performance might become rare and valuable. Not because it’s technically superior, but because it’s chosen. Because someone decided to put in the effort when they didn’t have to.
There’s a version of this already playing out in adjacent spaces. Vinyl records outsell CDs now, not because they sound better by every technical measure, but because the imperfection and intentionality carry meaning. Handmade goods command premiums that mass production cannot. The knowing inefficiency signals something that efficiency alone cannot.
If AI generates infinite content—perfectly tailored, frictionless, on demand—the scarcest thing in the cultural economy might be proof of human effort. Not effort as suffering, but effort as choice. The dancer who trained for ten thousand hours in a world that didn’t require it. The musician who played a live show when a perfect AI rendering was available for free. That choice, visible to an audience, might carry a weight we don’t fully have language for yet.
The economic logic follows, even if the economics are strange. Scarcity creates value. Human attention and energy, when freely given, become scarce by definition in a world where machines handle necessity. The arts don’t just survive post-automation—they might become the primary arena where humans signal who they are.
What motivates us without money?
But then another question surfaced: what would motivate us?
If money isn’t the driver, what is?
Maybe it’s something simpler. Maybe in that future, making people happy becomes the currency. Maybe a sincere “That was great” carries more weight than a paycheck ever did. Maybe emotional impact becomes the dividend. The applause. The shared breath in a room. The feeling of resonance.
Psychologists who study motivation have long argued that extrinsic rewards—money, status, grades—can actually crowd out intrinsic motivation. Pay someone to do something they love and you risk turning a passion into a job. Remove the payment and sometimes the passion returns. The self-determination theory research suggests that autonomy, competence, and relatedness are the real drivers of sustained human engagement—not compensation.
A post-scarcity world, if we can reach it equitably, might not demotivate us. It might finally allow most people to discover what they actually care about when survival pressure lifts.
That’s optimistic. It’s also not guaranteed.
Or maybe I’m romanticizing it
Remove necessity and you remove pressure—but you also remove structure. Some people might pursue mastery. Others might drift into endless consumption. Infinite AI-generated entertainment, perfectly tailored and frictionless, waiting for anyone who wants it.
The honest version of this daydream has to include that possibility. Huxley’s Brave New World is as plausible a vision of post-scarcity as any utopia. Soma. Feelies. Distraction deep enough to remove the desire for meaning entirely. A world not oppressed, but pacified.
The question isn’t just whether the material conditions improve. It’s whether the cultural and psychological infrastructure exists to help people make use of freedom. That’s a harder problem than building the robots or distributing the income. It’s the problem of meaning at scale, and no government or algorithm has solved it.
History’s closest experiments with enforced leisure—sudden early retirement, unemployment without purpose—don’t paint an entirely flattering picture of what humans do when freed from the obligation to produce. Health outcomes tend to worsen. Social connection frays. Purpose, it turns out, needs cultivation.
So the optimistic scenario isn’t automatic. It requires something—community, craft, education oriented toward meaning rather than credentials, institutions that help people find what they care about. None of that happens by default.
The choice to create anyway
Still, I keep coming back to that stage.
Those dancers weren’t just executing steps. They were responding to each other. Challenging each other. Recovering in real time. There was risk. There was effort. There was something undeniably human about it.
The choreography wasn’t just technically impressive—it was legible as human. You could read the years of practice in the muscle memory. You could see the split-second adjustments when timing drifted. You could feel the group awareness, the performers tracking each other without looking, anticipating rather than reacting. That kind of thing takes not just training but a particular form of attention—the attention you develop through genuine stakes, genuine effort, genuine care about the result.
AI can generate choreography. It cannot, yet, choose to dance for its own reasons. It cannot feel the satisfaction of a sequence landing right. It cannot want an audience to feel something and then feel something itself when that happens.
If AI handles everything else, maybe that’s what remains: the choice to create anyway. Not the output—AI will match or exceed most outputs—but the act. The decision to engage with something difficult for no reason other than the experience of it. The willingness to be bad at something on the way to being good.
The bus may not need to run.
But we might still choose to dance.