Today, Explained - Let AI replace you

Episode Date: December 14, 2025

If AI handles all our busy work and optimizes our resources, it may also give us the one thing there never seems to be enough of: time. This episode was produced by Hady Mawajdeh, edited by Jenny Lawton, fact-checked by Melissa Hirsch, engineered by David Tatasciore, and hosted by Jonquilyn Hill. Photo by Simona Granati - Corbis/Corbis via Getty Images.  This story was supported by a grant from Arnold Ventures. Vox had full discretion over the content of this reporting. If you have a question, give us a call on 1-800-618-8545 or send us a note here.  Listen to Explain It to Me ad-free by becoming a Vox Member: vox.com/members. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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By doing so, we can create lasting change. If you don't smoke, don't start. If you smoke, quit. If you don't quit, change. Visit unsmoked.ca. It has taken a job that would take months to do, and it can basically do it in an hour. And I said, we've got to get food delivered by a robot. My name is Jake, but perhaps better known as Rizbot.

It's nice to meet you. When you were a kid, did you daydream about the future? I thought it was going to look like the Jetsons. flying cars, video phones, robots to do our grocery shopping? Well, we're still waiting on those flying cars, but video phones are here, and so are the robots. In Austin, Texas, they're sort of everywhere rolling down the sidewalk on their way to deliver food. You'll also see autonomous cars on the street, and AI is even showing up in city government.

us being able to better have an idea of where we need to deploy our, you know, firefighting assets as well as being able to get warnings to people about, yes, fire, but also the smoke patterns that can go much bigger and broader than the actual fire does. Daniel Colato works for the city's Department of Organizational Excellence, and he says AI's cutting through red tape and making things way more efficient. I think we put across 27 different departments, and on average, people saved, you know, between four and like 12 hours a week of productivity time. So I think that's really exciting that across the board, we can see applications of this all over the city. So that's AI operating on a large scale. But what about the labor we do in our day-to-day lives? It has the ability to transform that, too. And so what happened is my mother became, or she was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer.

And so those robots allowed me to stay with her and meet her needs, but also still get those supplies from the store. This is a resident named Snow White. If she got up and I wasn't there and she slipped and she fell and she wouldn't be able to get up until I was there. I mean, for me, for that specific time, it was really needed and it helped so much. She says those little delivery robots really came through for her. And there was a time daily I was using the AV robot, sometimes two or three times a day. So yes, they're convenient. But then for me, it was just something that was essential.

I'm John Gwynne Hill, and this week, Unexplained it to me from Vox, what if the AI revolution actually gets it right? If AI helps us make better use of our resources and handles all our busy work, maybe it could give us the one thing there never seems to be enough of. Time. Honestly, if I had a lot of free time, I would work on myself. I would start taking up gardening. I would try to educate myself on things that are important to me.

I would absolutely dedicate all of that time to rescuing cats, feeding cats and housing them after they had been in some. of the high kill shelters in the city. I think a lot of the loneliness or the almost intense pressure to the point where I just want to give up of trying to schedule things, especially with kids, would just be released. There's actually a name for this best case scenario. It's called AI abundance. If everything goes well with AI, and I should see, that is a big if, then AI abundance.

then AI abundance essentially carries the notion that we could all be so much more wealthier than we can even imagine today. That's Anton Korenek. He's an economics professor at the University of Virginia and one of Time magazine's 100 most influential people in AI. AI and robots and so on will be able to produce a lot more goods and services than when we have in today's economy and would make us essentially an order of magnitude, wealthier, and better off. So tell me how we would end up better off. There are, you know, two types of positive outcomes depending on what your relationship to work is. Some people who really like their work, they predict a world where you have a lot more exciting work yet than today, maybe with a little bit less time intensity. And then folks who are

not that crazy about their job. They're predicting a world where we will have to work a lot less and can still sustain the kind of wealth and well-being that we have in today's world. You can see this in lots and lots of pronouncements by like business people who say, oh, we need more skilled workers. And that essentially encapsulate this notion that if we only had more workers, we could produce so much more. And yeah, the thing with AI, and advanced robotics is that those wishes may actually come through and we may enter a world where they can just press a button and have one more AI worker or press another button and they have one more robot and those can all perform work on their behalf and essentially expand our

economic opportunities. We keep hearing that a change of the scale is unprecedented. Is it actually? You know, I think it's the first time of this particular nature. But if you want to go into like history and look for any parallels, I think the closest parallel would be the industrial revolution. So you would have to go back some 250 years for anything that comes even close to what we are about to experience this time, I think. Coming up, what steam engines. can teach us about the AI revolution.

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to save your wallet while still showing up for the people you love. I'll share real numbers on how much the average person overspends during the season, smart swaps that don't feel cheap, and how to set boundaries without being the Grinch. Plus, I'm exposing the marketing tactics designed to make you panic by and revealing the framework for creating a holiday budget that actually works. Get ready for an honest conversation about staying financially sane during the most expensive time of the year. Listen wherever you get your podcasts or watch on YouTube.com slash your rich BFF. It's explained it to me. I'm JQ. And the International Monetary Fund estimates that AI could impact 40% of jobs around the world. And that number looks more like 60% in what it calls advanced economies like here in the U.S. If that turns out to be true, what will the future of work look like? UVA's Anton Kornick says there are clues in our past.

From a big picture economic perspective, you can say work as we have it today didn't. even really exist before the industrial revolution. Because before then, the most important factor of production was the land that people worked in order to produce the food that they needed. And all of a sudden, you had these new technologies that didn't rely so much on land as they relied on machines. It started with like spinning and weaving in the textile sector. But then soon we had the steam engine and electricity.

and so on and what that implied was that what was really scarce in the economy the land wasn't as important anymore and the new thing that you needed to produce in addition to the labor that people had to put in were machines that you can easily copy and reproduce so you could easily build more spinning wheels more weaving machines and that meant that there was nothing holding back production, and that meant that we could suddenly produce a lot more because that bottleneck of land was overcome. And in some sense, you can say that's the main reason

why today people in advanced economies are something like 20 times richer on average than they were before the Industrial Revolution. What did that mean for workers at the time? though. I imagine that transition wasn't easy. At the time, it was actually quite disruptive. And if you were basically an artisan weaver or something like that, then you were actually a pretty skilled professional doing your trade. And all of a sudden, you had these machines coming along that could do what you were doing, but in order of magnitude cheaper. so those artisans they lost their livelihood essentially overnight and they were impoverished

but i guess you know looking at the positive side their descendants lived in a world where you had cheap textiles and soon all other kinds of cheap industrial goods and they lived to be much wealthier than their artisan parents or grandparents who lost their job in the first wave of the Industrial Revolution. And that can be hugely disruptive and painful for the individual. But if we have a little bit of social protection, we can mitigate the disruption and we can make sure that in the end,

everybody actually benefits. When it comes to the AI revolution, is this something that's going to be benefiting, like more so our grandkids than us possibly? Well, I very much hope that we can all benefit. And I'll say just in terms of the economic possibilities, if you grow the size of the pie and if you grow it by orders of magnitude, it's possible, at least in principle, that everybody benefits.

But whether or not that's going to happen is a story that is yet to be written. and it's going to be challenging it's going to be challenging because at first there will be small sectors where people are losing out and then there's going to be a debate well why should we help them

we didn't help let's say other workers in previous technological revolutions that much and then the size of those sectors that are disrupted is probably going to go up and then eventually most people will be affected

at this, but it's not going to happen overnight. It's going to be a somewhat slow process. And our society is going to continually debate, how should we react to this? What are the best things to do about this? So there are people listening to this who actually live through another more recent technology disruption. I'm thinking about the 80s and 90s with computers. Yeah, in some ways, the way that I see the Industrial Revolution, is that it first consisted of basically building machines that could automate a lot of our physical strength and then since roughly the middle of the 20th century

we create machines that could automate cognitive tasks, essentially computers. And you know at first those computers they could only perform highly routinized things like, let's say, let's say adding up numbers in a spreadsheet and that was very useful for businesses so i don't want to put it down in any way and now the big question with AI is that first we are seeing that these machines can perform more and more of the complex really thoughtful cognitive tasks so the big question is where will this stop and will they leave anything for us

We work to get a paycheck in the future where we don't work anymore. How do we eat? How do we get health insurance? Pay for a place to live? Are there things that people are talking about to sort of take care of that if this is our new future? I think that's going to be the most important and also most fundamental challenge to our current system. In some sense, you can say the industrial revolution. has kind of by accident created this system where our labor became more and more and more

and more valuable because we were so scarce. And that has kind of underpinned all this material progress, all this increase in well-being that we have seen over the past 250 years. But once the AI revolution really hits, there is no guarantee. that we can earn like a decent living based on the value of our labor anymore. I do believe that we are going to need a new system of income distribution at that point. For example, universal basic income compute allotments that everybody essentially gets a certain amount of computational power allocated, that they can then either use. or sell off.

People are also talking about job guarantees. There's a whole range of options out there. From a big picture perspective, the primary concern has to be that will find some solution because as you say, if labor does get significantly devalued by this technological change, and at the same time we have much more abundance in the economy, It would be such a failure if we don't use that additional abundance to make sure that nobody's left behind.

So when the AI revolution arrives, what will we do with all that time? That's next. What's the connection between the suffrage movement and prohibition? You know, their thinking was, hey, one way to protect our rights to live and have a family and protect our children from violence would be to outlaw alcohol. It's not a crazy idea, given there's nothing else they can do. They can't vote. They can't charge their husbands with crimes.

I'm Preet Bharara. And this week, Harvard historian Jill Lippoor joins me to discuss her new book on the U.S. Constitution and the movements that shaped it in ways we've forgotten. The episode is out now. Search and follow. Stay tuned with Preet wherever you get your podcasts. Support for the show comes from New York Magazine's The Strategist.

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pages long documents that we need, and it has taken a job that would take months to do, and it can basically do it in an hour. So I've done the all-American task of pretending to be busy. My fear is that, much like every other technological innovation, is that instead of working less and having more leisure time, we are just going to keep working the same amount and be expected to do even more. One of the things that being busy and having a full life gives you is purpose. And we have a lot of time on our hands and we find ways to fill it, but those ways aren't as meaningful without the purpose that that busyness gives you. So if AI really does change the way we work, does that mean we'll have more time to do what actually fulfills us? That's the question I asked Tom Wait. He's a

senior writer at Dazed and reports on the intersection of culture and tech. I think we got to see a version of this kind of during the pandemic in the early 2020s. I don't know about your friends, but a lot of my friends were like, as soon as lockdown started, they were like, I'm going to learn to paint or I'm going to write more. It took this kind of real creative path. Throughout quarantine, many people have taken up new hobbies. One of the most popular hobbies this year has been gardening. That kind of seems like the theme of COVID, right?

Like everybody just has weird hobbies like baking bread and churning butter like they did in the 1800s. Actually, when I was working on this piece for days, James Smith, who was an academic and an author of a book called Work Won't Work, kind of threw a spanner in the works with this idea. Because he mentioned that people at the beginning of the pandemic had all of these great ideas, about what they were going to do, get fit, have new creative outlets. And then his opinion was, I think what most people did was just game and post and doom scroll and binge watch and cultivate their mental illnesses.

Which is like, it's a very harsh way of putting it maybe. But I think, yeah, it does speak to the idea that like the fantasies did not always kind of match reality. Okay, that's fair. But I still get the sense that you're pretty optimistic about how this. could play out. So if AI abundance works the way people hope it will, what would a world with less work look like in practice? I think we can still do the work that we are doing today without maybe the pressures of having to constantly monetize that work. I certainly would still

write if I wasn't paid to write and if it wasn't my way of kind of like paying my rent. I would still write because I value communicating with people and having that kind of like relationship that you have or discussion with other writers or with readers. And I find a lot of value in that work enough to do it without a financial incentive. And I actually think I would have a lot more freedom as a writer if I didn't have to kind of fit the specifications of the market, right?

And I think when I speak to a lot of artists, they say the same thing. A lot of artists are stuck in this cycle of having to either create work that fits the market or even create content online that stops them from creating work in the studio because they have to do the work of marketing themselves constantly in order to sell what few paintings they then have time to kind of actually create. and they would have so much more freedom and opportunity to do real meaningful work, I think, if they didn't have that imperative to make money from it all of the time. I know it's very unhealthy for us to be defined by our work,

but I also recognize that work can be something that gives our life purpose. And, you know, I think that's across Belize. Capitalism, of course, thrives on it. but Marx argued that humans are productive by nature. Work doesn't have to be a bad thing, right? Like, I guess to put it another way, without work, like, do we have less purpose? I think the problem here is that we have a really narrow definition of work. And I think when we talk about work today,

we're talking about things that generates money in order to, you know, put a roof over our head or put food on the table. But actually, someone that I spoke to for this piece, Liz Fuchsman, who's a researcher at King's College London, she pointed out that actually the word work is much more flexible and fluid than that and can include things like childcare and care for the elderly and all of these other things, because we certainly put effort into other parts of our lives

that don't generate money and that are actually really undercompensated today. Yeah, what would it take for this world to become an actual reality? Well, that's a whole different matter. I think it looks like a lot of disruption, a lot of kind of very hard work, ironically, because it requires huge, structural, political, and economic change, I think. And that could look like something like universal basic income, even though that seems to have fallen out of fashion a little bit in the last year. Or you have countries like China or Singapore, which are super invested in AI technologies and, you know, kind of have that technocratic kind of vibe about them, but also have been using a lot of this excess kind of capital that's generated by introducing machines into like really good public infrastructure.

and public luxury. And I think that is like a huge cause for optimism personally because it's a form of redistribution that yeah, maybe you don't see more money going to your bank account, but maybe you walk down the street and your life just feels that little bit like better or more convenient or you're struggling less because you have better social provisions. Is there anything that like we, like I'm thinking normal everyday people, is there anything we can do to shape the way AI transforms our lives? It's difficult to feel like you have agency in this kind of new world of billionaires

and robotic automation, for sure. I don't know how much agency any individual has beyond their kind of part in a wider collective. But I think what there is really space for now is a positive vision of the future that benefits everybody. So instead of just like straight up criticism of these new technologies, which is often warranted.

And I think, you know, that goes back to the Industrial Revolution and the kind of Luddites. Like the fear and anger is warranted there. But I think that has to be channeled into a kind of positive vision for the future instead of just endless criticism because it feels like these technologies are inevitable. And it feels like they could be used to make a better world. But nobody has really put forward that vision. at least for people like you and I instead of people like Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk.

I think of something that Elon Musk said in 2024 when he was rolling out some of his optimist robots which are supposed to be able to fit into our world very easily and automate tasks. And he said, With autonomy, you get your time back. And what can it do? It can do anything you want.

So it can be a teacher, babysit your kids, It can walk your dog, mow your lawn, whatever you can think of. That might have just been, like, bad marketing copy. I'm not sure. But to me, it speaks to, like, misplaced priorities, at least as far as I'm concerned. Because if I'm getting more time, if something's automating parts of my life, I want it to automate the boring stuff. I want technology to enable me to spend more time doing the things that I want to do, not kind of displacing these very kind of like core human activities as I see them.

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This episode was produced by Hadi Mahdi. It was edited by Jenny Lawton, fact-checked by Melissa Hirsch, and engineered by David Tadashore. Miranda Kennedy is our executive producer, and I'm your host, John Quillan Hill. Thank you so much for listening. I'll talk to you soon. Bye. Support for this show comes from Odu. Running a business is hard enough, so why make it harder with a dozen different apps that don't talk to each other? Introducing Odu. It's the only business software you'll ever need. It's an all-in-one fully integrated platform that makes your work easier, CRM, accounting, inventory, e-commerce, and more. And the best part, O-DU replaces multiple

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