Discussions of the impact of AI on human fulfillment or well­-being must begin by acknowledging that the latter is a highly contested notion. Three broad types of theories of well­-being have come to prominence in philosophy. Hedonism, a view associated with the 18th­ century British philosopher Jeremy Bentham, states that the only thing that ultimately makes people better off is pleasure and the absence of pain. Desire-­fulfillment theories, widely favored by contemporary economists, hold that the goodness of our lives is a matter of the fulfillment of our desires or preferences, quite inde­pendently of whether this gives us pleasure. Finally, “objective-list” theories identify a plurality of values, the actualization of which in our lives makes us better off quite independently of whether we desire those values or get pleasure from them. Standard items on such an “objective list” include knowledge, friendship, achievement, play, and aesthetic experience. I am going to assume the correctness of a theory of this third sort.

A defining feature of modernity is what the philosopher Charles Taylor has called “the affirmation of ordinary life.” By “ordinary life,” Taylor means “those aspects of human life concerned with produc­tion and reproduction, that is, labour, the making of the things needed for life, and our life as sexual beings, including marriage and the family.” Work is essential to ordinary life. And one of the distinguishing features of modernity is that ordinary life, including work activities, is treated as a scene of genuine human fulfillment. This contrasts with those ancient and medieval modes of thought that tended to disparage ordinary life and saw true human fulfillment as accessible only to the sage or the saint, figures who have liberated themselves from the mundane concern with the production of the necessities of life.

So understood, work is not merely valuable instrumentally, as a means to an income. If its value were purely instrumental, the loss of work opportunities could be fully made good by the establish­ment of a Universal Basic Income. Rather, the idea is that there is intrinsic value to work. On an objective-­list approach to well­-being, it is reasonable to suppose that work enables the realization of a plurality of intrinsic values. [Philosophers] Anca Gheaus and Lisa Herzog have identified these as attaining various types of excellence; making a social contribution; experiencing community; and gaining social recognition. Joshua Cohen has highlighted the values of worker voice (i.e. a say in what is produced and how), realizing a valuable purpose, and taking pleasure in the work itself, in addition to the “standard” instrumental goods of jobs such as money, stability, health and safety, etc.

These accounts seem plausible, but they prompt the question whether the intrinsic goods of work comprise an unstructured list, or whether there is a core good, one that is the primary good distinctively associated with work and in relation to which other intrinsic goods of work are derivative or secondary. A plausible candidate for the core intrinsic value is achievement, that is, the exercise of our human powers in meeting difficult challenges for a worthwhile end. And this intrinsic value is increased the more difficult the challenges and the more worthwhile the end. Part of the value of community or friendship in work is cooperating with others in order to realize a challenging but worthwhile task. Moreover, an important spin­ off of achievement is the self­-esteem that it promotes, which is a significant factor in fostering the sense among citizens of a democratic community that they can look each other in the eye as equals.

Of course, in claiming that achievement is the core value of work, it does not follow that all work activities offer adequate opportunities for the exercise of our powers in engaging in challenging but worthwhile tasks. Some jobs may be mind­-numbingly repetitive, and their value to those who do them may just consist in the wages they are paid. Moreover, even if some jobs, like bomb disposal or refuse collection, offer opportunities for achievement, they may be so dangerous or disagreeable that we should be willing to forego those opportunities if those jobs could be done by a robot. In general, however, I think we should be wary of sweeping claims by academic writers that certain jobs, typically of the sort that do not require a university degree, afford little scope for achievement. Often the problem with these jobs is not the absence of opportunity for achievement, but appalling conditions of work, including the low salaries given to people otherwise described as “essential workers.”

One radical challenge posed by AI is that it forces us to inquire into the sources of human achievement in an age of automation. This challenge arises for one of two reasons. Either there will be too few jobs for humans to do, since they will have been taken over by AI. Alternatively, even if we preserve human work opportunities by deliberately restricting the deployment of AI, those performing the jobs may be haunted by a sense of pointlessness. They will know that what they are doing could be done just as effectively, and a lot more efficiently, by AI technology. This is akin to the sense of pointlessness that assailed those who performed unnecessary government­ created jobs in the Soviet Union or who today under­take the sorts of pointless white­ collar jobs that the anthropologist David Graeber referred to as “bullshit jobs.”

In an essay entitled Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, published in 1930, John Maynard Keynes greeted the prospect of a jobless future with cautious optimism, signaling that it may neces­sitate a radical but unforeseeable revision of our ethical outlook — “we have been trained too long to strive and not to enjoy,” he said. Maybe so. But still, on an objective-list approach, passive enjoyment cannot fully displace achievement as a dimension of the human good. And, of course, there is a special joy in striving and succeeding. So the loss of opportunity for achievement threatens to create an evaluative void. Hence the pressing question: what will be the source of achievement in a world in which work no longer plays that role for many, even the great majority of, people?