About a month ago, Elon Musk boldly stated that “work will be optional” while discussing the future impact of AI on the workforce. While I assumed this was to evoke emotion in the general public, I felt stirred to explore this further.
As adults, many of us are focused on just fulfilling basic needs of food, shelter, and safety. Psychologist Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of needs states that we reach our full potential when we go beyond basic needs and reach the fifth level of self-actualization, in which we achieve our full potential, working and creating for our own purposes. This concept is crucial in relation to how I feel about work. I believe work is core to who we are as human beings. Work is not a burden or a curse, but what gives life purpose and drives people to greatness. And an essential element of work is creativity—once our creativity is unleashed, we feel more fulfilled. As humans, we’re meant to create—new recipes, buildings great and small, video games, furniture, space rockets, and paper dolls. We’ve even experimented as children, mashing up food and doodling in our notebooks.
In the Book of Genesis, humankind is described as being created in God’s image, reflecting our innate desire to work and create. Its importance could not be emphasized more—through the very fact that the Bible and Torah begin with “In the beginning, God created…” (emphasis mine). From a nonreligious perspective, Aristotle described people as makers and often used the term techne to characterize their goal-oriented approach to work. To work and create is in our nature.
Our firm, SparkLabs Group, is an investor in OpenAI, Anthropic, xAI, and more, so we’re no strangers to AI. We hear the voices of concern, tempered prognostications, and bold statements by people such as Musk. Fearmongering attracts the media outlets, so the more common voices of doomsayers are often repeated: AI will eliminate 50% of white-collar jobs within five years. AI will disrupt and cause half of the Fortune 500 companies to disappear. AI will result in the gradual disempowerment of humankind.
I believe that AI’s impact and future pathways are overstated because human nature is ignored in such statements. Our actions as humans are not simply driven by cause and effect, but by deep psychological needs, such as our need for a purpose. As Dostoevsky wrote in Notes from a Dead House (his fictionalized account of his years in a Siberian labor camp), the worst possible punishment would be to make people do utterly useless work. This was proven in Nazi concentration camps, as told by survivors such as Eugene Heimler. In A Link in the Chain, Heimler described how, after a factory that made equipment for the German military was bombed, the camp’s commander made them move rubble from one end of the camp to the other. Days and weeks as this exercise continued, people began to commit suicide or were driven to madness. Why? For many reasons, I’m sure—one of them being that their psychological needs, their desire for purpose as human beings, were ignored. At least when they worked at a factory, even if they were morally opposed to or repulsed by the circumstances of their forced labor, such work served a purpose. Without a purpose, people were driven to insanity.
Innovation spurs more work and creativity. From the printing press to electric power, the internal combustion engine, integrated circuit, computers, and the Internet, jobs were not lost—they were created. New industries were formed, serving as stepping stones to further innovations. In truth, while we may experience short-term job loss in certain sectors, AI is itself a stepping stone to the next wave of incredible innovations that will create new jobs and expand our boundaries of knowing the unknown.
If anything, work will not become optional, but an option for more people. Yes, robotics and AI will replace many physical, mundane tasks, but they will allow the hidden Einsteins, Zuckerbergs, and Musks to flourish, to spend more time creating and realizing the unlimited potential in their minds rather than being trapped in the slog of basic economic needs. And it won’t just be some people who benefit—almost everyone will be elevated to new levels of intelligence and creativity.
During these short thirteen years as a venture capitalist, one thing I have learned is that the beauty of entrepreneurship reveals no end to human creativity and innovation. Every year, tens of thousands of tech startups and hundreds of thousands of small businesses are launched across the globe. I sometimes wonder how many more fashion startups can possibly come out of South Korea, or how many more new enterprises can come out of Silicon Valley after decades of iterations, and then what happens? Another one launches. Human nature prevails.
I believe AI will become a tool of innovation, one that enhances and accelerates tomorrow’s entrepreneurs. Twenty years from now, the next wave of major innovations won’t be focused on AI, but on something else just as awe-inspiring that gets us talking and, more importantly, gets us creating.
*This article was not written at all with the assistance of any AI tool or platform.
