Colleges may need to prepare people for lives of leisure

Résumé détaillé

If AI revolutionizes work, people may have a lot more free time. They’ll need to learn how to put it to great use.

Nir Eisikovits is professor of philosophy at UMass Boston and the director of its Applied Ethics Center.

Why go to a university? Until recently, there was a standard answer to that question: A liberal arts education prepared people to be good citizens and have more satisfying lives because it equipped them to better understand the world, connected them to professional and social networks, and boosted the income they’d earn over the course of their career.

As the price tag for an academic degree soared, this rationale evolved. Parents and students started asking, understandably, whether they would get a good return on their investment. Would college prepare young people for work? Would it give them marketable skills? Place them in internships? It’s not by accident that professional placement is one of the statistics that schools highlight in their promotional materials.

But what if work disappears? Suppose the hype around AI turns out to be (at least partially) true and many jobs go away. The Economist, a publication hardly given to hyperbole, takes that possibility very seriously. This May it ran an article titled “Prepare for an AI jobs apocalypse” in which it noted that “society may be on the verge of a profound reallocation of resources and political upheaval” because of massive job losses.

Of course, we’ve heard this before. The economist John Maynard Keynes predicted in 1930 that by the time his kids grew up, automation would bring about a 15-hour workweek. But the possibility of a dramatic decline in the amount of work that needs to be done is worth considering this time — at least as a thought experiment.

Suppose, then, that AI vindicates Keynes, even if the upheaval comes much later than he anticipated. What will universities do for students if they are no longer getting them ready for work?

Well, if we are going to work a lot less, what if universities reimagined themselves as places that prepare people for leisure?

Taking this idea seriously rests on three…

There…

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