Author: Lasith Siriwardana

Imagine a world in which you can devote the majority of your waking hours to the things you enjoy. Days of early morning commutes to a sedentary desk job formatting spreadsheets are now a distant memory. Instead, you roll out of bed to a full cooked breakfast; gone are the days of overnight oats. You then take a leisurely stroll to your local cricket ground where you are meeting 10 of your friends. Today is the 4th day of the test match you are playing against a rival amateur team. What bliss!

“I am not always punctual in rising. On this particular morning I was feeling so supremely braced that I actually gave the bad old alarm clock a cold and scornful look as it tried to hoist me out of bed at 8:30. Why not, I thought, give it the miss in baulk and snooze on till luncheon?”

– Bertie Wooster, The Inimitable Jeeves by P.G. Wodehouse¹

But will this really be the typical life of those living in the AI world? I very much doubt it. Society in the AI world, I believe, will be vastly more unequal than it is today. The reasons for this are two-fold: the first is that AI will concentrate economic value with those who understand, use and own it. Very simply, imagine that AI replaces all the workers in an industry; the returns that once flowed to workers (through wages) will now flow to those who control the AI infrastructure the industry now relies upon. The second is that increased time for leisure will mean more time for social signalling – a non-negotiable of human nature. Consider a corporate office in London. Your boss may have a flashier watch than you, but you work in the same office, wear broadly the same clothes and most probably both get the Tube to work. This doesn’t apply to on the weekend – your boss might spend it at their country house whilst you are stuck in your London apartment; they might go shooting whilst you pop out for a Gail’s. In an AI world, the weekend is unending.

It may, therefore, be of interest to think about where in society one might rank once the AI revolution has run its course. I present a framework of “leisure classes” to formalise such thoughts. The framework comprises the following four classes:

Leisure Class 1 is composed of the AI overlords – they are the very few who have attained unprecedented (in the most literal sense) level of wealth. They have achieved this feat by owning a large share of the AI infrastructure that the world’s business operate on – they own data centres and crucial AI intellectual property. These businesses, due to their large economies of scale, are likely monopolies and therefore extract vast profits. LC1 includes the likes of Larry Ellison, Sam Altman and the Google co-founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin. Not only can they afford mega-yachts and private jets but they can afford holiday to the moon and Mars. The race to be in this class is over – this rocket has already had lift-off.

Members of Leisure Class 2 will essentially be able to enjoy all the luxuries afforded by those in LC1 bar maybe the most opulent. Members include two types of people: the first is those who have built AI businesses upon the aforementioned infrastructure. The vast applications of AI present a variety of opportunities to be a member of LC2. The AI world is your oyster; a smart idea and a little execution could land you a spot in LC2. Those at the top of leisure industries will also be members of LC2. Consider the various activities that humans enjoy – those at the top are AI immune. No one wants to listen to music generated by an AI. Neither do they want to read a book written by a large language model or watch two robots play chess against each other. It is the human imperfections of these things that we love. This is already acutely apparent: consider the pushback against completely replacing line judges at Wimbledon with Hawkeye. No one turns up to Carnegie Hall to watch a self-playing Steinway perform an AI generated piece of music. Compare this to Nobuyuki Tsujii’s moving performance of his own composition, “Elegy for the Victims of the Tsunami … in Japan” (here). Talented individuals like Tsujii will be increasingly valued in a leisure dominated world and compensated duly. Again, you could be a part of this sub-category of LC2 – a bit of talent and hard work could get you there.

Leisure Class 3 will be for those that work for AI businesses. And because of the super-intelligence of AI, the scope of these roles will be very limited. Human workers won’t manage the allocation of AI resources, there will be an AI to do that. These roles will almost certainly be mandatory regulatory roles. These individuals will research AI safety concerns and implement regulation according . Despite the required expertise, these roles will not generate much revenue thereby limiting their financial reward. Despite this, they will afford much higher quality leisure than those in the final class below them.

Leisure Class 4 will comprise of those who were unable to capture any of the opportunities from the AI revolution. More likely that not, these individuals will conduct manual tasks which are yet to be automated and will rely on a universal basic income bestowed by the benevolence of the AI overlords in LC1. These individuals will afford a subsistence level of leisure – maybe a SkySports subscription or an occasional visit to watch second tier sports leagues in person.

Having recently convinced myself of the above framework I have found myself suffering from “leisure class anxiety”. The prospects of LC2 membership are much more palatable to me than a bleak life in LC3 or, god forbid, LC4. It is therefore no surprise that I have thrown myself headfirst into a machine learning project over the past few days. In fact, it’s part of the reason I’m trying to consistently write on this blog – a role as a journalist at the FT or the Spectator may bag me a spot at the bottom of LC2. For the time being, I think this prudent. Silently, I would welcome a mathematical proof showing the inability of AI to do certain tasks. But until that day comes, I’m going to keep buggering on.

1. It was the reading of P. G. Wodehouse’s Jeeves books that sparked me to write this three-part series on AI and leisure. ↩︎

My last post concluded by expressing an optimism for the future of a world impacted by AI. This conclusion was almost entirely predicated on the fanciful assumption that AI will have minimal distributional effects. I chose to take this approach as a little jibe over the unrealistic assumptions often seen in economic models and in the interest of keeping the post snappy. This post, however, repeals that assumption. It is therefore unsurprising that its conclusions take a more Orwellian tone.

Let me first make some assertions about the role of human intelligence in modern western economies:¹

• Assertion 1
  • Intelligence is the most significant factor in determining one’s economic prosperity. There exists a reasonable amount of empirical evidence for this and the causality is intuitive.
• Assertion 2
  • The relationship between intelligence and economic prosperity has become stronger in recent history. Societies in the West have become increasingly egalitarian, meaning that other factors are less likely to inhibit the returns from intelligence than they once were. Think class barriers, racial prejudice and educational opportunity. They have all improved.²
• Assertion 3
  • The marginal returns of intelligence at the top of the distribution are higher today than they have ever been. This is most likely due to the increasing complexity of the problem that humans solve. I have witnessed this anecdotally. A few decades ago, an Oxbridge education (in any discipline) would have guaranteed you a good job in the city. Pay in the city would have been reasonably similar amongst graduates and progress there-on-out was not hugely dependent on intelligence. Today, Cambridge mathmos earn a significant premium over their peers by working in quant finance. Differences are even more granular; mathmos at the top of their class-list do noticeably better in the job market than those further down the ranks.

Now introduce AI. Access to AI will give employers unlimited access to intelligence – its form now computer based rather than human. We are already at the point where human and artificial intelligence are on par. Before long, AI will be factors of magnitude more intelligent than humans. Furthermore, AI will dominate human intelligence beyond just raw power. Human intelligence suffers from the foibles of human nature. Humans get ill. Humans engage in office chit-chat on company time. Humans require socialising via Thursday evening drinks and spend Friday mornings slightly hung-over only to leave the office at 2pm. In contrast, unprecedented levels of investment into data centres and energy infrastructure will give companies on-demand access to 24/7 super-intelligence.

What does this mean for our future selves? Well, this will lead to what I call the “debasement of intelligence”. Intelligence will become so abundant that the returns from having more of it than others will be negligible. 10 IQ points here, 10 points there will amount to nothing – these differences will be dwarfed by the intelligence gap between humans and AI in general. This will work in much the same was a the debasement of a currency – 10 Venezuelan bolívar here, 10 bolívar there will do nothing for you when a beer now costs over 8 million bolívar. And so it follows that intelligence will have a negligible effect on one’s success – different factors altogether will determine individual prosperity. Therefore, it stands that the three assertions stated above will cease to hold. If you’ve been a beneficiary of these assertions, and I suspect if you’re reading this you have been, then I’m sorry to say it, but you’re out of luck.

What does this mean for the leisure oriented society³ I predict will form as a result of AI? Well I think we will see something I am going to call “leisure classes” emerge.⁴ Today the class structure is most evident in the jobs people do; think of the universal terms “blue-collar” and “white-collar” and “working class”. A world of leisure necessarily means that the type of leisure people engage in will define their class. Leisure classes already exist today; a day of test cricket at Lord’s costs c. £200, a chance to watch from the pavilion as an MCC member requires proposal by a full-member and a thirty-year wait on the waiting list. The AI revolution will widen such gaps.

I am still developing my theory of leisure classes which I will flesh out in my next blog post. Nevertheless, I am already certain that one’s current “working” class will not necessarily map onto an equally ranked leisure class – a frightening thought for those towards the top, an opportunity for those who aren’t.

PS: I endeavour to make my next blog post the final one on AI for a while – a brief history of Wisden Cricketers’ Almanacs is to follow.

1. Here, I refer mostly to service based economies like the UK. ↩︎
2. This is objectively true – anyone who believes otherwise has been blinded by day-to-day news headlines and failed to see the big picture. ↩︎
3. If the notion of a leisure oriented society is new to you, please refer to the final two paragraphs of my last blog post. ↩︎
4. Credit to Aineias Arango, with whom I was in a conversation with when we denominated this idea. ↩︎

My last post (published over a BA ago) referenced the Keynesian Consumption Function in its approach. The eponym of this laughably oversimplifying economic assumption is largely unknown to those outside of the dismal science. Yet, I believe there exists a compelling argument to consider John Maynard Keynes the next time you’re asked for your dream dinner guest.

Born to a middle class family in Cambridge, Keynes won a scholarship to study at Eton. From there, he returned to Cambridge to study Mathematics at King’s. During this time, he was president of the University Liberal Club, president of the Union, and a member of the University Pitt Club. He was also an active member of the Cambridge Apostles during what many consider to be its heyday. This most secret of Cambridge societies was founded by George Tomlinson (an Olavian-Johnian¹ like myself) in 1820 for the most learned of Cantabrigians to engage in highbrow chat. Around a century later, the mother of an Apostle called it a “hotbed of vice” upon discovering her son’s letters. Nevertheless, Keynes’s Cambridge was undeniably a hotbed of intellectual activity. He graduated with a first and continued to be involved with the university for some time, attending economics lectures as a graduate having been urged to do so by the famously sexist economist, Alfred Marshall.

Over the following few decades, Keynes essentially fathered the modern field of macroeconomics. He argued that the government had a role to play in attenuating the business cycle by implementing counter-cyclical policy. Why? Well basically because people don’t like to see the key number on their pay slip go down. Don’t see how these two things are linked? Unfortunately, explaining why in simple terms is beyond my writing and economics abilities. You will have to ask a “macro specialist” – I know one or two who I can get you in touch with if you’re really interested.

Keynes’s magnum opus, The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money essentially made him a post-Depression celebrity. The rejection of the neoliberal laissez-faire paradigm caught on. In April 1942, Keynes joined the Bank of England and in June he was rewarded for his service with a hereditary peerage in the King’s Birthday Honours. He took his seat in the Lords on the Liberal Party benches (don’t let this stop you from reading on).

Following the war, Keynes and his idea in The General Theory were crucial in establishing the post-war global order. Keynes was heavily involved, as leader of the British delegation and chairman of the World Bank commission, in the mid-1944 negotiations that established the Bretton Woods system. He also proposed the creation of a common world unit of currency, the bancor and new global institutions. Although these did not materialise immediately, they were essentially manifested in the creation of the IMF and its Special Drawing Rights (SDR) function. Keynes rubbed shoulders (or more likely elbows at his towering height of 6ft 7) with the likes of FDR and negotiated fiercely with Harry Dexter White. He was able to obtain a preferential position for Britain but ultimately failed to implement his ideas globally. Despite this, Keynes was crucial in constructing the global world in which we live today.

This is all very interesting; all very impressive. But it’s Keynes’s views on leisure² that have really stuck out to me lately. For my own leisure, I picked up some P. G. Wodehouse this Christmas. Envious of Bertie Wooster’s position as a societal drone I was reminded of Keynes’s 1928 essay Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren. He posits that one day “the economic problem may be solved” and that “for the first time since his creation man will be faced with his real, his permanent problem-how to use his freedom from pressing economic cares, how to occupy the leisure, which science and compound interest will have won for him”. Keynes was no stranger to leisure; he had a passion for theatre, ballet, art, literature and philosophy which he shared with the likes of E. M. Forster and Virginia Woolf as a part of the Bloomsbury Set.

I wonder what Keynes would have thought about the recent developments in AI which is most certainly the type of science he anticipated in his essay. For the purpose of this post, let us assume away the bleak complications threatened by AI. I, for one, am hopeful. And I suspect Keynes would share my sentiment; he was considered by many an unbending optimist. He would have been particularly grateful for more time to indulge in the arts with his Bloomsbury chums. Taking a sporting view, I envision the demise of T20 cricket and the return of the superior format to the top of the agenda as hundreds of millions of fans are released from the shackles of work. Although could this go too far? Would these fans start reading through their copies of Wisden at a loss for what to do?

1. Tomlinson was at St Saviour’s school before its amalgamation with St Olave’s. ↩︎
2. Leisure is an economist’s word for anything that isn’t paid work. ↩︎