My first chopping board was something cheap I got from Ikea. The most recent one I bought was made by a local carpenter I met at a craft fair. He gave me a card with his contact details, so that I could pop down to his workshop if I had any problems with warping, or needed it re-sanded at some point.
The point of this story – other than to out myself as the dreadful hipster that I now realise I am – is that it sums up one view of how artificial intelligence (AI) and automation might change the world of work.
This vision was articulated last month by the economist Alex Imas, who has just been appointed “Director of AGI Economics” at Google DeepMind.
In an essay titled “What will be scarce?” he argued that even in a scenario in which advanced AI and automation could one day produce most goods and services more cheaply than humans, the demand for human labour would not necessarily disappear.
READ MORE
Instead, he said, as people got richer, they would want to spend more of their money on “the human-intensive, provenance-rich, sometimes artisanal part of the economy where the human aspect is part of the value of the good or service itself”.
In other words, AI might make dreadful hipsters of us all.
[ The Irish Times view on AI and the workplace: women could be the losersOpens in new window ]
It is clearly true that wealthy people tend to spend more of their money on things that are inherently labour-intensive – a personal trainer over a 20-person gym class, say, or a painting over a mass-produced poster.
This is one good reason to be dubious about the notion that automation will ever supplant all demand for human labour and create a “world without work”.
But there are a couple of caveats to the idea that we could all one day just make paintings and chopping boards for one another.
PrepayPower are hiking their prices - will other energy suppliers soon follow suit?
The first is distributional. If the productivity gains from automation are not widely shared, but concentrated in a relatively small group at the top, then a large number of people could find themselves competing for the chance to please that small group of elites in labour-intensive ways.
Needless to say, this feels like a much less idyllic scenario than one in which we’re all shopping in each other’s craft markets.
The second issue concerns transparency. In the creative sphere, for example, it’s clear that most people place a higher value on human-crafted art, music and writing than AI versions. In one experiment, participants bid for physical art prints that varied randomly in the described level and type of AI involvement.
The study found that even “trace amounts of AI involvement were sufficient to substantially devalue the artwork relative to the case where only a human artist was involved”.
The problem is that many people are not very good at telling the difference. Another research study, which showed people samples of AI-written messages, found “strong negative effects on social impressions when disclosing that a message was AI-generated”, but when AI use was not highlighted recipients did not exhibit any scepticism.
This presents the risk that true “artisans” will still be undercut or drowned out by machine-made rivals, even though there is genuine consumer demand for what they make.
In some spheres, technical solutions will hopefully develop. University of Chicago professor Ben Zhao, for example, has made a new tool which can detect if a song was made with AI. But in writing, AI detectors remain imperfect.
There could be behavioural solutions, too. It seems likely that demand for live music performances will grow, for example. Similarly, I have interviewed illustrators who have begun to make videos for customers of their creative process.
Some writers, meanwhile, are beginning to change the language they use in an attempt to create some distance between their own work and large language models (LLMs).
I did this myself recently. I have just finished writing a book, and one of the sentences I wrote some time back – a really nicely crafted sentence that I was proud of – suddenly struck me as the sort of structure which (LLMs) now spit out with annoying frequency. What once felt pithy and elegant now felt commoditised and cloying. At the last minute, I changed it.
Was it the right decision? I’m still not sure. If we human writers are already changing our work in order to move out of the way of the machines that are trying to imitate us, where will that take us?
There might well be demand for more artisans in an increasingly automated future. But don’t expect it to mean a simple life. – Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2026
