Work-Life Balance in the Era of AI

This article was a follow-up to my 2020 argument that AI would disrupt knowledge work earlier than many people expected.

I have become even more convinced that the usual comfort line is wrong: that jobs involving creativity, critical thinking, or emotional intelligence are naturally safer. In practice, many of those jobs are built around language, reasoning, and software, which makes them exposed to AI very early.

The article uses software engineering as the obvious example. Tools like GitHub Copilot do not make developers disappear overnight, but they do change the productivity curve. Once that starts happening across roles, the more interesting question is what we do with the gain.

The optimistic version is not just fewer jobs or cheaper work. It is that AI could eventually create room for less work, more free time, and a healthier relationship with work itself.