There is a quiet anxiety hanging over America’s dinner tables.
Parents worry about whether artificial intelligence will replace their jobs. Young people wonder whether their education will still matter. Many of us feel a more existential unease: that the age of AI may hollow out something essential about being human — our sense of purpose, relevance, even joy.
If that fear feels familiar, it should. Over the past two decades, we were promised that technology would connect us, empower us, and make life better. Instead, we ended up more distracted, more isolated, and more exhausted.
The Surgeon General recently reported that roughly half of all American adults experience measurable levels of loneliness — a condition as harmful to health as smoking 15 cigarettes a day. The average American checks their phone more than 140 times daily. And in 2012, the year smartphone adoption crossed 50 percent, happiness among U.S. adolescents began a sharp and sustained decline.
Given this history, it's reasonable to assume that AI will only make things worse.
But I believe the opposite may be true.
I’ve worked in AI for more than 16 years, including as head of Go-to-Market at OpenAI during the launch of ChatGPT. I’ve spent the last three years speaking in front of roughly 300,000 people and in more than 250 boardrooms, and these experiences have shown me that hope and reason should coexist.
If we get this right, artificial intelligence could become the tool that finally gives us back our most precious and limited resource: time. And in doing so, it may force us to confront the most important question of the coming era — not about work or productivity, but about how we choose to live.
The Happiness Function
For most of modern history, we've measured success by output. We built economies optimized for productivity and lives organized around work. We wear busyness like a badge of honor. “What do you do?” is the first question we ask when we meet someone new.
But what if productivity is the wrong metric?
I use the term "Happiness Function" to describe the surprisingly consistent relationship between human well-being and how we spend our time. The science here is remarkably clear: Once basic needs are met, happiness does not track with wealth, status, or job title. It tracks with relationships, purpose, creativity, and community.
The most compelling evidence comes from the Harvard Study of Adult Development, one of the longest-running studies of human happiness ever conducted. For more than 80 years, researchers followed participants and their families, tracking physical health, mental health, career outcomes, and life satisfaction.
The conclusion was unambiguous. The strongest predictor of a long, happy, healthy life was not professional success or financial achievement — it was the quality of a person’s relationships.
Close relationships protect us from life’s inevitable hardships. They delay cognitive and physical decline. They matter more than IQ, genetics, or social class.
This is the Happiness Function at work.
The mechanics of abundance
To understand why AI could help us fulfill it, we need to understand what AI is actually changing.
The most transformative impact of artificial intelligence is not speed or automation — it's what it does to intelligence itself.
Throughout human history, intelligence has been scarce. For an individual to develop their own, they needed to spend years of their life (and a whole lot of money) on education. To add to the challenge, this was only possible if they were fortunate enough to live near experts or schools that could teach them. But AI is rewriting this challenge, and doing to intelligence what the late 19th century did to electricity: turning it into a utility.
Before electrification, lighting a room after dark meant carrying candles from room to room or maintaining gas lamps. Once electricity arrived, illumination became effortless — flip a switch and forget about it.
AI is removing the friction from accessing intelligence in the same way. I call this unmetered intelligence: intelligence available on demand, at near-zero cost, embedded quietly into daily life.
This is not about faster spreadsheets or clever chatbots. It means each of us will have access to tireless, expert assistance for everything from planning trips and managing finances to scheduling appointments and triaging email, without the cognitive burden that currently fills our days.
Much of this work will happen in the background, through AI agents that learn our preferences and act on our behalf. As technology becomes more ambient, the need to constantly stare at screens will diminish. The goal is not more engagement, but less.
And the result is time.
The unavoidable implication is this: Over time, we will need to work less. For a society that has long equated self-worth with productivity, that may be the hardest transition of all.
A new relationship with work
This shift will undeniably change work, and understandably, that's where much of the fear resides.
The World Economic Forum estimates that by 2030, around 92 million jobs will be displaced — but also that 170 million new ones will be created, for a net gain. Work isn't disappearing. It's changing.
We are already seeing the upside. Doctors are using AI to reduce administrative overload, allowing them to spend more time with patients. Researchers are compressing years of analysis into months, accelerating scientific discovery. In countless fields, AI is eliminating drudgery rather than replacing judgment.
At the same time, as the cost of accessing intelligence falls (we call this inference cost, and the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Index Report 2025 reports the cost of running some models has fallen more than 99 percent), the cost of goods and services will follow. AI-driven efficiency is likely to be deflationary, lowering the cost of living and reducing the amount of labor required to sustain it.
The unavoidable implication is this: Over time, we will need to work less.
For a society that has long equated self-worth with productivity, that may be the hardest transition of all.
The productivity trap
We have conflated doing with being.
When productivity defined human value, this made sense. But we're entering a world where repetitive cognitive tasks — processing data, generating reports, optimizing workflows — are becoming commodities. AI will handle them quietly and efficiently.
For many, this will feel like a loss of identity.
But if we're honest — with the data and with ourselves — productivity has always been a terrible proxy for a good life. It is useful for economies, not for humans.
The Happiness Function offers a different metric. It asks not what we produce, but how we spend the time we have.
Time to be human
In the pre-AI world, fulfilling the Happiness Function was a luxury. Careers consumed calendars. Whatever time remained was often surrendered to the glowing screens already in our hands.
AI changes that equation.
As machines take on more of what exhausts us, we'll be left with a choice. We can fill the reclaimed time with more distractions, or we can invest it in the things that actually make life meaningful.
That will likely mean less screen time and more presence. More creativity and fewer metrics. More community, humor, curiosity, and care. More time in nature. More time with one another.
Economic questions about how AI’s benefits are distributed will remain critical. But if unmetered intelligence continues to expand, the historic struggle for basic subsistence may finally begin to ease.
When it does, the question will no longer be how hard we work — but how well we live.
AI can give us time. Only we can decide what to do with it.
Intelligence is not wisdom
As we enter this new era, it's important to be clear about what AI is — and what it is not.
Artificial intelligence is intelligence, not wisdom. Intelligence is computation: storing information, recognizing patterns, optimizing outcomes. Wisdom is something else entirely. It is shaped by experience, empathy, ethics, imagination, and compassion.
AI can give us time. Only we can decide what to do with it.
The arc of human progress has always bent toward greater freedom. Optimism, in moments like this, is not naïveté — it's a responsibility.
We are ordinary people, newly equipped with an extraordinary tool. The age of AI does not have to diminish our humanity. If we choose wisely, it can finally make room for it.
Zack Kass is the former head of Go-to-Market at OpenAI and author of The Next Renaissance: AI and the Expansion of Human Potential.
