What Happens When We Don't Need to Do Anything Anymore?

I spend a lot of my time looking at new tools, platforms, and technologies—the things that are right on the edge of what's possible today. It's fascinating to see how quickly things evolve, how entire industries shift seemingly overnight, and how what was cutting-edge six months ago is already being commoditized or automated away.

Lately, I've been particularly interested in automation platforms, AI tools, and no-code technologies—things that allow people to build real working products with almost no technical expertise. The trajectory of these tools makes one thing clear: we are accelerating toward a future where a significant portion of what we once considered essential skills or job functions will no longer be necessary.

And that raises some pretty big questions.

What Will People Do?

For most of human history, daily survival required specific skills—hunting, gathering, building shelters. If you didn't learn those things, you simply didn't survive. Fast forward a few thousand years, and today, nobody needs to know how to hunt for their food or build a fire just to make it through the night. You go to the grocery store. You turn a knob on the stove. You flip a light switch.

Now, look at what we consider core skills today—math, writing, driving, even basic design or coding. What happens when those become as unnecessary as hunting?

Already, AI can generate essays, write code, and design logos. Self-driving cars will (eventually) make human driving obsolete. Basic software development is increasingly becoming a matter of assembling pre-built components rather than writing custom code. Even knowledge work—the thing so many of us have spent years training for—is becoming more about prompting AI tools than actually doing the work ourselves.

So what happens next? If AI can do all of this faster and better than a human, what's left for people?

The Workforce is Shifting—Faster Than We Can Train For

If you're just entering the workforce today, what should you even be learning? Schools are already behind—they're still teaching kids how to write essays by hand when AI can write better ones in seconds. They're still teaching basic math when calculators have handled that for decades, and now AI tools can do far more complex reasoning.

Five years from now, will students even need to learn how to write? Will they need to know how to code? Or will the new "essential skills" be something else entirely—like understanding how to work alongside AI, how to interpret what it produces, or how to think creatively about solving problems that AI can't (yet)?

And what about the people whose jobs are on the chopping block? We talk a lot about entry-level roles being automated away, but it's not just basic jobs that are at risk. Mid-level designers, engineers, writers—these are all fields where AI is creeping in fast. What happens to those careers when AI is producing great design, writing high-quality code, and optimizing workflows faster than any human can?

What Skills Will Actually Matter?

The thing that I keep coming back to is this: If AI and automation eliminate the need for certain skills, does that mean we won't have them anymore?

I don't know how to hunt for my food. I don't know how to build a shelter in the wild. And I don't really need to—those skills are irrelevant to my day-to-day life. Will people in 10 years say the same thing about doing math? About writing?

Or will we shift toward a world where human skills are more about direction than execution? Maybe the most valuable people in the future won't be the ones who can write the best code, but the ones who can think about problems in the most effective way. Maybe creativity, critical thinking, and intuition will be the only skills that really matter because everything else will just be handled by machines.

The Future is Coming—But How Fast?

I don't know exactly where this is all headed, but I do know it's moving faster than most people realize.

A few years ago, AI-generated content was a joke. Now, it's so good that companies are restructuring entire teams around it. No-code platforms are enabling people with zero technical background to build fully functional apps in days. Self-driving cars are still imperfect, but at some point, they'll be good enough—and then human driving will become the equivalent of lighting a fire with sticks: possible, but unnecessary.

So the real question isn't if these changes will happen. It's how quickly they'll reshape everything.

And when they do—what will be left for us to do?