If robots do all the work, what is money for?

This one isn't a tutorial. It's a thought I keep coming back to, and I want to write it down to see if it holds up.

Step 1: AI gets better than us at digital work

I use Claude and ChatGPT every day. Every few months they get noticeably better. Things they couldn't do last year, they now do without much effort.

So here's the simple version of my thinking. If, in a few months or a few years, an AI can do a digital task better than a human, who would I hire for that task? The AI. Not because I don't like humans, just because it's better and probably cheaper.

And it doesn't stop at easy jobs. Today, if someone is brilliant at something, you can't replace them with a less skilled person. But an AI that has read almost everything ever written, and can reason through it, isn't a less skilled person. It might be the first thing that can actually replace that brilliant person.

Step 2: the same intelligence gets a body

Now put that same intelligence into robots.

Building houses. Manufacturing. Driving. Cleaning. Delivering things. If a robot can do these jobs better and cheaper than a human, the same logic applies. Why would anyone pick the human?

Over time, I think most work, digital and physical, could end up being done by machines.

Step 3: this is where money gets weird

Think about where money actually goes today.

Say I pay to get a house built. That money goes to the landowner, the construction company, the workers, the people who made the cement and the steel, the truck drivers who delivered it. Almost every rupee ends up paying for someone's time and work.

Now take the humans out of that loop.

Robots don't need salaries. They don't want a holiday or a bigger flat. What they need is electricity, GPUs, compute, raw materials and maintenance. That's it.

So if machines do almost all the work, and machines don't need money the way we do, then money, which is basically a way of trading our work, starts losing its point.

Where I end up

My hypothesis is a world where machines do the "karma", the actual work, and humans don't have to. People live, travel, learn, make things for fun and enjoy what the automated system produces. Money doesn't vanish overnight. It just slowly matters less and less.

I could be completely wrong. A few questions I can't answer yet:

• Who owns the robots? If a small group owns all the machines, that sounds less like freedom and more like a new kind of inequality.
• How do we get from here to there? The middle part, where some jobs are gone and the system hasn't caught up, could be rough.
• What do people do with their days? For a lot of us, work is part of who we are. Take it away and what fills that space?

That last one is the question I keep landing on. If machines can do almost everything we do today, what do humans become?

I don't have the answer. I'm just very curious to find out.