Could the Future of AI Reconnect Us to What Mattered Most?

Much of the conversation around artificial intelligence (AI) is framed in fear. White-collar professionals are increasingly anxious about AI replacing cognitive work once thought untouchable, a concern captured in The Atlantic’s piece on the worst-case future for white-collar workers. Blue-collar workers have their own version of this fear as employers test automation that shows up in the real world as robots and drones doing physical jobs once reserved for people, including delivery and warehouse work, like Amazon’s reported testing of humanoid delivery robots.

The anxiety is real. But what if we are asking the wrong question?

Instead of asking how we preserve jobs as they exist today, what if we ask whether working less might actually be progress?

We have changed the work week before. In the late 1800s, industrial workers routinely labored 60 to 70 hours per week. The 40-hour work week was not inevitable. It was the result of labor organizing and policy reform, as documented by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics.

Now imagine this: because of AI-enabled automation, your employer tells you that you no longer need to work 40 hours a week to earn the same pay.

That sounds radical, but the idea of a shorter workweek is not new. In 1930, economist John Maynard Keynes argued that technological advances could eventually make a 15-hour workweek realistic, leaving society with a different challenge: how to use all that newfound freedom well, an idea he explored in Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren.

And the redesign continues. The UK four-day workweek pilot found that most companies maintained reduced hours after the trial ended, with improved well-being and stable productivity. In Iceland, public-sector trials reducing work hours without cutting pay showed similar results: productivity held steady or improved, and worker well-being increased.

Reducing work hours did not collapse those economies. In many cases, it strengthened them.

So what if AI reducing the number of hours required to sustain society is not a crisis, but a correction?

Back to What We Once Had Without Going Backward

For much of the 20th century, many families lived on one income. One parent worked outside the home, and the other had more time for caregiving and community life.

That model was imperfect. It was rigid. It was often inequitable. It was not equally accessible across race and class. But it did provide something we are chronically short on today: time. Time scarcity is now one of the defining pressures of modern life.

Over time, dual-income households became the norm. Consumer culture expanded. Work hours expanded. Our cost of living expanded with it.

In How Consumerism Co-Opted Feminism to Reshape Work and Family Life, I explore how economic forces reshaped family life in ways we now assume are natural. They are not.

If AI reduces the hours required to earn a living, we have an opportunity to design something healthier this time. Not a return to rigid gender roles, but a future where adults work fewer hours, shared caregiving becomes normal, time with children is not squeezed into evenings, and community is not optional. Technology could make that possible.

Less Work Could Mean Better Health

More than 40 percent of U.S. adults meet the criteria for obesity, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) adult obesity data.

This is not primarily a nutrition problem. It is a time problem.

Long workdays compress everything else in life. Cooking becomes optional. Sleep becomes negotiable. Movement becomes aspirational. When time pressure decreases, health improves.

More discretionary hours could mean walking instead of rushing, cooking instead of ordering, and growing food at home or in community gardens that strengthen both nutrition and social ties.

AI does not just increase productivity. It reduces the human hours required to generate output. That time matters. Fewer work hours can mean more movement, better food, deeper rest, and healthier daily rhythms.

If Work Shrinks, Income Must Stabilize

Of course, this only works if productivity gains are shared.

For years, the discussion centered on universal basic income, a guaranteed baseline payment to every citizen. Peter Diamandis explored this in “free money, no strings attached”, arguing that exponential technologies make such models increasingly plausible.

But the conversation has shifted. Today, some technologists speak of universal stable income or even universal high income, language that reflects a move from scarcity to abundance. The Mosaic model proposes one framework for ensuring that when automation dramatically increases productivity, citizens participate in the upside.

This is not theoretical. Sam Altman’s OpenResearch unconditional cash study found that unconditional cash improved recipients’ financial well-being and ability to weather shocks, including more stable month-to-month spending, modest gains in credit outcomes, and increased savings in the early years. It also found that recipients remained engaged with work, with higher rates of job searching and applications, even as average hours worked dipped slightly.

If AI replaces large categories of labor, it strengthens the argument that efficiency gains should not accrue to a small fraction of society. They should be distributed through wages, reduced hours, and income guarantees. Income stability does not eliminate work. It prevents disruption from becoming collapse.

Stability creates freedom. Freedom creates time. Time creates space for purpose.

A Question for Education Leaders

For those of us in education, this conversation matters.

If the economy requires fewer traditional work hours, how do we prepare students? For nonstop competition, or for meaningful lives?

If abundance becomes technologically possible, schools cannot continue preparing students exclusively for scarcity. They must prepare students to use time well. That means cultivating creativity, civic engagement, health, collaboration, and judgment, not just résumé optimization.

Working Less and the Return to What Matters

For generations, long hours have been equated with virtue. But meaning does not require exhaustion.

Most of what makes life rich is not a job title. It is family, health, learning, service, creativity, and connection.

A reduction in the work required to sustain society does not have to signal collapse. It could signal maturity. We once fought to reduce 70-hour workweeks to 40. The next evolution may not be about producing more. It may be about living better.

If designed intentionally, AI could move us forward by restoring something we quietly lost: time for caregiving, time for health, time for community, and time for purpose outside the office.

The future of AI does not have to be dystopian. It could simply give us back what once mattered most: time for what matters.

Nutrition Labels Transformed Food. It’s Time for Environmental Labels to Transform AI.

I’m hearing more educators and students cite the environment as a reason not to use AI. 

Energy use. Water consumption. Emissions.

Those concerns are real.

But giving up AI isn’t the answer. Accountability is.

Check out my recent piece in Tech & Learning Magazine, where I argue that just as nutrition labels changed food, environmental labels can change AI. 

The article includes classroom-ready lessons and a practical student activity: designing an AI Environmental Label that schools can use to push vendors toward transparency and cleaner infrastructure.

How Consumerism Co-Opted Feminism to Grow Profits, Expand the Workforce, and Sell Us Convenience — and How Technology Can Help Us Reclaim Our Time

Feminism fought for agency, opportunity, and freedom. Consumerism saw a growth strategy.

Once feminist ideas entered the mainstream, advertisers and corporations did not simply accept them. They repackaged them. They took the language of liberation and turned it into a sales pitch. Empowerment became a brand identity. Independence became a lifestyle aesthetic. Equality got flattened into individual choice, with one consistent action attached: buy.

That process has a name. In 1991, scholars Robert Goldman, Deborah Heath, and Sharon L. Smith coined commodity feminism to describe how feminist ideals were absorbed by advertising and redeployed as marketable symbols. The politics were softened. The message was individualized. The outcome was profitable.

And once you see it, you start noticing it everywhere: empowerment campaigns that celebrate confidence while ignoring structural barriers, “you’ve earned it” messaging that translates liberation into purchasing power, and a culture that frames progress not as changing systems, but as consuming the right products.

The consumer republic and the expansion of the earner

Post–World War II America did not just experience economic growth. It built an identity around mass consumption. Historian Lizabeth Cohen describes how consumption became intertwined with national purpose and the American dream in The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America.

In a society organized around growth through spending, expanding the number of earners expands the number of consumers. That does not require a boardroom conspiracy. It is the logic of the system.

As women entered the workforce in greater numbers, they gained income, autonomy, and options. That is real. At the same time, businesses gained a larger labor pool and a massive new consumer segment: wage earners with purchasing power who were still culturally positioned as primary household decision-makers.

Work and consumption began reinforcing each other.

The second shift and the convenience solution

Then came the pressure point.

In The Second Shift, sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild documented how women’s entry into paid work often did not come with an equal exit from domestic labor. Many women worked one shift at the job and another at home. 

Time scarcity became the defining condition of the dual-income household.

And when time becomes scarce, markets do what markets do. They sell relief.

Packaged food as “liberation,” and the health costs that followed

This is where the story gets even more uncomfortable, because it is not only about what people bought. It is about what people ate.

As more households relied on two incomes, demand for convenience skyrocketed. The food industry was ready. Processed and packaged foods had been building for decades, but the postwar era accelerated their normalization. Breakfast cereals, boxed mixes, canned soups, frozen dinners, and instant meals were marketed as modern solutions. They were not just food. They were time. They were ease. They were the promise that you could “do it all.”

Convenience was framed as progress.

This dovetailed perfectly with commodity feminism’s logic. Empowerment was not framed as changing workplace expectations, redesigning hours, or redistributing domestic labor. It was framed as optimizing the individual, especially the woman: be efficient, be capable, be modern. And buy the products that make it possible.

Over time, the convenience food revolution also reshaped public health. Research reviews have linked higher consumption of ultra-processed foods to increased risk of obesity and other adverse health outcomes. 

What was sold as liberation through efficiency also became a pipeline of chronic health risk.

School hours, care gaps, and outsourcing life

There is another structural layer people rarely name.

The standard school day does not match the standard workday. That mismatch created a care gap that families filled with afterschool programs, paid childcare, and a whole economy of outsourcing. The Afterschool Alliance documents this persistent gap in reports like Working Families and Afterschool.

The pattern repeats:

• more paid work

• less time

• more outsourcing

• more consumption

• more dependence on consumption to sustain growth

The predictable pushback

This argument is not “women should not work.” Workforce participation expanded opportunity and independence for many women. That matters.

The critique is about how markets used the language of feminism to sell products and normalize a lifestyle that kept the burden on individuals.

Rosalind Gill’s work on postfeminist media culture explains how empowerment messaging often becomes individualized and depoliticized, emphasizing personal choice and self-management rather than collective structural change. 

In plain terms: empowerment becomes something you perform, not something society guarantees.

What comes next

For most of modern history, many families structured life around one primary income, not because it was easy or perfect, but because the household economy was organized differently. Then consumer culture shifted the baseline. Commodity feminism helped sell a new story: real empowerment looks like doing it all, and if you feel stretched, the solution is not redesigning work, school, or care. The solution is buying your way through it.

Work more so you can pay for childcare.
Work more so you can afford cleaning, convenience food, and labor-saving devices.
Work more so you can keep up with the lifestyle that now requires two incomes to sustain.

That is not liberation. That is a treadmill.

Here is the opportunity in 2026: we have tools previous generations did not. Remote and hybrid work can reduce commuting. Automation can remove busywork. AI can compress tasks that used to take hours into minutes. The promise should not be that we cram more work into the same day. The promise should be that we reclaim time.

The next chapter of empowerment is not buying better products with bigger paychecks. It is designing a life where work serves living, not the other way around.

That means making different choices, individually and collectively:

• Using technology and AI to reduce low-value labor, not intensify it

• Treating time as a primary form of wealth

• Resisting the narrative that outsourcing is the only path to survival

• Rebuilding shared responsibility at home and in communities

• Pushing for systems that match real life: work hours, school hours, childcare, and care for elders

We do not need to go backward. We need to go forward with intention.

If consumerism co-opted feminism to sell us a world where we must work more to afford the costs of working, then the response is not guilt. It is clarity.

Take back time. Reduce the unnecessary. Use automation and AI to create margin. Build a life with enough space to cook, connect, rest, and care. That is what a modern version of liberation can look like. 

Free Video Library Supports Digital Citizenship & Well-Being

One of the most practical ways to build a strong digital citizenship and digital well-being culture is to use short videos that feel relevant to students and are easy to discuss.

That is why this free Take Back video library is such a useful resource. The videos are designed to spark real conversations about online life, attention, identity, and healthy habits. And what makes them especially powerful is that they are made by students, for students. (Take Back video library)

These videos come from The Take Back resources page and connect to the broader Take Back movement, which focuses on helping young people and communities build healthier, more intentional relationships with media and technology. (The Take Back resources) (The Take Back).

This work is part of the (Take Two Media Initiative), which is dedicated to enhancing media literacy and wellbeing. Their Media Lab program empowers young people with the tools to lead. Through hands-on training in media literacy, well-being, and digital citizenship, students become Media Ambassadors - capable of delivering powerful talks and workshops to peers, parents, and educators.

Why student-made videos matter

Adults can say all the right things about digital citizenship, and students will still tune out if it feels like another lecture.

Student-created videos change the dynamic:

• The language sounds like peers, not policy

• The scenarios feel current, not generic

• The message lands as “this is for us,” not “this is being done to us”

The broader Take Back work also emphasizes youth leadership, with students taking on roles as ambassadors and peer educators. (thetakebackbook.com)

A simple way to use these videos that consistently works: Frame, Focus, Follow Up

The difference between showing a video and teaching with a video is what happens before and after the play button.

I use Frame, Focus, Follow Up, a quick structure that helps students watch with purpose and then do something meaningful with what they saw. (Frame, Focus + Follow Up)

Here is how it looks with digital citizenship and digital well-being content.

1) Frame (1 to 2 minutes)

Set students up to connect the video to real life.

• What is this video about in one sentence?

• Where do you see this issue show up for students right now?

• Why might a student have wanted to make this video?

The point is to activate context, not deliver a lecture.

2) Focus (30 seconds)

Give students a positive lens to watch through.

Choose one:

• Notice a strategy the student creators suggest for staying in control of your time or attention.

• Listen for a moment that shows what healthy online behavior can look like.

• Watch for one idea you want to try, and one idea you want to share with a friend.

• Pay attention to how the video models empathy, boundaries, or self-awareness.

This keeps the viewing grounded in agency and possibility.

3) Follow Up (5 to 8 minutes)

Make the learning visible.

Fast follow-up options:

• One-minute write: “What is one move I could try this week to improve my digital well-being?”

• Turn and talk: “What felt true, and what felt helpful?”

• Small group: “What is one norm we could strengthen in our school community?”

This is where student voice shows up, not just student compliance. 

Ready-to-use prompts that keep the tone constructive

These work with almost any clip in the library:

• What is one takeaway that helps you navigate online spaces with more confidence?

• What is one boundary that would make online life feel lighter or less stressful?

• What is one way to support a friend who is dealing with online drama or pressure?

• What is one habit you want to strengthen, and what would make it easier?

• What would it look like if our class or school got really good at digital well-being?

Where this fits in a school plan

This is a resource you can use without building a new program from scratch.

• Advisory or homeroom: one short video each week using the same routine

• Family engagement: one video plus a few discussion questions

• Student leadership: invite students to curate a playlist and facilitate the discussion

If you are looking for a free, student-centered way to support digital citizenship and digital well-being, this library is a strong place to start.