In 1920, Czech writer Karel Čapek wrote a science-fiction play titled “R.U.R.”, which stands for Rossumovi Univerzální Roboti (translated into English as Rossum’s Universal Robots). The play is famous for introducing the word “robot” into the English language, and as the stuff of science fiction, the word subsequently became part of both the genre and the broader culture’s shared lexicon.
The term itself is derived from robota, a Czech word for forced labour or drudgery, and around forty years later, in 1961, the first true industrial robot—a 3,000-pound hydraulically actuated ‘arm’—went online at a General Motors plant in Trenton, New Jersey, marking the birth of modern robotics. It was the first ‘small step’—but also giant leap—toward actually replacing the drudgery of labour.
Since then, robotics have advanced to be able to perform delicate surgeries, collaborate directly with humans on factory floors, and independently navigate their environment—from the Roomba vacuuming your living room to the Teslas driving on our highways.
Now, while the rest of the world is still only using AI as a glorified Google search engine (if they’re even using it at all), those at the forefront of the ‘Age of AI’ have already been working toward the next, more advanced iteration: AGI, or Artificial General Intelligence. The point at which machines become, in most measurable ways, much smarter than us.
It’s no longer a theoretical proposal; it’s basically a certainty.
Some are estimating that we’ll get there by 2030.
That’s only four years from now.
Imagine what happens when we combine advanced robotics with even more advanced AGI operating systems.
Four years.
In Rossum’s Universal Robots, the story sees the company manufacture mass-produced, artificial humanoids designed to do all of humanity’s manual labor, which—spoiler alert—ultimately leads to a worldwide rebellion, and the extinction of the human race.
If I were creating an audio version of this post, this is where I’d insert the sound of a loud record scratch.
Yeah. Yikes.
And that’s exactly what the AI ‘Doomers’ (as coined in an incredible podcast series about the history of AI; find the link at the end of this post if you’re interested) are afraid of.
But when you ask most of the other folks who are developing AI what happens to humans after we get to AGI—what we do, what we become, and what our lives eventually look like—their answers aren’t filled with R.U.R.-induced dread.
Instead, there’s a hint of a twinkle in their eye. A somewhat incredulous optimism mixed with the glimmer of something I might describe as a slightly puzzled curiosity, about the idea that AGI might actually free humans to pursue the things that make us uniquely human—the possibility that we’d be free to fill our days with creative endeavours, meaningful acts of service, joyful pursuits, and authentic, unhurried connection...with each other; with the Earth and other living things; with ourselves.
I can’t stop thinking about it.
If you’re like most people, you might be saying ‘oh sure, wouldn’t that be nice’ because you’ve only ever dreamed—if you’ve even allowed yourself to do that much—of a world where we’re actually, finally, truly free to live our days doing the things we’ve long said we’ve always dreamed of doing.
And that’s exactly the place where we discover just how cobwebbed we’ve allowed our imaginations—and our hearts—to get, never mind just how rusty we’ve gotten at aligning our day-to-day activities with the stuff of our dreams.
That’s what happens when you’ve been on the treadmill long enough—you forget that stepping off is even an option.
From survival mode to something else entirely
When it comes right down to it, for most of human history our daily lives have been organized around one primary question:
How do we stay alive?
That’s not to be melodramatic. Even in the developed world, the necessities of food, shelter and safety still aren’t abstract concerns. They’ve been the essentials of life for all of humanity’s existence—for all of life’s existence—for plants, animals, every living thing.
Even now, in the wealthiest societies in human history, some version of that question—even if less ‘survival’-vibe words are used for it—still runs most of our lives:
How do I pay the bills? Stay afloat? Keep the job? Hold it all together?
We answer that question by calling it ‘being responsible’. We call it adulting. We call it hustle. We call it the grind.
And that’s what we’ve come to call ‘life’.
This is the treadmill. And most of us have been on it so long we’re behaving as though we’re permanently attached to it.
Now, with AI already here and AGI on the near-horizon, I can’t stop asking myself: what happens when that way of living changes?
What happens when the thing that’s been consuming most of our waking hours—the economic necessity of work in its current form—starts to be handled differently? Not eliminated, not overnight, and not without difficulty and disruption, to be sure. But genuinely, structurally transformed by technology in ways that free up human time and energy at a speed and scale we’ve never experienced before?
What do we do then?
What would we want to do?
We can’t yet imagine what’s coming—and that can be the biggest gift
Here’s a thought experiment worth sitting with.
Before the telephone existed, nobody could imagine a ‘telephone operator’ plugging lines into a switchboard to connect calls. And once they did exist, nobody could have fathomed the devices we now carry in our pockets: connecting us wirelessly to anyone on the planet, translating languages in real time, and running on more computing power than the systems that sent humans to the moon.
You can’t fully imagine what you haven’t yet experienced.
Which means whatever we’re picturing as the “post-AI world”—the scenarios we’re hoping for or dreading—are almost certainly as inadequate as Queen Victoria trying to imagine the internet.
There’s no doubt about it: the future will be stranger and richer and wilder than our current imaginations can even access.
That’s not naive optimism. That’s just how technological transitions have always worked. The jobs that disappeared in previous industrial revolutions were replaced by categories of work that couldn’t have been named in advance. The printing press. Electricity. The internet. The lives that became possible were unimaginable from inside the old paradigm.
I’m not saying this transition will be painless. It won’t. I’m not saying the disruption isn’t real. It is.
But I am saying that the story doesn’t have to end with disruption—or destruction—like it did in the Czech play.
The disruption can be where our new story begins.
The job that was siphoning your soul
Let’s be honest.
A lot of us have jobs—or have had jobs—that we would not choose if we didn’t need the money.
Not because we’re ungrateful for the work, or because we don’t understand the value of making a contribution. But because the particular work we’ve been doing, in the particular way we’ve been doing it, never quite fit the person we actually are. Certainly not the whole of who we are.
Listen—the fear of losing a job to AI or having to close a business due to changes in demand is real. I’m not trying to minimize that.
But AI is giving us the opportunity to examine a question underneath those fears—a question most of us have never allowed ourselves the privilege of entertaining before—about whether or not you actually want to keep doing this particular thing for the rest of your working life.
As uncomfortable as the short-term disruption might be, what if it ends up being the catalyst for freeing you to do what you’ve deep-down wanted to do for years—if not decades?
Not everyone is in a soul-siphoning job. Some people genuinely love their work, so it’s understandable to want to protect it. But for those who aren’t—and there are a lot of you—the question is worth asking:
What are you actually afraid of losing?
That’s obvious, you say. My home. My car. The ability to put food on the table.
Those fears are real.
But here’s what else that’s real: the treadmill—the promise that working hard equals a stable life—has already been failing a lot of people for a long time. Housing costs have outpaced wages for years. Job security has been eroding for decades, with companies cutting pension plans and employment contracts in favour of contract positions with no benefits.
Long before AI ever entered the conversation, I used to lead workshops about building alternate sources of financial independence, and when we asked attendees who was there in the hopes of replacing their job income, every single time around 85-90% of the people in the room would raise their hand. And everyone wanted the freedom to do work they enjoyed, when they wanted, and with whom they wanted.
So the choice in front of us now isn’t really between the “safe, reliable” treadmill and the “terrifying unknown”. It’s just the choice between two different flavours of uncertainty—one that’s familiar, and one that’s new. The question worth asking then, is whether the familiar one is actually delivering what we need and want in the first place, or whether we’ve simply gotten used to that particular flavour of instability because it’s what we’ve been getting fed for a very long time.
The people who’ve always fared best in times of transition are not the ones who waited for the system to protect them. They’re the ones who got clear on what they actually needed—not what they’d been conditioned to want, but the underlying feelings of safety, security, connection, and meaning that actually make life enjoyable to live—and then started building toward that, with whatever degree of agency available to them right now.
You may not particularly love any of the choices you have in front of you in a given moment, but your next step doesn’t have to be your final stop—and you always have a choice about what your next move will be.
The leap you keep not taking
Most people have some kind of answer to ‘the thing they’d do if circumstances were different’. The life they’d build if the risk felt more manageable. The creative work, the service, the project, the way of being in the world they imagine anytime they let themselves dream—but that keeps getting deferred until “someday.”
What’s your dream?
I’m not asking rhetorically. I’m asking because the conversations I’ve been having for decades—with people navigating career transitions, or sitting with the uncertainty of where things are headed, or who feel both the anxiety and the strange undercurrent of relief at the possibility that things could be different—always circle back to this question.
There’s usually a direction that keeps calling, but never gets followed. A leap that hasn’t been taken. A version of a life that sits on the shelf waiting for conditions that feel safer, or a time that’s more convenient.
What if the conditions are changing now? Not into something safer, exactly—at least not in the short term. But into something that makes the old reasons for waiting not only less convincing, but—and perhaps sooner than you think—irrelevant?
What leap would you take, if the treadmill slowed down long enough for you to step off?
What do you actually want?
We got our first taste of coming eye-to-eye with this question during COVID. For some, it was a reckoning about the people we’d chosen to make our home with. For others, it was a revamping of longstanding day-to-day routines. For many, the question hit hardest when it came time to go back to work.
Because we’d had time to start asking ourselves the hardest question of all.
Most people still aren’t very articulate with their response to it—even though the answers have always been waiting patiently in their heart. They’re unclear on it not because they don’t know what they want—although that’s often what their mind will tell them—but because the treadmill they had to jump back onto in order to keep feeding the machine once the world opened back up stole back the time they needed to really sit with the question—to feel into it.
When I ask people what they want, I often get answers about things: a certain income. A certain kind of house. A certain degree of autonomy. Recognition. More time. Rest.
And those answers might be true. But I like to dig a few layers deeper.
Why do you want those things? How do you imagine you’ll feel if you had them?
When you get far enough beneath the surface desires, what you’re looking for is always something much deeper than the thing itself. It’s always about how you anticipate feeling in those circumstances. Safe. Seen. Understood. Free. Excited. Purposeful. Peaceful. Connected. Joyful. Loved.
Here’s the thing about those feelings: they’re not actually dependent on the specific external circumstances most of us are blindly grinding toward. They’re available through other paths. Shorter paths. Paths that don’t require thirty more years on the treadmill before you get to start living the life you actually want.
If your core physical needs were genuinely met—if all traces of survival anxiety were lifted—what would you enjoy doing when you woke up in the morning? What would make you feel useful and glad to be here? How would you want to be of service, if you could choose the where, the what, the when, and the who?
Really think about these questions, not as hypotheticals but as actual, real questions you’ll need to have real answers to—maybe sooner than you think.
Maybe less than four years from now.
These aren’t just things to daydream about anymore. My business is called Dreamsmith® for a reason—because these are the questions we’re all going to be forced to find answers to.
Your answers will be the raw material for your next chapter.
Your life, the sequel.
The world we actually want to build
Most people are under the illusion—compelling though it may seem—that the relentless pace and economic organizing principles of the past few centuries are a permanent feature of life on Earth, rather than a single chapter that future generations will look back on the way we now look back on hand-copying every book by candlelight before the printing press existed.
No different than the way our grandchildren and great-grandchildren will one day look back on how we currently live.
‘The way it’s been’ has just been one more stage in our evolution. A particular configuration of technology, economy, and social organization that served certain purposes for a time, but which is now—slowly, and then at some point it may feel like it’s happening all at once—being reconfigured.
Because I don’t believe the treadmill was ever supposed to be the destination. It was just the bridge we built on our way—a means of figuring out how to get to the life we actually want.
In the play, Čapek handed the win to the robots.
But we’re the ones writing this story.
What replaces the treadmill is in our hands. We get to choose. The future will be created one way or another: either through conscious and deliberate new intentions and aspirations, or by repeating old default beliefs and practices that we insist, even unconsciously, on dragging along with us like luggage without wheels over cobblestones—roads worth honouring for how far they carried us, but that were never meant to take us all the way.
The new world will be created from the values and visions and decisions of the people living through the transition.
That’s you and me. Right now.
Which means the most important question isn’t how do I survive what’s coming?
It’s what kind of world do I actually want to help build next?
What does the most beautiful version of this world look like? Not the one where we’ve simply automated the old economy and kept all the same structures intact—we can all see in real time where that approach has gotten us—but the version where the freed-up human time, energy, and creativity get directed toward something genuinely worth directing it toward.
Toward each other. Toward the planet. Toward the things that make life meaningful rather than just manageable.
That world is not guaranteed. But it is possible. And it starts with the people who are willing to ask, what if it did work out?—and then begin, one decision at a time, to build in that direction.
It’s up to us to take that twinkling of optimism seriously—and create accordingly.
That’s the work I’m here for. If you’re here for it too, that’s exactly what we’ll be talking about here in The Chrysalis.
Subscribe below if you haven’t already—there’s more of this conversation coming. And if someone in your life needs to hear the message that the treadmill is optional and something better is possible, share this with them today.
Let’s gently become together. 💛
Kelly
P.S. Still not thinking AI is going to impact you, your industry, your family, or your life much? Listen to The Last Invention podcast during your upcoming walks, drives, or workouts. It’s a fascinating journalistic series about the history of the development of AI. I was fortunate to have met Andy Mills, one of the producers of the series, at a conference recently, and it’ll help you understand what’s happening, how we got here, and where we might be headed. Highly recommend.