Nir Eisikovits is professor of philosophy at UMass Boston and the director of its Applied Ethics Center.
Why go to a university? Until recently, there was a standard answer to that question: A liberal arts education prepared people to be good citizens and have more satisfying lives because it equipped them to better understand the world, connected them to professional and social networks, and boosted the income they’d earn over the course of their career.
As the price tag for an academic degree soared, this rationale evolved. Parents and students started asking, understandably, whether they would get a good return on their investment. Would college prepare young people for work? Would it give them marketable skills? Place them in internships? It’s not by accident that professional placement is one of the statistics that schools highlight in their promotional materials.
But what if work disappears? Suppose the hype around AI turns out to be (at least partially) true and many jobs go away. The Economist, a publication hardly given to hyperbole, takes that possibility very seriously. This May it ran an article titled “Prepare for an AI jobs apocalypse” in which it noted that “society may be on the verge of a profound reallocation of resources and political upheaval” because of massive job losses.
Of course, we’ve heard this before. The economist John Maynard Keynes predicted in 1930 that by the time his kids grew up, automation would bring about a 15-hour workweek. But the possibility of a dramatic decline in the amount of work that needs to be done is worth considering this time — at least as a thought experiment.
Suppose, then, that AI vindicates Keynes, even if the upheaval comes much later than he anticipated. What will universities do for students if they are no longer getting them ready for work?
Well, if we are going to work a lot less, what if universities reimagined themselves as places that prepare people for leisure?
Taking this idea seriously rests on three assumptions. First, there are better and worse forms of leisure. There must be more to leisure than sipping daiquiris on the beach or scrolling on Instagram. Mindless indulgence is great for a while, but it is not a sustainable or sustaining way to spend one’s time.
There must be, to borrow a term from Aristotle, a noble form of leisure: free time wherein people, released from the urgent need to support themselves, engage in activities for their own sake, which exercise their uniquely human qualities and combine thinking, socializing, play, and the appreciation of beauty and great works.
Aristotle argued that it is thanks to leisure that we can discover and enjoy things that are not immediately needed for survival. Leisure is necessary for the formation of human achievements — mathematics, poetry, philosophy, and so on. And it is also necessary for wondering at the world and appreciating its beauty. As the Aristotle scholar David Roochnik puts it, “Only when free from responsibility and distraction can someone afford to be open to and amazed by the world.”
The second assumption is that there are some preconditions for the capacity to engage in leisure well. We must gain exposure to various forms of human achievement like literature, athletics, and architecture so that we can figure out what we are drawn to in the first place. But that’s not enough: We must also be able to pay attention in a sustained way, so that we can give each of these areas of interest its due. We need to hone our critical thinking skills to help us discern that even if some lesser form of leisure (say, lurking on TikTok) seems attractive, it might be harmful in the long run. We need self-discipline to limit the pull of such “ignoble” forms of leisure, and finally, we need the capacity to engage fully in close relationships — friendships, romantic ties, family connections — so that we can share our lives of noble leisure with others.
But if these are the preconditions for engaging in excellent leisure, we’re not terribly well prepared.
As a result of overexposure to social media and the short-form content available there, the average American has a shorter attention span than the American of two decades ago. Our capacity for critical thinking has been declining as we have outsourced many of our judgments to predictive algorithms and have surrendered our capacity to sift through raw information to large language models. As for young people’s ability to form strong bonds with others, AI is eroding that as well. The most popular uses of the technology are either asking it for psychological advice or engaging in relationships with it. Some people don’t write texts to their friends without running them through a chatbot first; others prefer the company of chatbot companions to that of real romantic partners. These trends pose a threat to our ability to appreciate real human connections and to negotiate the friction they can entail.
In short, if a new age of leisure is coming, we are not ready to take advantage of it. This brings us to our third assumption: Leisure can be taught.
But doing so will require schools to be intentional and unapologetic about that goal.
Universities can rehabilitate the capacity to pay attention by cultivating sustained engagement with complex and rich works. They can revitalize critical thinking by insisting on student writing (the college essay is still the best tool we have for teaching people how to organize and critique their own thoughts) and insisting that students process information for themselves rather than consume the predigested summaries offered up by ChatGPT or Claude. Universities can also nudge people into practicing their social skills by offering small, discussion-rich classes and extracurricular activities that bring participants together (they are already doing some of that — think of film clubs, debate tournaments, and so on; such activities will have to be given more weight). Most important, our universities can introduce young people to the peak achievements civilization has to offer, so that they can figure out what ignites their curiosity.
A massive reimagining of higher education away from job preparation and back to the cultivation of human excellence is obviously going to require a different funding model. You can’t charge many families $90,000 a year for self-discovery.
But then again, if a lot of work disappears, the entire economic model that determines how citizens sustain themselves and how companies that still make things get paid will have to be revamped. Some municipalities and countries are already experimenting with different versions of guaranteed basic income programs in anticipation of these changes.
Strikingly, the etymology of our English word “school” harkens back to the ancient Greek “scholé” — meaning leisure. If the AI revolution really takes hold, our universities will have to take note of that old connection.
Higher education has largely given up on the idea of promoting knowledge for its own sake. The university has had to show that it is useful. In the process it has turned itself into an expensive apprenticeship program, buttressed by nice climbing walls and food courts. Ironically, we may be coming to a time when a university’s best chance of survival will be to show that it is a place where young people can pursue activities that aren’t good for anything beyond themselves.