In the 1980s, at my particular school in the UK, we were being primed for a society where computers and machines would do so much work that we would only have to work for ten hours a week or so. Therefore, in the curriculum, we had lots of classes on leisure things, as in hobbies.

This world never came to be. Instead we had Graeber's 'McJobs', with ever more specialist roles as per the capitalist division of labour idea, with lots of important jobs that aren't important at all.

We had a glimpse of a 'leisure society' during the pandemic when only key workers were needed to do anything useful, everyone else was on the government furlough.

In theory, AGI offers the prospect of a leisure society of sorts. However, it doesn't. Going back to the unusual curriculum at the school I happened to go to, a key skill was critical thinking. As well as doing macrame, football, cookery, pottery, art and what not during what would be teaching time, we also had plenty of courses on philosophy and much else that can be bracketed as literature. The idea was that we were not being brought up to be compliant serfs for the capitalist machine, instead we were expected to have agency and be able to think for ourselves.

The problem with AGI is that we are bypassing our brains to some extent and at a cost of being able to master the art of critical thinking. Nobody has to solve a problem by themselves, they can ask their phone to do it for them. I could be wrong, however, I don't see evidence that AGI is making people smarter and more intelligent.

We have already outsourced our ability to recall information to search engines. General knowledge used to be something you had or you didn't, and people earned respect for being able to remember and recall vast amounts of information. This information came from books that you either had or had to access in a library. Nowadays, whatever it is, a search engine has got you covered. Nobody has to be a walking gazetteer or dictionary.

This ability to recall information rather than look up everything came with risks, mostly because it was easy to be wrong, or 'almost right', which can be worse. However, it is/was the bedrock for critical thinking.

Clearly the utopian vision of a leisure society never happened in the form that some envisaged in the 1980s. With AGI I don't see any talk of a leisure society where we are only having to put in ten hour working weeks. This isn't being proposed at all. If it was then AGI would not be a nightmare for the average person.