After the Washing Machine

At dinner the other night, two people who work in AI said something that’s stayed with me. They were talking about automation — dishes, laundry, repetitive tasks — and said, “Hell yeah, I’d get a robot to do that for me. I hate doing it.”And then, just as quickly, they acknowledged the worry: “But if AI is going to take over, that’s exactly how it’ll happen.”

And I thought — maybe the better question is: what would you do with your time if you didn’t have to do dishes and laundry anymore?

I brought up the washing machine.

Because if we want a modern parallel to AI, that’s one of the first. A domestic revolution. It cut the hours women spent washing clothes dramatically. It was marketed as a liberation device — a machine that would give people, especially women, more leisure.

But did we take the leisure?
No.

We filled it. We filled it with more work. More goals. More productivity.
We used our new freedom not to rest, but to perform new versions of being useful.

And that’s what I’m seeing now.
We’re staring down the next wave of automation — and instead of wondering how we might soften, or reconnect, or heal — we’re already reaching for the next place to dig deeper, optimize harder, perform better.

When I asked this question at dinner — “What would we actually do with the time AI gives back to us?” — one of the guests launched into a canned monologue about mineral extraction and the value of digging into the core of the earth. It felt dystopian.
It felt like Don’t Look Up.
It felt like we’re still scared of the void.

Because we are.
Because real rest, real spaciousness, is unfamiliar.

We’ve turned freedom into optimization.
We’ve turned time into currency.
We’ve turned stillness into a glitch.

And I’m asking something quieter:

What if AI didn’t just replace our effort — what if it confronted our relationship with being?

What if the machines really do get better at the chores — and suddenly, we’re left with ourselves?

No dishes. No scrubbing. No proving.
Just space.

What will we do with that space?
Scroll? Extract? Perform?
Or maybe — will we finally learn to dwell?
To walk slower? To make eye contact?
To listen to music without thinking about productivity?
To write letters? To ask better questions?

Because this isn’t about robots.
It’s about relearning how to be human — when no one’s making us earn it by suffering.

And that, to me, feels like the real singularity. Not when machines surpass us — but when we remember we were never machines to begin with.