The Machines Arrived. The Boredom Followed.
Sixty years after a New York Times prediction, AI and automation have redrawn the map of work—and the soul of it.
In 1964, amid Cold War anxieties and space-age optimism, a speculative column titled “Visit to The World’s Fair of 2014” painted a future shaped by technology and trembling with psychic unease. Among its eerily prescient observations was this warning:
“Mankind will suffer badly from the disease of boredom… The lucky few who can be involved in creative work of any sort will be the true elite of mankind, for they alone will do more than serve a machine.”
Sixty years later, the machine has arrived. It speaks, it writes, it drives, it diagnoses. And for millions of workers, it has begun to replace—not just assist—them. The dread beneath the surface of that 1964 prediction is no longer a speculative fear. It’s a lived experience.
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The Rise of the Servants
Artificial intelligence now drafts legal memos, composes advertising copy, generates code, grades essays, and, in some countries, adjudicates insurance claims. The physical world has also been rewritten by automation: warehouses hum with robots; fast-food chains experiment with cashierless models; long-haul trucking is being reshaped by fleets guided by software.
In the face of these shifts, labor markets have remained resilient—on paper. Unemployment is low in the United States. But under the surface, a new stratification is taking hold: a society cleaved into those who instruct the machines, those who maintain them, and those who serve those who serve the machines.
The Creative Class and the Quiet Crisis
The “lucky few,” as the Times article put it, now go by various names: prompt engineers, innovation leads, content strategists. Many work not in factories but in glowing rooms, nudging neural networks toward creativity. Their work is often celebrated in TED Talks and LinkedIn posts. But even among them, a quiet crisis brews.
“There’s a subtle despair that comes from watching your own thinking automated,” said Dr. Maya Adebayo, a cognitive psychologist who studies tech-related burnout. “It’s not just fear of being replaced—it’s the sense that your value is shrinking to a narrow sliver of what it used to be.”
Psychiatry, once an afterthought in medical hierarchies, has indeed surged—as the 1964 prediction envisioned. The World Health Organization estimates a global shortfall of mental health professionals in the tens of thousands. In the U.S., therapy apps powered by AI try to fill the gap, ironically treating some of the very anxieties created by AI itself.
The Age of Useful Uselessness
The economist John Maynard Keynes once warned of “technological unemployment,” caused by our discovery of means to economize labor faster than we can find new uses for it. Yet in 2025, a different paradox looms: a glut of new jobs—many of them insecure, low-paid, or psychologically hollow.
A recent report from the OECD found that nearly 40% of jobs in advanced economies now involve some degree of “meaningless automation”—workers doing tasks that software could perform faster but isn’t allowed to, for reasons of oversight, liability, or sheer inertia.
“It’s a kind of theater,” said Santiago Perez, a logistics worker whose warehouse job involves monitoring bots that rarely malfunction. “I’m here so the system feels human. But I don’t think I matter to it.”
Redefining Human Work
Still, resistance to techno-determinism remains strong. Across sectors, unions are reasserting themselves, advocating not just for wages but for purpose. The Writers Guild of America won new safeguards against algorithmic replacement. Germany’s “right to disconnect” laws have inspired similar debates across the EU.
Some nations are experimenting with Universal Basic Income, not merely as a safety net but as a societal redesign. “We’re moving toward a world where economic value can’t be the sole justification for a life,” said László Székely, a Hungarian futurist. “We must define usefulness beyond productivity.”
Art, care, play, philosophy—these are the domains increasingly seen as irreducibly human. Yet, access to such dignified labor is limited. The elite, as 1964 foresaw, are not just the wealthy—but the creatively engaged.
The Machine’s Mirror
The future, it turns out, was less about flying cars and more about internal landscapes: how it feels to live in a world shaped by thinking machines. What it does to our attention, our ambition, our sense of worth.
“We built tools that can now outwrite the average human,” said Adebayo. “But what we haven’t figured out is what the average human is supposed to feel in response.”
It’s no longer about serving the machine. It’s about finding meaning beyond it.
