Oscar R. Gómez, Ratan Lal Basu
The relationship between work, productivity, and leisure has undergone profound transformations throughout history. In the slave societies of Antiquity, certain forms of social organization allowed segments of the population to devote time to political, cultural, religious, and recreational activities through the appropriation of the labor of other human beings. The Industrial Revolution introduced a qualitatively different transformation by enabling machines to progressively replace part of human labor. Today, artificial intelligence extends this process to cognitive and professional tasks. This article proposes an alternative interpretation of the so-called unemployment problem: when a society reaches levels of productivity that make it possible to produce goods and services with a decreasing amount of human labor, the reduction in employment should not necessarily be regarded as an economic failure, but potentially as a liberation of time. The central problem therefore shifts from the creation of jobs to the distribution of the benefits of productivity. The article examines the attention economy, the concentration of benefits derived from digitalization, the redistributive function of the State, and the possibility of partially decoupling material subsistence from employment. Drawing on historical and contemporary precedents, including Keynes's reflections on the future of work, experiences with Universal Basic Income, and current debates surrounding artificial intelligence, the article proposes the hypothesis that AI could enable the democratization of leisure historically reserved for minorities. The decisive question, therefore, would not be how to preserve employment indefinitely, but how to transform increasing productivity into leisure, material security, and citizenship.