A new essay published on October 29 challenges one of the more comforting assumptions about an AI-driven future: that people freed from work will naturally spend their time with friends. Writer Fernando Borretti argues that this vision overlooks the institutions and shared efforts through which friendships are usually formed.
The essay is a work of analysis rather than an empirical study, and its claims should be read as a proposed social risk, not a forecast. Its central point is that “hanging out” depends on prior conditions. People first need reasons to meet, experiences to discuss and activities that make them useful or interesting to one another. Workplaces, universities, cities and technical communities currently provide much of that structure.
Borretti imagines a post-scarcity society in which inexpensive superhuman intelligence makes human labor and much formal education economically unnecessary. In that setting, he argues, the same technology that supplies material abundance could remove common routes into lasting relationships. He uses software communities as a personal example: learning Linux, asking for help in chat rooms and publishing open-source projects once created repeated contact with peers. An AI assistant can now answer many of those questions directly, reducing the need to approach another person.
The concern extends beyond employment. If people no longer travel to workplaces or educational institutions, cities may lose part of their role as gathering points. At the same time, increasingly personalized digital entertainment could become a more convenient alternative to unpredictable human company. The essay describes those forces as a form of disintermediation: people get information, assistance and stimulation without depending on one another.
That argument does not establish that isolation is inevitable. It also does not account in detail for clubs, families, sports, religious groups, volunteering or new institutions that could emerge around abundant leisure. Instead, it identifies a planning problem for optimistic accounts of advanced AI. Removing compulsory work does not automatically replace the repeated cooperation, mutual reliance and shared difficulty that work and education often supply.
Borretti is especially concerned about generational effects. People who formed friendships before widespread AI assistance may retain those networks, while younger people could have fewer opportunities to create comparable ties. Even long-lived adults could see existing relationships gradually weaken without institutions that generate new ones.
The essay’s practical contribution is to shift the post-work debate from the amount of leisure available to the quality of the social systems around it. If AI reduces the need for human help, societies may need to design new reasons for people to learn together, depend on each other and pursue difficult goals. Abundance, in this account, solves the problem of scarcity but leaves the construction of meaning and community unresolved.
