I grew up devouring Ray Bradbury. I don’t know why my childhood mind was so fascinated by the future. At the time, I never imagined that humans would one day be living a version of the future he wrote: not in the rocket ships or Mars missions he imagined, but in the quiet, insidious ways our lives would bend to screens and algorithms. I remember reading “Fahrenheit 451” with its earpieces, the omnipresent screens, and a society distracted from reflection. Now, I realize that I almost live in that world.
AI-generated portrait of Aida Haidar.
Sitting here at a Starbucks in my neighborhood, I look around and see people staring at screens—laptops, phones, white AirPods nestled in their ears. We don’t talk anymore like we used to. Conversation is replaced with scrolling, notifications, and curated digital echoes of the world. Bradbury imagined a society anesthetized by distraction. Now, this anesthesia comes courtesy of AI algorithms, subtly shaping what we see, read, and click. Back in 1953, when Bradbury wrote “Fahrenheit 451,” books offered a different rhythm: a chance to slow down, to confront ourselves. As Faber tells Montag, “If you’re not driving a hundred miles an hour… you can shut them… say, ‘Hold on a moment.’” That pause, that breath of thought, is almost extinct.
Artificial intelligence is here. People use it in myriad ways. I use it to brainstorm ideas, plan vacations, even get advice on finances. But for most of us, these are just playthings. The true stakes are far higher.
Futurologist Brett King, in an interview with me, put it bluntly: AI’s intent has always been to destroy human capital. “The most efficient form of a company is a humanless corporation,” he said. “The more automation you put into the system, the more likely our system of capitalism will fail.”
At first, it sounds counterintuitive. Automation is supposed to make things faster, cheaper, better. But capitalism relies on humans to expand production as demand rises; AI breaks that model bringing seismic consequences.
“That doesn’t mean we’ll move to socialism or communism. It means we need new economic thinking about what comes next,” King said, adding that otherwise, AI will produce a techno-feudalist world where those who own AI technologies accumulate massive wealth, and people will be left on basic income just to survive.
In an interview with The Astana Times, Brett King shared his thoughts with Aida Haidar. Photo credit: The Astana Times
“So AI must produce a philosophical shift in terms of what the purpose of the economy is,” he said.
The data show this is not just a theory. Internal documents leaked indicate Amazon plans to automate more than 600,000 jobs in the United States in the coming years, aiming for approximately 75% of operations to be automated by 2033. And this isn’t just unfolding in the West. Here at home, in Kazakhstan, government officials warn that AI could put up to 2.5 million specialists at risk of automation within the next five years. President Kassym-Jomart Tokayev has urged the government to anticipate these inevitable changes in the labor market and to leverage AI to create new jobs. He called for the launch of a national AI-based online platform for workforce retraining. When a disruption of this scale is already underway, it is no longer distant speculation—it is the challenge of our near future.
Where, then, is the place for humans in this new paradigm? Are we content with just existing, secure but devoid of challenge? History suggests not. Communism promised equality, but humans are not uniformly egalitarian. We are individualistic, driven by curiosity, ambition, and the desire to create. Authors like Bradbury sought to remind us of the beauty and complexity of our humanity.
In “Fahrenheit 451,” Montag begins to understand that the act of reading is an act of resistance against thoughtlessness, distraction, and the tyranny of convenience. The same, perhaps, could be said about our encounter with AI: it is not merely a tool, but a challenge to what it means to think, to work, to live. Bradbury wrote: “Live as if you’d drop dead in ten seconds. See the world. It’s more fantastic than any dream made or paid for in factories. Ask no guarantees, ask for no security, there never was such an animal.” It is a call to action, to refuse a life reduced to algorithmic obedience.
Still, King offers a counterpoint—a future less bleak, more human. The world of the 2040s, he predicts, will not focus on economic growth as it does today. “We’ll be asking how to use these technologies to raise the standard and quality of life for everyone, so that the struggle of human existence disappears. That’s the promise of AI. But we have to go through that period of disruption where we see the collapse of capitalism and the concept of work as it exists today,” he warned.
He paints a picture of a radically different economy: one where your work is not about putting food on the table or surviving, but about pursuing what you are passionate about, contributing meaningfully to the world. “When I meet you in 15 or 20 years, and I ask, ‘What do you do?’ your answer won’t be about a job that puts food on the table or helps you survive,” he said to me. “Thanks to these tools, your work will be about what brings real meaning to the world, instead of being just an economic unit of value.”
Meaning to the world? It is intoxicating, almost unbelievable. And yet, here where the tension lies: AI is both a threat and a promise. It can shake the foundations of our economy and society, but it also offers a chance to imagine life differently. Will humanity rise to the challenge, or will we drift into passive survival, seduced by efficiency and comfort?
Bradbury reminds us that thought, reflection, and human curiosity are not incidental—they are vital. AI may be able to calculate, optimize, and predict, but it cannot replace the messy, wonderfully human pursuit of meaning. The worry of AI is not just the fear of lost jobs or disrupted markets; it is the fear, at least mine, that we may lose the reflective, creative part that makes us human.
Ultimately, the meaning of our work and our interaction with technology is not in efficiency or survival—it is in the mark we leave on the world. As Bradbury wrote: “Everyone must leave something behind when he dies . . . Something your hand touched some way so your soul has somewhere to go when you die. It doesn’t matter what you do, so long as you change something from the way it was before you touched it into something that’s like you after you take your hands away.”
In the age of AI, this remains our truest measure: not the work a machine can do for us, but the irreplaceable imprint of our humanity.
