Salim Ismail loves to drive. He loves it in India, he said, and his favorite place in the world for it is Naples, because the drivers there are "completely bonkers crazy." He also expects autonomous cars to take that pleasure away. On the Moonshots with Peter Diamandis episode recorded October 16, 2026 and published the next day, Ismail offered that loss as his own small test of an idea the panel spent its final segment on: when machines do most of the work, people's sense of purpose could come from something other than their jobs, and they may be better for it.
Host Peter Diamandis, founder of XPRIZE and Singularity University, put the idea in one line: "We confuse making a living with having a reason to live." The panel was Diamandis; Ismail, founder of OpenExO; Emad Mostaque, founder of Intelligent Internet; and Anousheh Ansari, CEO of XPRIZE and the first woman to fly to space on a privately funded trip. The idea is a proposal and a hope, not a finding. Ansari raised the objection nobody fully answered.
Where the question comes from
Diamandis started from how fast the machines are improving. He pointed to the cost of robots falling as the language models behind them get cheaper, at a pace he described as halving every three weeks. "When AI and robotics can do more of the doing," he asked, "what do we want the human experience to become?"
His starting point was that people thrive when they have some struggle to overcome and a purpose, and that "we've always found purpose through our work." He added that work in the modern sense is recent: 500 or 1,000 years ago, he said, people did not have work, they survived.
The case that work was never the source of meaning
Ismail said he wanted to "dispute that." People often worry about what humans will do once AI takes over the jobs, because they assume people get so much meaning from work. Diamandis refined the point: he wasn't sure people have meaning in their work, only that they currently define their meaning through it.
Ismail gave two reasons to doubt even that. The first was a figure from polls of corporate workers, which he said show 79% are dissatisfied with their work, mostly because the work does nothing for any outcome the organization cares about. He did not name the poll. The second was historical. Since the industrial revolution, he said, people have been trained to act like robots and measured like machines: how many widgets a worker can stamp out, how many trial balances an accountant can finish. Now, he argued, the most useful colleagues are the ones who learn fastest, are most creative and are "the most human." As robots and AI take on more of the doing, he said, "humans can spend much more time being."
Diamandis said most people work because that is how they put food on the table and keep insurance for their families, not because they dreamed of waiting tables or cleaning hotel rooms. His question was what they did dream of, and whether they could pursue it in a world where money goes "a thousand times further than ever before." He mentioned the idea of a "universal high income," then set the term aside.
Ismail tried to make the economics concrete. He pointed to the Abundance Prize, an XPRIZE idea that asks whether housing, food, health care and education for a family of four could be brought down to $1,000 a month. Prizes of this kind, he said, typically become viable about seven years after they are announced, and robots and AI make this one plausible. He gave a handheld diagnostic device as one example that could quickly cut the cost of health care, "if we can get outside the regulatory capture." At that level, he said, a family would need $12,000 a year to be cared for, "not that high of a bar." The rest of a person's time could go to questions like which problems to take on and where to find the most fun. These figures are Ismail's projection for a prize target; nobody on the panel said costs had reached that level.
Diamandis added a line he credited to Sadhguru: technology is "the mechanism by which humanity takes a vacation from survival."
The objection: what if AI does what you love, better?
Ansari said she wanted to "challenge that a little bit." Suppose money is no longer a worry and you are free to do what you want. If AI and robots can do that thing better, cheaper and faster, then "I'm not needed to do that thing anymore." More and more activities are falling into that category, she said, including the ones she loves: "even I love being a physicist, even I love to be a mathematician, I'm no longer needed."
Ismail answered with his driving story. Autonomous cars will take that activity away, and he said this will push him to move his desire toward work where he adds more value. He called it a "forcing function" to lift up Maslow's hierarchy and act from one's higher self. He also gave the conversation's standing caveat: "we're optimists on this show," he said, and "you could go to the negative side also."
Abraham Maslow's original 1943 paper supports a looser version of that ladder than the phrase suggests. Maslow described people as partly satisfied and partly unsatisfied in several needs at the same time, with higher needs emerging gradually, not only after lower ones are fully met.
The replies: process, connection and the collective
Diamandis thought there were better examples than driving. People still enjoy playing chess against one another, he said, even though they are "crappy compared to even a mediocre AI." Ismail added that chess is more popular than ever. Diamandis's second example was an artist who enjoys painting or drawing: AI may produce better pictures, but the artist enjoys the process.
The discussion then moved from doing things to being with people. The conversation turned to how people once introduced themselves by lineage, how strong communities can be, and how a family does not need wealth to be happy. Most people, the point went, do not spend enough time with their children or parents, and freed-up time would allow stronger connections, "to share and experience the universe together. And that's what abundance is."
The collective theme kept coming back. The discussion touched on the idea that "I can't do something, but we can do anything," and on Alpha School as an example of learning done with others rather than alone. Ismail said the reasons to live used to be survival and procreation, and that energy, water and health-care abundance would let people pursue "higher purposes and collective purposes." His example was the musician whose highest aspiration is to play well together in a band. The discussion settled on a phrase for this: meaning as "collective flow and flourishing." Diamandis went further, predicting that people are about to become "conscious on a new level" as they become more connected, whether through brain-computer interfaces, psychedelics or flow states.
Ansari gave a concrete example of a community acting together. At XPRIZE's Visioneering gathering in Malibu, wind and fires forced the organizers to cancel the event, and everyone went to bed late and disappointed. She woke up to thousands of text messages: attendees had organized themselves to meet in the ballroom anyway. "Everyone's coming," she said.
Glass ceilings
Diamandis added another argument: most people put limits on what they believe they can do, shaped by their parents, their friends and what they have been told. In the age of superintelligence, he said, people need to shatter those limits. He called giving a ninth-grader an AI model to do ninth-grade homework "a travesty." The better use, he said, is to ask the student to use AI to build an interplanetary spaceship or create a new life form, and to point the technology at the world's biggest problems "because you can."
Purpose, passion and "who you bring along"
When Diamandis asked for closing thoughts, Ansari said purpose and happiness are tied together. She described young people who have not found their purpose and do not know how to, and said they struggle the most, including "people who commit suicide because they just can't see why am I here." If people can be helped to find purpose, she said, "a lot of problems will be solved."
The discussion then cited the late Clayton Christensen, who coined the term disruptive innovation, and his book How Will You Measure Your Life? At the end of a life, the point went, being rich won't matter much; what matters is "who you bring along with you." The same turn argued against treating purpose as individual: "It's my purpose. No, it's our purpose." Writing a book, making a song or building a strong family could all count. The Christensen Institute's summary of the 2012 book describes it as separating motivation from financial incentives and treating relationships as long-term investments shaped by how a person spends their time and attention.
Ismail brought in a concept from his own work, the massive transformative purpose, or MTP. He said that in 2012 his group noticed the fastest-growing companies all had one, and that hiring now often depends on whether a person's MTP matches the organization's. "If you're joining SpaceX, you better be passionate about space," he said. OpenExO's explanation of the term defines an MTP as a long-lasting aim for meaningful change, not a profit target. It works as a filter for decisions and a reason for people to join a shared effort, and OpenExO applies the idea to individuals too, including purposes centered on family or community.
Ismail also argued that purpose produces persistence. He told of a man in Bangalore who decided to open a natural-food restaurant, learned from YouTube, grew his own produce and, by Ismail's account, built one of the world's top 50 restaurants. He also said Google's founders made 362 venture pitches before they got funded, at a time when there were already a dozen search engines. "I may have stopped at 10," he said. Both are his anecdotes, and the panel did not check them.
Diamandis ended on a distinction. "A passion is something that you love doing," he said. "A purpose is something you love doing that helps other people." The most important thing a parent or mentor can do, he said, is help someone find that purpose, "even if they're not being paid," because it makes a person intrinsically motivated. Ansari added one thing: believe you can actually achieve it.
Open questions
The support offered was mostly anecdote and analogy: a workplace poll Ismail did not name, chess, painting, a band, a restaurant in Bangalore, Google's pitch count. The cost figures are targets for a prize, not prices anyone has reached. Ismail said the panel looks at the positive side and that the outcome has to be seen; he framed the hopeful path as depending on getting through "this next 20, 30 years."
Ansari's objection was answered only in part. The chess and painting replies say that enjoying a process can survive being outperformed. They say less about her specific worry, that someone who loves physics or mathematics may stop being needed in the field at all.
Ansari also named a present-day problem. She said technology and AI have so far separated people, who don't feel connected as a community and so feel more fear and uncertainty. People hear talk about the future, she said, but "don't see a real path or movement in that direction." Ismail agreed that this is "the biggest negative today": people do not see where they sit in that future. Diamandis voiced how it can feel to many: the billionaires over there and me with no part of it. Ansari finished the thought: the billionaires are becoming trillionaires, "and I'm still here."