The Post-Job economy is already here. AI isn’t coming for your job. It’s already replacing creative teams, farmers, drivers, coders, entire industries. And the robots that follow are gonna cost less than your laptop.

In the old system, you were valued for how much you could produce. But when production is automated, what’s left for humans to do?

What still matters is what’s always mattered: living close to nature, raising kids in community, and doing meaningful work with people you care about.

Smart villages aren’t escapism. They’re regenerative, tech powered communities, with shared infrastructure, coworking, childcare, and creativity at the center.

AI can help by quietly coordinating projects, suggesting events, flagging repairs, and connecting neighbors.

In a post-job world, smart villages aren’t a utopia. They’re a survival strategy. They can help us create a future worth living.

This isn’t the end of work. It’s the beginning of a new way of life.

What if you could live in the mountains in the summer and the desert in the winter without ever losing your people?

That’s the idea behind the network of villages: seasonal living without starting over, shared values, tools, and a culture that moves with you. Families, creators, remote workers rotating between locations, staying connected year round.

Instead of one isolated project, we want to build a network of villages, each with its own flavor but linked by purpose, technology, and trust. It’s a new model of living: flexible, grounded, and built for this era.

The future isn’t just one village. It’s many. And they’re starting to connect.

The first sound is trees brushing against your windows. Sunlight warms the roof above. You open the glass door barefoot, step onto the porch, and breathe in earth, mint, and dew drying on timber.

The dome workspace hums nearby. Children laugh near the forest playground. A glider launches from the slope, handmade in the maker space. Elders gather herbs. Solar panels flash across rooftops.

In the communal kitchen, bread is rising. Someone stirs eggs and wild mushrooms in cast iron. Everywhere, quiet motion, quiet purpose.

A young resident asks how to open source their aquaponics design. Someone else is sculpting functional roof tiles from clay. Later, the village AI reminds you what’s ready for harvest.

Evening comes with music, firelight, and small ideas passed like gifts. You fall asleep to the sound of frogs, wind, and crackling fire.

The future isn’t something far off anymore. It’s here and it’s alive.

Four years ago, we crowdfunded a 400 acre campsite to build a village.

Since then, we’ve been working on infrastructure and getting ready for phase two of developing our smart village project. We’ve built a wood-fired sauna, a geodesic dome, early versions of our permaculture garden. We laid new irrigation, brought in satellite internet, cleared land, and hosted thousands of guests in the campsite.

We’ve also been working on early versions of our Village OS, AI tools to help coordinate life here. We learned how to live and work as a group through seasons of hard lessons and shared effort.

And finally, we’re ready for phase two: to build a seasonal village with shared infrastructure, childcare, coworking, health and wellness, and creativity at the core.

Our long-term vision is to build a network of these smart villages around the globe. If you want to be a part of it, we host work stays and immersions, and we’re looking for investors and partners.

Leave a comment “Village” on this video for more info.

We’re entering a world where most people won’t have jobs. But that’s not the crisis—it’s the opportunity. AI is replacing entire industries, housing is unaffordable, and loneliness is now considered a public health epidemic. What’s breaking isn’t just the economy; it’s the entire model of how we live.

The real answer isn’t just another app, or another government program, or another business. It’s villages—smart, regenerative, tech enabled villages. Places where people share tools, grow food, raise kids, build things, and belong.

We’re not just talking about it. We’re building one. And you can join.

Four years of building. Here’s what it taught us.

We didn’t come here as experts. We didn’t know anything about land management before we got here. But we came here to learn, and after four years of field work we learned more than any school could ever teach us.

We learned how to fix what breaks, adapt when plans fail, and stay calm when things get chaotic. We built resilience the hard way—sunburnt, cold, covered in dirt and bug bites.

But we also learned how to learn, how to stack skills, solve problems, and build systems that build themselves. We learned how to organize as a team and face discomfort, and still find a way to laugh through it all.

This place kind of became our dojo, a training ground for the meta skills that the future demands. And that’s the part that’s most exciting for us—giving other people the chance to learn meta skills of their own.

Come check it out.

We offer camping and work stays at wellsgrayresort.ca.

We are not building a utopia; we’re building a prototype.

Nothing about this is perfect. We’ve made huge mistakes. Things break all the time. Projects stall. People burn out. But that’s the point. This is a test bed for new ways of living, working, and building community.

We’re experimenting with shared tools, local food, childcare, governance, and AI—all on real land, with real people, in real time. This isn’t theory; it’s field work, and every season we get a little bit better.

If you’re waiting for perfect, this isn’t it. But if you’re into building, come help us make it better.

This isn’t about manifesting a vibe; it’s about doing the work. We’re building systems from the ground up—food, water, power, governance, childcare, housing. There’s no mystical secret, just a lot of digging, wiring, planting, repairing, and listening.

We’re not chasing utopia, and we’re not drowning in cynicism either. We’re just trying to live better with real people, real tools, and real connection to place.

If that feels idealistic, then maybe the bar’s been too low for too long.

What happens when AI helps run a village?

In a smart village, AI isn’t just a chat bot; it’s the quiet co-pilot in the background, knowing where things are, what needs doing, and who can help. It can suggest events, flag repairs, and coordinate shared tools without anyone needing to micromanage.

Here’s how. Drones capture LIDAR scans, creating 3D terrain maps that track changes over time: erosion, growth, water flow. Environmental sensors monitor soil moisture, drainage, air quality, weather patterns, and sun exposure to guide planting, building, and maintenance. And video adds another contextual layer for the AI—training footage for using tools, handling animals, or completing seasonal tasks, all geolocated and all searchable, building a memory for the land.

Now imagine what happens when you give it access to the best books on permaculture, indigenous land management, and community building. These systems run locally, keeping data private and purposeful. The more context it has—from terrain, to tools, to timing—the smarter it gets, so people can spend less time figuring things out and more time living well.

Here are eight ways we can adapt to AI and the changing world.

AI is replacing jobs and purpose. We could reclaim meaningful work—growing food, building tools, creating culture.

People are isolated and housing is unaffordable. We could build close-knit villages with real connection, minimalist homes, and shared infrastructure.

Families are overwhelmed; elders are warehoused. We could rebuild intergenerational culture where care skills and responsibility flow both ways.

Kids grow up indoors, overstimulated and disconnected from nature. We could raise them in forests, gardens, and workshops, where learning is lived, not lectured.

Modern life is optimized but fragile. We could rebuild resilience through exposure, not comfort.

Supply chains are breaking down. We could grow food locally with permaculture, cutting emissions and building soil at the same time.

Culture feels flat, angry, and fake. We could make new culture through rituals, art, and shared meaning.

Everyone’s talking about collapse. We could build something better right now from the ground up.

What makes a good life?

Some places have it figured out through centuries of trial and error: the Blue Zones, Mediterranean coasts, Costa Rican mountains, rural Japan—where people live the longest, happiest, and healthiest lives. They have things in common: walkable villages with nature, not traffic; strong social bonds and generations under one roof; movement and purposeful work built into every day; fresh local food shared at the table; and days shaped by meaning, not just productivity.

Now imagine combining that ancient wisdom with modern tools: shared infrastructure, coworking, gardens, sauna, childcare, seasonal living, freely moving between villages, AI assisted coordination and land management, a village operating system for governance, tools, and knowledge sharing.

And when these villages connect into a network, they could become a new way to live globally in harmony with people and place.

We’re building it now, starting in BC Canada.

Most intentional communities fail, and we’ve spent the better part of a decade trying to figure out why.

It’s not because people can’t live together, or because there’s a lack of good business models or funding. When you boil it down, most failures come from four places: finances, poor infrastructure, a lack of skills, and the inability to navigate relationships.

But here’s the good news—and the real opportunity. We’re entering a new era of community design, where we finally have the tools and the systems to get this right. Thanks to new technologies, especially AI, we can now tackle the toughest challenges that have sunk communities in the past.

AI can support coordination and leadership, help resolve conflicts, boost efficiency, facilitate mentorship and skill building, and give us better visibility into the health of our land, finances, and resources.

This is our moment to combine the best of both worlds, using tech to make community living easier and more resilient, while building the culture, skills, and wisdom that make it truly work.

There’s a quiet shift happening right now. More people are stepping out of burnout culture and into something more human and grounded.

You could call it lifestyle first living. Wellness trips and glamping retreats aren’t just weekend getaways anymore; they’re becoming test drives for a healthier way of life.

People want to move their bodies naturally, eat real food together, lean on community, do work that actually matters, and slow down enough to actually enjoy it.

When we first bought our campground, our investors weren’t sure how it fit into our vision for a village. But it turns out campsites are the perfect starting point. They already have the basics—spaces to live, immersed in nature. Then add in saunas and gardens, coworking spots, maker sheds, and play spaces, and you have the beginning of a modern village.

As AI takes over more jobs and economies shift, people are rethinking how they want to live. And these places are becoming the foundation for a new kind of community—ones that are built around health, purpose, and connection.

Why do some places feel alive the moment you arrive? It’s because they’re designed that way.

Think about your favorite cities or neighborhoods, they don’t just happen to be vibrant. They’re intentionally built to welcome culture.

When art, music, and food spill into public life, a place starts to feel safe and inviting, because beauty signals care.

Parks, plazas, and walkable streets invite people to slow down and connect.

These “third places” give people somewhere to be without having to buy a ticket or have a reason. They make you feel like you belong.

Even Starbucks built it’s brand on this idea. Not just a coffee shop, but a third place between work and home, designed for gathering, conversation, and community.

If we want places that spark creativity, belonging, and opportunity, we have to design for it. That means prioritizing shared spaces, flexible gathering spots, and beautiful details that invite people to linger. Because culture doesn’t appear out of nowhere, it grows where people have reasons to stay, connect, and contribute. Design for that and the rest will follow.

The screwed up thing about the health and wellness industry is that it’s designed to fit within burnout culture. It’s designed to treat symptoms rather than actually dealing with the underlying causes of why people are burning out and getting sick and unhealthy in the first place. It’s like doing a yoga class because you spend day after day hunched over a laptop, or going on your annual retreat to deal with the stresses of the rest of your year.

The reason you need these things is because of how unhealthy your lifestyle normally is. If we wanted real health and wellness, we’d have real food grown nearby, we’d have natural movement built into our days, purpose-driven work, intergenerational living, and community support. We’d spend more time outside getting fresh air, time in nature.

But cities aren’t designed with these things in mind; they’re designed for cars and industry. If we stopped treating wellness like it’s a product and instead looked at it from a lifestyle design perspective—if we built it into place—then we would no longer have to escape our lives to feel well.

I think people are desperate for a different way to live. We’ve been digital nomads for years and have seen that industry explode firsthand, just seeing so many more people traveling to new countries and working online.

There are just so many more people looking for a healthier lifestyle. Wellness, homesteading, homeschooling, and city life just isn’t appealing anymore.

The other thing that people didn’t really expect was that millennials would be inheriting a lot of wealth from the boomer generation, but not spending it in the same way. Instead, they’re wanting to spend money on experiences and purpose rather than more stuff.

There’s a lot of a focus on culture and natural movement, local food, environments that support purpose and that are good for raising kids and community.

At the same time, tech is making it easier to organize communities and facilitate all of the complexity of building community.

I think the future is gonna look a lot more local and a lot more ancestral. I think tech is going quietly help in the background.

Eco villages kind of have a bad reputation. A lot of people still imagine them as off-grid communes where everyone’s trying to escape society, avoid taxes, or live in some kind of free love experiment.

But the truth is they’re becoming a real solution to the problems most people face today—isolation, rising costs, burnout, and a work culture that’s losing its meaning as AI takes over more jobs.

It’s not about running away; it’s about rebuilding what we’ve lost: community, health, purpose, and connection to nature.

In places like Russia, this idea already exists as dacha culture. Families keep small countryside plots where they spend summers gardening and reconnecting with friends. It’s not about escaping the city; it’s about balancing it.

On our land, we see it every day—remote workers, creators, tradespeople, families. Some live in RVs, some in domes, some help build new projects with us. None of them are trying to drop out of society.

So if you’ve ever wanted to test drive a modern version of village life, there might be a place for you here.

You might be surprised how you can use AI in a village in the middle of the woods. In our smart village project, we’re developing an AI to coordinate repairs, harvests, events, and shared tools.

We’re building it to observe the rhythms of the land, get to know the people on it, monitor sensors, water, soil, and energy so that we can work with nature, not against it.

It’s not about automating life; it’s about supporting it, quietly and in the background. Nature is still the main character here. Tech just helps us take better care of it and each other.

This is how we see villages being run in the future—people doing what they love, and AI and robotics automating a lot of the hard stuff.

Forward thinking investors should be looking at villages as the next major asset class. Cities are becoming more expensive and fragile in the face of global crises.

The old escape was suburbs or rural homesteads, and now some are building bunkers or isolated compounds. But isolation isn’t resilience.

History’s most enduring, healthy, crisis proof communities are villages—like the world’s Blue Zones, where people live long, connected, purposeful lives.

In North America this way of living is rare, and that’s the opportunity. RV parks and rural subdivisions can be transformed into smart villages with modern tech, shared wellness facilities, gardens, coworking, childcare, and event spaces.

Better than suburbs or gated communities, more resilient than isolated bunkers, networks of smart villages can have built-in economies of production, trade, services, and new models of membership and ownership.

The next wave of real estate isn’t skyscrapers or private compounds; it’s modern networked villages.

When people think of failed ecovillages, they often blame cult dynamics, crazy gurus, or big egos. But the real reasons are much more practical.

Developing an eco village costs a lot. Without funding, villages struggle to build and sustain themselves, and if the members can’t make a living, more problems come. Bad infrastructure—like housing, drinking water, sanitation, power, and transport—can all lead to village collapse. These can often be solved with better funding.

Villages need skills. Though, knowledge of permaculture, natural building, and conflict resolution are helpful, most of the time you’re just doing boring jobs: digging ditches, fixing septic tanks, or doing day-to-day management. So work ethic, discipline, ability to learn, and the willingness to do hard things are all essential. When people can’t do the necessary work, conflicts happen.

Other issues have to do with disagreements around religion, relationships, and diet. It takes a lot to make a village project succeed.

Follow our channel as we build our village lab in rural BC Canada.

Having a full time job used to be enough to get food, a home, healthcare, education, and raise a family. But nowadays, it’s kind of like… pick one.

I think community land projects could help. These places can provide a place to live, teach new skills, make you more resilient, improve your health and food quality, and bring back community based child raising.

I think this could help a lot in the face of AI, inflation, and declining education.

And I know a lot of this sounds far fetched, but we’ve been building a prototype for this kind of project for about 3 years now, and we’re making some progress.

We’re still trying to figure out a lot of things, but the long term vision for our project is to invite more people, and eventually template it for other locations.

Buy a farm, live off grid, and start a community—you hear people talking about this all the time. Well, back in 2020, as the pandemic was hitting a peak, we crowdfunded a 400 acre property with a campsite, golf course, and RV park in Wells Gray, British Columbia, Canada, with the intention of building a community.

I read a quote once by Robert Heinlein, and I’m paraphrasing: a human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, design a building, pitch manure, and program a computer. Specialization is for insects. I’d probably add to that: train an AI, 3D print a tool, make a video, and plant a garden. But this quote sums up the direction of our project.

I wanted to become a more capable and well-rounded person, and I wanted to give other people the opportunity to do the same.

Check out the full story at futurethinkers.org/land

In 2020 we crowdfunded a 400 acre property in rural BC Canada. Here’s why.

We’ve been discussing concerns over AI on our podcast Future Thinkers for years. AI is going to disrupt almost every industry and wipe out a lot of jobs. People are going to be looking for alternatives, and we saw a need for experiments with parallel systems that could offer different ways to live.

We wanted to build a high-tech homestead and living lab to test alternative energy, housing, and food that would make living off the land easier and more automated. But first we had to learn how to do things the old school way with our own hands and minimum resources—building structures, gardening, making our own stuff, and running a land-based business. We needed to become tougher, more capable, and resourceful.

As things get harder, the need for strong communities increases. Families are the strongest foundation for any community, and that’s why we started there. But fundamental health is also important. We wanted to create a healthier lifestyle by growing our own food, being more active, and living closer to nature.

As AI pushes more people into this kind of life, we can make the transition easier by sharing our stories and helping people to avoid our mistakes.