In 1984, when I was in sixth grade, I managed to sneak into an R-rated movie called “Revenge of the Nerds.” (It probably helped that I was almost 6 feet tall.) The movie played on familiar stereotypes about jocks and nerds, culminating in a delightful comeuppance where the nerd fraternity bests the jocks who have been picking on them.

It all feels dated now, and not just because some of the “raunchy, uproarious satire,” as one critic put it, plays differently post-MeToo. The dynamic of jocks oppressing hapless nerds — quite accurate for the time — no longer rings true, because the past 40 years have been one long revenge of the nerds. Silicon Valley became rich and glamorous, and the internet became a sheltered workshop for bookish, awkward keyboard warriors.

Alas, what technology giveth, technology also taketh away. Artificial intelligence is best at the very nerdy skills that became so financially rewarding over the past few decades, such as writing software code. Oh, it’s not yet good enough to replace a seasoned professional at their peak. But then, it’s only been around for a few years.

Even if you’re not worried that AI will take your job — if, say, you are an obstetric nurse or a federal judge — it’s scary to think of machines taking over tasks that have, until now, seemed particularly human. People have been using substitutes for human muscle for millennia. But we’ve never tried substitute brains. What does society look like if human cognition is no longer unique, or even the best on the block? Will we all end up living in some machine-ruled sci-fi dystopia?

If you’re anxious about that, let me suggest how it might make our lives more human. Yes, AI is likely to be painfully disruptive. But it can also enable — even force — us to focus on our common humanity.

Job skills are the most obvious: The more inroads AI makes into corporations, the more the jobs of the future will rely on the things we’re still relatively better at, such as people skills and physical presence. That may be a tough transition for the nerds. But it might be a better society if work consisted mostly of interacting with other humans, rather than abstract symbols on a screen.

But the more interesting possible transformation is in our personal lives. Take one of the most beautiful human scenes, a pack of kids running around the neighborhood, migrating from house to house and yard to yard as the mood takes them. Unfortunately, that tends to be a scene from an old movie that few kids have ever witnessed in real life.

At 6 years old, even in the bitterest Great Lakes snows, my mother was snapped into a playsuit daily and instructed to go out and play until dinner. My freedom was limited to one Upper West Side co-op building. My friends’ kids tend to have organized activities, or carefully scheduled playdates.

There are many reasons for this — the lure of screens, the disappearance of housewives who kept a genial eye on the proceedings. But a major one is the ubiquity of the automobile, which made it extremely dangerous to let small children run around in the street. Now imagine that those cars are reliable self-driving ones, which — unlike a human driver — can be counted on to see your kids and stop. Parents could, like my grandmother, turn off the screen, hand the kid a cookie and tell them to go out and find some kids to play with.

AI could also make it easier to have those kids. We’ll be richer, for one thing. Even those near the top of the current income ladder who find themselves downgraded to some less glamorous position will benefit from the productivity boom. And if many professional class jobs go away, we’ll also lose the ultracompetitive professional class work culture that makes it hard to juggle parenting and a career. We can also jettison the professional class parenting culture in which kids need to be intensively groomed for their future career from a young age, like little monarchs.

By increasing our productivity, AI can also give us more time to spend with our families and friends. The five-day workweek was an invention of the industrial era; fields and livestock won’t give farmers a couple of days off every week to relax and rejuvenate. The AI revolution might similarly give us more leisure time that we could invest in our relationships with the people around us. That sounds more utopian than dystopian.

The obvious rejoinder is that people might just use that time to stare even harder at their screens, while human society withers. And indeed, what I’m sketching out will have to be a choice. It will not happen automatically, and AI certainly won’t do it for us.

Megan McArdle is a Washington Post columnist.

All I’m saying is that it’s a possibility, a choice we could make with the opportunity before us. And with AI rapidly oncoming, it’s a choice we should prepare to make.

Megan McArdle is a Washington Post columnist.