The R1 humanoid robot, designed by the Instituto Italiano di Tecnologia, at the Palazzo Madama Museum in Turin, Italy, on May 12, 2021. MARCO BERTORELLO (Getty Images) (AFP via Getty Images)
After the embarrassing apple incident in the Garden of Eden, Christian tradition says that God condemned mankind to earn their daily bread by the sweat of their brow, i.e. by work. Articles and essays have repeated ad nauseam that the word “work” comes from the Latin tripalium, which means a method of torture. Nobody likes to get up early and take the subway to work and then spend most of the day there, far from rest, family, friends, free time, life. In other words, work is a curse, whether mundane or divine. Well, for better or for worse, because of technology, artificial intelligence, and the high level of automation, we’re starting to get an idea of what a world without work, a world after work, would be like.
Almost a century ago, economist John Maynard Keynes predicted that by 2030 we would be working just 15 hours a week or 3 hours a day, in an era of “leisure and plenty”. It now seems clear that this will not happen. Nevertheless, according to the World Economic Forum, by 2025 machines will do almost half of all tasks, namely 47%; In 2020 it was only 33%. It is possible that the technological revolution will destroy some jobs but create others to the same extent as previous technological revolutions have done. But it is also possible that work will decline, the population will be driven into underemployment or unemployment, become redundant and poor – in short: a dystopian post-work society. Or, at best, a social system will be designed in which we can all live happily with little work and fulfill the technological dream of emancipation. The stubborn reality suggests a mix of the first two options. But beyond the debates about the true potential of digitization and the need for a guaranteed basic income, how would it affect us if we didn’t have to work to survive? Would we tolerate the dolce far niente (the pleasure of doing nothing)?
This question points to a philosophical problem of the first order: how to think about or anticipate utopia in the present. Today, amid the “cancellation of the future,” that task is even more urgent, says philosopher Antonio Gómez Villar, one of the editors of the collection of essays Working Dead (Barcelona City Council). The prophets of utopia usually do not reveal how we would live in a classless society or what exactly we would do. “Perhaps,” says Gómez Villar, “because thinking about a future freed from a present of exploitation and alienation implies that our own imaginations are also trapped in these conditions.”
In any case, this work would most likely also exist in a post-work society, either because of the impossibility of automating certain types of work or because work can be understood as something more than just what we do to survive. Nick Srnicek is one of the fathers of accelerationism (which advocates automation and urges the left to encourage the transcending of human labor as part of its political project) and co-author of Inventing the Future: Postcapitalism and a World Without Work. He says we need to realize it’s not about work or laziness. In a post-work world, he argues, people wouldn’t lie on the couch all the time (although we’d probably be more relaxed). The real difference would be doing tasks that are imposed on us and tasks that we choose to do: In a hypothetical post-work world, we would pursue what fulfills us (some prefer to use the word “work” instead of Work). , not what puts food on the table.
In his book The Right to Be Lazy (1880), Paul Lafargue, Marx’s son-in-law, fantasized about a society that would leave slavery to work behind and devote itself to its work and pleasures. An unemployed society would also mean a profound change in traditional family structures and gender relations based on the need for work, and would bring a new dimension to caring and domestic work (those other types of work).
That sounds good, but it’s more complicated. Traditionally, work not only serves the material basis of existence, but also the creation of identity and the creation of meaning in our lives. For example, when someone asks us what we are, we don’t usually answer that we are “a human” or “a dreamer”; we answer that we are an electrician, an accountant, a nurse, a journalist… Our profession is strongly linked to our identity. This connection was even stronger a few years ago when working relationships were less fluid and people had jobs for life. Identification with a trade or company, socialization at work (or in a union) is becoming increasingly rare. This is not only due to automation, but also to the trend towards teleworking, even if it has been shortened in some places by temporary work or the atomization of the workforce into self-employment or micro-enterprises.
As the sociologist Zygmunt Bauman wrote in his book Work, Consumerism and the New Poor: “The career of work marked the path of life and, in retrospect, provided the best record of one’s lifetime achievement or failure; that career was the main source of self-confidence and insecurity, self-satisfaction and self-deprecation, pride and shame.” His monograph also deals with the work ethic, which regards work performance as a virtuous end in itself; According to Bauman, the work ethic was used as a pretext to adapt the first proletarians, formerly self-employed farmers, to mechanical, strenuous, pointless, and low-paying jobs during the Industrial Revolution. In a post-work world, this work ethic would lose all meaning: post-work theorists tend to denigrate this concept in favor of celebrating celebrations that, despite everything, we have less and less time for. Aside from not having enough jobs for the entire population, the jobs we have are precarious and therefore provide no livelihood and no social mobility.
Work is the great equalizer, beyond all individual differences, argues Jean-Philippe Deranty, professor in the philosophy department at Australia’s Macquarie University. “Because of these deep levels of common and shared experiences, work has always been at the heart of strong community cultures; we could call them work cultures.” These work cultures include greetings, shared values, and ways to use space, spend time, communicate, dress, and even eat. According to the philosopher, the bond that forms between people when they unite to pursue a common goal is precious and essential to human existence. Therefore, instead of thinking about a post-work society, says Deranty, we should think about how we can build a society where work is sustainable and democratic.
“It’s true that work often gives people meaning,” admits Srnicek. However, most work today is not performed in circumstances of our choosing. Making work free and voluntary means overcoming an economic system based on bonded labour. “That’s not to say we shouldn’t fight for better working conditions (wages, benefits, conditions, autonomy…), but without also trying to replace capitalism, that work will always remain fundamentally unfree,” he says.
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