Towards the post-job world

We are moving towards a post-job world. Not only is automation radically altering the amount of work that needs to be done by humans in the first place, labor relations for the work that remains are also changing. Industries that see volatile skill requirements are hardly interested in hiring for life and, in several sectors, workers no longer depend on employers to provide them with means of production, to borrow a concept from Marxian economics. In other words, we are moving towards a world in which there is an increasing amount of contractors and entrepreneurs, doing a decreasing amount of total work.

Overall, this is a good thing. While I do not agree with thinkers like Bob Black, who considers work immoral in all its forms, I do think that Keynes' vision of a world of leisure, as premature as it may have been, is a vision of a good world. Not having to do work to keep the economy going does not mean we need to idle -- it just means that we can enter a society that is perhaps more ludic than it has ever been.

Moreover, I do somewhat agree with Black on the immorality of jobs. Now, rational individuals may sometimes be able to develop themselves through being an employee. The experience may endow them with skills and attitudes that increase their odds of success as free workers. Black ignores such cases, which are especially prevalent in higher-tier work, and classifies all jobs as incompatible with liberty. I think this goes too far, but do agree that the job system is essentially hierarchical. A lot can be -- and has been -- said about this, but for now I want to suffice by saying that my problem with jobs is their psychological effect, in that they render people uninspired and receptive to control.

In other words, the post-job world can be better than this world, and the post-work world can be better than the post-job world. Ergo, the fact that we're moving there is good news. Right?

Not really. In all matters social, the path is as important as the destination. And while it is certainly great to fantasize about a ludic world where the machines do all the work, the fact remains that our economic system distributes resources in a way that is supposed to be approximately proportional to contributions. We have no idea how to allocate resources in a world without work. Also, the past 200 years or so have seen economic, social and educational systems adapt to job-based work.

As a consequence, we are poorly prepared for the transition. Simply denying those without work access to society's resources, as we do now, means signing up for growing resentment and all the social unrest it may bring. Convincing skilled, competent and bright people that they are failures means wasting human capital and causing unnecessary suffering. Letting go of the middle class means losing aggregate demand, which ultimately means the happy few will need to reinvent the economy anyway. So why not do it in advance and bypass the painful processes?

This year, I want to consider possible scenarios for our rapidly automating world. What are the immediate challenges, and how could we deal with them? Which alternatives exist for a work-based economy? How should political actors of different stripes respond to technological unemployment? How can we make the transition towards a ludic society go as smoothly as possible? These questions need serious thought, as moving beyond our current model won't be easy.

In fact, losing work is going to take some effort.