The thought of never working again is a tempting one. Maybe that's why millions of people play the lottery – for a chance to become wealthy enough to live with complete freedom, doing whatever, whenever and wherever they please. But would we find it more concerning if every person on Earth were also work-free? Someday we may develop machines intelligent enough to relieve us of all human tasks. While it may sound great to have robots doing your bidding, this "utopia" would come with immense economic, social, and moral implications for our society. It's time we plan for this new future before it arrives.
To be clear, we are almost certainly approaching a world where human labor is obsolete. Experts ranging from Stephen Hawkingto Elon Musk agree we're on the verge of a societal transformation to rival the Industrial Revolution. We are now entering a new machine age where humans can't keep up with the exponential rate of technological development. Three of the world’s 10 largest employers are already replacing workers with robots and the World Economic Forum predicts that at least 5 million jobs will be lost to automation by 2020. As artificial intelligence advances, this displacement will expand to not only physical but also mental tasks - things only humans could do before. A world with artificially intelligent personal assistants and with robots like those from Boston Dynamics foreshadows a world where machines are capable of any kind of task, manual or cognitive, routine or non-routine.
Maybe you think this a Luddite fallacy; technological development has only helped us in the past. But even thought the first machine age didn’t cause total unemployment, it did put the horse out of work. Modern AI advances will make full-time work scarcer and drive down wages in remaining jobs. At the very least, this will lead to a shift in expectation where work is no longer central to human existence. Or, perhaps we will also go the way of the horse.
If we agree that significant societal change is on the horizon, then the natural next step is to prepare for it. One common proposal is to develop a better-trained workforce. After all, honing new skills helped us adapt to the Industrial Revolution. Many argue that humans are uniquely capable of empathy, compassion, and creativity, so we should emphasize jobs in therapy, customer service, and art – fields that will persist. But as authors Andrew McAfee and Erik Brynjolfsson describe, the very nature of exponential growth makes it virtually impossible to predict the direction technology will develop; we didn’t predict that the smartphone would disrupt the hotel industry, and yet Airbnb exists. Current innovations in human-centric fields, like psychology and journalism suggest that “safe” jobs may not be safe for long. As more industries become automated, the number of available human-centric jobs may not keep pace with the rate of AI outsourcing.
Another common suggestion is to educate workers to enter the technology sector, a fitting way to reclaim agency over our new robot overlords. But while education is important, relying on it alone is an avoidance tactic; we cannot assume that it is possible to immediately retrain and re-employ everyone displaced by automation. Opportunities in fields such as AI and robotics require highly skilled workers, a time-consuming and costly commitment. This is a significant burden for individuals who just lost low-income, low-skill jobs. And let's not forget more subtle barriers, like the psychological distress and discrimination associated with unemployment, retraining, and rehiring, particularly for middle-aged people. Empirical evidence suggests that the number of jobs in new technology industries will decrease over time, creating more competition for fewer jobs. During the Computer Revolution of the 1980s, about 8.2% of American workers switched into jobs in new technology industries, but a decade later, this dropped to just 4.4%. By the 2000s, less than 0.5% of workers were shifting into industries that had just emerged. We can't rely solely on the so-called “creative destruction” of new technologies to re-employ displaced workers.
If technology continues to advance exponentially and the number of existing jobs does not keep pace, it is natural to think we might run out of jobs. But let's ask a more philosophical question: in an AI future, do we need jobs? In his book Four Futures, Peter Frase writes that people work for three main reasons: societal survival, monetary necessity, and personal fulfillment. In a world where robots are efficient enough to drive both growth and productivity, human labor may be entirely unnecessary for society to continue functioning. This leaves us with two possible reasons for needing jobs: money and happiness.
Let's talk about money. Eventually, in some distant future, it may be possible that the massive spike in productivity from artificially intelligent machines drops prices and eliminates scarcity to such an extent that money may no longer be necessary. In the near term, it will naturally be difficult or impossible for humans to outcompete such machines. It seems wrong that workers needing jobs would be forced to accept the lowest of wages in an attempt to avoid extreme poverty. If jobs are unobtainable, then it is unfair if they are the only method of acquiring money. A post-work society ought to decouple income from employment. Additionally, if machines are doing more of our work and not getting paid, then money is flowing into the hands of the people who own the machines. As author Jaron Lanier notes in Who Owns the Future, there is an ongoing phenomenon where technological developments consolidate wealth into the hands of fewer and fewer people. This exacerbates income inequality and further strains an already thinly-stretched government safety net. In order to avoid societal collapse, we have to find ways for people to acquire money outside of employment.
A natural solution to the problem of monetary necessity in a world without work would be a universal basic income, or UBI. Individuals don’t deserve to suffer simply because they cannot produce profitable labor. A UBI would act as a buffer against the harmful effects of automation, and unlike many policy proposals, has also been hailed as a bipartisan solution. The redistribution of wealth and leveling of the playing field appeal to the left-wing, while the libertarian right prefers the use of cash as a less bureaucratic resource than in-kind welfare services like food stamps. A host of renowned technology experts, including AI guru Andrew Ng, data scientist Jeremy Howard, and computer scientist Moshe Vardi have all come out in support of a UBI. Experiments have taken place in Finland, Kenya, and Silicon Valley, among other places, and last year Switzerland voted on a referendum to implement such a program. In some sense, by offering all individuals a share in technological progress, a UBI hearkens back to the uniquely American method of homesteading the West in order share value among citizens.
One criticism of the UBI is the tremendous cost, but this challenge exists for all current policy proposals; a UBI could be made feasible by some combination of repurposing portions of existing welfare funds and raising taxes. Plus, the universality makes it more likely that a richer person would feel that they are also benefiting from the system rather than paying for someone else. This is empirically seen in the higher popularity of other government programs that are near universal, such as Medicare and Social Security, compared to the lower popularity of programs such as Medicaid that are targeted towards lower income brackets. In addition, the potentially enormous productivity gains from new technology could lead to cheaper goods, increasing the purchasing power of the same amount of money. Overall, a UBI would provide a more robust safety net allowing individuals to survive even in the systemic absence of gainful employment.
Still, there is another reason why people might need work: personal fulfillment and happiness! Some people enjoy their work, and find meaning and purpose in it. Who are we to deprive them of that self-actualization? In fact, there seems to be something inherently unsettling about life without work. In Kurt Vonnegut’s novel Player Piano, the protagonist Paul is an engineer in a world where the machines have won – the “working class” is permanently unemployed and the only workers are a few highly-skilled engineers who design the machines. Paul becomes disillusioned with this system, eventually finding his purpose as a leader of an anti-machine rebel group. He realizes that “men, by their nature, seemingly, cannot be happy unless engaged in enterprises that make them feel useful.” Vonnegut illustrates an important part of our attitude towards work: we have made our productivity the source of our identity and individual worth. It is human nature to build, and not doing so carries its own social stigma. Particularly in America, the virtues of hard work and industriousness and pulling oneself up by the bootstraps are almost sacred. For many, a world where human labor is less important or unnecessary would be meaningless and indolent. It is possible that by making work unnecessary, robots help us realize that work is essential to our nature.
This is not to say free time is unimportant. Aristotle writes that “happiness is thought to depend on leisure; for we are busy that we may have leisure, and make war that we may live in peace.” We may have been socially conditioned to want work, so much that we are at a loss when it is taken away. Time-use studies of the unemployed have found that on the whole, they don’t spend their new free time picking up hobbies or making friends – they watch TV and sleep, and report higher levels of isolation and sadness. Further research has shown that while people who are at work typically want to be somewhere else, they paradoxically also report feeling happier or less worried while at work. If people are happier complaining about their work, then perhaps there is value in that. Even a world full of healthy and wealthy people would fall short of ideal if the inhabitants felt unfulfilled. Any discussion of a UBI is only relevant if we seek to increase the well-being of the individuals in a post-work world. If work increases overall well-being, then it is worth pursuing.
It is important to mention that Aristotle’s definition of leisure is not the absence of work. Rather, leisure, like work, is a kind of productive activity. However, it is enjoyed for its own sake instead of being imposed on us externally. This kind of intrinsically enjoyable productivity is the ideal goal for a post-work society, where humans have the freedom to choose how to spend their time. John Maynard Keynes’ essay “Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren” grapples with precisely this choice, and it is especially insightful given that his grandchildren would be our contemporaries. Keynes writes about “the enormous anomaly of unemployment in a world full of wants” – an important note that as long as there are unmet desires on this earth, there will be work to do. Here, our human value comes from our ability to create our own work based on our creative desires and the needs we observe. Unlike a machine whose goal is always to follow instructions, humans can choose what they believe is a wise, worthy, or interesting task. This is what is most admirable in a world where human labor is unnecessary – laboring for an authentic cause.
It may be impossible to fully prepare for a post-work society. It is a given that a lack of workers will lead to social instability and a lack of consumers will lead to economic instability. Yet, at its core, the purpose of all our technological advancement is not to simply increase the number of low-paying, long-hour jobs. Rather, we innovate in order to solve human problems and maximize well-being, to make this a life worth living. In an age where machines can learn, perhaps the most important lesson for us is to let the machines do the work but not forget to do the living ourselves.