The Last Shift — Column 4
Here is a question that sounds philosophical but is actually quite practical: if a machine can do your job, what are you for?
Not what will you do for income — that’s a policy question, and we’ll get to it. But what are you for? What is the shape of a day without work? What fills a life when the thing that has organized human existence for ten thousand years — the necessity of labor, the requirement to produce something in exchange for surviving — quietly disappears?
We have spent three columns in this series documenting the mechanics of the shift: which jobs go first, how unnervingly competent the machines are, how communities hollow out when the work leaves. Now comes the harder question, the one economists are not particularly well-equipped to answer. Not how does the economy adapt, but how do people adapt. How does a civilization built around the moral weight of work reconstitute itself when work is no longer something most people are needed to do?
Nobody has fully answered this yet. But we’re starting to find out.
Continue reading… “After Work: What Happens to a Planet That Doesn’t Need Most of Us”