Post-work society

In futurology, political science, and science fiction, a post-work society is a society in which the nature of work has been radically transformed and traditional employment has largely become obsolete due to technological progress.

Some post-work theorists imagine the complete automation of all jobs, or at least the takeover of all monotonous, rule-based, predictable and repetitive (and thus unworthy of humans) tasks in the future by ultimately cheaper, faster, more efficient, more reliable and more accurate intelligent machines. Additionally, these machines can work in harsher conditions and for longer periods of time without stopping than humans, which is expected to eventually lead to massive economic growth, despite high rates of ever-increasing human unemployment. Overall, this development would lead to an enormous increase in prosperity, whereby it would be the task of politics to distribute this wealth evenly within the population.

Other theories of a post-work society focus more on challenging the priority of the work ethic, and on the celebration of nonwork activities.

Near-term practical proposals closely associated with post-work theory include the implementation of a universal basic income, as well as the reduction of the length of a working day and the number of days of a working week. Increased focus on what post-work society would look like has been driven by reports such as one that states 47% of jobs in the United States could be automated. Because of increasing automation and the low price of maintaining an automated workforce compared to one dependent on human labor, it has been suggested that post-work societies would also be ones of post-scarcity.

Literature

• Daniel Susskind: WORLD WITHOUT WORK: Technology, Automation, and How We Should Respond, 2020, ISBN 9781250173515

See also

• AI era
• Critique of work
• Four-day workweek
• In Praise of Idleness
• Humans Need Not Apply
• Imagination age
• Post-capitalism
• Refusal of work
• Tang ping ("lying flat")
• Technological utopianism
• Inventing the Future: Postcapitalism and a World Without Work
• The End of Work
• The Future of Work and Death
• Workism

References