World without Work

A couple of articles with this title (here and here) inspired me to rehearse the history of commentary on this subject. It was Charles Handy’s 1984 book “The Future of Work” which first warned me that the familiar contours of our world were moving under our feet; that the notion of life-long jobs wa;s gone for ever and which introduced us to the term “portfolio life”. And I vividly remember the impact on me of Zuboff’s In the Age of the Smart Machine (1988) which drew on the evidence of the new information technology industries to underline the threat the future held to our notion of a normal working life….

We have all subsequently taken advantage of the speed, choice and capacity with which we have been richly endowed by the new information facilities - but perhaps been a bit slow to recognize the scale of its consequences. Google's driver-less car and the speed with which companies such as Uber and Airbnb have scaled up brought it all home to us….But people like Frithjof Bergmann and Jeremy Rifkin – the latter with his “the End of Work (1995) were amongst a few at the time who appreciated what Handy was onto……Since then there have been quite a few books with the title “The Future of Work” (2004), David Bollier (2011), Jacob Morgan (2014) to which I should have been paying more attention…..

But, very suddenly it seems, the scale of the impact of IT and robots on jobs previously thought safe from automation has hit people and the prospect of the majority of people living without paid work is now beginning to both excite and frighten….Race against the machine (2011) is perhaps the most famous of the books about this....The air is thick with talk, for example, of the necessity of a Basic Income; and of the writings of both Keynes and Marx on this subject…..Inventing the Future – Postcapitalism and a world without work (2015) is typical of the titles which are now appearing. You can read it for yourself in full here

I’m currently in the middle of Future Politics – living together in a world transformed by Tech by James Susskind (2018) which must be one of the first popular books to explore the likely impact of the new world of algorithms and artificial intelligence

The premise of ‘Future Politics’ is that relentless advances in science and technology are set to transform the way we live together with consequences that are both profound and frightening. We are not yet ready for the world we are creating. Politics will not be the same as it was in the past.

For Susskind, three changes are of particular note: increasingly capable systems that are equal or superior to how humans function; increasingly integrated technologies that are embedded in the physical and built environment (the internet of things); and an increasingly quantified society, whereby details of our lives are captured as data and processed by digital systems. Those who control the technologies will exercise power over us, set the limits of our liberty, and determine the future of democracy. One of the problems is that the engineers devising and implementing these technologies rarely engage with consequences of these developments.

So, it is up to the rest of us to correct this deficiency and take responsibility for understanding and analysing the implications of this transformed world. We must, says Susskind, engage with political theory if we are to think critically and develop appropriate intellectual tools to tackle these digital developments. With this as the agenda, Susskind sets out to examine this future under the headings of power, liberty, democracy, justice and politics itself, devoting sections of the book to each of these subjects in turn.

Further Reading
Automation and the future of work; Aaron Benanov (2020)
How to Run a City like Amazon and other Fables; ed M Graham…. J Shaw (2019)
https://www.e-ir.info/2019/02/21/review-future-politics-living-together-in-a-world-transformed-by-tech/
automation and the future of work HMSO 2019
The People v Tech – how the internet is killing democracy (and how we save it); Jamie Bartlett (2018)
Living Together – the future of politics in a world transformed by technology; James Susskind (2018) 
A World without Work? (Values and Capitalism network 2018)
The Future of Work (ILO 2015)
A World without Work (The Atlantic 2015)
https://williamtemplefoundation.org.uk/blog-review-future-politics/
http://bostonreview.net/politics/clara-hendrickson-jamie-susskind-future-politics-review
The Second Machine Age; Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee (2014)