Post-work_society
Post-work society
Form of 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.[1]
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.[2][3] Additionally, these machines can work in harsher conditions and for longer periods of time without stopping than humans,[4] which is expected to eventually lead to massive economic growth, despite high rates of ever-increasing human unemployment.[5] 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.[6][7]
Other theories of a post-work society focus more on challenging the priority of the work ethic, and on the celebration of nonwork activities.[8]
Near-term practical proposals closely associated with post-work theory include the implementation of a universal basic income,[9] 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.[10] 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.[11][12]
