As part of an article in The Guardian reviewing “World without Work”, a book examining the sort of society we will need to build as machines get more and more competent at all sorts of work:
“Sooner or later, we will run out of jobs.” Yet Skidelsky, like Keynes, saw this as an opportunity. If the doomsayers are to be finally proven right, then why not the utopians, too?
Committed to neither camp, Susskind leaves it late in the day to ask fundamental questions. The work ethic, he says, is a modern religion that purports to be the only source of meaning and purpose. “What do you do for a living?” is for many people the first question they ask when meeting a stranger, and there is no entity more beloved of politicians than the “hard-working family”. Yet faced with precarious, unfulfilling jobs and stagnant wages, many are losing faith in the gospel of work.
In a 2015 YouGov survey, 37% of UK workers said their jobs made no meaningful contribution. Susskind wonders in the final pages “whether the academics and commentators who write fearfully about a world with less work are just mistakenly projecting the personal enjoyment they take from their jobs on to the experience of everyone else”.
We just wrote about this – that the most opposition from a work-free leisure society will come from us ourselves – who derive our identity by our work.