You may have heard of this term: post-labor. It’s a thought that occurred to me in regards to the inexorable and accelerated march of Artificial Intelligence (AI). Most of us have been following the amazing yet frightening developments of the past 3 years since the advent of Large Language Models and Generative AI. We have come to realize that these amazing new technologies can start to replace human labor. Some experts opine that jobs and job roles have always been displaced by technology and new jobs and roles would come into being. The need for labor does not disappear they assure us. Yet, it seems hard to believe that a system that can mimic and imitate our intelligence to such an alarming degree, and be faster and more efficient than us, would not eventually take away our jobs permanently. It is also less than comforting to note that the researchers at the forefront of AI are talking more and more about Artificial General Intelligence (AGI) and Artificial Super Intelligence (ASI), both of which are about replicating human activity and exceeding its performance. Any new job roles that get created would eventually disappear as AI is trained to learn to do that job too. Save for a much smaller number of jobs in job roles that require monitoring, maintaining, and controlling AI, all other jobs would become extinct, replaced by AI and Robotics. This future seems inevitable considering that market forces push companies to automate for efficiency and this benign intent eventually results in a world without human labor.
Our economic systems built over the past few hundred years depend on human labor. Without labor receiving income there would be no consumption of the goods and services that the labor produces. When production happens largely through robotics and AI, humans at large have no means to earn. In such a world, how will those without land, capital and technology find a way to live? And how will those who do have land, capital and technology relate to those who do not? Humanity found a way, after centuries of repression, to forge a path for the have-nots to become haves; by trading labor for capital, land and technology. But it seems that in a post-labor world we may have to revisit the modern assumptions of ownership and private property. Or risk sliding back into feudalism where the haves dictate to and enslave the have-nots. Communism, as was understood in the 20th century, is probably not the answer either. So, what kind of new world would it be? What new -isms will replace the great economic theories of the last few centuries?
Some answers lie in the way ancient civilizations lived. Some of those ways and practices are still followed today, albeit in a commercialized modern economy. Thousands of years ago it was not so that commerce dominated all aspects of life like it does today. People did their duties and not all groups dealt with money and commerce. Some were knowledge-bound, some were security/military-bound, some were administrative-bound, some were service-bound, and some were commerce-bound. Except for those who were commerce-bound, the other groups did not deal in money; the acquisition of material wealth and earning monetary income was not their way of life. The new world would likely be one where the acquisition of wealth and income would no longer be the driving force of the lives of people generally.
So, what do you think? What would a post-labor world look like? And how would we transition into it? Let me know in the comments below!
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