The world of work is changing fast. The rapid rise of artificial intelligence, from disembodied chatbots to humanoid robots, is driving a global wave of panic about job insecurity. Tech billionaires say that the nine-to-five will be extinct by 2034. UK think tanks believe almost 8 million jobs could be automated away by AI in coming years, while the investment bank Goldman Sachs has predicted that 300 million full-time roles could be replaced worldwide. The question is: do we even care? According to a recent poll, three-quarters of Gen Z don’t want to work a traditional job in their lives, one in ten never intend to enter the workforce, and almost half would rather be unemployed than unhappy. Tradwives dream about trading professional success for domestic bliss, while influencers pivot away from hustle culture, toward anti-work memes and calls to “seize the means of relaxation”.

Is it a coincidence that we’ve fallen out of love with work at the exact moment it seems destined to disappear from our lives, or is it a natural reaction to the coming “jobs apocalypse”? And, if we really can delegate the vast majority of our work to intelligent, self-supervising machines, then what comes next for humanity?

Before we try to answer any of these questions, let’s address an elephant in the room: experts (and billionaires like Kim Kardashian) have been claiming that “nobody wants to work these days” for a long time. Supposedly, people stopped wanting to work during the ‘Great Resignation’ of 2021. Or in 2014. Or 2006, or 1999. The 50s, 30s, 1922. As pointed out in a widely-shared X thread, critics have been complaining about a rising anti-work movement since at least 1894. 130 years later, though, these claims do have an added urgency. Thanks to rapid technological change, it seems increasingly likely that we actually could get along with a massively reduced workforce. And much of our work already feels expendable. Discourse about “fake email jobs” – what the late anthropologist David Graeber might have called “bullshit jobs” – is all over TikTok. University professors say they’ve been reduced to “human plagiarism detectors” by AI. And the coronavirus pandemic only stoked the suspicion that many of our jobs have been rendered basically meaningless, besides keeping us busy and paying us a wage.

James Smith, academic and author of Work Want Work, recalls this shift amid the first wave of COVID lockdowns in 2020. “Overnight, there was a reassessment of what work was valuable, what work was necessary, what work we actually needed,” he says. In many nations, including the UK, “non-essential work” was suspended and furlough schemes were introduced to cover people’s basic needs. If only temporarily, people got to experience what post-work life might actually feel like. “The dystopia of COVID presented, in a distorted mirror, quite a lot of the stuff that had only been imagined in post-work writing over the previous five years or so,” Smith says. Books like Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams’ high-tech manifesto Inventing the Future, or Aaron Bastani’s provocatively-titled Fully Automated Luxury Communism, which called for the large-scale automation of work as part of a radical new system for governing human society.

Smith is less optimistic about what came next. “When lockdown first happened, there was a little bit of discourse like, ‘What books are you going to read?’ or ‘This is my chance to finally learn the saxophone!’” he says. “People thought that this weird, slightly dystopian version of post-work would lead them to think differently, act differently, create differently. What very quickly became clear is that, for the vast majority of people, there was no such kind of creative renaissance.” Maybe that says more about the unproductive rhythms of life in lockdown, or a broader lack of creative energy in the culture of the 2020s. But for Smith it speaks to a fundamental flaw in the widely-held belief that people would find their ‘true purpose’ if only they were freed from the drudgery of the nine-to-five. “I think what most people did was just game and post and doom scroll and binge watch and cultivate their mental illnesses.”

“People thought COVID would lead them to think differently, act differently, create differently. But what most people did was just game and post and doom scroll and binge watch and cultivate their mental illnesses” – James Smith

Others are more optimistic about the possibilities of a post-work future. In the 2010s, Williams and Srnicek made the case that full automation (done right) could produce a much-needed alternative to the failed experiments of neoliberalism and austerity that have defined the political landscape since the 2000s, and allow workers to take back control of their lives. It’s a mistake to equate leisure with idleness, they argue, because plenty of our leisure activities already require a degree of effort or creativity. (Think: learning an instrument, reading, playing sports, or even gaming.) “A post-work world is therefore not a world of idleness,” reads a passage in Inventing the Future. “Rather, it is a world in which people are no longer bound to their jobs, but free to create their own lives.”

In October 2024, Tesla founder Elon Musk – who wants to radically cut US government jobs as the head of Trump’s DOGE – made a similar appeal as he unveiled his new Optimus robots and automated cars. ​​“With autonomy, you get your time back,” he said. “[Optimus] can be a teacher, babysit your kids, walk your dog, mow your lawn, get the groceries, be your friend, serve drinks. Whatever you can think of, it will do.” (Admittedly, this is a strange list of applications – aren’t robots supposed to shoulder the unpleasant work, and free up more time for spending with your kids, walking the dog, making friends, etc? Anyway...) That same month, Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei also expressed an optimistic vision for the future of powerful AI. In his 13,000-word essay Machines of Loving Grace, he writes that it’s a mistake to believe that our lives will become meaningless as soon as robots take our jobs, since “meaning comes mostly from human relationships and connection, not from economic labour”.

It seems like a good idea to question the motives of any tech CEO when they argue in favour of ‘disrupting’ work with AI, even if they claim to value safety and human benefit above all else. At the most dystopian end of the scale, it’s all a conspiracy to roll out an army of tireless robot slaves, while the working classes are repurposed as robot fuel, à la The Matrix. That said, it’s not just tech leaders making the case for automation. 

Liz Fouksman is a lecturer in social justice at King’s College London whose research focuses on our moral, social, and cultural attachments to work. To really talk about the future of work, she says, we need to agree on a definition of ‘work’ in the first place – and that’s easier said than done. “It could be working for a wage, or doing something entrepreneurial, or hustling... whatever it is that you’re doing to create resources so that you can eat and have housing,” she tells Dazed. But she’s also sympathetic to arguments in favour of expanding the definition to include things that aren’t currently remunerated by capitalism, like care work, parenting, or artistic labour. One of the benefits of accelerating automation, she suggests, is that it makes these conversations unavoidable. “It forces us to think really hard about what we want as human beings, what it is that gives us meaning and pleasure.” 

[AI] forces us to think really hard about what we want as human beings, what it is that gives us meaning and pleasure – Liz Fouksman

It isn’t just about pleasure though, because there are some very difficult or boring tasks that we wouldn’t want to automate. At the time we’re speaking, for example, Fouksman has a three-week-old baby to care for. “It’s very hard to get up at 1AM and 3AM and 5AM to feed the baby, and you probably could find a way to automate that, but I don’t know if you’d want to,” she says. The same might go for jobs in hospitals, schools, or care homes. “Care is so vital to our society and so extremely undervalued. We pay people nothing, or very tiny amounts, to wipe other human beings’ butts and [care for] babies, the elderly, the sick.” Again, we could probably automate many of these processes if necessary, but there are some situations where our emotional connection to another human being might prove irreplaceable. “I think the way to deal with that,” she adds, “is to give it way more value in our society.”

This would require significant systemic change. For some – like David Beck, a lecturer and food poverty expert at the University of Salford – one possible route forward is a scheme like Universal Basic Income, or UBI. Proponents of UBI advocate a fixed government payment that covers the basic costs of living for every citizen, with absolutely no obligations (including employment). In recent years, major UBI trials have taken place across the world, from Wales, to Ireland, Finland, and Namibia. In 2024, the biggest-ever US study drew to a close, having paid a monthly sum of $1,000 to citizens in Illinois and Texas (funded by OpenAI CEO Sam Altman). So far, the findings have been positive. Recipients are shown to focus more on seeking healthcare and spending time with their family and community, and invest more into their future via education or entrepreneurship. Notably, they don’t immediately quit their jobs and resign themselves to a life of Netflix, junk food, and video games, like the post-work humans of WALL-E. In fact, previous schemes have been shown to improve job prospects, though results vary from study to study.

But how could free money change what kind of work we value most? Well, by providing a safety net for workers, suggests Beck, UBI allows them to take risks that aren’t available to those living in a state of economic precarity. (Around 14 million people, or 20 per cent of the population, live in poverty in the UK alone. Countless more pay the bills via zero-hour contracts and piecemeal work.) “It produces the freedom to say: ‘I don’t want to do this shit job anymore, you’re not paying me enough. I’m gonna find a better one.’” With Gen Z already questioning the pros and cons of the nine-to-five, this would be amplified even further in a world where AI picks up most of the slack – if most people were free to not work, the essential jobs that are left over would have to be very well rewarded to convince humans to trade in their time.

And what about the rest? Even if UBI did make everyone ‘lazy’ and unwilling to work as hard, would that be such a bad thing? In Beck’s opinion: “Laziness is good for society.. If people take more time themselves, to chill out, slow down, take a breather... straight away they feel more relaxed. And if people are more relaxed, that’s a benefit for the NHS, there’s less stress on the system.” (According to Mental Health UK, one in five workers took time off work in 2024 due to poor mental health caused by pressure or stress – the UK, it says, is at risk of becoming a “burnt-out nation”.) Plus, Beck agrees with Fouksman that people could fill their time with work that falls outside the narrow definitions of contemporary capitalism, in caring for their parents, the elderly, or their own children, “instead of paying someone else because [they] have to rush off”.

The “work haters and art makers” of Bare Minimum Collective framed laziness another way during their 2021 ICA residency, This World Makes Us Sick. “The Bare Minimum Collective believes in doing nothing, or at the very least, as little as is required of us,” they said. “We work smart, not hard [...] We hate work. The drudgery of wage labour, the grind, the side-hustle, the neoliberal requirement for self-improvement.” In work’s place, the collective expressed a desire to “live lives of wonder” – of attentiveness, risk, and community building.

Obviously, there’s a crucial question when it comes to actually implementing schemes like UBI: how are we going to pay for it? But isn’t that the point of technological progress? For decades, economists and philosophers including Karl Marx and John Maynard Keynes have dreamed of automation as a way to maximise productivity, free up resources, and take the weight off workers. In 1930, Keynes imagined that his grandchildren’s work week might be as short as 15 hours. But that hasn’t happened. Today, even the four-day work week is treated as a radical idea. Working hours have reduced very slightly over the last two decades, while wages have stagnated, even as productivity booms. And where has all that extra productivity gone, if not towards our personal income or leisure time? Hint: the wealth of the world’s five richest men has doubled since 2020, while the wealth of the poorest five billion fell.

“I think it’s obscene that we live in a time of extreme abundance, and there are still some people who struggle to get food or housing,” Fouksman says. “I just cannot believe we tolerate that.” For her, UBI is an “obvious and straightforward” part of addressing that imbalance, and she’s already worked alongside other academics to prove its economic viability.

In the wake of the 2024 US election, Bernie Sanders also pointed to the contradiction between productivity and pay, as an explanation for Americans’ widespread loss of faith in the political establishment. “Despite an explosion in technology and worker productivity, many young people will have a worse standard of living than their parents,” he says. “Many of them worry that artificial intelligence and robotics will make a bad situation even worse.” Beck expresses a similar concern that inequality and precarity fuel a large part of the fear and anger that leads to the election of formerly-fringe figures like Donald Trump or Nigel Farage. Drawing on the research of economist Guy Standing – who points to the “precariat” as an emerging social class whose legitimate unhappiness can be channelled by populist and neo-fascist figureheads, with dangerous consequences – he stresses the need for individual economic stability as a way to fend off this rising threat.

On the other hand, there’s widespread opposition to UBI, even among those it could benefit the most. It goes much deeper than its economic viability or technological implementation, Fouksman explains. “The advent of capitalism imposed a certain form of work and carried it around the globe.” Tied up with colonialism, the ‘Protestant work ethic’, and other Western ideas about who ‘deserves’ to get rich, this ideology influenced our perspectives on time, culture, community, and many other fundamental parts of life. We aren’t just going to forget those attachments any time soon. Barring a few extreme exceptions – like artists living in squats in 1970s London – there are few models for different ways of living in Europe and the US. “It’s so hard to actually carve out alternatives unless you already have wealth.” On the flipside, billionaires like Musk are treated by their fans with an almost religious fervour, reinforcing the association between hard work and morality. “Then it gets flipped, and people believe that people who are poor must be lazy and thus undeserving, and you don’t have to help.” 

It is very difficult to imagine what social relations could be when disentangled from the concept of work – James Smith

“It is very difficult to imagine what social relations could be when disentangled from the concept of work,” Smith agrees, noting that the connection between community and work has been “coded into” our economic models dating back to ancient civilisation. To change that “would require some hard thinking and imagination, and some hard creativity”.

Unfortunately, the politics of the 2020s isn’t known for its long-term thinking and creative solutions. Instead, all of our social and cultural attachments to work converge on a reluctance to let go of the nine-to-five, even as it wears away at our souls. This even filters through to our leisure time. Among the highest-rated simulation games on the videogame storefront Steam in 2024 are: Euro Truck Simulator 2, PowerWash Simulator, Car Mechanic Simulator 2021, Supermarket Simulator, Gas Station Simulator, Farming Simulator 19, and the DIY renovation sim House Flipper. Each has tens of thousands of user reviews, with Euro Truck Simulator 2 clocking in at over 600,000. Interestingly, they almost all revolve around ‘blue collar’ jobs, albeit with a wildly aspirational degree of worker autonomy. In any case, there’s clearly some appetite for the trappings of work – the kind that doesn’t involve slaying monsters or exploring alien planets, but sitting in a truck cab for several hours at a time, in a digital facsimile of the world outside your window – even when it’s not paid. That’s not to mention the infiltration of recreational gaming by actual, IRL employers.

Many fear that this rise of simulated work heralds a particularly uninspiring post-work future: as machines take our real jobs, and our basic needs are met by the state, we retreat into a world of virtual toil and video games, enabled by increasingly powerful VR tech. Far from allowing people to “be who they want to be more”, as in Beck’s optimistic vision for the future, workers are turned into mindless consumers, doomed to waste their days on virtual tasks that bear little relation to the real world (besides data collection to train the next best AI).

Arguably, this process has already begun, says Smith, pointing to an uptick in some concerning social trends amid the blurry work/life arrangements of the post-pandemic: “More atomisation, more withdrawal, and more disappearance into a commodified online space.” But this VR dystopia isn’t inevitable. “The biggest naivety that people can have on the Left,” he adds, is that technology and culture develop in isolation. What Smith found exciting about the post-work movement that arose in the mid-2010s (alongside political figures like Bernie Sanders and Jeremy Corbyn) was its place in a broader political context, as it emerged from conversations about radically different economic models enabled by cutting-edge tech. “The idea was that this extraordinary technology needs to be run and owned in the public interest,’” he explains. “Of course AI is going to have undesirable effects, if you continue to let some of the most undesirable people in the world own it, develop it, and decide how it proceeds.”

But is it even possible to wrest power from the hands of Big Tech in 2024? That remains to be seen. It begins with asking some “really tricky” ethical questions, Fouksman suggests. When tech billionaires support UBI pilots, for example, we should ask how they treat their own workers for a real insight into their motives – and not just their tech developers, but the people who clean the toilets and serve food in the cafeteria, too. “Are they insured? How much do they get paid? Do the [billionaires] use any tax evasion tactics? Do they put their money offshore?” (In 2023, while OpenAI experimented with free money for US citizens, it outsourced the “traumatising” work of screening toxic chatbot content to human workers in Kenya, for an average of $2.15 per hour. In 2024, researchers highlighted how tech titans like Apple and Amazon use similar processes, relying on cheap outsourced labour to develop AI, with a view to improving working conditions back home.) At the end of the day, Fouksman says, if you’re going to sing the praises of a post-work utopia and advocate the kind of reforms that would make it a reality – which generally involve accelerating the development of tech like AI or robotics – you need to be able to back it up. “You have to start in your own house.”

Of course AI is going to have undesirable effects, if you continue to let some of the most undesirable people in the world own it, develop it, and decide how it proceeds – James Smith

One of Fouksman’s main concerns is that nothing will meaningfully change for human workers, even as Big Tech finds new tools to automate work. “My big worry is that they won’t disrupt it,” she says. “I really worry we could liberate ourselves from a tonne of tedium and bullshit, but we won’t because we’re so attached.” And what does that scenario look like? Basically: more of the same but with AI, with the added productivity only serving to line the pockets of billionaires and create an even wider wealth gap. Oh, and maybe you could rent one of Elon’s Tesla bots to look after your kids in the meantime.

There’s probably no such thing as a post-work utopia. Even if we assume that Big Tech has our best interests at heart and ushers in a new, fairer kind of politics powered by advanced tech (and yes, that’s a big ask), things are bound to get messy as we break with centuries of tradition. That shouldn’t stop us from trying to imagine a different way to work, though. 

“Everybody’s scared of the iRobot future where your house has some sort of sentient robot that does all the toil and labour for you,” says Beck. “And I think people are rightly scared of that, because it’s an unknown future. But it could free people up to be more compassionate, and more involved in [their] community, and work less. And why not?” What we call ‘work’ today is seriously flawed – unhealthy, unsustainable, and unfulfilling, for millions of people – and other viable alternatives seem few and far between. A little bit of disruption might not be such a bad thing. As Williams and Srnicek wrote almost 10 years ago, we should be careful not to end up “implicitly idealising an older model of work” as we criticise technology’s negative effects on the jobs of today. Instead, we should focus our energies on shaping the future, which might mean fighting for collective ownership of AI, or a universal basic income, or a different economic model that no one has even imagined yet. There’s one thing everyone seems to agree on, at least: it isn’t enough to sit back and let tech billionaires make all the decisions. That’s how you get turned into robot food.

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