What if the future of work was no work at all?

What if the future of work was no work at all?

You work and then you die, so the saying goes.

Although new technology allows us to subvert the standard nine to five routine, the general rule is you do your time from when you finish education until you’re ready to retire.

Work is all we know as a culture. After meeting someone, ‘what do you do?’ is one of the first questions we ask and the government wants to opt out of the EU Working Time Directive, which limits work to 48 hours-a-week.

Over a third of people in the UK see their jobs as completely meaningless and companies are looking at ways to automate their workforce in the coming years.




Does this mean we won’t have to work anymore?

Kyle Lewis, a researcher at thinktank Autonomy and an associate lecturer in philosophy, doesn’t think it’s realistic or a good thing to think about the ‘end’ of work.

‘We can use robots in a more egalitarian and focused manner that offers the potential for shorter working weeks, the production of more human-centred work and the reduction of toilsome and dangerous jobs,’ he says.

Design scientist, futurologist, and systems theorist, Melissa Sterry agrees.

‘AI has immense capacity to help humanity to not merely ask much bigger and more complex questions than have been asked before, but to find the answers to those questions,’ she tells Metro.co.uk.

‘The advent of AI is akin to that of the calculator, in that it builds on, rather than competes with our abilities… For better or for worse, we discern how, where and why AI’s potential is used.’

So if work is still continuing, how much do we need to work? Is work anything more than a means to pay for survival?

There’s an increasing body of evidence that shows we’re not actually doing 10 hours of work in our 10-hour working days.

Salaried employees only do around three hours of ‘real’ work each day, according to one study.

Presenteeism could be seen as detrimental to companies as well as just employees.

And this drive to work is a relatively new one.

To tally with idea of three hours of ‘real work’, the traditional Kung people of the Kalahari Desert work three hours a day and as little as 12 hours a week.

While servants probably didn’t have the best lives, it was normal to consider a day’s work to take half the day and averaged out to around eight or nine hours-a-day, according to HS Bennett’s Life On The English Manor.

The main difference was that, it is said, up to half the year was taken as some sort of holiday.

It was only the Industrial Revolution that created the working patterns we know today.

(Picture: Ella Byworth for Mwetro.co.uk)

For those with African heritage, the idea of this structure is a relatively new concept. Kenyan philosopher John Mbiti stated that Western time is something to be ‘utilised, sold, or bought’, as opposed to African time, which is not as finite and can be ‘made’ at will.



Emma Dabiri states in her book, Don’t Touch My Hair: ‘As recently as 150 years ago, wage labour seemed both degrading and perverse to the people of what was about to become Nigeria. The schedule that most of us grudgingly accept today – starting work at a certain predetermined time (not your own choice), eating at a predetermined hour dictated by a boss, finishing work at a regimented time (ordained from on high) was seen by my great-greats as akin to slavery’.

How much time work ‘should’ take is already being disrupted by flexible working and trials of the four-day working week.

In one trial of a four-day week at a company in New Zealand, productivity was stable, employee stress levels decreased and people felt they had more of a work-life balance. Small companies here in the UK are following their lead and completing similar trials with similar results.

Billionaire Richard Branson even believes that we may see a three-day working week, and has implemented flexible working and unlimited holiday time for Virgin employees. He states that the changes help parents to continue their careers after starting a family, and also allows them to maintain healthier lifestyles.

Despite good results, however, it’s currently not a change that’s proved sustainable overall.

After a trial of six-hour work days in Sweden, Daniel Bernmar, the Left Party councillor responsible for running Gothenburg’s elderly care (who organised the trial) said: ‘Could we do this for the entire municipality? The answer is no, it will be too expensive’.


Another entrepreneur who took part stated that it was ‘stressful’, and it was only backed by 6% of the country’s electorate in the last general election.

They all did say, however, that it was a growing trend of what’s going to be on the agenda for politicians in the coming decades.

Economist John Meynard Keynes wrote in 1930 that we’d be working for 15 hours a week in 100 years: ‘For the first time since his creation man will be faced with his real, his permanent problem,’ he wrote.

‘How to use his freedom from pressing economic cares, how to occupy the leisure, which science and compound interest will have won for him, to live wisely and agreeably and well.’

Kyle Lewis believes that we already have those answers to those ‘permanent problems’:

‘In many ways, to ascertain what kind of things people will get up to, we just need to look around on bank holidays, on our weekends and at those who are happily retired,’ he says.

‘It simply isn’t true that employment is the only thing that gives meaning to our lives – often the opposite is true and people find themselves in repetitive, gloomy work that doesn’t reflect their aspirations or potential.

‘It is also important to remember that outside of their jobs people often engage in activities that still might count as work – volunteering, caring for loved ones and/or starting a new project with friends.

‘This situation underlines why it is so problematic to consider “work” only in terms of whatever job we have to do to make ends meet.’


That problem of money is one that doesn’t have any easy answers.

(Picture: Ella Byworth for Metro.co.uk)

In Finland, a ‘free cash experiment’ – or providing universal basic income (UBI) – where everyone was provided £475-a-month regardless of circumstance was controversial. It didn’t make unemployed people more likely to be in work but did improve health and happiness.

In the UK, a recent report by economists Stewart Lansley and Howard Reed said that the cost of switching to a Universal Basic Income in Britain would be £28bn.

This figure ‘is less than the aggregate cuts to welfare since 2010’ and the report’s authors said: ‘These reforms offer a significant modification of the existing system of social security – creating one more suited to the new risks of insecurity, precarity and work-based poverty of the 21st century.’

So would that mean we would work less and be happier?

‘[We should] start thinking seriously about decoupling income from wages so that everyone in society can participate and contribute to social life without the fear of stigma and destitution that often comes with unemployment,’ says Kyle Lewis.

He suggests moving on from current ‘solutions’ like Universal Credit and the Job Centre, and looking towards universal basic income as a right

‘It could be introduced incrementally over time – starting with modest rates and gradually amounting to something like a living wage,’ he says.

‘It would represent a progressive redistribution of wealth from the 1% (and the 0.1%), who have grown incredibly rich over the past thirty years, to the rest of society, who have paid for this inequality over the decade of austerity.’

But this is a contentious issue. Working is said to give people purpose, with Evelyn Cotter, Founder of SEVEN Career Coaching saying: ‘Most people need to feel like they are contributing, adding value, making an impact in ways that are seen or felt to feel good about themselves and progress. That is not going to change, that’s the human spirit’.

She continues: ‘It’s healthy to have a work ethic because what you put in, you get out, which doesn’t mean needing to slog, but having passion for what you do, fully showing up for your work because it aligns with your values and enjoying contributing’.

Plus, even UBI advocates admit it would not be a catch-all solution. Critics say inflation would be triggered because of increased income, prices would go up, the number of people seeking work would fall and there’s the question of who would pay for it.

Would companies chip in to provide the income that people need once it isn’t tied to work?

While better working conditions are agreed by all, a core idea from the government is to ‘make work pay’ rather than removing the need for work. Although Labour ministers – most notably John McDonnell – have backed a UBI, former Tory minister Nick Boles called proposals ‘dangerous nonsense’.

‘Mankind is hard-wired to work,’ he wrote in his book.

‘We gain satisfaction from it. It gives us a sense of identity, purpose and belonging… We should not be trying to create a world in which most people do not feel the need to work’.

We’re at an impasse, and the answer about what our working lives will look like is one that futurologists struggle to agree on.

According to CIPD, one in five of the companies they surveyed last year reported that mental ill health is the number one cause of long-term absence in their organisation, while nearly three-fifths reported it is among their top three causes of long-term absence.

The TUC also report that wage stagnation is the worst it’s been for two centuries, making for an amalgamation of unsatisfactory mental and financial wellbeing.

‘We look in horror at the poor houses of Oliver Twist but it’s basically the same now,’ Will Stronge, director of Autonomy, has said.

Essentially, what we want and the trajectory we’re on aren’t currently compatible, which puts us on the precipice of something massive. Perhaps we’re moving towards a world where instead of working until we die, we’re able to really live.

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