GK Chesterton once wrote: “I have long ceased to argue with people who prefer Thursday to Wednesday simply because it is Thursday.” Chesterton was sceptical of what he considered the “cult of progress” – modernity’s unhealthy preoccupation with technological advancement and scientific development for its own sake.

You might wonder what he’d make of today’s futurists, so-called techno progressives and the utopian guarantees promised by the fourth industrial revolution.

It’s hard not to channel Chestertonesque thoughts when viewing the documentary The Future of Work and Death, which explores the brave new world of “super-intelligence, super-longevity and super-happiness”, as one of the documentary’s subjects describes it. The 2015 film is screening as part of the Transitions film festival, now travelling around the country.

The first-time documentary directors Sean Blacknell and Wayne Walsh have interviewed scientists, futurists, philosophers, sociologists and anthropologists about the promise of a utopian world.

“We’ve made this film to create a global forum and bring these problems to life,” Blacknell says. And it seems to be doing just that – the pair has learned the film will be screened at the European Commission.

Pivoting off Benjamin Franklin’s famous line, “nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes”, the documentary imagines a world where neither is necessary. And the film-makers want to encourage their audience to consider whether they would want to live in such a world.

The Oxford Martin school predicts 47% of current jobs are at risk of being replaced by robots in the next 25 years. In the film, Blackwell and Walsh identify certain key industries likely to be threatened by automated disruption and come up with the approximate figure of 500 million people who will soon be made redundant.

Typically, these statistics are a launching pad for people to speculate about how humanity will find meaning in a world without labour. Although the film does tackle these questions, it also encourages viewers to think about what will happen to the half billion-odd workers facing sudden redundancy.

“We saw all these futurists, some of them very articulate and very successful but we found they were just becoming too excited without thinking about the global repercussions on very fragile infrastructures in developing countries,” Blacknell says.

On this point, the Rise of the Robots author, Martin Ford, is especially prescient. Contrary to many of his fellow interviewees, he argues that technology alone offers no solution to the problems of massive job displacement.

Ford believes addressing the challenge will require social and political will to push the boundaries of capitalism – and although the idea of a universal basic income isn’t explicitly mentioned (it’s to be the subject of Blacknell and Walsh’s next film), it does serve as the backdrop to much of the discussion.

The film-makers decided to intersperse interview footage with archival footage, much of it in black and white. This helps to place contemporary questions about work in a deeper historical context.

Indeed there have been moments in the past when the rapid expansion of technology has both excited and terrified us. At the 1889 Paris Exhibition, guild artisans were invited to marvel at new labour-saving devices which, as the artisans quickly realised, would destroy their way of life and most likely leave them destitute. Whether they endured or not isn’t easily determined, though several interviewees acknowledge the enormous job displacement that occurred in this period.

Of course, there are strong moral arguments for progress, and Blacknell and Walsh don’t deny the potential benefits. But while The Future of Work and Death encourages viewers to look toward the leading edge of research, it also strongly advises us to keep the other eye on what’s happening right now.



“You’ve got to ask yourself, what’s important on a global scale?” Walsh says. “I think it’s important to focus on the trailing edge [those in poverty] a little bit if you’re going to move forward at such pace.”

This is perhaps more significant in the discussion of death. The documentary includes a quote from Bill Gates: “It seems pretty egocentric while we still have malaria and TB [affecting impoverished communities] for rich people to fund things so they can live longer.”

When the documentary turns to mortality and humanity’s attempt to conquer death through longevity, the discussion of what the future is likely to look like gets even more opaque.

The film explores two different models of longevity: the attempt to conquer ageing, championed by the gerontologist Aubrey de Grey, and the project of digitally uploading human consciousness so our minds can live on without our bodies.

The unifying tenet behind these approaches is the philosophy of transhumanism, a movement that aims to reject the physical and intellectual limitations of humanity in favour of something greater. Given death is humanity’s greatest limitation, the holy grail of transhumanism is immortality.

The anthropologist Ernest Becker believed human life was defined by its avoidance of death – a theme the anthropologists Joanna Cook and Steve Fuller and the writer Will Self explore at length in the documentary. Becker also believed humans strived for immortality, though he thought we were more likely to achieve it through what we created. Instead of actual immortality, Becker believed humans undertake “immortality projects” to be remembered once they’re gone.

There’s a striking coincidence here: at the same time that humanity seeks genuine immortality, we’ve begun to phase out work – the attempt to fuse our labour with the world to create something new – perhaps the most common immortality project we’ve created.

The irony here is that the transhumanist desire to overcome humanity is motivated by perhaps the most deeply entrenched human instinct there is: survival. The transhumanists claim it is their zeal for life that motivates them.

Chesterton’s words again come to mind. “When men have come to the edge of a precipice,” he says, “it is the lover of life who has the spirit to leap backwards, and only the pessimist who continues to believe in progress.”

Who the optimists and the pessimists are in the fight for humanity’s future remains to be seen, but The Future of Work and Death lends both a soapbox on which to state their case. And as technology takes us closer to either utopia or the cliff, the film helps along a conversation we desperately need to have.

• The Future of Work and Death is part of Transitions film festival, screening nationally