We are going to have to structure our economies so they can still function when the need for human labour is a thing of the past. That day may be closer than many think. And even today, how much of the work that is done is really useful? How much is just people making unnecessary work for themselves and others, and desperately figuring out ways to insert it into the productive economy in such a way as to siphon off some of the benefits?



It's actually not very hard to imagine a society without work, and how it might function. We actually have examples of such societies, both from the past and the present. These are the societies of aristocrats, slave owners, and today's idle rich. Such people do not waste away, longing for a job. They find things to occupy themselves. If there is no more need to work, all of society would still find things to do.



But we would need to limit consumption, because the environment will not stand limitless consumption for everyone. The most reasonable way to do that would be for the things that are produced by the automation to still have a price, reflecting the environmental costs. The money collected would then be returned to the people as an allowance. Because there is no need for any incentive to work, there would be no reason not to just give everybody the same amount. It would be set to balance peoples' material desires against the environmental costs of excess consumption.



We should be moving towards such a society already. Already, we would benefit from a basic income, paid for by sales taxes and things like carbon taxes. A basic income would reduce the incentive to work, but that is a good thing. People could more easily take time off to raise a family, improve their education, become an artist of some sort, or start a business. We would just be taking the pay-off of all the technological improvements in a different form - less stuff, but more leisure and less stress. And such a system could gradually transition into the workless society imagined above as technology moves toward the point where it can do anything a human can do.