No, Once Freed from Work, We Shouldn’t Fight for Our Right to Work

• A recent article published in Psychology Today urges us to fight for our “right to work” in a future where AI frees us from labor.
• The article stated key points are:

• Long-term unemployment can lead to depression and mental illness.
• Universal Basic Income may not be a solution.
• We need to reframe human labour as valuable and fight for the right to work.

Surviving Within Artificial Intelligence’s Useless Class | Psychology Today

• The author repeatedly asserts that unemployment leads to depression and mental illness, citing historical evidence.
• However, the author overlooks the fact that this “new unemployment” differs fundamentally from traditional unemployment.
• Unlike past unemployment, the new scenario won’t involve financial anxiety, which contributes to depression both directly and indirectly by hindering individuals from finding alternative sources of purpose.
• Additionally, this new form of unemployment will not carry the stigma of failure or diminished social status.
• The author frequently refers to a “useless class,” but if this group soon encompasses 99% of society, labeling it a “class” becomes meaningless. When nearly everyone is unemployed, individuals are unlikely to feel shame or guilt about their own joblessness.
• However, these are not the only aspects of unemployment that could contribute to depression.
• The author does acknowledge one critical aspect of unemployment: the loss of a primary source of meaning and purpose.
• As mentioned earlier, the author claims that “Universal Basic Income may not be a solution.” The question is: a solution to what?
• UBI, or a similar scheme, is undoubtedly an economic solution—and more than that, it will become an absolute necessity. Dismissing it as ineffective simply because it does not address issues outside its scope is misguided.
• While UBI addresses economic concerns, it does not solve psychological ones.
• Indeed, we will face a psychological crisis; however, instead of engaging in a futile and misguided fight for our “right to work,” we should seek solutions in other dimensions of human life—after all, we are more than just workers.
• While the author criticizes UBI as a “left-brain solution” with a narrow view of humanity, it is their argument that appears strictly utilitarian—failing to recognize that human existence encompasses far more than income-generating activities.

I want to say, in all seriousness, that a great deal of harm is being done in the modern world by belief in the virtuousness of work, and that the road to happiness and prosperity lies in an organized diminution of work. [… Work] is emphatically not one of the ends of human life.

In Praise of Idleness, Bertrand Russell

• We should certainly prepare ourselves for life after work—not by tilting at windmills like Don Quixote, fighting imaginary foes in a futile quest for our ‘right to work,’ but by taking the milled grain we are given for free and learning to bake delicious bread.
• Could a machine bake better bread faster? It probably will—and perhaps it already does. So what? We can still choose to bake it ourselves and enjoy the process; nothing, not even AI, can take that away from us. Just as cameras have existed for centuries, and yet we still find joy in painting.
• Hobbies are a wonderful—AI-proof—source of meaning, and we don’t need to fight anyone for the right to pursue them.