Job Loss in the 21st-Century Economy
A recent Quinnipiac poll found that 70% of Americans believe AI will result in fewer jobs. Boosters in the industry cite this fear as a reason people aren’t more on board with the AI revolution. And with tech companies laying off tens of thousands in the past few months, the affective tide doesn’t seem to be changing anytime soon.
I’ve been working on a big piece about the cultural implications of “software brain,” the messaging around taste and judgment tech leaders are toting out to pacify our concerns about AI, and how the uncertain future of work is impacting the guidance I give my daughter, who is heading off to college in the fall.
In the process, I’ve been thinking about the way we conflate jobs and work.
A job is a specific type of container for work. A job is work-plus. Work plus a relationship to an employer. Work plus a compensation scheme. Work plus certain guarantees and rights.
Strip away the container of job, and work still exists.
When pundits and executives say people fear losing their jobs, it papers over a list of discrete fears—ones that point to more creative solutions. People fear losing a stable relationship with a community of people working toward the same goals. They fear the loss of their livelihood and their ability to survive in an unforgiving economic system. They fear the loss of guarantees and rights. And yes, they also fear the loss of work inasmuch as that work feels substantive and meaningful.
But work exists independently of jobs. We work outside of the container of job all the time. And work will exist long after AI becomes good enough to do certain types of jobs. We yearn for the freedom to apply ourselves to work irrespective of its connection to a job. "Though work has often entailed subjugation, obedience, and hierarchy," writes economic historian James Livingston, "it's also where we have consistently expressed our deepest human desire, to be free of externally imposed authority or obligation, to be self-sufficient."
If what we really fear is the loss of a stable relationship to a community with shared goals, we can organize those communities. If we fear the loss of certain guarantees and rights associated with employment, we can attach those rights to individuals rather than jobs. If we fear the loss of our livelihoods, we can develop new systems to ensure that everyone has what they need.
These are problems that can be solved. And those solutions aren’t new ways of saying “get a job.”
None of those solutions is new. None is easy.
But beginning the work of executing on them requires more of us to disentangle work from jobs and agitate for what we really want: an economy that works for all of us.
