As we enter the post-work future, we have to reassess how we measure our economies

One of the clearest signs of our failure to embrace reality is that even in an era dominated by the ever-increasing availability of automation technologies to boost our productivity, the world continues to obsess over increasingly irrelevant metrics.

In the picture, the evolution of the GDP of five countries between the year 1000 and 2015. The graph shows the very important contribution of technology to the generation of wealth, while at the same time, it shows how right Robert Kennedy was when he observed that “GDP measures everything except that which is worthwhile”. With more and more machines injecting more and more productivity and wealth into the economy, have we really created an economic system that makes us happier, or on the contrary, have we created a monster that trap growing numbers of people in badly paid, boring jobs that is provoking social unrest even in relatively stable economies? Anyone who thinks that the protests in Chile are an exception, needed wait long to see that they are the logical consequence of a completely unsustainable economic system.

There has been a lot of talk lately about the end of certain kinds of work. In the beginning, it was assembly line workers, drivers, miners, cashiers, administrative staff… but now we are talking about bank and warehouse employees, white-collar jobs and even agriculture. In China, thousands of young workers once assigned to assembly lines in factories have been re-educated to work on manual data tagging for algorithm training. Amazon is also committed to training 100,000 employees, one-third of its US workforce, to do the jobs of the future, but the reality is that it is hiring less and less.

As societies age, robots are doing more and more of the jobs that people did before, with one consistent result: greater productivity and fewer errors. Some countries may see opportunities in this, but in general, we are talking about a future in which we will work fewer and fewer days a week, fewer hours, we’ll work wherever we want to, and on things we really want to work on, because those we don’t like will be irremissibly automated. Automation replaces more jobs than it creates, and that turns the utopia of full employment into a conceptual absurdity: one way or another, we are heading toward societies where many of us will not have to work; instead, we’ll look for things to do that interest us or bring in some extra cash. That said, we’re going to need viable alternatives to avoid growing inequality and social unrest.

After centuries of thinking that the problem was scarcity, we now find that the problem is abundance: increasing productivity, once based on dirty and unsustainable technologies, along with replacing people with technology. This doesn’t have to be a drama, and simply requires a radical rethink of assumptions that were unquestionable until now. The future is post-work: get on the program.

(En espa?ol, aquí)