The work of the future: more occupation and less working hours

Abstract

Will the machines, robots replace human labor in the near future? Based on this question, in a world of rapid digitization, advance of artificial intelligence and robotization, there lies a bleak picture, not of the work itself, but of its occupation, of employment. For some decades now there have been many analysts who, beyond the science fiction stories, have been looking at a jobless horizon for human beings, where intelligent, self-sustaining, and self-created mechanical entities will be the exclusive support for the creation of wealth. If we get to this point, it's possible, and this is what the analysts of the catharsis of human work point out, to start thinking about a future in which social organization will be dissociated from work, which up to now continues to be the axis through which economic, social and, by extension, political relations are articulated. What, then, would be the key concept in the articulation of these relationships? A new era in social organization would be making its way to the compass of the radical technological change we are experiencing. However, this article points to the accumulated experience of social transformations linked to the previous processes of technological revolutions, it is possible to maintain the link between employment, as a cement of the social organization, with better distribution of jobs, among people who work fewer hours, fewer days and dedicate more hours to other human activities not linked to income generation. The reduction of working time is thus, in the future, not only a mechanism for distributing scarcer employment, but also a tool for maintaining a social structure in terms similar to those experienced in past decades, as a pillar of greater social cohesion and of a certain political and social stability, the basis of the democratic systems we enjoy today. If it played that role in the past, there is no reason to think that it cannot do so in the future; it is simply a matter of encouraging substantial reductions in working time in order to generate more jobs.