People talk about a post-work and post-scarcity future. It all sounds rather breathless, science fiction, techno-utopian. The things is, we are already there--or at least at a point in our development in the first world, where what we need and genuinely want could be produced by something like 15-20 hours a week of labor.
But:
1) Advertising has been designed to pump up what are (for lack of a better term at the moment) "inauthentic" wants. (Marx lives!)
2) We don't have infrastructure to distribute the wealth we have so that regular people can subsist in such a society. (Universal basic income!)
3) Our culture hasn't developed so that people know how to meaningfully use their liberated time. Education is needed. It's not that the resources and opportunities aren't there (give or take, depending on the area of interest), it's just that we haven't evolved into thinking in those terms.
Anyway, this article in The Atlantic is an interesting look at the issues.
A World without Work
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