In an earlier piece I deliberately kept my conclusions cautious. We do not know how far the automation of knowledge work by AI will go, or how quickly. Let me set that caution aside for a moment: suppose it succeeds. Suppose that within the foreseeable future, machines take over a large share of paid intellectual work. What then?

The first reaction is usually fear and unease — about money, but above all about the question of what people are still for. We have tied work, income and identity together so tightly that we can barely imagine a dignified life without paid employment. That is precisely where we need to start.

Work is a bundle

A paid job delivers more than a wage. It gives your day a rhythm, a place among others, and the sense that you are contributing to something. Pay, structure, connection and status are currently bound together in one package, attached to the labour market.

Automation cuts primarily the first thread: the market no longer needs your labour to make money. But for the person, little changes: they still need money to live on, a daily rhythm, a sense of belonging, and the knowledge that they matter.

No shortage of valuable work

We fear a world without work, while valuable work lies everywhere undone. Elderly people who deserve more attention than there are hands to give it. Children who would benefit from smaller classes. Neighbourhoods that need maintenance, nature that needs restoring, knowledge and culture that need to be passed on. The list is long and the needs are real.

There is no shortage of valuable work. There is a shortage of paid work — a fundamental difference.

The obvious objection is: if that work is so valuable, why doesn’t the market pay for it? The answer is that its value is hard to monetise. The value is diffuse, it materialises only in the long run, or it accrues to people who cannot pay: a child, a sick person, an ecosystem, a future generation. It is public value, and we do not organise that through the market but through shared choices. Education, healthcare and culture exist because we have collectively decided they are worth it, even if they generate no profit. It is work that resists automation, because it revolves around presence, human interaction and relationships. It is work that people do for people.

Care and interdependence as an organising principle

We can therefore think about work differently. As long as we equate “work” with “paid job”, a future with fewer jobs looks empty. The moment we look at “work” as “contribution to society in a broader sense”, a world of possibilities opens up.

A group of British researchers has developed this idea under the heading of care as an organising principle, at every scale: from the household to the community, the economy and the natural world. The core insight is that we are interdependent in thousands of ways, whether we find that comfortable or not. Nobody manages alone — not as a child, not as a sick person, not as an elderly person, really not at any point in our lives. A society that acknowledges this puts care at the centre of everything it does.

What is the economy actually for?

The economist Kate Raworth has a model for this, which she calls the doughnut. In her model the goal is not to make the economy as large as possible, but to meet everyone’s needs within the limits of the planet. A social floor that nobody falls through, and an ecological ceiling that we do not break through. Between those two lies the space in which a society can flourish.

What is appealing about this image is that it takes growth off its pedestal without throwing prosperity overboard. Growth becomes a means that is sometimes necessary and sometimes not, rather than an end in itself. The measure shifts from how much we produce to whether people and the living environment are genuinely better off. From “how do we keep production going” to “what is that production actually for?” Amsterdam was the first city to embrace this model as a compass for policy, in 2020.

A basic income or a job guarantee

So much for the direction. But a direction is nothing without options for implementation. If we decouple income from paid labour, two practical questions arise. How do people get an income? And how is all that valuable but unpaid work financed and taken seriously? Here the answers diverge.

One much-heard answer is unconditional basic income: the government gives everyone a fixed amount, regardless of work. It is simple, it gives people freedom, and it keeps the state out of the question of what counts as valuable work.

Another answer is a job guarantee, most fully developed by the economist Pavlina Tcherneva. The government offers everyone who wants to work a job at a decent fixed wage, precisely in the work the market neglects: care, community, nature restoration. Anyone who cannot find a place in the private sector can come here. Such a job guarantee also works as an automatic stabiliser. In bad times, when businesses shed workers, the programme grows. In good times, when the private sector picks up, it shrinks again naturally.

I lean towards the job guarantee, for two reasons. The first is that a basic income primarily turns people into consumers. The money keeps the economy moving, but it does not cause the work we actually want done to get done. Care, attention, restoration — someone still has to do that. A job guarantee arranges income and work in one move, and gives people what a benefit payment does not: a place in society and a chance to contribute to it. The second reason is political durability. A bare money transfer is vulnerable. It is easy to cut, easy to frame negatively as free money, or to quietly erode. Work from which people and neighbourhoods visibly benefit is much harder to abolish.

And the costs? They form a less hard constraint than is often assumed. The school of thought behind the job guarantee — Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) — points out that a state that issues its own currency cannot simply run out of money the way a household can. The only real limit is what is available in people, materials and environment. It shifts the question from “can we afford this?” to “do we have the people and resources to do this?”

The job guarantee also has its weak spots: work that disappears the moment the economy picks up fits poorly with care and nature restoration, which require continuity above all.

What is of value?

And who actually decides what counts as valuable work? With a job guarantee, that answer lies partly with the state — and that is a real risk. Whoever draws up the list determines a great deal. But perhaps that is not a flaw to be engineered away. Perhaps it is the heart of the matter. In a world where machines can do most paid work, the question of what human effort is worth is a political and moral question — and it belongs to all of us, not to an algorithm, a market or a ministry alone.

Alongside strengthening the safety net, we need to work out together which work we consider worth preserving, defending and growing. We are barely having that conversation now. We would do well to start it before technology makes the choice for us.

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