The End of Jobs? Or the Beginning of Human Work?
How Artificial Intelligence Prepares Humanity for an Economy of Abundance
Artificial Intelligence has triggered a global conversation about the future of work.
Will millions lose their jobs?
Will unemployment become permanent?
How will people earn an income?
These questions dominate public discussion.
Yet they all arise from a deeper assumption that few people ever question.
We assume that the primary purpose of human work is to produce the goods and services society needs.
For most of history, that assumption was entirely reasonable.
Consider an elephant.
An elephant spends nearly 16 to 18 hours every day gathering and eating food simply to sustain itself.
Early human beings were not very different.
Most of their waking hours were devoted to producing life's necessities.
Growing food.
Finding water.
Building shelter.
Making clothing.
Survival itself occupied almost the whole day.
As agriculture improved, tools evolved and technology advanced, producing those necessities required progressively less human effort.
Human beings did not become unemployed.
Instead, they expanded the meaning of work.
The time liberated from survival gave birth to civilisation.
Schools.
Universities.
Science.
Medicine.
Engineering.
Arts.
Music.
Literature.
Sports.
Festivals.
Environmental conservation.
Public administration.
Community life.
Every major technological advance reduced the labour required merely to survive and expanded the possibilities of what human beings could contribute.
Artificial Intelligence and robotics represent the next stage of that same journey.
For the first time in history, they have the potential to produce almost all the goods and services a modern society requires.
Many therefore conclude that society faces mass unemployment.
That conclusion rests upon a misunderstanding.
As Warren Mosler has often reminded us,
"Don't confuse the productivity story with the unemployment story."
Artificial Intelligence changes the productivity story.
It does not determine the employment story.
The two are entirely different.
The productivity story asks:
How do we produce society's material needs?
Artificial Intelligence and robotics increasingly answer that question.
The employment story asks something altogether different.
How do human beings contribute to society?
That question has no technological answer.
It has an institutional one.
As technology progressively undertakes material production, human beings become progressively free to undertake other forms of contribution.
Teaching.
Caring.
Healing.
Scientific discovery.
Environmental restoration.
Arts.
Culture.
Sports.
Festivals.
Community building.
Strengthening families.
These are not lesser forms of work.
They are the very activities that define civilisation.
Ironically, many of them have often received the least economic recognition because markets reward commercial value rather than social value.
Artificial Intelligence now gives humanity an opportunity to rethink that relationship.
The greatest challenge of the AI era is therefore not production.
Artificial Intelligence and robotics are steadily removing that constraint.
The greater challenge is navigating the transition from an economy organised around scarcity to one increasingly characterised by abundance.
For centuries, wages served as the principal mechanism through which people gained access to society's production.
As long as human labour produced most goods and services, that arrangement functioned reasonably well, although unequal compensation inevitably produced unequal access to society's abundance.
Artificial Intelligence fundamentally changes that relationship.
If machines increasingly produce society's material needs, then access to those needs should no longer depend exclusively upon wages.
One fear surrounding Artificial Intelligence is,
"What work will I do?"
The other is,
"Will my family continue to live with dignity?"
The first fear disappears once we recognise that human contribution has always extended far beyond material production.
The second fear disappears when society progressively guarantees access to life's essential goods and services through comprehensive public welfare.
Comprehensive public welfare therefore becomes much more than social assistance.
It becomes part of society's distribution architecture.
Production.
Distribution.
Consumption.
No longer treated as separate economic functions, but organised as one coordinated system.
This is the great institutional transition.
During this transition, governments progressively expand Artificial Intelligence and robotic productive capacity while progressively expanding comprehensive public welfare.
Every increase in productivity immediately improves people's lives.
Artificial Intelligence ceases to be something people fear.
It becomes something they welcome.
The Resource Standard belongs precisely to this transition.
It is not the destination.
Nor is it intended to become the permanent economic architecture of the mature AI era.
Its purpose is to prepare society for that future.
It coordinates production.
Distribution.
Consumption.
Human contribution.
And the rapid deployment of Artificial Intelligence.
It gradually transforms an economy organised around scarcity into one prepared for abundance.
When that transition is complete, the Resource Standard itself will no longer be needed.
Not because it failed.
Because it succeeded.
The mature AI era will require institutions appropriate to an economy where material production is no longer humanity's principal challenge.
The Resource Standard prepares the world for that future.
Perhaps the question before us is not whether Artificial Intelligence will replace human work.
Perhaps the real question is whether humanity is prepared to embrace a richer understanding of what work has always been.
More: AI Is Not the Challenge. The Economic Architecture Is
AI Has Exposed India's Oldest Economic Mistake
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