The Future of Work Beyond AI

We’ve known for decades that wages have not kept up with the productivity gains technology has afforded. And we’re on the verge of yet another leap ahead once artificial intelligence (AI) is more integrated into the economy. There’s an imbalance between how much value the typical worker produces versus how much they are paid, and today’s economic climate is exacerbating the financial strain.

Millions of people live from paycheck to paycheck. Chase bank is now giving some customers their direct deposit two days early, helping account holders avoid late fees and bank overdraft charges. Earned wage access (EWA) startups are dominating fintech with services that advance workers the money for hours worked to keep them afloat in between paydays.

The businesses that depend on people to spend their paychecks understand what’s going on. Grocery stores are now providing no-interest loans for customers to buy food while installment plan payments for everyday purchases are increasingly available. There’s a cottage industry growing around the financial insecurity of workers that, on the bright side, is disrupting predatory short-term lending. But it's not a long-term solution.

The simple answer is to pay people more. In the absence of jobs that pay well enough to live on, solutions such as universal basic income (UBI) are having a positive impact on poverty and health. Giving people money works. The growing number of pilot UBI programs with beneficial outcomes is encouraging, particularly considering potential impacts of AI on the workplace such as technological unemployment.

Another option is to pay people the same, but give them more free time. This is the kind of thing that some of the four-day workweek experiments have explored with promising results. Employees are happier and productivity remained steady. The mental health benefits for employees are considered one of the biggest improvements resulting from a shorter workweek.

When long-held rules like the 40-hour work week or biweekly paycheck cycle start to dissolve, perceptions are changing. It’s a time to envision scenarios for a future of work that is financially and psychologically satisfying, the opposite of what we have now where low pay and burnout threaten workers’ mental health. Imagine a future where having a job is obsolete due to a basic wage paid from the earnings of robots doing all the work. We could rehearse scenarios where jobs might not fall into neat categories of “full time” or “blue collar” in the future, and what world rankings would look like if GDP accounted for caregiving, domestic, and other forms of unpaid women’s work. The biggest change might be that working for money might not last much longer as the primary system of meeting basic needs. AI might catalyze this change, but it would only be the beginning of a new phase of realizing human potential.

Photo by Sigmund on Unsplash