Introduction

Framing My Approach

Management scholars interested in meaningful work have focused most of their efforts on understanding the conditions that lead individual workers to find their work meaningful. As many review articles on the topic document, this framework has led them to approach this topic from an individual and subjective perspective (Lepisto & Pratt, 2017, p. 103; Lysova et al., 2019, p. 375–6; Michaelson, 2021, p. 417; Michaelson et al., 2014, p. 78; Pratt & Ashforth, 2003, p. 311; Rosso et al., 2010, p. 94). The strategies to operationalize and measure meaningful work have further entrenched this subjective bias because such strategies “have focused exclusively on capturing the subjective experience” (Bailey et al., 2019, p. 91; cf. Rosso et al., 2010, p. 97).Footnote 1

Research on meaningful work among philosophically oriented scholars has also gravitated around concerns related to individual workers: the extent to which meaningful work aligns with and is necessary for worker’s individual autonomy (Arneson, 1987; Bowie, 1998; Ciulla, 2000a, 2019; Hsieh, 2005; Moriarty, 2010; Schwartz, 1982), whether an employee needs, deserves, or has a right to meaningful work (Ciulla, 2000b; Danaher, 2017; Yeoman, 2014) and the extent to which it is the responsibility of employers or governments to provide their workers with meaningful work (Arneson, 1987, 2009; Hsieh, 2008; Kim & Scheller-Wolf, 2019; Michaelson, 2011, 2021; Moriarty, 2009). As Michaelson (2021) has recently argued, while the philosophical literature tends to incorporate into their examination of meaningful work objective and normative considerations, the concern about the subjective experience of individual workers is nevertheless pervasive.

Studying meaningful work from the perspective of the individual’s subjective experience has undoubtedly provided the scholarship with important insights. However, this one-sided focus has led the literature to under-theorize the cultural and normative dimensions of meaningful work (Lysova et al., 2019, p. 375; Michaelson et al., 2014, p. 78; Rosso et al., 2010, p. 118). Keeping in mind the cultural and normative dimension is critical to properly understand meaningful work. The individual and subjective approach that has characterized the literature has obscured that a person’s ability to find meaning in her life in general, and her work in particular, is frequently anchored and dependent on a set of specific shared institutions and cultural aspirations.

Reflecting on the future of work, particularly on the dangers posed by the threat of technological unemployment, helps us recognize this cultural and normative dimension of meaningful work. Widespread automation, I will argue, would pose a significant cultural challenge given that work operates as a central organizing telos around which our contemporary lives gravitate. A world with few work opportunities would be a world devoid of a core structuring ideal around which our society has organized itself and, as such, has the potential to strain our ability to make sense of what it means to find life meaningful.

To say that a human practice (like compensated work) is “a central organizing telos” of our society is meant to encompass two aspects. First, the practice plays a central role in how society is structured and functions. Second, the practice plays a major role defining the aspirations of the individuals in such a society and the ideals of human excellence that guides them.

Scholars have suggested that in a world pervaded by technological unemployment, some individuals will struggle to find their lives meaningful (Danaher, 2017; Kim & Scheller-Wolf, 2019). What I want to propose is not merely that individuals will struggle to find lives meaningful, but that we may face a cultural crisis of intelligibility. The nature and full depth of this threat have not been properly appreciated in the literature because of its tendency to approach meaningful work from an individual and subjective perspective.

A Few Methodological Remarks

A few remarks on how I use and understand “meaningful” and “work” are appropriate. To show that something has “meaning” or is “meaningful” is to clarify its place in a broader context that makes it intelligible. When “meaning” and “meaningful” are predicated on actions or activities (such as “work”), the broader context that makes the action or activity intelligible consists of the practical concepts that help us to make sense of our lives (Lear, 2012, p. 141). Our actions and activities have a teleological structure (Anscombe, 2000; Aristotle, 2002). A meaningful activity is meaningful to the extent that it contributes to a meaningful life (Bailey et al., 2019, p. 90; Ciulla, 2000b, xiii). This teleological structure explains why so much of the scholarship has tended to connect “meaningful work” with the idea of “purposeful work” (Baumeister, 1991; Lysova et al., 2019; Pratt & Ashforth, 2003;  Rosso et al., 2010).

In what follows, I will assume that “a meaningful life” is also “an excellent life.” In doing so, I am assuming that a meaningful life is a life we should aspire to live, a life that exemplifies human excellence. I use “flourishing” as a synonym for “excellence.”Footnote 2 I will also assume that you can not make sense of an individual’s meaningful life in isolation, but need to do it in the context of her social environment. As Lear (2006, p. 6) mentions, “Humans are by nature cultural animals, we necessarily inhabit a way of life that is expressed in a culture.”

Danaher (2017, p. 42) highlights that it “is notoriously difficult to define ‘work’ in a manner that both covers all the phenomena of interest, and avoids begging the question as to its desirability.” Ciulla (2019, p. 24) also argues that “work” “can mean just about any activity and any product of an activity.” Susskind (2020, p. 232) illustrates some of these difficulties:

Is something only “work” if it is done for a wage? If so, that would suggest that housework, for instance, is not work. Is something only “work” if it is strenuous and hard, or perhaps slightly unpleasant? That would require us to say that people in paid but pleasurable work are at leisure (and that sports fans intensely watching television as their team loses are at work).

Ciulla, Danaher, and Susskind are on to an important point here. The aspiration to offer a precise univocal definition of “work” and “meaningful work” is bound to be unsatisfactory (cf. Wittgenstein, 1967). But while the aspiration to offer a definition of “work” that captures all the ways in which the term is used may be misguided, it is nevertheless helpful to clarify the specific aspect of work on which I will focus: “compensated work,” work that you are paid to do. This includes paid employees and contractors of private corporations or public organizations, gig workers and informal workers who make money from their labor, public officials, and public-sector employees that are compensated for their service, as well as entrepreneurs who may work without short-term compensation but with the expectation that they will be financially rewarded down the line.

Three reasons justify this focus. First, this allows me to engage directly with the most prominent authors writing about the axiological challenge posed by technological unemployment, who have also focused their attention on paid work (Danaher, 2017; Kim & Scheller-Wolf, 2019; Susskind, 2020). Second, most research on meaningful work has been conducted in environments where people are paid to work. Focusing my attention on this dimension of work allows me to tap into this rich literature. The third reason, which I will substantiate in the paper, is that compensated work plays a central role in our society.Footnote 3 It is worth adding that my discussion will also be constrained to the context of Western industrial contemporary societies, the societies where most of the research on “meaningful work” has been conducted.

My claim that compensated work is a central organizing telos could be misinterpreted in at least two ways. First, by defending that compensated work is a central organizing telos in our culture, I am not suggesting that compensated work is the only one. Other activities, such as parenting, are also central organizing teloi in our society. Second, by focusing on compensated work, I do not intend to suggest that only work that is compensated is meaningful. Many people in Western societies who live meaningful lives do not devote a significant part of their lives to compensated work or find compensated work particularly attractive (homemakers, artists, contemplatives, etc.). By defending that compensated work is a central organizing telos in Western societies, I am not suggesting that the lives of such people are meaningless or deficient.Footnote 4

Structure of the Paper

I start the paper by providing an example from the Crow Nation that illustrates that many of our individual aspirations are dependent on determinate cultural institutions, social arrangements, and environmental factors. In particular, I describe how buffalo hunting organized the Crow and the way in which their meaning-making abilities were challenged when they moved into a reservation and were no longer able to hunt buffalo. I then highlight the role that compensated work plays in our culture, and defend that work functions as a central organizing telos in our society. After this I discuss the threat that technological employment poses to our meaning-making abilities, and conclude by addressing some objections to my account and discussing a couple of potential solutions to address the potential crisis of intelligibility that we could face.

The Crow Nation

The individual and subjective approach in the scholarship of meaningful work has obscured that a person’s ability to make sense of her life in general, and her work in particular, is anchored and dependent on her cultural environment. One aspect of this dependence has to do with the fact that “individuals ascribe meaning to things or come to see certain aspects of their lives as more or less meaningful in ways that reflect socially or culturally influenced worldviews and value systems” (Rosso et al., 2010, p. 4) and that “the meanings individuals attached to work as well as how individuals define what they consider meaningful work reflect the cultural norms, expectations, and priorities of the particular society they live in” (Lysova et al., 2019, p. 385). The nature of the dependence I have in mind includes these facts but runs deeper. It is not merely a psychological dependence grounded on the fact that social norms tend to influence individual perceptions. The dependence I have in mind relates to the fact that our practical aspirations depend on certain conditions of possibility that presuppose determinate cultural institutions, social arrangements, and environmental factors.

To illustrate this, I’d like to provide an example that may seem out of place: the period when, due to pressures from American settler colonialism, the Crow nation relinquished their nomadic life and settled into a reservation. This example will help bring into sharp relief that a person’s ability to make sense of her daily activities (and her life as a whole) is fully anchored in, and dependent on, determinate cultural institutions, social arrangements, and environmental factors.

Before moving to a reservation, the Crow had been a nomadic culture whose life gravitated around hunting buffalo and warring with neighboring enemy tribes. As Lear (2006, p. 55) describes it,

[the Crow had] a conception of what life was worth living for. (...) This was an active and unfettered pursuit of a nomadic hunting life in which their family life and social rituals could prosper. Because the tribe was threatened by other tribes, they developed a warrior culture to defend their way of life. The martial values—bravery in battle, the development of the appropriate character in young men, and the support of the warriors by all the tribe—were important constituents of happiness as understood by the Crow.Footnote 5

Due to the increasing military pressures from their neighbors, particularly from the Sioux, the Crow decided to ally with the U.S. government. This alliance eventually led to their voluntary confinement into a reservation. After they moved to the reservation, they could no longer live their traditional life: the buffalo had been killed, and their nomadic life and inter-tribal warfare were forbidden (Lear, 2006, p. 27). This led to a profound cultural crisis. Buffalo-hunting and inter-tribal warfare had been pivotal activities around which Crow life had been organized. When the Crow were moved into a reservation, these activities were no longer available. This led them to experience a profound sense of practical unintelligibility: “The characteristic activities that used to constitute the good life ceased to be intelligible acts. A crucial blow to their happiness was a loss of the concepts with which their happiness had been understood” (Lear, 2006, p. 55).

Human excellence is a thick concept; it is embedded within a culture whose institutions, social structures, and social aspirations are necessary for its instantiation. What it meant to be an excellent Crow was articulated against the backdrop of the main goals and activities that structured Crow life: traversing their territory following the buffalo’s migrating rhythms and keeping their territory free of enemy tribes. Military honors were extremely important and structured the hierarchies and social positions through which the Crow organized themselves as a society.

When it was no longer possible to migrate, when most of the buffalo had been killed, when it was not possible to gain honor by warring with enemy tribes, and when private property laws no longer made it possible to determine the limits of one’s territory through battle, the notion of human excellence that had structured Crow life became unavailable. The central ideals that structured Crow life no longer made sense. In this case, “[t]here is a breakdown in the telos of a form of life, and as a result, the concepts and categories that had been organized in relation to that telos cease to make sense as ways to live” (Lear, 2012, p. 144). After they moved to the reservation, the Crow faced a profound crisis of intelligibility.

As Lear (2006) highlights, the Crow continued to exist as members of a specific tribal group, and their members could still identify themselves as members of this group. But it was no longer possible for them to constitute themselves as certain types of subjects, as what they understood to be a Crow subject (Lear, 2006, p. 44). Lear formulates this challenge from the perspective of a Crow living through this period: “The concepts with which I would otherwise have understood myself—indeed, the concepts with which I would otherwise have shaped my identity—have gone out of existence” (Lear, 2006, p. 49). In a very profound way, after they moved to a reservation, the Crow no longer knew how to pursue a meaningful life. For instance, Plenty Coups, the last great chief of the Crow, said: “When the buffalo went away the hearts of my people fell to the ground, and they could not lift them again. After this nothing happened” (Linderman, 1962, p. 311). Similarly, Pretty-Shield, a Crow medicine woman, noted: “I am trying to live a life I do not understand” (Linderman, 1974, p. 8). Finally, Two Leggings, a lesser Crow chief, stated: “Nothing happened after that. We just lived. There were no more war parties, no capturing of horses from the Piegan and the Sioux, no buffalo to hunt. There is nothing more to tell” (Nabokov, 1967, p. 197).Footnote 6

The breakdown of the practical intelligibility experienced by the Crow provides a clear illustration of how determinate cultural institutions, social arrangements, and environmental factors need to be in place in order for a person to be able to make sense of the activities around which her life is organized. In what follows, I will argue that the role that compensated work plays in our society is similar to the role that buffalo hunting plays among the Crow. In particular, I will argue that compensated work constitutes a central organizing telos in industrial Western industrial societies. Recognizing this, in turn, entails recognizing that a massive dislocation of work opportunities, such as the one that technological unemployment may bring about, may lead us to experience a similar cultural crisis of intelligibility.

The Role of Compensated Work in Our Culture

In their review article on the meaning of work, most of it discussing compensated work, Michaelson et al. (2014, p. 77) claim: “In the human quest for meaning, work occupies a central position. Most adults spend a good deal of their waking hours at work, which often serves as a primary source of purpose, belongingness, and identity.” This well-known fact is echoed throughout the literature (Brief & Nord, 1990; Ciulla, 2000b; Danaher, 2017; Kim & Scheller-Wolf, 2019; Lysova et al., 2019; Michaelson, 2021; Pratt & Ashforth, 2003; Rosso et al., 2010; Solomon, 1992; Susskind, 2020;  U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops, 1986). Such a fact has often been used to justify the importance of meaningful work as a topic of academic scholarship. The implicit idea is that we should pay attention to what happens at work because we spend many hours at it. Susskind (2020, p. 232), for instance, writes: “Work is a source of meaning for some people at the moment not because work itself is special, but because our jobs are where we spend a good deal of our lives.”

This is inadequate. If what makes compensated work meaningful is that we devote many hours doing it, then we should also be writing about meaningful sleep, given that we spend a good deal of time devoted to sleeping. Compensated work is important not merely because we spend many hours at work. It is important because it is a central organizing telos in our culture, because it plays a central role in structuring our societies and provides a set of ideals at the heart of our notion of human excellence. As Sherman (2009, p. 72) reminds us, the meaning of a way of life is more than just the means for living.

The Pervasiveness of Work

Compensated work touches everything in our lives. Compensated work allows us to take part in a massive network of interconnected anonymous cooperation. Every day you interact, directly or indirectly, with thousands of companies. Behind their products and services lies the work of millions of people. Not surprisingly, the unemployment rate is one of the central economic indicators. The importance of this single number is partially explained by the fact that, because employment permeates and affects every corner of society, it serves as a metric to assess the economy’s health and the well-being of the individuals who partake of it.

One of the first questions that you typically get asked when someone meets you is what you do for a living. Knowing a person’s job tells us a whole lot about who this person is and what we may expect of her. People’s jobs and professions constitute a very important social marker through which we understand one another.

Compensated work plays a crucial role in how contemporary societies are organized. Our early years are meant to be devoted to acquiring an education to make us competent at our future jobs. We are then expected to devote most of our adult life to work, and we retire when we have lost our energy and capacity to work. As such, compensated work is the center of gravity toward which youth tends and from which elders step back. There are many possibilities of who we may become and how we may apply our skills, but compensated work is a central and pervasive referent from which we typically imagine most of these possibilities.

Compensated work also provides a rhythm and structure to our weeks. It delineates the two main categories that structure our days: our working life and our life outside of work (Ciulla, 2000b; Jahoda et al., 2002). The weekdays and weekends get their significance because the former are working days and the latter are not. In addition, work structures and dictates the daily activities of many of us; “it tells us what to do every day” (Ciulla, 2000b, p. 7). In fact, and as Ciulla (2000b, p. 183) mentions, “many people might be totally lost without the regulating structure of the nine-to-five workday.”

Work Allows us to Contribute to our own Good and the Common Good

Compensated work is a paradigmatic way in which people in contemporary societies provide for themselves and contribute to the lives of millions. The work that takes place in Western industrialized societies has been the result of a long and complex social and historical development. In agrarian communities, one produced much of what one consumed. But in industrialized societies, we make a living by trading very specialized forms of labor for universal tokens of exchange that allow us to access myriad goods and services. Market mechanisms regulate both what we get paid for our labor and the prices of the goods and services that we can acquire with what we are paid (Susskind, 2020, p. 168). This division of work has allowed industrialized societies to improve their overall prosperity significantly (Roser, 2013). In this way, compensated work provides its members with a platform to participate in societies’ economic activities and, through it, cultivate the common good (Danaher, 2017, p. 51–56; Kim & Scheller-Wolf, 2019, p. 324–325; Michaelson et al., 2014, p. 83; Sison & Fontrodona, 2012, p. 240).

Given the social importance of compensated work, people in industrialized societies are expected to contribute to the common good through it. As Danaher (2017), p. 49 has pointed out, “even in a relatively generous welfare state, one cannot escape the work ethic except through illness, old-age and death (...) we are all compelled to pursue work and to participate in a culture that glorifies work.”

Because compensated work provides an opportunity to provide for oneself and others, this partly explains why it is a source of self-respect and self-esteem (Ciulla, 2000b, p. 21; Jahoda et al., 2002; Kim & Scheller-Wolf, 2019, p. 326; Susskind, 2020, p. 218). Another dimension of the source of this self-respect and self-esteem arises from the fact that jobs provide people with the ability to make things happen (Susskind, 2020, p. 218). Compensated work gives people “the sense that they can shape and influence the world around them” (Ciulla, 2000b, p. 21). As such, compensated work is centrally connected with one’s agency and self-efficacy, “a vehicle that empowers individuals to capably realize their agency and contribute to others” (Ciulla 2000b; Danaher, 2017; Kim & Scheller-Wolf, 2019, p. 324; Lepisto & Pratt, 2017; Rosso et al. 2010).

Work as a Core Aspect of our Identity, Agency, and Human Excellence

Given the central role that compensated work plays in contemporary Western societies, it is not surprising that it constitutes a critical dimension of identity and human excellence (Ciulla, 2000b; Susskind, 2020). Being successful at your job is a core dimension of what we take to be a successful life (MOW International Research Team, 1987). We tend to look at compensated work as virtuous (Ciulla, 2000b, p. 21; Danaher, 2017, p. 47–62) and sometimes even equate professional success with flourishing (Susskind, 2020, p. 227). We are encouraged to be productive and not waste our time (Ciulla, 2000b, Chap. 10; Danaher, 2017, p. 50). Conversely, seeking but being unable to get a job often leads to “a sense of loss that goes well beyond the value of the wages they once received” (Susskind, 2020, p. 218).

Compensated work is also associated with the cultivation of central moral virtues and the development of valuable human skills (Ciulla, 2000b; Danaher, 2017; Kim & Scheller-Wolf, 2019; Rogers, 2020; Sison & Fontrodona, 2012; Solomon, 1992). Many of the virtuous traits valued in industrial societies are, precisely, the virtues that help us succeed at work: industriousness, hard work, discipline, perseverance, resilience, and team spirit. Salient virtues in other historical periods take nowadays distinctive corporate forms (e.g., courage to blow the whistle or loyalty to your boss and company). In fact, and as some scholars have argued, “work virtues form a privileged part of the common good” (Sison & Fontrodona, 2012, p. 240). Similarly, many of the skills deemed important by Western societies are deemed important precisely because of the value they have in the labor market.

Compensated work also plays an important role in determining our social status (Ciulla, 2000b; Gheaus & Herzog, 2016; Susskind, 2020). On the one hand, compensated work typically takes place in corporate hierarchies. The place you occupy in such a hierarchy is taken to be an indication of your social status. On the other hand, labor prices indicate what the market values and, through these values, what society values (Michaelson, 2021, p. 420). There are, of course, different ways in which market prices send the wrong signals about the value of a person’s job. Some valuable jobs are lowly paid, and certain highly paid jobs are not valuable (Graeber, 2018; Michaelson, 2021). Moreover, market prices don’t provide an indication of the absolute value of a good or service but only of its relative scarcity (Friedman, 1990, Chap. 3). Nevertheless, and as Susskind (2020, p. 233) mentions, we often think that “a thing’s value is the price that someone is willing to pay for it, and a worker’s worth is the wage that they receive.” In particular, failing to get a paid job is often taken as an indication that one’s work is not socially valuable. Conversely, having a stable job is often seen as a badge of honor that testifies that you are a respectable member of society who spends your time pursuing socially valuable activities.

Finally, compensated work allows one to interact directly with people with varied skills and backgrounds. It facilitates spaces to establish and cultivate an array of interpersonal relationships (Rosso et al., 2010, p. 100), provides a sense of community (Gheaus & Herzog, 2016), and serves “as an occasion for meaningful exchange, relationship and encounter among human beings” (Francis, 2015b, p. 162; Sison & Fontrodona, 2012, p. 231). It sometimes even “substitutes for the fulfillment we used to derive from family, friends, religion, and community” (Ciulla 2000b, xi). Given the growing decline in voluntary civic associations, work has become a central place where we establish important social connections with people of diverse provenances, people whom we would otherwise not meet. Because of this, the workplace has become a central place where we develop social interactions and build the social capital on which democratic societies depend (Estlund, 2003).

The Cultural and Normative Dimension of Compensated work

Meaningful Work is a Central Aspiration of our Culture

In the previous section, I argued that compensated work is pervasive in Western industrial cultures. It touches everyone and everything, defining the rhythms of our days and weeks and providing a center of gravity around which our lives are structured. Compensated work constitutes the most prevalent way in which individuals in contemporary societies provide for themselves and a paradigmatic way to contribute to the common good. Compensated work also constitutes a central dimension of human excellence, and it offers a space to cultivate skills and virtues necessary for many people in Western societies to flourish. Because of this, much of our own identities and sense of worth comes from our success and efforts at our working activities. In other words, I’ve shown that compensated work serves as a central organizing telos of our society: it is pervasive in our culture, plays a very important role in how it is organized, and provides core ideals and aspirations that culture’s members recognize and endorse.

Two potential objections may be lurking in the background: first, that I am painting an unrealistic and overly optimistic picture of compensated work; second, that my description ignores the many meaningful activities that people pursue outside of compensated work. Allow me to respond to each.Footnote 7

The facts discussed in the previous section are normative ideals. When scholars say that work provides its members with a platform to participate in society’s economic activities and cultivate the common good (Kim & Scheller-Wolf, 2019) or that work is a source of self-respect and self-esteem (Ciulla, 2000b; Susskind, 2020), they are making a normative statement that describes how compensated work is supposed to operate. They are describing, in other words, the function that compensated work plays in our society when things work well.

These normative statements are not falsified by the fact that there are many people who don’t find their jobs meaningful. As Graeber (2018) has argued, there are many people with “shitty” jobs that don’t provide them with self-esteem and many others with “bullshit” jobs through which they do not contribute to the common good. That the statements I discussed function as normative ideals is partially confirmed by the fact that most of these people with “shitty” or “bullshit” jobs are committed to such ideals. The aspiration of the person with a low-paid, repetitive, and exhausting job is, very frequently, to have a better job that allows them to cultivate their creativity and agency. The person with a meaningless job frequently aspires to have a job that makes a difference in the world, a job that allows her to truly contribute to society.Footnote 8

Second, I have argued that work is a central organizing principle of Western cultures and have focused exclusively on articulating how such a principle touches and gives meaning to a variety of aspects of our lives. While I will further elaborate on this later, it is worth stressing here that nothing in what I have said should be taken to suggest that work is the only meaning-making activity or that everyone who wants to flourish in our culture should devote their life to it. My claim has been that compensated work plays a central role (not the only one) in how Western societies are organized and in the aspirations that characterize them. My focus on compensated work is also not meant to suggest that life is more meaningful as one devotes more time to compensated work. Saying that work is a central organizing telos is compatible, for instance, with thinking that having free time is also important for human flourishing (Rose, 2016).

The Scope of My Normative Contribution

The normative perspective I am examining has some significant similarities to the normative perspective defended by Michaelson (2021). He argues that one important dimension of meaningful work may not be found in the work itself, nor in the worker’s subjective experience of it, but in the role that a person’s work plays in our society. According to him, work should be recognized as meaningful when it contributes to society’s well-being. Thus even if a person is frustrated with her job washing dishes, such a job is still valuable given its contribution to a hygienic world (Michaelson, 2021, p. 426). In fact, and as he argues, this normative perspective is what justifies and grounds the legitimacy of our subjective experience of meaningful work. Subjective experiences are meaningful not merely because they are experienced as meaningful, “they are meaningful because there are non-circular good reasons for that experience” (Michaelson, 2021, p. 421).

While my contribution is in line with his, I’m examining work’s social functioning from a vantage point that is both more general and more circumscribed. More general because I am not trying to articulate, like Michaelson (2021), the social contribution of a specific type of job. My contribution seeks to elucidate how compensated work in general, compensated work understood as a social institution, serves as an organizing telos in our society.

It is more circumscribed because I focus merely on the role that compensated work plays in contemporary Western societies. It is compatible with my argument that in other cultures or historical periods, compensated work did not operate as an important source of meaning and did not play an important role in the aspirations and ideals around which these cultures were organized.

In the previous section, I argued that work is pervasive in our culture. It touches everyone and everything, defining the rhythms of our days and weeks and providing a center of gravity around which our lives are structured. Work constitutes a pervasive way in which individuals in contemporary societies provide for themselves and contribute to the common good. As such, work constitutes a central dimension of human excellence, and it offers a space to cultivate skills and virtues necessary for individuals in Western societies to flourish. Because of this, a significant part of our own identities and sense of worth comes from our success and efforts at our activities associated with compensated work.

I have called this dimension of work “culture and normative” to signal the normative dimension in these cultural facts. Human beings are cultural animals, “[w]e inhabit a way of life that is expressed in a culture” (Lear, 2006, p. 6; cf. Rogers, 2020, p. 138). The fact that we are cultural animals involves a co-constituting dialectic between individuals and their culture that is both empirical and normative. Cultures shape (and are meant to shape) how individuals understand the world and their place in it. Individuals, in turn, sustain (and are meant to sustain) the cultural institutions and social arrangements that allow them to understand the world and their place in it.

When we try to make sense of an individual, we typically do so in the context of the culture to which they belong. This fact has normative implications. When we consider an individual as a member of their culture, the cultural values and aspirations provide a norm by which we judge them. From this perspective, the extent to which individuals embody human excellence is dependent on the culture whose institutions, social structures, and social aspirations allow such excellence to manifest.

For instance, what it meant to be an excellent Crow was articulated against the backdrop of the main goals, activities, and aspirations that structured Crow life: traversing their territory following the buffalo’s migrating rhythms and keeping their territory free of enemy tribes. Crow excellence was associated with “bravery in battle, the development of the appropriate character in young men, and the support of the warriors by all the tribe” (Lear, 2006, p. 55). This does not entail that every Crow member had to fight in war or hunt buffalo. Women, for instance, did not typically hunt or fight, but they were nevertheless committed to these ideals and such ideals permeated their lives. In this respect, Lowie (1983, p. 218), an anthropologist who recorded narratives of the traditional ways of life among the Crow, mentions: “Girls as well as boys derived their names from a famous man’s exploit. Women danced wearing scalps, derived honor from their husbands’ deeds, publicly exhibited the men’s shield or weapons; and a woman’s lamentations over a slain son was the most effective goad to a punitive expedition.”

It is important to highlight, however, that the normativity provided by these cultural facts is, so to speak, thin. These facts do not provide an ultimate and indefeasible grounding. While cultures provide individuals with norms and ideals by which such individuals are typically measured, such norms and ideals are defeasible; they are open to being questioned and challenged. One might criticize these cultural ideals and argue that we ought to try and change them.

For instance, one may challenge the notion of human excellence among the Crow, in particular the bravery to which they aspired, given its masculine and sexist undertones (Sherman, 2009). Similarly, one may argue that the central role that compensated work plays in our society should be criticized because it leads us to interact among ourselves as means and not as ends or because the Western capitalist focus on compensated work is fundamentally antithetical to flourishing.Footnote 9

The Effects of Unemployment

Given the role that compensated work plays in our societies, one would expect joblessness to strain the ability of individuals in such societies to flourish. This is exactly what the empirical literature suggests. Jahoda et al. (2002) wrote an influential and widely cited study on the effects of unemployment in Marienthal, a small German factory town during the 1930s, where most people experienced long-term unemployment. Even though the inhabitants were given unemployment payments that allowed them to provide for some of their basic necessities, researchers found that their prolonged unemployment led to a “vicious cycle between reduced opportunities and reduced level of aspiration” (Jahoda et al., 2002, xxxi), and “a state of apathy in which the victims do not utilize any longer even the few opportunities left to them” (Jahoda et al., 2002, xxxi). Despite having more time at their disposal, there was a diminution in the number of books that they read and checked out from the public library, a growing disinterest in participating in political activities, a drop in their attendance to cultural events, and an increase in their ill-will to others.

There are passages in Jahoda et al. (2002) that have eerie echoes to what has been written about the Crow.

[L]eisure proves to be a tragic gift. Cut off from their work and deprived of contact with the outside world, the workers of Marienthal have lost the material and moral incentives to make use of their time. Now that they are no longer under any pressure, they undertake nothing new and drift gradually out of an ordered existence into one that is undisciplined and empty. Looking back over any period of this free time, they are unable to recall anything worth mentioning (Jahoda et al., 2002, p. 66).

Plenty Coup’s dictum that “after this nothing happened” or Two Leggings’ that after they moved to the reservation there “is nothing more to tell” resonates deeply with Marienthalians’ inability to recall “anything worth mentioning.”

Maslova-Levin (2016) is a painter and blogger with the means to live without being compensated for her work. Her description of her own experience illustrates some of the adverse effects of unemployment, even amid a life of abundance:

I feel this painful contradiction every day; I am living it. (...) I don’t really need to do anything which would qualify as ‘labor.’ (...) I am living in the realm of freedom from life’s necessities. (...) But this lack of need for me to do anything often feels like it’s me that is not needed, and then the realm of freedom appears to me as the barren desert of uselessness and meaninglessness. (...)

And so my days are split between painting and this (blind and somewhat desperate) quest for contribution, for action, for participation in life. A search of how to share whatever it is I have to share – is it a search for meaning in the realm of freedom, or a quest to be bound by something, not so weightlessly and carelessly free?

Various empirical studies provide additional support to the negative social and psychological effects of unemployment, many of which are not just connected with the loss of income. In an influential study, Wilson (1996, p. 567) noted that “the consequences of high neighborhood joblessness are more devastating than those of high neighborhood poverty.” Grün et al. (2010) argued that job quality does not matter much to life satisfaction, but that unemployment does. Similarly, Rafael Di Tella & Oswald (2003) argue that, even when controlling for income and education, people who experience unemployment are significantly less happy. Clark & Oswald (1994, p. 655) found that “joblessness depressed well-being more than any other single characteristic, including important negative ones such as divorce and separation.” In an influential study Csikszentmihalyi (1990) highlighted that people report being more focused, happier, and more satisfied when they work than during leisure (even though they also report, paradoxically, less desire to spend time at work than at leisure). McAfee and Brynjolfsson (2016, p. 147) mention that unemployment leads to “declines in social cohesion and civic participation and increases in divorce rates, absentee parenting, drug use, and crime.”Footnote 10

Compensated Work as a Central Source of Meaning

Some of these empirical arguments have led Kim and Scheller-Wolf (2019) to claim that, in a future with scarce job opportunities, people will “lose a large portion, and in fact an entire class, of meaning-creating opportunities” (Kim & Scheller-Wolf, 2019, p. 327). They point out that lacking the opportunity to work deprives one of “opportunities to be part of a well-coordinated productive means or a cooperation-enhancing hierarchical and technological infrastructure” and thereby makes one unable “to contribute to the economic process and to the good of society and its constituents” (Kim & Scheller-Wolf, 2019, p. 325). These points are insightful, but Kim and Scheller-Wolf don’t sufficiently highlight their implications. They say that people will “lose a large portion, and in fact an entire class, of meaning-creating opportunities,” but they don’t explain or articulate what they mean by suggesting that it is an “entire class” of activities. They fail to highlight that work is not just one particular context where some people happen to find meaning, but a central organizing telos that structures our contemporary lives. Recognizing this entails recognizing that technological unemployment will not just limit the number of opportunities to pursue meaningful activities; it will deprive us of a central organizing principle through which we make sense of the world and what it is to excel in it.

Part of the reason why Kim and Scheller-Wolf may not problematize this is that they approach this topic from the perspective of the isolated individual. They suggest that a society with scarce job opportunities still offers plenty of opportunities for people to find meaning in other spheres of life. In particular, they write that “paid employment is not the only form of work by which one can contribute to the good of society. Those who take care of housework and raise children significantly contribute to the good” (Kim & Scheller-Wolf, 2019, p. 325). Kim and Scheller-Wolf want to ensure that their account has room to say that individuals who take care of housework and raise children have meaningful lives despite not working. I agree and would add that there are also students, artists, retirees, social activists, contemplatives, and intellectuals who don’t devote a significant part of their lives to compensated work, many of them because they do not want to do so, and who nevertheless find their lives meaningful.

Scholars who approach meaningful work by focusing on isolated individuals have failed to highlight how compensated work touches nearly everything and everyone in society and how it encompasses and gives meaning to the lives of many who are not paid to work.Footnote 11 There are at least two ways in which compensated work, as an organizing telos, touches those who don’t get compensated for what they do.

On the one hand, compensated work (and the value and meaning that it provides) is often directly connected with the specific activities of many who don’t get paid to work. As I just suggested, students are (and should be) devoting their time to grow intellectually and may find meaning in learning for its own sake. However, a central motivation to pursue their education is to help them prepare to join the workplace. Homemakers often find intrinsic meaning in serving those under their care. But their ability to do so often depends on the fact that others in the household pursue compensated work. In fact, members of these households sometimes think of their activities communally, understanding their triumphs as shared, and therefore consider themselves as partially contributing to the meaning-making activities of those in the household who are paid to work. Moreover, in the cases in which they take care of children, the notion of human excellence provided by compensated work shapes how they try to educate such children to make them competent to partake in compensated work.Footnote 12 Many artists and social activists who are not paid to work may use their energies to improve the conditions of those who seek compensated work. In helping these workers attain the aspirations and ideals that compensated work promises they are thereby contributing and supporting compensated work.

On the other hand, even when compensated work does not directly influence the activities of those who are not paid to work, most of these individuals recognize that compensated work is a central meaning-making activity of our culture, a legitimate source of values and meaning. And this is so, not merely because many of them are partly sustained by the goods and services provided by those who are paid to work, but also because they recognize and endorse the way in which compensated work instantiates a form of human excellence that is central to our culture.Footnote 13

Of course, there are also individuals within a society, particularly a liberal one, who challenge the culture’s ideals, deny that they help attain human excellence, and refuse to recognize their normative force. These cultural iconoclasts, however, need to be exceptional given that the culture’s existence and subsistence depend on the fact that its ideals are recognized, endorsed, and pursued by most of its members.

An individualistic perspective makes it difficult to recognize that compensated work does not merely provide an environment where individuals find meaning but that it serves as an organizing principle that provides intelligibility to the lives of most members of society. A world with few jobs is not merely a world removed of one context where people can “put sustained efforts into developing excellence and improving their personal skills” (Kim & Scheller-Wolf, 2019, p. 326). It is a world where a core source of meaning, identity, and status has vanished. As such, this is a world that challenges our ability to make sense of our place in it, a world where it is no longer clear how we can pursue an excellent human life.

Technological Unemployment and its Impact on our Meaning-Making Abilities

The Case for Technological Unemployment

The ability of machines to automatize jobs and replace workers has always led to widespread anxieties. Historically, however, the anxiety about an overall decrease in our working opportunities has often been misguided. Even if machines displace workers in the short term, in the long term automation has always created more jobs than it has destroyed, these jobs have generally been more rewarding and interesting, and the overall productivity and prosperity of society have increased (Autor, 2015; Denning, 2015). But there are reasons to think that this time may be different, that this time automation may lead to widespread long-term unemployment. While these reasons are not irrefutable, they are compelling enough to warrant exploring a future without jobs and its axiological implications (Brynjolfsson & McAfee, 2014; Danaher, 2017; Kim & Scheller-Wolf, 2019; Susskind, 2020).Footnote 14 Even if technological unemployment does not come about, examining the axiological challenges that it poses is valuable in that it helps us understand the central role that compensated work plays in our contemporary lives.

A wealth of examples illustrate how artificial intelligence has been rapidly encroaching into human activities that, only a few years ago, were assumed difficult, if not impossible, to automatize. These involve manual, cognitive, and even affective capabilities (Susskind, 2020). Allow me to mention a few.

JP Morgan has developed software to review commercial loan agreements that can review in a few seconds the equivalent of 360,000 hours of work by lawyers and loan officers (Susskind, 2020, p. 82). The area of automated diagnosis in medicine is also growing at a fast pace. For example, “DeepMind has created a program that can diagnose more than fifty eye diseases with an error rate of only 5.5 percent; when it was compared to eight clinical experts, it performed as well as the two best and outperformed the other six” (Susskind, 2020, p. 83). AlphaGo, a program designed to play the ancient boardgame Go, beat Go’s world champion in 2016. The achievement is remarkable for two things. First, it was not expected to happen for at least a decade; the intuitive nature of the game and its unwieldy combinatorial possibilities seemed to pose very hard technical challenges (Kohs, 2018). Second, the machine did not just mimic human players; it made moves against the conventional human wisdom that surprised the audience for its creativity.

Algorithms are also playing a growing role in selecting employees during hiring processes. These algorithms promise to be valuable, not merely to select unskilled workers or middle managers but even corporate directors (Erel et al., 2021). Robots and algorithms are also playing a growing role in monitoring and managing humans, “detecting inefficiencies that a human manager never would” (Dzieza, 2020). Other digital systems can accurately identify a variety of emotions in a person’s face. Some of these “can outperform human beings in distinguishing between a genuine smile and one of social conformity” (Susskind, 2020, p. 86). Finally, there is a rapidly growing industry of social robots. “Paro, a robot therapeutic baby seal, comforts people with cognitive disorders like dementia and Alzheimer’s disease” (Susskind, 2020, p. 86). Robear “can lift immobile patients from bath to bed,” and Palro, a humanoid robot, “can lead a dance class” (Susskind, 2020, p. 94). GPT-3, one of the latest language models in the market, has provided early signs that AI can achieve general intelligence. GPT-3 is able to write short stories, computer code, poetry, press releases, memes, and technical manuals. The fact that it can do this on pretty much any topic and using very little user guidance has led some to describe it as “at once amazing, spooky, humbling and more than a little terrifying” (Manjoo, 2020).

Companies’ ability to accumulate more data, the growing digital connectedness among individuals, and the increasing dimensions of our lives that can be collected digitally allow machines to engage more effectively with more and more areas of our lives. Moreover, the exponential advances in science and engineering are leading to ever more sophisticated hardware and software (Altman, 2021). Finally, the continually lowering costs of the materials needed to automatize human tasks further contribute to its widespread adoption (McAfee & Brynjolfsson, 2016, p. 139).

The argument for technological unemployment does not rely only on the fact that many tasks performed by humans will be automated. Automation is expected, as it has in the past, to create many new jobs. However, there are compelling reasons to believe that many of these new jobs will be performed by machines, not humans (Brynjolfsson & McAfee, 2014; Susskind, 2020). The increasing manual, cognitive, and affective capabilities of machines, the growing affordability of these machines, and the difficulty for humans to retrain (and often relocate), entails that machines, not humans, will be better positioned to take up many of these new jobs. In addition, the digital economy has led to winner-take-all markets that require significantly less labor than the labor used by incumbents (Danaher, 2017; Susskind, 2020). Technology companies are capturing the market precisely through their capacity to scale up through algorithms and intelligent systems (Tkacik, 2021). As has been argued, these companies are “not in the business of creating new tasks for humans” (Semuels, 2020). Thus, in many instances, “the number of new jobs created [that humans will take on] is often minuscule compared with the number of jobs lost” (Semuels, 2020).

A variety of academic and government studies support this perspective. The Oxford Martin Programme on the Impacts of Future Technology predicts that 47% of the total U.S. employment will likely be automated over the coming 20 years (Frey & Osborne, 2013). The World Bank has suggested that about 65% of jobs in developing countries are at risk of automation (World Bank, 2016). Not everyone on the economic ladder is expected to be equally affected. According to Frey and Osborne (2013), jobs that involve higher wages and more education are less likely to be automatized. The 2016 Economic Report of the President to the Congress echoes this by arguing that the probability of robots taking over the lowest-paid U.S. jobs (less than $ 20 dollars per hour) is 83%, the middle-paid jobs is 31%, and the highest-paid jobs (more than $ 40 dollars per hour) only 4% (United States President, 2016).

As I mentioned before, while the reasons in support of technological unemployment are not incontrovertible, they are sufficiently compelling to justify taking this potential future seriously. And even if this future does not come about, thinking about it helps us learn valuable lessons about the present world in which we live, more specifically, about the place that compensated work plays in it.

Utopia or Dystopia

Many authors writing about technological unemployment celebrate the future that technological unemployment promises to open up if the productivity gains achieved by technological unemployment are widely distributed. In a world where machines have taken care of the daily drudgery of compensated work and where individuals are able to meet their basic needs, such individuals appear free to devote themselves to what they please to their heart’s content. Technological unemployment heralds, then, the possibility of allowing us to devote our time and energy to many meaningful uncompensated work activities to which we currently can’t. Individuals would have more time at their disposal to, for instance, devote themselves to artistic and civic endeavors (and cultivate the skills associated with them). As such, technological unemployment promises to open up myriad opportunities to which we can devote our time and effort, many of which would allow us to cultivate some of the eudaimonistic features associated with compensated work that I discussed earlier. In such a future, we would expect society to develop new institutions and forms of organization that would provide members of this society with new ways to flourish and collectively find life meaningfully.

This is a plausible view, one that reflects the aspirations that many thinkers throughout modern history have placed on technological progress. But this view is not universally shared. Not everyone thinks that technological unemployment would be a boon for humanity.

On the one hand, many scholars and thinkers believe that working to make a living plays, and ought to play, a central role in human life. The United Nations has enshrined the right to work as a fundamental human right (United Nation’s, 1948, Art. 23). Pope Francis has argued that “there is no poverty worse than that which takes away work and the dignity of work” and that “work is an essential dimension of social life” (Francis, 2015a, §162). It is frequent to find scholars arguing that work is an “essential part of human nature” (Rogers, 2020, p. 133) or “a necessary means to attain [eudaimonia]” (Sison & Fontrodona, 2012, p. 240).

On the other hand, scholars and practitioners are worried about the potential misuse of our leisurely time. Floridi (2014), for instance, has argued that “[i]n the leisure society, the risk is that there will be countless people bored and demotivated, undecided about what to do with their free time (...). We may turn into “idle creatures.’” Moshe Vardi, a computer scientist, has also said: “I do not find this a promising future, as I do not find the prospect of leisure-only life appealing. That seems to me a dystopia” (Knapton, 2016).

It is beyond the limits of this paper to take a stance on whether we should hail or fear a future where machines have replaced most human workers. What I want to highlight here is that, even if technological unemployment is a boon in the long term, we still have to reckon with the short term. In particular, we need to deal with the transition into a world of pervasive and long-term unemployment. Given the central organizing role that compensated work plays in our societies, such transition will be challenging given that it could involve a potential crisis of intelligibility, one that would arise by the fact that this organizing principle is no longer available to most members of society.

The worry, here, is not merely that this transition will be disruptive of our established ways of living, for instance, in the way that the Covid-19 pandemic was disruptive. The worry here is that this transition will challenge our axiological abilities. Even though the Covid-19 pandemic was highly disruptive, it did not challenge our aspirations and notions of human excellence. Technological unemployment, by contrast, will challenge a central organizing telos that has organized our contemporary societies. Compensated work is an institution around which society has been structured and plays a major role in how we have understand ourselves and aspire to live. Because of this, technological unemployment will challenge and undermine central ideals of human excellence that have provided our lives with meaning, leaving us at a loss of what it is to live a meaningful life. And this is so, even if even if one has reason to be optimist and even celebratory about the potential long-term future that technological unemployment harbingers.Footnote 15

The Effects of Technological Unemployment Beyond Compensated Work

It may be intuitive to think that if people are liberated from compensated work they will have more time at their disposal to devote themselves to artistic and civic endeavors (and to cultivate the skills associated with them). There are at least three important reasons, however, why this view may be too optimistic.

First, as I discussed earlier, there is abundant empirical evidence about the negative psychological effects that unemployment has on other realms of our lives. Many of these seem to go beyond the mere fact that individuals have less income at their disposal. For the inhabitants of Marienthal, for instance, leisure was a “tragic gift” (Jahoda et al., 2002, p. 66) that led to a decrease in their levels of aspirations and an increase in their general apathy despite having more time at their disposal

Thus, as people’s ability to make sense of their lives during long-term unemployment is strained, long-term unemployment also strains their ability to make sense of their leisurely activities. As Ciulla (2000b, p. 198) has argued, “people’s leisure mirrors certain aspects of their work.” People who have suffered long-term unemployment “not only lost their work, but they lost their ability to enjoy leisure” (Ciulla, 2000b, p. 5). This helps to explain why the consequences of unemployment are more devastating than those of poverty (Wilson, 1996, p. 567) and that unemployment leads to declines in social cohesion and civic participation and increases in absentee parenting and drug use (McAfee & Brynjolfsson, 2016, p. 147).

Second, the idea that technological unemployment will allow us to devote our time and energy to many meaningful uncompensated activities fails to recognize that automation will also encroach into many of these uncompensated activities. In this respect Danaher (2017, p. 56) has highlighted that “automating and assistive technologies infiltrate our moral, artistic, intellectual and political lives.” For instance, and as he mentions, “[s]cience is increasingly a ‘big data’ enterprise, reliant on algorithmic, and other forms of automated assistance to process large datasets and make useful inferences from those datasets. Humans are becoming increasingly irrelevant to the process of discovery” (Danaher, 2017, p. 57). AI has also made important inroads into creative arts. The advances in computational creativity have allowed machines to compose musical scores, improvise, and play music with expressiveness (Mántaras, 2017). Machines are now also able to produce visual art that involves choosing style, subject, composition, colors, and texture. Their creations have been said to “surprise us in their range, sophistication, and variation” (Elgammal, 2019). Viewers are unable to distinguish these works of art from those made by human artists, and collectors appear quite excited about them.Footnote 16 Finally, there are various ways in which AI has been mustered to address political and social issues. Bots and machines are becoming increasingly powerful in social media campaigns. They can help disseminate information that puts certain social issues on the table, track political trends as they are emerging, and counteract (or promote) certain kinds of information. Machines can also be harnessed to identify outbreaks of diseases, predict wildfires, diagnose medical conditions, improve student achievement and teachers’ productivity, and optimize the distribution of food and drugs (Chui et al., 2018). Thus, technological unemployment will not only affect compensated work. Machines will also take away many of the unpaid activities to which we may want to volunteer.

Third, transitioning to a world where a significant proportion of the population can devote themselves to leisurely activities involves radical social and political changes in how our societies are organized. In particular, income from compensated work will no longer serve as the source of sustenance for most individuals in society. Their livelihoods can no longer be dependent on being part of the network of productive activities to which most of us currently contribute and from which we draw upon. These social changes will involve systematic changes in how we conceive of ourselves, what our place in society is, and, more generally, on what excelling as a member of our society amounts to.

Objections and Partial Solutions

I have argued that compensated work operates as a central organizing telos in contemporary Western societies. Compensated work allows us to provide for our material needs, develop our skills and virtues, build community, and contribute to the common good. Because much of our own identities and sense of worth comes from success at our professional activities and the work we perform in them, our notions of human excellence are intimately tied to compensated work.

Because of this, a sudden and massive dislocation of work opportunities will lead to a cultural crisis of intelligibility, a crisis where individuals will be deprived of one of the core aspirations through which they understand the notion of human excellence. If this is the case, it can lead us to confront the kind of hopelessness and loss that the Crow experienced when they were confined to live on a reservation. I want to conclude this paper by discussing a few objections that one may raise against my proposal and discuss a couple of partial solutions that could help us confront this potential crisis of intelligibility.

Why few job Opportunities are Insufficient to Provide Meaning

One important disanalogy between the crisis of meaning faced by the Crow and the one that we could face as a result of technological unemployment has to do with the fact that our threat will not be as systematic as theirs. Because buffalo had been all but exterminated, hunting migrating buffalo was no longer a live possibility for the Crow. It was an aspiration that made no sense. Technological unemployment, however, is not expected to wipe away all jobs. To the extent that there will still be a few jobs available, the aspiration to work will still make sense; it will still be an intelligible possibility.Footnote 17

This possibility, however, will not be able to sustain us as a cultural ideal if we hope to live in a society committed to a principle of equality where flourishing is available to all members of society. In any society committed to this egalitarian principle, the core sources of life meaning should be available to the population as a whole, not just to a selected few.

Work has provided individuals in industrial societies with a wide array of options to apply their skills and talents to promote their good and the good of their community. Even if one starts in a job that one does not find particularly meaningful, the aspiration that one can change jobs and get better and more meaningful opportunities is available to most of us. As such, work has provided us with a vibrant ideal. There are many types of jobs, many ways to succeed and flourish at work, and therefore many ways to instantiate human excellence through compensated work.

In a world pervaded by technological unemployment, however, where jobs are few and far between, this aspiration will no longer sustain the majority of the population. In particular, for those at the lower end of the socioeconomic ladder, work will become a dysfunctional ideal, leading to social despair and hopelessness and straining the ability of such individuals to see their lives as meaningful. The reason, of course, is that those unable to work will be devoid of one of the core ideals through which their excellence is instantiated.

Human Labor will not go Away

One may think that the fear of technological unemployment is exaggerated because the demand for products and services produced by humans will be kept in place for social or esthetic reasons.

For instance, one may argue that social motivations may lead to the promotion of initiatives that incentivize buying human-made objects. Kim and Scheller-Wolf (2019, p. 332), for instance, briefly entertain the idea of counterbalancing technological unemployment by creating a “market demand for human jobs (...) for example by initiating a ‘made by humans’ campaign.” This proposal, they argue, “could create some market demand for human labor” but, as they also recognize, it is a strategy that cannot be relied upon as a large-scale solution (Kim & Scheller-Wolf 2019, p. 332). Experience with consumer boycotts reveals some of the shortcomings of this strategy. While boycotts have sometimes been able to influence market behavior in the short term, in the long term economic forces and collective action problems tend to make the effects of these boycotts marginal.

One may also think that esthetic reasons may provide enough demand for human-made objects to support widespread human employment. Some scholars with whom I have discussed these ideas have pointed to our growing demand for artisanal products that are not mass-produced as evidence of our growing demand for human-made objects. Others have suggested that there is an increased appreciation for the idiosyncratic quirks and attractive imperfections of human-made objects. In this case, the argument for the continued demand for human-made objects is not that our social conscience is mobilized to “buy human” but that esthetic reasons make human-made products and services attractive.

This proposal lacks promise. To begin with, it appears to conflate automation with mass production. Intelligent systems are now able to mass-produce highly customized products and services that can be tailored to meet these idiosyncrasies across many industries. What makes this high customization possible is, precisely, intelligent systems in their manufacturing and distribution processes that can manage personalized orders on a mass scale. Apparel companies, for instance, are now offering to personalize many of the clothing you buy from them. The media we consume online is filtered by sophisticated algorithms that identify what each person is more likely to read, listen, watch, or click. Medicine promises to use the power of artificial intelligence to track our personalized data, establish fine-grained correlations, and provide customized diagnoses and treatments. Thus, if what people like about human-made objects are their idiosyncratic quirks and attractive imperfections, machines will be able to mimic and produce them, and they will often do it in ways that better track our own expectations.Footnote 18

The Speed of the Transition

The transition from a world with full employment to a world of technological unemployment will be more gradual than the almost instantaneous transition the Crow faced when they abandoned their nomadic life and were confined to a reservation. If we manage to slow down the pace of technological unemployment, this may actually give us more time to gradually adapt to a new reality where jobs are scarce. This additional time could allow our societies to gradually develop new institutions and values around which to organize themselves differently.

It would be valuable if this could happen, but I don’t have high hopes about it. As I discussed above, advances in science and engineering are leading to exponential development of ever more sophisticated hardware and software, the costs of the materials needed to automatize human tasks are dropping extremely fast, and companies are accumulating ever more digital data about more and more areas of our lives that machines can process. The explosion of online activity during the Covid-19 pandemic, the quick growth of blockchain and Web 3.0, and the recent developments of the metaverses, virtual realities that supplant our physical reality, will only accelerate the encroachment of machines into our lives.

Many executives have publicly acknowledged “the negative consequences that artificial intelligence and automation could have for workers” (Roose, 2019). And one would hope that their apparent conscientiousness would lead them to slow down the pace at which they are automating their workforce. But this hope appears naive and misguided. Naive because their words have been, for the most part, a facade. These executives are well aware that the potential public backslash does not allow them to publicly disclose their systematic efforts to automate their workforce (Roose, 2019). Misguided because it ignores that competitive and economic forces will put companies who fail to automate at a significant disadvantage. In fact, the main motivation of many of these executives to automate is their worry that if they fail to do so, they won’t be able to keep up with the competition (Roose, 2019).

An additional strategy to slow down the speed of the transition would be to slow down the pace at which workers are permanently unemployed. For instance, by reducing the number of hours offered to workers, companies would be able to hire more workers. The idea is that, even if the aggregate number of hours that the population spends working is declining, the total number of individuals taking part in compensated working opportunities may be kept relatively stable. Again, it is not clear how systematically this strategy can be pursued. The increase in costs and potential drops in productivity will place limits on it. In particular, this strategy would increase hiring and managing costs because companies would need to invest more resources to train and manage a bigger workforce, it would increase coordination costs involved in divvying up complex tasks among several individuals and then putting their separate work together, and it would reduce productivity due to the need to distribute the information about the company’s day-to-day activities and processes into more minds.

Strategies to slow down automation, which I believe are important to make the transition less traumatic, are more likely to succeed if they are mediated by coordinated regulatory actions that level the playing field by constraining the behavior of all market participants. Whether this is better achieved through “robot taxes” or “employment incentives,” and the specific taxes or incentives that should be offered, is an empirical question best left to economists and lawyers. What seems uncontroversial is that we should start by dismounting the subsidies that we currently provide to companies that invest in automation (Porter, 2019). Slowing down automation has one additional, and very important, advantage. It will give us more time to assess the many unintended consequences that these powerful technologies are bringing about (Vallor, 2016).

Technical and Humanistic Re-education

Low-skilled workers are expected to bear the brunt of the effects of technological unemployment. It has been frequently proposed that governments and private companies should offer education to these workers to re-skill (Roose, 2019). This specific proposal is misguided because it fails to address the underlying long-term issue. The main challenge posed by technological unemployment concerns the overall demand for jobs, not merely about skilled jobs. There is little reason to think that increasing the supply of skilled workers will have an effect on such demand (Roose, 2019). What is more, this proposal seems too optimistic about the ability of people of different walks of life to become proficient in certain kinds of skills.

There are, however, forms of education that we should promote given the way in which they could prepare us, not to get a new job once our current one is automatized, but to confront the fact that we may live in a world with few jobs. This education does not seek to educate workers into STEM fields. It seeks to prepare them for a future with no jobs by developing intellectual tools to face the potential crisis of intelligibly head-on.

And while it is beyond the limits of the paper to discuss the specific details of such an education, I do want to make a couple of brief remarks about it. I suggested that economists and lawyers are best positioned to help us determine the specifics of how to tax robots and employment incentives. The design of the resolute education I have in mind should be best left to humanists. Historians and anthropologists can help open our eyes to radically different ways in which cultures have organized themselves. Artists and poets can equip us with tools to articulate and express our challenges, anxieties, and expectations. Novelists and cinematographers can use fiction and narrative to enhance our moral imagination (Nussbaum, 1990). Philosophers can help us examine and criticize the notions of meaning and flourishing to which we have, often tacitly, been committed to. Confronting the precariousness of some of our foundational commitments may help us feel more comfortable being at a loss about how to live meaningfully (Mejia, 2020). This is an education that seeks to help us reflect on our situation and open our minds on how to move forward individually and socially.

Like with policies to slow down the transition to a future with few jobs, there are additional reasons that speak in favor of it. The liberal arts help us expand our horizons and understand better the place of our individual actions within a broader context (Mejia & Aronstein, 2022). There is, in fact, a growing awareness of the benefits that such education can bring to business. In addition, this kind of education will also help us live more meaningfully even if technological unemployment is not as dire as many of us expect it to be.

Approaching meaningful work from a cultural and normative perspective is critical to shed light on important features of meaningful work that are missed when one studies the topic from the subjective experience of the individual worker. This cultural and normative perspective allows us to see that, individuals’ capacity to find compensated work meaningful is partly dependent on the way in which compensated work, as a social institution, constitutes a central organizing telos in our society: it plays a central role in how society is structured and functions and in the aspirations and notions of human excellence that guide individuals within it. Understanding this dimension of meaningful work is important, not just to have a better understanding of meaningful work, but also because it helps us recognize one important challenge that technological unemployment may pose: A world with few work opportunities will strain our ability to make sense of what it means to find life meaningful.