The central question of this article is: if the increase in human technical abilities renders human labour superfluous in the future, how should the the distribution of the income and perhaps the little work remaining be organized?
To those not afraid to confront this possibility the problem is serious: nowadays wage-labour has a crucial role in this process. What if it vanishes?

Go directly to the solution

In history, work has been done in different institutional settings. In the tribe, everybody has his or her place, given by tradition, in the division of labour and its fruits. From the study of antiquity, we know how work was done predominantly by slaves, usually ethnically different from their free masters, who took slaves by military defeat, bought them on the market, or bred them themselves. In the Germanic Middle Ages in Europe, the serfs were ethnically similar to their masters, no slaves, but simply down in the hierarchy and forced to be obedient where desired by the strongest nobility around. Then, in the cities coming up after 1000, an army of guild apprentices lent their hands while their masters attended important meetings. In all times and places much work is done by household members in a family or extended family context.

Wage labour has been existing at many times and places but was never basic type of brick to the edifice of society until the end of the eighteenth century (and one could argue for a later date). As such a basic type of brick, it is only two centuries old.

And now business leaders, the architects of our society, are much more interested in other kinds of brick for their future building activities. We will live in a world where not the workers, but computers control machines, machines will be repaired and improved by computers. Will we end in a self built automated Garden of Eden, where all our wishes are measured in our brains by sensors and their fulfillment is coming to us without further ado? Will we not have to work anymore? Will this make us happy?

It is a sometimes little scary but yet instructive to dream. Imagine that the progress of technical change will continue to accelerate in the pace of the past 20 years. Masses of jobs vanish, and we can only hope for continuous near full employment if entrepreneurs can think of enough new ways to profitably employ labour to re-employ every obsolete worker. Apart from dreams, who seriously believes this will remain possible?

It seems hard to deny the value of thinking over the consequences of a long run increase of historically incurable unemployment, just for the chance, small or not, that those who foresee this are right.