Work Reform

Back when TED Talks were all decent and not a money grab, I saw one presenter talk about the coming automation and the need for economic safety nets, and he brought up a good point. Man has tried to minimize work ever since the beginning, but just as we get to a point where most people could eliminate it altogether, we want to hold onto that last little bit. Some good reasons, but most are centered around the need for income and the need for identity, which aren't great ones. He mentioned the phrase "working for a living", which can also be termed "having to work to be alive", both in the necessity of income and in the Puritan way of seeing people that don't have to work hard as worthless.

People should be able to work on things for pleasure or creation or even some other type of fulfillment, but not because without that work they aren't people. Yet that's how society views work. "What do you do" is a much more common casual intro than "what are you interested in". And there are arguments about how we can even get to a point like that, if such a utopia is just that, a fantasy. But we sure aren't trying hard to put systems in place to help us get there, at least not the ones that help the people who are hurt by things like automation (which is its own debate, of course).