I think there's an intrinsic human drive to be useful. It makes sense evolutionarily: the tribe can't kick you out if they rely on you for something. It's no gu

I think there's an intrinsic human drive to be useful. It makes sense evolutionarily: the tribe can't kick you out if they rely on you for something. It's no guarantee of safety or success, but it's a bargaining chip. Kevin Simler (via Dennett) goes as far as modeling this phenomenon on the level of individual neurons [0]: that conditions like depression and grief can be thought of as neurons and their networks becoming suddenly obsolete, and casting about trying to find new ways to be useful. The employment model is hardly perfect; if anything, it has an uncomfortably feudal flavor in practice, where one is a thrall/vassal for 40(+) hours/week, in exchange for autonomy the other 128(-); and where one has the option to seek a new lord if sufficiently dissatisfied. There are countless other ways to be/feel useful outside that model: entrepreneurship, non-profit/community work, raising children, passion projects. There are also potential perverse incentives: in particular, to maximize the problem one purports to solve. The most obvious parallels are the military- and prison-industrial complexes; planned obsolescence is another milder example. It's easy for unions to tip from collective bargaining into protectionism of industries that we'd like to become obsolete (prison guards, coal miners), out of a very understandable desire for those individuals to not lose their social bargaining chips. So I do think we should celebrate the idea of "employment", as such, becoming optional; I strongly favor UBI. But at the same time, we need to be thinking about new institutions and proactive strategies for people to be, and feel, useful. I dare say, in some cases we want to be spending the economic surplus from the efficiency of automation, on intentionally inefficient pro-social economic activity. One example might be a community garden: it's a safe bet that industrial agriculture will always be an order of magnitude more efficient at producing food; but the community garden has other benefits, of connecting humans to nature and to each other (and perhaps a bit of resilience against supply chain disruption). [0] https://meltingasphalt.com/neurons-gone-wild/ https://meltingasphalt.com/neurons-gone-wild/