Will AI take our jobs? And should we even consider that a problem?
This text is an adaptation of earlier work, published in Dutch as a podcast titled De Toekomst Werkt Niet (tr. The Future Doesn't Work). You can listen to the podcast here.
For decades, dystopian visions of technology have dominated popular culture. Worlds where machines take control over humanity only to reduce them to something expendable. Like in The Matrix, where humans are stripped down to energy sources. Or in Terminator, where Skynet becomes self-aware and decides humanity is the threat. In Blade Runner, artificial humans (i.e. replicants) are exploited as disposable labor. And the list goes on, right up to more recent releases. In Black Mirror, for instance, technologies that are initially designed to make life easier become tools of surveillance and control. All these narratives echo a persistent fear that technology is not just a tool, but a force capable of consuming our autonomy, taking over our humanity even, and, of course, our jobs.
And yet, collectively, we remain captivated by technological progress. Despite – or perhaps because of – these apocalyptic imaginings, we continue to embrace, integrate, even idealize new technologies. Because alongside fear, technology carries a promise progress, convenience, and a future in which human beings are - paradoxically so - liberated from work. How must we understand this techno-ambivalence? And what does it reveal about the relationship between work, value, and power?
Post-Work for who?
In 1930s, the British economist and philosopher John Maynard Keynes predicted that by the end of the twentieth century, technological advancement would reduce the workweek to just fifteen hours. In the West, at least. In a way, he was right. We have more labour-saving devices than ever before. Think of where we would be without Email, dishwashers, washing machines, dryers, smartphones, and recently, LLMs... So far, however, these innovations have not shortened our workweek. If anything, we only work more. Many of us spend our time working jobs that add little to no meaningful social or economic value. We are busy occupying what the anarchist anthropologist David Graeber famously called bullshit jobs: roles that sustain entire industries while serving no real purpose.
So, no. Technology has not yet taken over our jobs. But considering where we stand, technologically, that might precisely be the problem. Because, perhaps worse than losing your job to machines – mind you: in a world where work is the only way to secure your basic needs – is not losing it. If one’s job isn’t automated (in a time where it technically could), one is effectively competing with machines. And that means one has to be cheaper than the ever-decreasing cost of automation, just to survive. We all know what that looks like for delivery riders... So let’s consider this seriously and speculate what a future beyond work might look like. I took this exercise seriously and curated a program on the topic as part of my job... ironically enough. Exactly one year ago, on May 1st 2025, International Labor Day, I brought together thinkers and activists to imagine a future beyond work. I called it post-work futurism.
One of the invited speakers was Jill Toh, co-founder of the Racism & Technology Center and a PhD researcher at the University of Amsterdam. Her work explores the relationship between law, labour, and social justice within the platform economy. When the moderator of the event, Jennifer Muntslag, asked her how she envisions a post-work future, Jill responded critically:
There is this narrative about technology automation that it will help us and liberate us. That once we have certain systems in place, then we don’t have to work. And I reject that premise. Because all of these systems [that allow us to work less] have human labor behind them, located in the global majority. Including in where we reside, where is a lot of labor that goes into automating thing to make it appear as though it is automated.(…) So, post-work for who?
Toh's response makes very clear that technology is not neutral. It does not automatically work in everyone’s favor and doesn't rid people of their jobs equally. So when we consider a post-work future, perhaps the real question is not what technology can do to make that future happen (in the most practical sense), but, more so: who it works for in the process.
Slaves and Robots
In the early nineteenth century, the Luddites stormed the textile factories, smashing the newly introduced machines. They protested against an economic system in which they had become disposable. New technologies such as the mechanized looms had stripped workers of control over wages and working conditions. The machines themselves were not the core problem. It was more so about the way they were used as instruments in the hands of factory owners who monopolized production in pursued profit at the expense of workers.
Under the pressure of the so-called Industrial Revolution factories in Britain became centers of mass production. Machines dramatically increased productivity while devaluing craftsmanship. Workers, including women and children, were subjected to long working hours, low wages, and dangerous conditions. Labor became monotonous and – as Karl Marx described it – alienating. Ultimately, workers became themselves interchangeable parts within a larger mechanical system.
Notably, this industrial transformation did not exist in isolation, but was entangled with colonial extraction. The cotton feeding British textile mills came from plantations in the southern United States and parts of Latin America where enslaved people carried the heaviest burden of the industrial revolution. Enslaved people were forced to grow and harvest cotton, effectively forming the backbone of the textile industry. Behind approximately 465.000 people who worked in the textile mills of a large industrial city were some 3 million enslaved people on the cotton plantations.
Work (i.e. waged labor), in this period, was increasingly hailed as the moral foundation of society. Like some noble pursuit contributing to both individual well-being and the prosperity of the nation state. In the imperial center, workers fought to reclaim their dignity on the workplace, while on the plantations people labored under coercion, without pay, without dignity, and without any machine taking on some of the heavy labor. Indeed, after slavery was formally abolished, a new myth took hold, namely, that those who were emancipated from slavery – and all of their descendants – were inherently lazy and unwilling to work. It's a deeply racist myth that continues to shape perceptions of labour to this day.
The techno-futures we tend to see in films or read about in books and media are often presented as radically new. But beneath the glossy surface of innovation lie familiar logics of ownership, control, and dehumanization. I spoke about this with Mathieu Charles, dramaturge and decolonial thinker. He traces how our technological imaginaries are deeply entangled with colonial and slave-based logics, and how even the word robot carries that history. The term originates from Karel Čapek’s 1920 play R.U.R. (Rossum’s Universal Robots) which stages a world in which artificial workers are created to be exploited. The Czech word robota means forced labor, and the play shows what happens when a class is fabricated (literally) both materially and ideologically to serve an elite: they eventually revolt.
As Charles explains, it is not a coincidence that this narrative landed so well in this particular time in history. The story of R.U.R. reflects a recurring impulse of empire, namely, the creation of an “other” that can be owned, used, and exploited without moral consequence. That same colonial fantasy of domination occurred simultaneously through slavery and colonialism, and it reappears today in our relationship to AI. It surfaces in the desire for total control, in the commodification of bodies, even in the development of robots and AI-characters for sexual (ab)use. In that sense, both slavery, colonialism, and technology persist as fantasies in the unquenchable hunger of the white-supremacist-capitalist-patriarchy for absolute power and domination.
Are tech-bros onto something?
In 2024, Elon Musk held a speech at the VivaTech conference in Paris about how AI will take our jobs. He acknowledged – at least in part – the dystopian potential of the rapid technological development we're witnessing, but he framed it as something potentially positive. A future in which work becomes optional and where technology frees us of the burden of labor (that is, of course, the kind that doesn't require what he calls "emotional intelligence", i.e. the care work that is structurally relegated to the realm of women). Like Keynes, Musk imagines a future of abundance. Only now, powered by what he calls the “magic genie” that is AI. Is Musk... post-work?
The way technology is positioned at the center of popular post-work discourse (note: by men) leaves room for pretty much anyone to frame its potential in ways that sidestep anti-capitalist critique and questions of redistribution (think of universal basic income), emancipation, and care. Simply put: post-work language gets easily co-opted by tech-bros to sell their capitalist dreams. Just like that, Musk believes AI will bring about not a universal basic income, but a universal high income. It sounds wonderful, but Musk's vision of automation and post-scarcity wealth stands in stark contrast to the lived reality of the existing working class. But, why focus on the here and now if you can focus on a future far, far away? That long-term thinking has gained serious traction in Silicon Valley for a while now. It's an ideological current called "long-termism".
Long-termists prioritize safeguarding the distant future, even if it means sidelining present-day crises. Their ambitions stretch toward colonizing other planets, digital immortality (i.e uploading of one’s consciousness to the cloud), and those sort of grand ideas. It's clearly not a future for everyone. It is a future for those who can afford to think at least a century ahead, and not for those worrying about next month’s rent. Right now, in this very present, workers are dealing with overwork, exploitation, and the relentless demand for efficiency. And those without work? They serve as a constant reminder that we - the employed class - must be grateful. Because no matter how shitty our jobs are, it could alway be worse.
In that respect, unemployment is merely a tool to discipline those still employed, as some sort of a pre-condition. Rather than easing the burden of labor now, long-termist visions defer current responsibility just to safeguard a future for their own descendants. Inequality, environmental degradation, labor exploitation are all treated as problems that will somehow sort themselves. The same way Brazilian miscegenists - as Beatriz Nasciemento wrote - believed anti-Blackness would be sorted through the eradication of Black people.
And then there is AI itself. Its rapid integration into everyday life may make certain tasks easier, but not necessarily fewer. More importantly, it tends to reproduce existing power structures as they are trained on datasets that reflect the world as it is. That is, a world structured by whiteness and patriarchal norms. Further still, the material foundations of AI are not in Silicon Valley. Cobalt for our devices is mined by Congolese workers, including children. Data used to train AI systems is labelled by underpaid workers in Kenya, Uganda, and India, often for mere cents per task. The labor required to make human work obsolete relies, paradoxically, on the most precarious workers in the global system.
Western data-labelling companies increasingly set up operations in remote regions of the Global South. Big Tech (i.e Google, Meta, Apple, OpenAI, Tesla, Microsoft, and the whole lot) outsources the invisible labor that powers AI and frames it as an opportunity. After all, they offer jobs, training, even scholarships (four per year, lol). That is, for the time being, because these workers are effectively training systems designed to replace them in the near future.
It gets bleaker. In 2023, Meta and a data-labelling firm were sued in Kenya. Content moderators reached a breaking point after being exposed daily to images of drone strikes, child abuse, suicide, and a plethora of other disturbing visual content. It turns out, such "economic empowerment" is a convenient cover for relocating traumatic, dehumanizing labor to the margins of the world, far from the eyes of those who benefit most. That is to say: us.
Universal Basic Income
Back to the post-work futurism program, where Hilde Latour takes the floor. As vice-chair of the Basic Income Earth Network, she advocates for universal basic income with a premise: if money is a condition for survival, then basic income should be a birthright. Universal Basic Income (UBI) is one of the most concrete post-work proposals. It reframes livelihood as a right, not something earned through productivity. Free money for everyone, unconditionally, as long as you are alive and human. But for Latour, it doesn’t stop there. If basic income is distributed through the state and its banking systems, we remain dependent on the conditions that they impose. That contradicts her commitment to individual freedom. So she proposes Bitcoin, a decentralized currency without central authority, through which UBI can be generated and distributed.
You can probably see where this is going. Bitcoin’s energy consumption is one of its most criticized aspects (aside from the scammy course sellers on YouTube, of course). However, Latour argues that the Bitcoin technology could, in principle, operate on simple hardware, even phones. The real issue, she asserts, is societal greed. Maybe so, but in practice, the system rewards computational power. And that drives miners toward energy-intensive supermachines, consuming up to 175 terawatt-hours annually, producing millions of tonnes of CO₂. As long as more power equals more profit, that footprint is unlikely to shrink. And besides, basic income – as she envisions it – does not abolish money, nor does it eliminate economic inequality altogether. It may raise the absolute bottom, but leaves the ceiling untouched.
Towards solarpunk anarchy
When I imagine the year 2130, the air feels heavy. Machines hum endlessly in the distance. Factories exhale smoke like lungs that never rest. Rivers carry water still laced with toxins. PFAS clinging stubbornly to every drop. We were promised technologies that would reverse the damage. But here we are, generations later, still carrying the burden. It seeps into bodies and into soil. Inequality is no longer always visible, but it is deeply felt. Every movement is monitored, every task tracked, every hour accounted for, every breather unremunerative...
But what if something else is possible? What if technology were simply a tool, shaped around human needs, rather than the other way around? I find inspiration in the work of Andrew Sage, known online as Andrewism. He is a writer, YouTuber, and a radical thinker who exposed me to a framework of thought that gave words to the feelings and questions I had grappled with ever since I entered the job market. He describes himself as a solarpunk anarchist, blending decolonial critique with anarchist imagination. Solarpunk evokes a world where lush greenery and technology coexist. Most people immediately think of buildings wrapped in plants and solar panels embedded seamlessly into daily life, communal gardens blooming across rooftops. But solar punk is not just an aesthetic. It's a movement and a speculative genre that brings forth a vision of abundance. Not the long-termist kind (!), but the kind where technology and nature reinforce one another.
Solarpunk is not about inventing new technologies, but about rethinking how we use what we already have, collectively and regeneratively, so work can be reduced, revalued, and equitably redistributed. No one is escaping to Mars, but we all remain here to reconnect with one another and with nature.
As Andrew puts it:
the post-work idea has been heavily shaped and significantly established by anarchist philosophical text related to the liberation of workers, the self-abolition of the workers as a class, and the erosion of the labor-leisure distinction that we are forced to abide by in our capitalist system. I think the action we take to establish a solarpunk future, things like creating greater food autonomy, or energy autonomy, and developing alternative economies that are more sustainable and more localized and regionalized… those sort of things – over time I think – can allow us to decouple ourselves from the capitalist system and allow ourselves to sustain a way of life that is integrated in a solarpunk way of life. Which still involves labor of course, but is not as strictly workerist as – you know – the existing system is in terms of how we approach work and how much control we have over our labor.
Solarpunk, he argues, is not a blueprint but an opening. However, unlike cyberpunk, or even afrofuturism, its stories are still largely unwritten.
What if that is the work we need to do? Not to "invent the future" (and demand full automation), but to create the conditions under which something truly different can emerge. The technology already exists to make a good life for everyone possible, right now. What stands in the way is a system upheld by a small minority that benefits from it. As long as productivity outweighs justice, technology will continue to serve the interests of a small elite.
Let's stop pondering on whether AI might take our jobs, and start worrying about which future they serve. Because, frankly, if we carry on like this, the future won't work for most of us.