3 There’d be more time for... other things
One way to plug a giant, worksized hole in our daily schedules would be to fill it with more work, just not of the paid variety. “In a post-work world, what seems important to me is that people can substitute employment with a purposeful activity,” says Zechmann. “For example, this could be engaging in voluntary work, which some people already do, because it pertains to collective purpose – you can work to a greater goal.”
Perhaps we could give our lives purpose by helping the robots to solve some of the world’s most pressing problems. In the days before science became a bona fide profession, there were unfunded or self-funded ‘natural philosophers’. Even as late as the 1930s, Guy Callendar, who discovered climate change, was more of a hobbyist than a qualified academic. Today, volunteers or ‘citizen scientists’ monitor butterfly populations and beach litter. The jobless could swell the ranks.
For those who prefer not to spend their free time working, how about looking to the early 1800s for a blueprint of an Austenesque future where people sit around all day matchmaking and throwing high society balls? Appealing, but few of us would have the money for such extravagances – Mr Darcy was worth roughly £6m a year in today’s money. Even Callendar, in his leisurely pursuit of climate change data, had the benefit of his steam engineer father’s 22-room mansion and greenhouse laboratory. And matchmaking will probably be done by the robots, anyway – dating apps already use algorithms and machine learning to up our chances of finding a sweetheart.
Imagined post-work futures don’t usually take into account all of the unpaid domestic labour that forms a substantial part of our lives. Even if we have a liveable basic income, and a sense of purpose from some kind of community endeavour, we’ll still have the washing up to do and the kids to put to bed.
According to Dr Helen Hester, technofeminism researcher and author of the upcoming book After Work: The Fight For Free Time, the machines we’ve introduced to the household so far have provided only limited relief. This is because we spend any time our household appliances save us on deeper cleaning and increasingly engaging activities for our children. A 2016 study by Oxford University researchers, for example, showed that in the US, a woman with one child does about two fewer hours of cooking and cleaning a day than she did in the 1920s, but an hour or more of this is reabsorbed into childcare. So it’s likely that, whatever household robots we employ, we’ll still end up carrying out some domestic tasks.
Hester thinks that we could be more open to automating care work at home – for example, using care robots to help us look after children and elderly parents. But she says there’s a “moral value” attached to doing this work ourselves that often leads to us “dismissing automation out of hand”. So perhaps the greatest hurdle to having more robots in our homes is not technological, but our own reservations about handing the work over to machines.