If I told you that we are headed towards a future where you won’t need to go to a traditional job, would the thought scare you or make you happy?
Well, even if you hate your job, you would be scared by such a future, right? I mean jobs are the source of most people’s income in a society and no jobs would mean that you wouldn’t be able to sustain your life.
You might ask then, why I am posing this question. That’s because, we are indeed, slowly but surely, headed to such a future. Technological innovations are already beginning to replace humans in so many areas and this is just the start.
Artificial Intelligence, robotics and other automation technologies will make about 47% of today’s jobs obsolete in the next 25 years, according to Oxford University. The next decades will totally disrupt jobs as we know them leaving hundreds of millions of people in uncertainty.
But, every problem has a solution and the increasing automation might bring forward a radical solution that could redefine how we humans participate and contribute in a society.
A Basic Income For All?
The current solution that is being heavily debated on is something called a Universal Basic Income. Basically, under a UBI, people of a country would get a fixed sum of money at regular intervals for basic subsistence, regardless of income of a person.
Such a system would ensure that even if people don’t have jobs, they are able to at least fulfill their basic needs. In a world where half of the jobs are threatened, this would be a wonderful solution. It almost sounds like utopian, doesn’t it?
In fact, many countries are running pilot projects to test the practicality of such a system and the results should start coming by next year. As we wait for real world data, there is an ongoing debate about the feasibility of a UBI.
Proponents of the system including Stephen Hawking, Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg, all believe that in a futuristic society with robots taking over jobs, there would be a need to distribute income to keep the economy going and UBI could help in that regards.
What Would You Do If You Didn’t Have To Work?
The skeptics of UBI say that if we just gave people the money they needed to live, it could collapse the whole system because most would just do nothing and it would be an immense burden on the governments.
Perhaps, a UBI system can be more refined in a way that, people would need to contribute in at least a pre-determined number of ways to be eligible for a basic income. Also, people who make a healthy living could be excluded from the program.
In my own opinion, in whatever way a UBI can be implemented best, could do wonders for humanity. It would be a huge shift away from today’s world which would lead to a snowball effect to create an entirely new world.
As for people getting lazy, that could happen to some extent, but I was a marketing student and if you have read Maslow’s need hierarchy theory, you know that that a human being’s needs go far beyond just satisfying the basic physiological needs.
In fact, once those needs are taken care of, it is more likely that people would pursue careers that they simply couldn’t do before. In a world shared with machines, we could still find meaning in creative work and creative solutions where, I like to believe, we would still have our uniqueness.
What would you do if you didn’t have to work?