We know what a world without work looks like
TL;DR
Clara Collier asks what happens if AI takes over economically necessary labor and life becomes "relational." She says we can already see the result in Versailles courtiers, 1980s upper-class Midwestern women and Boston's working-class West End. These groups drew no status from work. They turned clannish, conformist and absorbed in gossip. Collier argues that work's real gift is respect earned for what you do rather than who you know.
The article
- Writers like economist Alex Imas predict a post-AI "relational sector," where human connection is what's left to trade. Collier reads this as a return to the pre-industrial idea that social ties, not jobs, define people.
- Aristocratic memoirs by Saint-Simon and Catherine the Great show rich, idle, intelligent people spending their lives on gossip, precedence disputes and factional intrigue. Historian Antoine Lilti found that even Enlightenment salons ran mostly on political gossip.
- Susan Ostrander's 1984 study of upper-class Midwestern women found them filling their time with nonprofit board fundraising. Some admitted it accomplished little, one saying "It's that illusion of being useful that's satisfying." They did it mainly to mark themselves off from the lower orders, inside a narrow, exclusive circle.
- Herbert Gans's study of Boston's West End found a working-class "peer group society" that saw no status in jobs. It distrusted outsiders and leaders. It bullied boys for wanting white-collar work. Because it trusted no leaders, it could not organize against its own demolition.
- In all three cases, dignity comes from group membership. So people spend their energy defending the group's reputation and policing deviance. Collier concludes that relational societies tend to be restrictive and exclusionary.
- Surveys and oral histories show that people value work for competence and impersonal respect. Sources include Pew's figure of roughly 85% job satisfaction, Claudia Strauss's post-COVID interviews, the Federal Writers' Project and Studs Terkel's Working. Adam Smith's circle argued that commercial society freed friendship from necessity.
Why it matters
Worth reading in full for anyone thinking about what people would do in a post-work economy. The essay's value is in the case studies and in Collier's dry, funny voice. It quotes long passages from Saint-Simon, Ostrander's interviewees and Gans that a summary can only point at.
The discussion
A small, mixed thread, where several commenters rejected the AI framing. Some don't believe capital owners will share the gains, and others found the history interesting but disconnected from the premise. Others argued over whether work can vanish at all and added their own models of post-scarcity life.
The AI premise undercuts the essay
calldacopsidc called the essay pollyannaish, since American politics shows contempt for the unemployed and AI labs are lobbying against guardrails. dh2022 added that the premise assumes capital owners will share enough to calm economic anxiety, which dh2022 called fantasy. wduquette and jfil replied that the essay is really a historical study of societies without jobs. jfil thought the AI framing was unnecessary, since the analysis applies just as well to mass unemployment.
One of the premises of the article is that the capital owners (who thus own the economy, and the political system, and the legal system and the law enforcement) will give the rest of the people enough to assuage economic anxieties.
This was interesting historical food for thought without tying it to AI. I think its relevant to a mass-unemployment, economic depression scenario too, and others.
Work won't disappear, only its motivation
em-bee argued that care, child-rearing, art, government and science still need humans, so the question is how to motivate people once nobody works to eat. em-bee held that money is the most egalitarian motivator, because social status breeds prejudice. casey2 called a world without work impossible, since emotional labor can't be automated short of synths indistinguishable from people. fittingopposite asked whether playing with your kids or talking to the elderly even counts as work.
money is the most egalitarian way to motivate people to do work that is hard but needs to be done. everything else brings us back to status and class, which is not what we want.
I think a lot of things we have outsourced to "professionals" is considered work now and was considered "just normal life" before.
Other models of post-scarcity life
aaroninsf described early Burning Man as a temporary post-scarcity experiment where status shifted to charisma and the quality of one's gifts. aaroninsf suspects people will always find some coin to hoard and envy. erelong pointed to exercise, self-improvement and prayer as things machines can't do for you. A side thread on Calhoun's mouse utopia experiments disputed whether it shows idleness or overcrowding as the cause of collapse.
My assumption is that human nature (in all layers of its stack) makes social hierarchy inevitable, and if we don't need literal currency, we'll find a coin to trade in, hoard, envy, and pursue.
The nuance is it wasn't a utopia because eventually the population of mice were extremely overcrowded: that's when things circled the drain.
Gossip turned into enforcement
webern777 took the essay's warning further. A leisure society built on gossip and deviance-policing, combined with surveillance, would keep expanding what counts as a crime. mindslight noted the essay skips people who leave or are shut out of these tight circles. mindslight said their angst drives much of the worry about a world without work.
Most of all though more "crimes" because a culture of policing deviant behavior will start to find more and more behavior as "deviant".
Consensus
Most commenters doubted the premise more than the history. Nobody defended the idea that AI will bring a comfortable work-free life soon, and those who engaged with the case studies found them worth reading.
Dissent
FLeXMurphy dismissed the essay as a string of historical just-so stories with no argument holding them together. FLeXMurphy said the scenes describe ordinary life in their own eras, not a world without work.