The question of what people will do once machines take over much of the work is more than 140 years old. This page maps the key ideas and thinkers: from early utopias and a study from Austria to the camps of today’s debate.
The debate has two starting points. One is utopian: if productivity rises, everyone could work far less. Paul Lafargue, Bertrand Russell and John Maynard Keynes each did the sums in their own way, arriving at three hours, four hours, or a tentative hint at a fifteen-hour week.
The other starting point is a warning, and it comes from Austria. The study of the unemployed of Marienthal (1933) showed that people without work do not flourish but become resigned. Marie Jahoda, its lead author, later described what work provides besides wages. This research continues today, including at Johannes Kepler University Linz.
The two roots belong together: less work can liberate, but only if what work gives beyond money is replaced.
Lafargue revised his polemic in prison in 1883. His claim: three hours of work per person per day would be enough to produce everything needed. A shorter working day would even make work more productive.
Source: The Nation (Austin Kelley), 2005
In his 1932 essay the British philosopher argues that four hours of work a day would suffice. He sees the work ethic as a morality that entrenches dependence. Leisure, in his view, is the foundation of culture and civilisation.
Source: Connexions Library
In “Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren” (1930) Keynes expected productivity growth to solve the basic economic problem within about a hundred years. On working hours he wrote only cautiously: “Three-hour shifts or a fifteen-hour week may put off the problem for a great while.” That is not a firm forecast of a fifteen-hour week; the sentence was only sharpened into a prediction in 1999 by the newspaper Newsday.
Source: Quote Investigator, 2025
After the textile factory closed in February 1930, a research team studied the village of Marienthal near Gramatneusiedl in Lower Austria from November 1931 to around May 1932. Instead of unrest, it found a “weary community”: the unemployed became resigned. Marie Jahoda was the lead author, Paul F. Lazarsfeld led the project, and most of the fieldwork was done by Lotte Schenk-Danzinger.
Source: University of Graz, AGSÖ archive
Besides income, paid work provides five further things: time structure, social contact, a shared purpose, status and identity, and activity. A meta-analysis of 106 studies (2023) confirms all five; together with financial circumstances they explain around 19 per cent of the differences in mental health. Retired people lack these functions almost as much as the unemployed.
Paul and Batinic of Johannes Kepler University Linz tested Jahoda’s model in 2010 on a representative sample in Germany. The study laid the groundwork for the later meta-analysis. It draws a direct line from Marienthal in 1933 to Linz.
Source: JKU Linz, 2010
Broadly, three positions can be distinguished today. The first camp seeks liberation from work: wage labour should no longer be the centre of life, and automation should create free time.
The second camp wants to save work, or at least steer technology. Its proponents stress that the direction of technical change is a political choice, and they favour technology that complements people rather than replacing them.
The third camp asks above all who owns the machines. If wages shrink as a source of income, ownership of capital becomes the decisive question.
Weeks argues (2011) that wage labour is not a natural good and that even Marxism and feminism have questioned it too little. Her aim is a society in which people can be productive without being tied to the wage relation. The book is regarded as a founding text of the first camp.
Source: Duke University, 2011
The 2015 book sets out four demands: full automation, a shorter working week, a generous universal basic income and an end to the work ethic. Critics such as Jon Cruddas accused it in 2018 of losing sight of the human being.
Source: Wikipedia
The two economists show (2023) that technical progress does not automatically benefit everyone. Its direction reflects the interests of powerful groups. Shared prosperity, they argue, requires deliberate political choices in favour of technology that creates work rather than merely replacing it.
Source: Hachette Book Group, 2023
The economic model (2024) describes a race between automation and capital accumulation. If human tasks remain open-ended, people keep their work. If they are limited and fully automated, wages collapse, and income then depends mainly on ownership.
Source: arXiv, 2024
Between utopia and warning stand voices that consider a world with little work plausible and ask, soberly, how it could turn out well. They are contradicted by sceptics who doubt that automation is the main driver at all.
This dispute is unresolved. Who is right also depends on how quickly and how broadly AI actually takes over tasks.
Human jobs could go the way horse labour once did, Susskind suggests (2020). In response he sketches a strong, redistributive state, a basic income and support in the search for meaning. The book was shortlisted in 2020 for the Financial Times and McKinsey Business Book of the Year.
Source: NHH review, 2020
Danaher considers a largely work-free world possible and not a catastrophe (2019). He estimates that 10 to 40 per cent of the population will remain in paid work. Critics note that he leaves open who owns the systems and what their environmental impact is.
Source: Vector (BSFA), review
Benanav disputes the automation thesis (2020): weak demand for labour stems from global stagnation and overcapacity, not from robots. The result is underemployment in poorly paid services. His position is contested; critics say he deals with the post-work literature too briefly.
Source: Labour / Le Travail, 2021
Frase arranges possible futures on two axes: abundance or scarcity, equality or hierarchy. This yields four scenarios, which he calls communism, rentism, socialism and exterminism. The idea appeared as an article in 2012 and as a book in 2016.
Source: P2P Foundation
The two terms are often treated as one. Yet a world with less work can also be imagined through shorter working hours, public services or new forms of ownership. Conversely, a basic income can exist without much changing about work.
The meta-analysis on Jahoda’s functions (2023) concludes that a basic income would be unlikely to reduce labour supply much. In the German-speaking debate, Lisa Herzog, for example, considers a right to work more promising than a basic income.
In 1994 Gorz declared the work-based society “effectively dead”. He called for a large, gradual reduction in working hours, roughly every four years, with largely maintained pay. At the time he rejected an unconditional basic income: too low, it would act as a wage subsidy; too high, as an exit. Instead he proposed a second, additional payment.
Source: taz, 1994
The debate is not confined to Europe and North America. From Japan comes a link between shorter working hours and climate protection; from southern Africa, an attempt to connect basic income with the philosophy of Ubuntu.
The Catholic Church, too, spoke up in 2026 with an encyclical of its own on AI and human dignity.
Pope Leo XIV’s first encyclical addresses artificial intelligence and human dignity. It was signed on 15 May 2026, the 135th anniversary of the social encyclical Rerum Novarum, and published on 25 May 2026. One chapter is devoted to truth, work and freedom in a time of transformation.
Source: Dicastery for Promoting Integral Human Development, 2026
The Japanese author links degrowth with the late Marx. Shorter working hours are meant to help cut emissions; the change is to be driven locally and by cities, with Barcelona as a model. He considers the Green New Deal insufficient. The English edition appeared in 2024.
Source: Publishers Weekly, 2024
Since March 2024, an online seminar series run by the University of Freiburg and the University of Namibia has connected the African philosophy of Ubuntu with social contract theory and basic income. Ubuntu here stands for a bond of unity. Participants included Robert Esuruku (Makerere University) and Jurgen De Wispelaere.
In the German-speaking world several traditions sit side by side: the empirical work from Marienthal and Linz, positions that defend work, popular basic-income utopias and models from social ethics.
What stands out is how differently the same question is answered: from “work you really want” to basic income to a right to work.
The concept emerged in the 1970s and was tried out in Flint, Michigan, after the collapse of the car industry, where the first New Work centre was set up. Bergmann meant work that people really want, as a critique of wage labour. It has little to do with today’s HR methods of the same name.
Source: bpb / APuZ, 2023
Precht sees the end of the achievement-driven society as an opportunity (2018); his central instrument is an unconditional basic income. Armin Nassehi praised the chapters on financing in the FAZ but found the cultural critique facile.
Source: Perlentaucher, 2018
Herzog argues the opposite (2019): work is social and shared. She calls for politics to shape digitalisation and for more democracy in the workplace. She considers a right to work more promising than a basic income.
Source: FES Buch-Essenz, 2019
The Lucerne social ethicist expects a sharp decline in paid work. He proposes a conditional basic income linked to mandatory time spent serving society. In this way he tries to think income and belonging together.
Good starting points are a compact introduction, a book on the often overlooked work done at home, and a freely accessible bibliography. All other titles on this page are linked as well.
An introduction published in 2025. It questions three widespread assumptions: that work is good in itself, that identity comes from one’s job, and that any job is acceptable. An accessible place to start.
This 2023 book puts unpaid housework and care work centre stage, the blind spot of many automation debates. Real free time, it argues, also requires different housing and different cities.
Source: Housmans, 2023
An open online bibliography from Macquarie University in Sydney, curated by Jean-Philippe Deranty. It organises literature on around 100 topics, including automation, basic income, the four-day week and meaningful work. The content is openly licensed.
Source: Macquarie University