With **autonomous agents** entering the workforce, it's likely that people will work less and less.
Eventually, assuming that current developments are consistent, agents have taken over a big part of workforce productivity and it will be very normal that many people don't have a job anymore and don't need one since they will probably receive a **Universal Basic Income (UBI)** and services or something similar.
This raises a lot of questions about the well-being of people in a **post-labor world**.
How will people spend their time when they don't work?
There are already people who don't work because they already have enough money to come by. These people include the very rich, retired or people who are getting money from the government because they are physically less capable of working for example.
So people who don't work are not a new phenomenon.
But what if this phenomenon becomes a reality at a massive scale and it's normal for people to not have a job as part of their everyday lives?
Assuming a mass exodus of people from the workforce, below are considerations for the post-labor world on how people will likely spend their time if not spent on work.
How the unemployed spend their time
As mentioned, there are already many people who don't work (and are not planning to re-enter the workforce). This means we already have quite some data on how the unemployed spend their time.
Not so surprising is that for the unemployed a big part of the time is redistributed from work to leisure.
Notable is that how unemployed people spend their time is different between genders. Unemployed women spend 4.5x more time on childcare and housework than men, although household labor for both genders increases when unemployed.
The total time spent on house labor in the future is not very likely to grow though, as a matter of fact, with household automation and robotics being implemented as we speak, household activities will be increasingly outsourced to robots.
Tesla's Optimus for example is expected to be sold at the price of a small car and Chinese competitors are planning to ship household robots for even more accessible prices.
Unemployed men spend more time on leisure than women. And young unemployed men spend most time on leisure, with video games being a major part of time spent.
Looking at this statistic and knowing that **virtual reality** world's are emerging, it'slikely that a big part of the people who exited the workforce will spend a significant part of their time in virtual worlds.
It is expected that many people who don't work, will spend their time on non-productive activities, since productivity will be the thing that machines typically do.
Even when we look at the part of the workforce that became unemployed but still is looking for employment, we see time spent on productivity like job searching and skill development, but leisure time and personal care is still an eqaul category.
Only in economic recessions people seem to become extremely motivated to become productive and increase their chances of employability, but we can safely assume that this is due to financial necessity since resources are obviously constrained during a recession.
When we combine the insight that unemployed people only spend significant time on productivity in a recession or when trying to re-enter the workforce with the fact that, for most people, financial necessity is the strongest motivator to work (as shown in below table), we can imply that the drive to be productive primarily comes from the financial necessity to have a job.
When this financial necessity is taken away, because for example people will get money from the government without having to work for it (like with Universal Basic Income), they will be less motivated to be productive and as a result spend more time on non-productive activities.
What those non-productive activities will be we can only speculate about, but based on the above insights we do have some strong leads.
The biggest future categories of time spent
In the above analysis we can conclude the following on how currently time is spent by unemployed people who are not seeking employment:
- Household activities are significant part of time is spent on, especially by women, although this time is expected to be reduced by household automation and robotics
- Childcare and personal care are currently significant categories for time spent and are expected to still be required and preferred ways of speding time
- Leisure is another main activity for unemployed people with gaming being the top activity, especially under young men
We can conclude that care and leisure will be the remaining major categories.
Care is the category that will stay relatively the similar, but leisure as a category is expected to be transformed on some fronts.
We can look ahead at how time will be spent in a post-labor world. These are the main expected activities in a post-labor world:
- Personal care and caregiving
- General leisure time
- Virtual worlds
- Creative expression
- Exploration
Personal care and caregiving
Personal care and caregiving will for a big part still be required in people's lives since they need to take care of their own health and wellbeing and that of others in their family and rest of their social circle.
Care will change but not as much as the leasure activities. Both personal care as caregiving might be augmented by technology but will still require significant time.
General leisure time
General leisure time will include many activities from having a beer, to long barbeques, going on weekend trips and holidays, visiting friends, family and hanging around.
These activities will be spent relatively similar to how they are spent today since they're very much based on human-to-human interaction.
Virtual worlds
Virtual worlds will be an emerging way for people spend their time. Virtual world offer an extended experience to the current physical world and a new way for people to connect.
Since virtual worlds are an emerging dimension, much still has to be explored to know how exactly virtual worlds will be exploited.
Creative expression
Creative expression is an activity that in today's world, driven by productivity, is often repressed. The elimination of work will free up time for wondering around and experimentation that is required for creative development. With less opressed thoughts free from authoritative constraints, the human mind will lead us to more creative and expressive paths.
Exploration
Exploration is an existing category as well, with people exploring the world by for example taking a year off to travel the world. But in the post-labor world there will likely be an extra dimension added. With the further development of space technology and ways of travelling into space, people from all kinds of backgrounds will be a lot more likely to participate in the exploration of space.