NO ONE WILL MISS WORK:

At some basic level the classical link between the creation of wealth and the creation of jobs has been severed. In the era of high industry, all the world's most valuable companies required enormous labour: General Motors, at its height, employed 800,000 people. Today's companies are very different: though Facebook has a market capitalisation of $300 billion--seven times General Motors'--it employs fewer than 15,000 people. Facebook is an enormous concentration of new wealth, but it pays little in terms of wages. It is the perfect symbol of our era of work-without-employment: Facebook's income is actually generated by the billion people who supply their journalism to the world's biggest media company as a charitable donation.

But as with so many other transitions, this one was of little interest as long as it did not touch the western middle classes. It was the explosion of white-collar work, after all, that saved capitalism from the death predicted by Marx; and the memory of this middle-class explosion has stayed with the west ever since, supplying an unwarranted optimism about capitalism's purpose. Even when the long-term assault on working-class jobs made abundantly clear just how little this system cared about providing "employment" the optimism of the middle classes--the chosen--did not falter.

But that is changing now the middle classes are the main target. Of course robotisation will continue to eat away at working-class opportunities: the advent of driverless cars, and its consequences for bus and taxi drivers is only the highest-profile example. But such data-led innovation will obviously have its greatest impact on intellectual labour. We realise that "artificial intelligence" need look nothing like what we thought--which was, essentially, us--and that it has already crept up on us through big data and analytical algorithms. These systems are evolving several million times faster than human intelligence, and it is obvious that the small edge that human beings still retain is vanishing as we speak. Bustling middle-class workplaces--corporate offices, engineering labs, even schools--will go the faceless way of airport check-in and supermarket check-out. [...]

This system does not need all of us. Employing us, in fact, is an irritation whose eradication is already a main focus of innovation and investment. Unemployment will be the structural reality for very large numbers across the world. So what are we going to do?

For a start, we will need more complex ideas of sharing than those encouraged by individualistic welfare states.

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