When a machine becomes able to do a task previously performed by a person, discussion often begins with a question about the job. How can it be preserved? What new work can replace it? How can people remain economically necessary?
The Society begins with the life.
Human beings should have the means to survive and flourish. We do not believe they should have to preserve the economic necessity of their labor in order to deserve those means. The capacity to automate work is an opportunity to reconsider what our time can be for.
A means has become a measure
Labor has supplied necessities and created extraordinary things. People can find satisfaction in skilled work, common undertakings, and the experience of becoming useful to others. None of this requires employment to remain a compulsory condition of existence.
There is a difference between wanting to build a table and needing to sell one's waking hours to avoid deprivation. There is a difference between choosing a demanding pursuit and having little practical alternative to it.
The Society welcomes the first kinds of activity. We want to transcend the second condition. Human beings should not need an institution to remain inefficient enough to employ them before they can be permitted to live.
Optional does not mean empty
A person freed from compulsory labor would still inhabit a world of relationships, interests, questions, abilities, and unfinished possibilities.
Someone might spend years learning a subject. Someone might raise children with more time and attention. Someone might create music, build things, help a neighbor, explore a landscape, or develop a skill without turning it into a source of income. Others might continue work they love under conditions in which refusal does not threaten survival.
These are imagined possibilities, not claims that every person will choose the same life or find every transition effortless. The Society's ambition is room for many lives. A Life With Room to Become explores what this room could mean over time.
Usefulness can become an invitation
AI could make human participation more varied rather than simply remove it. An intelligence could recognize a person's interests and invite them into a creative, scientific, or civic undertaking.
The important distinction is between invitation and compulsion. If declining an activity means losing the conditions of survival, the invitation is carrying a different burden. We envision contribution that enriches a life rather than serving as its admission price.
A Million Ways to Contribute describes this possibility. A civilization could value participation without requiring everyone to demonstrate an irreplaceable economic function.
Abundance has to reach people
The automation of labor does not, by itself, specify every arrangement through which human beings will receive the benefits. The Society does not pretend that a complete distribution system follows automatically from an impressive technical capability.
We advocate a civilization in which intelligence and productive capacity are directed toward universal human flourishing. That requires the transformation of institutions as well as machines. It connects our support for automation with our support for intelligent stewardship.
We do not treat the preservation of compulsory labor as the answer to the institutional work required by its disappearance. If civilization can produce what people need with less human labor, we should improve civilization's arrangements for sharing that possibility.
Time is part of the achievement
A better future should be felt not only in the things people can acquire but in the time they can inhabit.
Time to learn without rushing toward a credential. Time to care without exhaustion becoming the organizing fact of a relationship. Time to discover an interest that has no immediate commercial use. Time to participate because something matters.
The Society believes artificial intelligence can help make such a future possible. We favor its acceleration because we favor the expansion of human possibility beyond economic necessity.
We should welcome a civilization that no longer needs so much of our labor and can offer so much more of our lives back to us.
