We already know what a world without work looks like

This article originally appeared in Issue 15: Work. Subscribe to the print magazine to get future issues delivered to your door.What will people do all day? I mean, of course, if the AIs surpass us at all economically necessary forms of labor.There’s an emerging consensus on this point, assuming we’re all still alive and not subjects of a cyberpunk feudalist dystopia. When the machines can do everything else, our relationships will be what’s left.Maybe we won’t have to work at all. Or maybe we’ll still have something that superficially resembles modern employment, just concentrated in what economist Alex Imas1 calls “the relational sector” in his essay “What Will Become Scarce.” We’ll always need humans to supply the human touch. And how will we get those relational jobs? Relationships, obviously. It’s not what you know, it’s who you know, since everyone knows everything anyway.What is really being suggested here is less a continuation of modern work than a return to a much older cultural understanding of labor. Imas makes this point directly: “Before industrialization, it was difficult to separate a product from the person who made it … Economic transactions had a distinct social component that was innately linked to the consumption experience.”Relatedly, before industrialization, there was very little sense that working, in itself, could be dignified or meaningful.2 We were not defined by our jobs but by our participation in a densely interconnected social world. And we might be again. That’s the natural consequence of all these relationalist predictions — a world where our connections to other humans are what give us structure, identity, and meaning.I am afraid they’re right. Making sweeping statements about the relationship between technology and cultural change is always a risk, and I’d rather avoid it until it’s absolutely necessary. At the same time, our degree of ignorance about the future is greatly exaggerated. If the future looks anything like the past — and there’s good reason to believe it will — then we can make progress with case studies.Let’s start with 18th-century aristocrats. Aristocrats are (typically) rich, which we certainly will be if we have robots capable of all normal nonrelational labor. More importantly, when they did need to acquire material resources, they did it through leveraging their connections to obtain more land or a lucrative position at court — no drudgery necessary.They did not work for pay; they certainly did not see work as a source of meaning. It’s certainly true that some of them had real obligations, like governing or killing each other, but court life in the age of absolutism is as close to a purely relational world as anything I can think of.We also know a great deal about what mattered most to them and how they chose to occupy their time. Aristocrats tend to be sensitive social observers who are also extremely self-involved, which makes them talented and prolific memoirists. The most famous work in the genre, rightfully, is the memoirs of Louis de Rouvroy, duc de Saint-Simon.3Saint-Simon was a courtier at the Versailles of Louis XIV. This was the wealthiest and most brilliant court in Europe, a center of unparalleled refinement in aesthetics and manners; according to Voltaire, another courtier, it was the greatest of the four great ages of light, surpassing Athens, Rome, and Florence at their peaks.It might seem surprising, then, that Saint-Simon himself is dull, petty, anti-intellectual, and obsessed with nuances of heredity and precedence to the exclusion of every other human concern. Most of his life was spent in incomprehensible litigation over which families might be entitled to a certain heraldic emblem or whether parliamentary magistrates could wear a particular bit of ceremonial headgear in the presence of dukes. He despised the king, in part for elevating his bastards to positions of ceremonial precedence, in part for turning over the governance of the realm to talented commoners. (Voltaire was an upjumped nobody, barely worth dismissing if not for his unfortunate reputation among “certain kinds of people.”) His dignity was immense and constantly outraged. Reading his memoirs is like spending a few hundred pages in the mind of Daffy Duck.Reinhard Sebastian Zimmermann (German, 1815–1893), Audience with the French King Louis XIV, oil on canvas.None of this is to say the memoirs aren’t entertaining to read: they are, in large part because of the contrast between the keenness of Saint-Simon’s observations and the inanity of their content. All the amusements of court life — plays, operas, masques, fetes, games, feasts that last for a week and feature hundreds of servants dressed as figures from classical myth — are a backdrop to the real organizing activity of daily life: intrigue. In this world, nobody goes to the theater to appreciate the genius of Molière or Corneille. (That’s the kind of thing Voltaire points out in his own history of the period, which is how we know he’s hopelessly bourgeois.) They go to see who else is there, and what they’re wearing, and whether what they’re wearing could be construed as a statement of allegiance in some ongoing factional conflict.It would be unfair to judge an entire society from the recollections of one disappointed man. And this isn’t how we typically picture 18th-century French aristocratic culture. You might be imagining glittering salons where the leading figures of the Enlightenment discussed poetry, drama, and the most pressing philosophical issues of the day. This is (mostly) a lie. Salons existed and philosophes attended them, but more for entertainment than for rational discourse. When we look at the enormous amount of written material the salonnieres and their guests produced — as French historian Antoine Lilti did — it is clear that their conversation consisted overwhelmingly of political gossip.4 They were almost all aristocrats, and they almost always talked about themselves.I’m no Lilti, but I’ve read a lot of aristocratic memoirs, and all of them are like this. Saint-Simon might be an unusually advanced case, but that’s all he is: The morbid symptoms are universal. Take the memoirs of Catherine the Great. Catherine is everything Saint-Simon is not: open-minded, intellectually voracious, an admirer of Voltaire, and ruthlessly pragmatic in the pursuit of power.Catherine is a very different kind of observer, but the world she’s observing is essentially the same. St. Petersburg might not hold a candle to Versailles, culturally speaking, but the distinction hardly matters — as in the French court, the only path to advancement was through politics, and all politics was relentlessly personal. Daily life was, again, gossip: who was seen speaking to whom, who’s too religious or not religious enough, who’s having an affair, who’s offended or might offend or could be maneuvered into offending the empress. There was no freedom, no privacy, and almost no conversation that is not ultimately about jockeying for favor with someone closer to the center of power.It’s difficult for modern readers — at least, for this modern reader — to understand why intelligent, perceptive adults with every material resource would behave like this. It all seems so undignified. But then, aristocrats are not like us. We’re bourgeois: Our idea of dignity involves being diligent, productive, responsible citizens. (That is, it involves working.) Aristocratic dignity comes from honor, which is to say it comes from maintaining distinctions of family and class.In addition to aristocratic memoirs, I enjoy reading about primate ethology. Indeed, I like these books for similar reasons: Aristocrats are basically chimpanzees. They’re highly social, cunning, at all times hyperaware of their strict internal dominance hierarchy, and constantly, obsessively tracking alliances, challenges, displays of prowess, and attempts to get ahead. Norbert Elias argues in The Court Society that the highly elaborate etiquette and ceremony that consumed life at Versailles was part of a civilizing process — part of the transition from a military aristocracy who handled outbursts of emotion by stabbing each other to a form of institutionalized self-control. Clearly, they needed it.But another important lesson from Elias is that we shouldn’t see the behavior of aristocrats under absolute monarchy as some kind of inevitable regression to our universal primate instincts. The inmates of Versailles or St. Petersburg are hardly the inevitable product of a world without work. They were all born into centuries-old webs of feudal institutions and court ceremonials, which were themselves warping under pressure from the birth of the modern state. Our own society will be evolving from a much saner starting point. Should we expect to do better?David Teniers the Younger (–1690), Smoking and drinking monkeys, c. 1660, oil on panel.Susan Ostrander’s Women of the Upper Class5 is an ethnography of upper-class women in an unnamed Midwestern city in 1984.Theirs isn’t a pure post-work society. All the women have husbands who have jobs, even if it’s just managing the family money, and one of them (but only one) works herself. Even so, I think this book is about the best modern case study of a relational society as we’re going to find.6 None of Ostrander’s subjects grew up with the expectation that they would work outside the home, and none of them feel any obligation to do so as adults. And Ostrander is interested in the same questions we are: Why do these women do what they do? What matters to them? What are the structuring assumptions of their lives?The main structuring assumption, it turns out, is that class matters. Unlike 18th-century aristocrats, they are not especially ambitious (“These are men and women born to privilege, and social striving is not necessary”). Instead, “the women see to it that the social network of ‘congenial’ people is kept in good order.” Much of this work