Vision for a Fresh View of Work

"Simon", charcoal by Tim Holmes

The great news is that our grandparent's old world of performing tedious, back-breaking work in exchange for a paycheck is now becoming obsolete. Jobs around the world are rapidly being outsourced to machines and computers. Even the huge labor markets of China and India that absorbed manufacturing over the past couple decades are being dented by those jobs returning to the US and other developed nations. But most of them are going to robots, not people. So what do we do with an increasing population of unemployed?

We need a new vision of work for the future. It's time to let go of the old attitude that if we don't work at some boring job we will starve. The old capitalist winner-take-all model that gives the spoils to the 1% cannot survive. The time has come for a new economic ecology that distributes more equitably the wealth created by super-efficient systems which were not created so much by individuals as by generations of workers. Once we solve the scourge of income inequality we'd have enough to support everyone. A new work world would see in place of immigrants threatening to steal our jobs, valuable resources to be explored like we would a new planet, each talent valued and put to use in the best place to allow it to thrive. 

It's time we see humans not as competition for work but as resources for a better life for all; not a threat but a treasury of skills and dreams born to bring us all into a deeper, more responsive community.