Tom Waite

But actually, someone that I spoke to for this piece, Liz Fuchsman, who's a researcher at King's College London, she pointed out that actually the word work is much more...

flexible and fluid than that and can include things like child care and care for the elderly and all of these other things because we can we certainly put effort into other parts of our lives that don't generate money and that are actually really undercompensated today

Well, that's a whole different matter.

I think it looks like a lot of disruption, a lot of kind of very hard work, ironically, because it requires huge structural, political and economic change, I think.

And that could look like something like universal basic income, even though that seems to have fallen out of fashion a little bit in the last year.

Or you have countries like China or Singapore, which are super invested in AI technologies and, you know, kind of...

have that technocratic kind of uh vibe about them but also have been using a lot of this excess kind of capital that's generated by introducing machines into like

really good public infrastructure and public luxury and i think that is like a huge cause for optimism personally because it's it's a form of redistribution that yeah maybe you don't see more money going to your bank account but maybe you walk down the street and your life just feels that little bit like better or more convenient or you're struggling less because you have better social provisions

It's difficult to feel like you have agency in this kind of new world of billionaires and robotic automation, for sure.

I don't know how much agency any individual has beyond their kind of like part in a wider collective.

But I think what there is really space for now is like a positive vision of the future that benefits everybody now.

So instead of just like straight up criticism of these new technologies, which is often warranted.

And I think, you know, that goes back to the industrial revolution and the kind of Luddites, like the fear and anger is warranted there.

But I think that has to be channeled into a kind of positive vision for the future instead of just endless criticism, because it feels like these technologies are inevitable.

Yeah.

And it feels like they could be used to make a better world.

But nobody has really put forward that vision yet, at least for people like you and I, instead of people like Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk.

I think of something that Elon Musk said in 2024 when he was

rolling out some of his Optimus robots, which are supposed to, you know, be able to fit into our world very easily and automate tasks.

That might have just been like bad marketing copy.