The future is a constant focus of anxiety, and we are all familiar with the pressures that come distinctively from automation – the transformation by which tasks formerly assigned to humans come to be performed by machines. These days, the stakes seem to be higher, as technology now seems poised to render nearly all human labor obsolete. What lies in store for us, and for the flourishing and meaning of our lives, once technology has relieved humans of the need to work?

In Automation and Utopia: Human Flourishing in a World without Work (Harvard University Press, 2019), John Danaher explores the issues facing us as we confront our own obsolescence. He defends the idea that a workless future is not only possible, but possibly utopian.

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