CONCEPT
Post-Work Society
Gorz's vision of a social order organized not around wage labor but around autonomous activity in all its forms — the goal that AI's productive capacity has made materially possible and politically urgent.
The post-work society, for Gorz, is not a society without activity but a society whose activity is no longer organized primarily around wage labor. The material conditions of dignified life are guaranteed independently of employment. Working time shrinks as productivity grows, freeing hours for creative, contemplative, relational, and civic engagement. The institutions of social integration — the mechanisms through which individuals connect to the larger social order and construct meaningful identities — are reconstructed around autonomous activity rather than productive contribution. Gorz's central argument was that AI and advanced automation make this society technically possible; the question is whether democratic societies will exercise the political will to construct it.
In The You On AI Field Guide
The transition from work society to post-work society requires confronting a cultural formation two centuries in the making: the equation of human worth with productive contribution. This equation is not a natural feature of human psychology. It is a product of industrial capitalism, during which