People are, rightly, concerned about how generative AI might affect their jobs, careers, and incomes in the future.

Progress has never been successfully stymied in the interests of protecting people’s now-outdated jobs. We don’t send people down into mines with pick-axes, and we don’t hand weave the clothes that most of us own.

We, as society, have to ask hard questions about what the meaning of life is, and whether economies are the right tool to keep people busy when (and if) the number of jobs starts to dwindle.

My view is that we need to start electing people who are standing on shortened work-week legislation, pro-paid vacation legislation, mandatory paid maternity/paternity/parental leave, ethical and meaningful unemployment payments, and/or universal basic income.

When we start moving the running of society away from what meaningless tasks we set the populace, and towards meaningful ways of spending time, especially as robots and AI remove a lot of the jobs that a lot of people are suitable for, we will be better able to cope with, what is otherwise, a source of fear.

One final thought. I am a British-American and, in the 1980s, the UK government under Margaret Thatcher, decided to stop subsidizing the mines in Cymru (formerly Wales) and the north of England. Her government didn’t provide training or economic redevelopment money, the government just turned off the taps. That’s what we must avoid as (and again, if), society changes in the fundamental way it looks like it may change.