In the opening of Reclaiming Work, André Gorz writes provocatively:

We must dare to prepare ourselves for the Exodus from “work-based society”: it no longer exists and will not return. We must want this society, which is in its death-throes, to die, so that another may arise from its ruins. We must learn to make out the contours of that other society beneath the resistances, dysfunctions, and impasses which make up the present. “Work” must lose its centrality in the minds, thoughts, and imaginations of everyone. We must learn to see it differently: no longer as something we have—or do not have—but as what we do.

Gorz, Reclaiming Work, page 1

Gorz is writing long before AI hypemen started to promise the elimination of millions of jobs, but automation has always been the aim of capitalism, since the first steam-powered looms displaced experienced weavers and installed children in their place. Now, that automation is coming for “knowledge” work—for work that was hailed as somehow exempt from the degradation and alienation of all other work, but whose hailing was only ever a thin and shabby cover.

[The work that is ending] is, unambiguously, the specific “work” peculiar to industrial capitalism: the work we are referring to when we say “she doesn’t work” of a woman who devotes her time to bringing up her own children, but “she works” of one who gives even some small part of her time to bringing up other people’s children in a playgroup or a nursery school.

Gorz, Reclaiming Work, page 2

That is, the work that is being abolished is work that is institutionalized and exploited, that makes a profit for someone other than the worker. Work where there are rules and metrics, performance-improvement plans, stack-rankings, hastily arranged all-hands where executives perform the meanest apology after the latest round of layoffs while suggesting those workers had it coming (and you likely do, too). This isn’t “work” in the sense of making change or making a contribution to the world, but work as the price you pay for the privilege of keeping a roof over your head—absent any promise that the roof will always be there.

[I]t is precisely in the sense of self-realization, in the sense of “poiesis,” of the creation of work as oeuvre, that work is disappearing fastest into the virtualized realities of the intangible economy. If we wish to rescue and sustain this “real work,” it is urgent that we recognize that real work is no longer what we do when “at work”; the work, in the sense of poiesis, which one does is no longer (or is increasingly rarely) done “at work”; it no longer corresponds to the “work” which, in the social sense of the term, one “has.”

Gorz, Reclaiming Work, page 2

Poiesis is the emergence of something that wasn’t there before; it’s the work of creation. But so much knowledge work—even before AI started to be shoved down our throats—wasn’t creative but necromantic: raising up the de-fleshed bones of past successes and reconfiguring the joints into recognizable but beastly products with glossy marketing wrapped around them like an emperor’s cloak. The assertion that slop-makers will replace most jobs is a pathetic attempt at resurrection: only work that has been demeaned into the grave could be supplanted by such boring and obsequious ghosts. The real work has always been elsewhere. Perhaps it’s time we follow where it takes us and leave the dead to their tombs.