1. Introduction: Automation and the Philosophical Crisis of Labour
Work has long functioned as a central category in Western thought, linking subjectivity, social reproduction and moral value. In the 21st century, however, the rise of artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning and robotic process automation is destabilising these connections. As machines absorb cognitive and physical tasks once exclusive to human labour, society must confront the age of technological unemployment. The longstanding nexus between education, employability and identity is under threat, and the very foundations of work-centred life require re-evaluation. These developments prompt a philosophical and pedagogical crisis: if machines can perform most work, what does it mean to be human? What role should education play in preparing individuals for futures in which work is optional, devalued or radically redefined?
Philosophically, the meaning of work has been contested across traditions. From Aristotle’s disdain for manual labour – delegated to slaves and the unfree – as inimical to the life of the mind, to Marx’s notion of labour as the species-being of humanity, work has oscillated between necessity and self-realisation. In the modern era, particularly since the Industrial Revolution, work became the principal axis of moral worth and social integration. It was no longer just what humans did to survive, but how they were recognised, governed and valued. Educational systems mirrored this transformation by training bodies and minds for productivity, efficiency and employability – shaping subjectivities according to the demands of industrial capitalism and later neoliberal flexibility.
Emrys Westacott captures the point well when he writes as follows:
Whether or not a certain line of work is shameful or honourable is culturally relative, varying greatly between places and over time. Farmers, soldiers, actors, dentists, prostitutes, pirates and priests have all been respected or despised in some society or other. There are numerous reasons why certain kinds of work have been looked down on. Subjecting oneself to the will of another; doing tasks that are considered inappropriate given one’s sex, race, age or class; doing work that is unpopular (tax collector); or deemed immoral (prostitution); or viewed as worthless (what David Graeber labelled ‘bullshit jobs’); or which are just very poorly paid – all these could be reasons why a kind of work is despised, even by those who do it. One of the oldest prejudices, though, at least among the upper classes in many societies, is against manual labour.
The introduction of intelligent machines into this historical narrative marks a significant rupture. Whereas past technological innovations displaced certain jobs but created new ones, AI and automation threaten to undermine the very logic of human labour. Unlike previous waves of mechanisation, which targeted physical tasks, contemporary automation extends into domains of reasoning, decision-making, writing and teaching, raising the spectre of redundancy across both manual and cognitive sectors. This new paradigm forces a rethinking of the anthropological assumptions that have underpinned education for over a century: that work is inevitable, that jobs are central to citizenship and that learning is a means to labour-market insertion.
Education is thus implicated in a profound ontological transition. If the future of work is uncertain or diminished, the future of education must be reconsidered not simply in instrumental terms – preparing students for ‘jobs of the future’ – but in ethical and existential ones. What kinds of knowledge, dispositions and capabilities are worth cultivating in a world where work may no longer structure time, identity and belonging? How can education foster forms of subjectivity not tethered to wage labour, but to care, creativity, cooperation and ecological responsibility? These questions mark the horizon of a new educational philosophy for the postwork age.
2. From Labour to Algorithm: The Evolution of Work and Its Discontents
Historically, work was embedded in necessity, divine order or feudal obligation. With industrial capitalism, it became commodified and abstracted. Karl Marx identified this shift as alienation, where the labourer becomes estranged from the product, process and their own species-being. Max Weber argued that the ‘Protestant ethic’ moralised work as a spiritual calling, paving the way for capitalist rationality. In the age of AI, this moral economy is eroded. While some forms of employment persist, the ethos of self-worth through labour has become fragile and is diminished. As Kathi Weeks notes, neoliberal capitalism intensifies the contradictions of work by valorising ‘hustle culture’ even as jobs disappear. AI intensifies this paradox: individuals are taught to find purpose in labour, yet are increasingly excluded from it. The educational implications are clear: schooling remains oriented toward employability, even as employability itself becomes technologically obsolete. The dominant educational project is therefore dislocated from its material foundations.
This dislocation is not simply economic – it is also cultural and ontological. The historical centrality of work as a source of personal meaning, moral discipline and social legitimacy has been deeply internalised. The erosion of stable employment thus creates existential anxiety and social fragmentation. As André Gorz foresaw, the decentering of labour threatens a kind of ontological disintegration unless new forms of meaning-making and social participation emerge. The growing prevalence of mental health crises, burnout and precarity under conditions of overwork and underemployment suggests that the affective economy of labour is itself in collapse.
At the same time, digital labour introduces new contradictions. Platform-based work – such as ride-hailing, delivery and content moderation – is often celebrated as flexible and entrepreneurial, yet it often reinforces alienation in new forms. Workers are governed by algorithmic management systems that remove human discretion, increase surveillance and obscure accountability. The promise of autonomy is undercut by the reality of fragmented, undervalued and invisibilised labour, especially in the domestic and community caring domains. Even in knowledge-intensive professions, AI systems are beginning to automate routine cognitive tasks, eroding the skills base of human workers and generating deskilling alongside intensification. The advent of open-source reasoning AI models represents a transformative phase in cognitive externalisation, extending a trajectory that began with writing 3,000 years ago. These models, both open and closed proprietary – encompassing transformers, reinforcement learning systems and neural networks – can augment human cognition by enabling symbiotic reasoning, dynamic adaptation and scaffolding for learners. However, their integration into education raises critical questions about epistemic dependency, cognitive deskilling and the redefinition of intelligence itself.
These developments challenge the assumption that technological advancement will free humans for more meaningful pursuits. Instead, they risk deepening what Marx called the ‘reserve army of labour,’ now expanded into a digitally monitored underclass. The outcome is not liberation from toil, but a bifurcated labour economy – on one side, hyper-exploited service and platform workers and on the other, a shrinking elite of technocratic or creative professionals. Education, caught between preparing students for this polarised economy and sustaining the illusion of universal opportunity, finds itself complicit in the reproduction of false promises.
To respond meaningfully, educational institutions must abandon the narrow equation of learning with labour-market insertion that began with the industrial revolution and intensified with neoliberal and human capital theory. Instead, they must foreground broader ethical and civic aims – preparing students to navigate, critique and transform a world where work may no longer be the primary structure of social value or organising principle. This requires an education of critical consciousness, collective imagination and non-utilitarian purpose, capable of dislodging the metaphysical centrality of labour in both curriculum and culture.
Education must fundamentally shift to prepare students for a future where work may no longer anchor social value, identity or daily life. This requires moving beyond utilitarian, job-focused training to cultivate critical consciousness, enabling students to analyse and dismantle the ideology of ‘workism’ that equates labour with moral worth. Students need tools to understand how this ideology perpetuates inequality and ecological harm, while navigating emerging realities like automation. The goal is to equip learners to ethically engage with a world where traditional employment structures dissolve, ensuring they can question systems defining human dignity through productivity alone.
Central to this reimagined education are broader ethical and civic aims: fostering collective imagination to envision societies organised around principles like community care, ecological stewardship or creative flourishing. This demands curricula developing radical empathy and collaborative agency, empowering students to co-design institutions where value arises from relationships and justice, not GDP. Education becomes a project of civic imagination, preparing learners to build structures prioritising human and planetary well-being over extractive economics.
Achieving this necessitates ‘dislodging labour’s metaphysical centrality’ in curriculum and culture. It means embracing non-utilitarian learning – valuing knowledge for ethical insight and existential reflection. Pedagogy must prioritise critical reflection over commodifiable skills, using history, economics and arts to illuminate societies thriving without wage labour. This transforms education into gthe roundwork for a just transition toward societies honouring human flourishing as their core purpose.
3. The Political Economy of Automation: Capital, Crisis and Education
Technological automation has historically been a tool of capitalist intensification. From Taylorism to AI-powered platforms, the aim has been to reduce labour costs, increase efficiency and extract surplus value. Education systems have mirrored this logic, training compliant, efficient and adaptable labourers. Peters demonstrates how neoliberal education policies emphasise employability – the entrepreneurial self – while youth unemployment, underemployment and precarity persist. This contradiction reveals a deeper ideological crisis: education promises entry into a labour market that is increasingly closed off by intelligent machines.
Moreover, the political economy of AI-driven automation concentrates wealth and control in the hands of a technological elite. The benefits of automation accrue to capital owners, while labour bears the costs. Education, if uncritically aligned with this system, risks reinforcing inequality rather than mitigating it.
This process of ‘digital enclosure’ reconfigures the basic coordinates of economic power. As AI systems become proprietary assets guarded by powerful corporations, value creation shifts from human labour to data extraction and algorithmic optimisation. Human users, whether workers or students, become both sources and subjects of data capture. The educational system is increasingly absorbed into this logic: adaptive learning platforms, surveillance-based assessment tools and algorithmic performance tracking reconfigure pedagogy itself around the imperatives of control and prediction.
As a result, education is being repositioned not as a public good or emancipatory project, but as a site of technological investment and future profit. Corporate alliances with schools and universities – often under the rhetoric of digital transformation or AI-readiness – subordinate educational aims to market imperatives. Students are no longer primarily educated to think, critique or create collectively, but to be ‘reskilled’ and ‘upskilled’ in ways that align with labour market volatility. The promise of AI, in this context, is less about human liberation than about managing surplus populations rendered economically redundant.
In this configuration, the very concept of human capital is redefined. What counts as valuable knowledge or skill is increasingly determined by machine-compatible metrics. AI systems privilege standardisation, efficiency and performativity, thereby marginalising forms of knowledge that are embodied, tacit, relational or context-sensitive – precisely the forms that resist automation. The result is a narrowing of educational purpose: from fostering broad-based democratic citizenship and ethical reflection to producing data points legible to algorithmic systems of governance.
To resist this trend, education must reclaim its normative and political dimensions. It must engage with automation not only as a technical shift but as a site of ideological struggle over the meaning of work, the value of human activity and the future of democratic society. As Peters argues, educators must critically interrogate the convergence of AI, platform capitalism and the crisis of labour and cultivate pedagogical spaces where alternative imaginaries – postcapitalist, postwork and post-instrumental – can be envisioned and enacted.
4. Automation and the End of Work? The Post-Labour Imagination
A growing body of literature explores the possibility of postwork societies – scenarios in which machines fulfil basic productive functions, allowing humans to redirect their energies toward non-instrumental forms of life. Proposals such as Universal Basic Income and reduced work weeks are gaining traction. Yet automation poses the risk of exacerbating inequality if redistribution is not coupled with structural reforms. Feminist and ecological perspectives offer critical alternatives. Mariarosa Dalla Costa and Sally James foreground unpaid care labour as central to social reproduction. Gibson-Graham emphasises diverse economies – subsistence, gift exchange, volunteerism – that resist capitalist valorisation. These perspectives reframe labour not as waged productivity, but as life-making. Education must engage with these transformations, preparing learners not for obsolete jobs, but for postwork citizenship – rooted in care, digital fluency, political literacy and environmental responsibility.
Yet postwork imaginaries are not without contradiction. Much of the popular discourse around automation and UBI tends toward techno-utopianism, presuming that intelligent machines will seamlessly usher in a world of abundance and leisure. This view neglects the asymmetries of power and capital that determine how automation is deployed and who benefits from its efficiencies. Without democratic control over technological infrastructures, automation may simply deepen existing hierarchies by consolidating control in the hands of technocratic elites. As such, the postwork society must be understood not as an inevitability, but as a contested terrain of political struggle.
Moreover, the ethical orientation of a post-labour world remains unresolved. If the moral value of labour has historically anchored identity, social recognition and obligation, its dissolution raises important questions: What replaces the ethical discipline of work? How do we cultivate responsibility, reciprocity and meaning in the absence of traditional economic roles? These questions signal the need for a postwork ethics, grounded not in productivity or accumulation, but in care, interdependence, ecological stewardship and the cultivation of human capacities beyond market value.
In this context, the role of public institutions – particularly education – becomes crucial. Education must equip learners not only with the skills to navigate a post-labour economy, but also with the imagination to reconstitute collective life. This involves fostering critical consciousness of technological systems, historical awareness of labour’s social role and capacity for ethical reflection on alternative futures. The postwork citizen is not a passive recipient of leisure, but an active co-creator of democratic, sustainable and pluralistic worlds.
Rather than treat automation as a force of historical determinism, education can serve as a countervailing force of mediating the shift from work-centred to life-centred forms of human association. This requires a redefinition of educational purpose, not in terms of adaptability to market shifts, but as the cultivation of collective autonomy and planetary consciousness. The challenge is not only to live without work, but to learn how to live otherwise.
5. Education Beyond the Work Society: Toward a New Ethos
As AI decouples productivity from employment, education must shift from the paradigm of instrumental utility to one of emancipatory potential, to realise a new historical and social evolution of creativity under conditions of freedom from non-alienating labour. Educational institutions should cultivate ethical imagination, cooperative skills and critical inquiry into the structures of post-industrial life. This reorientation implies a revaluation of learning itself, not merely as human capital investment, but as existential inquiry. What kinds of beings do we wish to become in a world where work no longer defines us? What forms of collective life are possible beyond the regime of productivity? Youth subjectivity is at stake. In the face of AI-driven dislocation, education must defend the human capacity for agency, meaning and community. A new educational project must therefore resist both techno-utopianism and fatalism and instead foster post-labour ethics rooted in solidarity and sustainability.
One implication of this reorientation is a curricular shift toward what could be called post-instrumental learning: pedagogies that privilege relationality, creativity, critical ecological thinking and collective responsibility over competitive credentialism. Rather than channelling students into jobs that may not exist, educational systems must cultivate capabilities for living well with others, in conditions of both technological abundance and ecological constraint. This includes revisiting long-marginalised domains of education – such as the arts, philosophy, ethics and civics – not as ancillary, but as central to the formation of postwork subjectivities. Furthermore, the notion of learning as self-production – a dominant motif of neoliberal education – must be displaced. In its place, educators should emphasise modes of inquiry that resist commodification: collaborative research, intergenerational knowledge exchange and democratic deliberation. A postwork pedagogy requires not only new content but new social relations of learning. Institutions must move from models of competition and surveillance to models of care, participation and shared inquiry. The school and university become not training grounds for employability but laboratories of collective imagination and ethical formation.
To enact this transformation, education must also engage critically with the infrastructures and logics of digital capitalism. As algorithmic systems reshape knowledge production and assessment, students must be equipped to interrogate the epistemic, economic and ethical dimensions of these technologies. This includes fostering AI literacy, not simply for vocational fluency, but as a form of political and philosophical awareness. In doing so, education can reclaim its role in shaping the use and direction of technological development, rather than being passively shaped by it.
Lastly, a postwork educational ethos must affirm the importance of non-productive life: time spent caring, mourning, contemplating, playing and creating outside the circuits of value extraction. These domains of experience have long been subordinated or excluded within capitalist education, yet they may offer the richest possibilities for a post-labour humanity. To teach for such a future is not to abandon rigour or relevance, but to expand what counts as meaningful knowledge, what counts as a valuable contribution and ultimately, what counts as a life worth living.
Ultimately, a postwork educational ethos must radically affirm the intrinsic worth of non-productive human experiences: time devoted to caregiving, communal mourning, meditative contemplation, experimental play and artistic creation untethered from market logic. These domains have been systematically marginalised – even stigmatised – within capitalist pedagogy, which conflates learning with future productivity and reduces human value to economic output. Yet as automation destabilises employment’s cultural hegemony, these very activities may hold the key to human flourishing. Care work sustains social fabric in the absence of transactional relationships; contemplation fosters ecological consciousness; play cultivates adaptive creativity; and collective mourning processes shared trauma – all vital capacities for navigating post-growth futures. To teach toward this horizon is not to reject rigour but to redefine it: rigour as ethical depth in understanding interdependence, relevance as responsiveness to planetary crises and knowledge as that which nurtures resilience amid uncertainty. Education must thus dismantle the epistemic hierarchy that privileges ‘productive’ skills, instead centring curricula on practices that expand our conception of contribution, from tending community gardens to co-creating inclusive rituals. In doing so, it dares students to ask the most urgent civic question: What constitutes a life worth living when human value is no longer indexed to labour?
6. Why Marxism Matters
Capitalism cannot solve the crises it creates. Marxist pedagogy arms learners to seize these crises, turning automation into liberation, alienation into solidarity and ‘redundancy’ into revolutionary potential. It rejects incrementalism, insisting education must nurture the collective subject capable of dismantling work’s hegemony and building a society where, as Marx envisioned, ‘the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all.’
A Marxist approach begins by exposing how education under capitalism reproduces labour’s ideological dominance, training students to internalise their future roles as exploited workers while alienating them from their creative and communal potential. This demystification is essential: by historicising work – revealing its rise as a capitalist imperative rather than a natural condition – we dismantle the illusion that wage labour is inevitable. Marxism thus reframes the erosion of work (via automation or crisis) not as a threat, but as an opportunity to reclaim human activity for collective flourishing. Education must leverage this moment, teaching students to recognise capitalism’s contradictions – such as its simultaneous dependence on and devaluation of reproductive labour like caregiving – as openings for systemic transformation.
Transition requires turning schools into laboratories of resistance by exploiting capitalism’s own failures. As the system generates ‘surplus populations’ excluded from formal employment, education can politicise these groups, transforming alienation into collective agency. Teachers and students might organise around shared experiences of commodified learning – resisting standardised testing or debt-driven credentialism – to build solidarity against the market’s encroachment. Simultaneously, capitalism’s crisis in social reproduction (collapsing care infrastructure, ecological breakdown) creates fertile ground to centre curricula on practices capital deems ‘unproductive’: mutual aid networks, climate resilience projects or communal arts. These become acts of dual power, prefiguring postwork relations within the shell of the old system.
Concrete pedagogical interventions must model the society we seek. Marxist pedagogy rejects ‘reformist’ skills-training (e.g., coding for gig work), instead designing learning that practices expropriation – reclaiming time, space and creativity from market logic. For instance, students might study squatter movements or universal basic income campaigns, then prototype community land trusts or time-banking systems. Courses could replace competitive grading with cooperatively managed projects sustaining life beyond profit: maintaining neighbourhood food forests, creating open-access digital archives or developing care collectives. Such work dissolves the boundary between ‘productive’ and ‘reproductive’ labour, teaching that tending relationships and ecosystems is foundational to a postwork world.
Finally, Marxism demands vigilance against neoliberal co-optation. Transitional education must explicitly target the abolition of work ideology, not its adaptation. This requires dismantling racialised and gendered myths that equate non-productivity with laziness (e.g., ‘welfare queen’ tropes), exposing how these stereotypes uphold exploitation (Virno, 2004). Crucially, educators must foreground global solidarity, challenging the illusion that postwork futures in wealthy nations can exist without ending imperialism’s reliance on hyper-exploited labour elsewhere. By uniting critiques of work, race and empire, education cultivates a transnational working-class consciousness capable of seizing technological and ecological ruptures not for profit, but for liberation – actualising Marx’s vision of a society where ‘the free development of each is the condition for the free development of all.’
7. Conclusion: Work, Machines and the Future of Human Purpose
The automation of labour challenges not only economic systems but also philosophical and pedagogical foundations. As intelligent machines replace both manual and cognitive tasks, societies must decide whether to cling to obsolete labour ideologies or to envision a postwork condition based on dignity, care and flourishing. The future of work in the age of AI is not predetermined. As Gorz warns, the liberation from work may become a curse if not grounded in new forms of collective meaning. Education has a central role in this transition – not as an engine of employability, but as a site of moral and civic imagination. It must help learners navigate the disintegration of the work society and co-create alternatives grounded in justice, creativity and ecological responsibility. In the age of automation, the central philosophical question remains: how shall we live and what shall we teach, when work is no longer the measure of life?
This question demands a reframing of human purpose beyond the economistic metrics of productivity, efficiency and exchange. If the essence of education has been tethered to preparing individuals for labour markets, then the decline of those markets compels a rearticulation of education’s telos. What emerges is the need for a pedagogy of post-labour humanism – an orientation toward life that values being over doing, meaning over output and relationships over transactions. The promise of AI lies not in its capacity to displace workers, but in its potential to liberate human time and imagination from economic compulsion. This transformation, however, is not automatic. Without political will and collective action, AI may simply amplify the inequalities of the present, deepening the divide between those with access to capital, education and technological fluency and those rendered superfluous by automation. Education systems must therefore confront not only the technological challenges posed by AI but also the structural injustices that determine its impact. This includes rethinking curricula, institutional priorities and modes of assessment to resist the instrumental logic that equates human worth with economic function.
Furthermore, the postwork horizon calls for renewed attention to existential and ethical questions that have long been marginalised within education. What constitutes a good life in a world no longer organised by labour? How do we cultivate responsibility, joy, or care in the absence of economic necessity? What kinds of knowledge, relationships and institutions can support human flourishing under conditions of technological abundance and ecological precarity? These are no longer speculative inquiries – they are practical imperatives. Finally, the task of educational philosophy is to hold space for ambivalence. While the decline of work may offer opportunities for emancipation, it also threatens to dissolve the structures of meaning and identity that modern societies have long relied upon. The role of education, then, is to accompany this transition – to offer frameworks of orientation, critique and creativity that help individuals and communities build new solidarities. Whether the postwork future becomes one of exclusion or inclusion, despair or renewal, depends in large part on the kinds of learning, thinking and imagination we cultivate today.
Michael.Peters@waikato.ac.nz