Consider the following comments on automation.
We automate the task and then discover the dignity was hidden inside the labour.
Every machine that frees a worker also asks society who that worker is now meant to be.
The promise of less work has, somehow, always arrived as more.
A job is not only a wage, it is a place to stand in the world.
We measure what the machine produces and forget to measure what the worker loses.
Write a piece in response to one or more of these comments. Your essay will be assessed on the quality of your argument and the way you express it.
A way into this prompt
Argue that automation is not merely an economic event but a moral one, because work has never been only about output, and stripping the labour can strip the meaning with it. Begin by conceding the liberating case, that handing dangerous, dull or backbreaking tasks to machines has spared real bodies real suffering. Then press the harder point: a job supplies identity, structure and a sense of contribution, so displacing it raises a question that no productivity figure can answer, namely what people are for when their labour is no longer needed. A useful third move distinguishes automating the toil within a job from abolishing the role of the person entirely. Caution: avoid both the techno-utopian fantasy that freed time automatically becomes flourishing and the reactionary instinct to preserve drudgery simply because it is familiar.