You can earn a living by cleaning people’s houses – unless it happens to be the house you live in yourself. You can make money by taking care of children – unless they happen to be your own. You can get paid for garden work – unless it’s in your own garden.

But that’s just the way our society is organized: some of the work done by some people is considered to be a job, which gets rewarded with money, other work done by other people is not. Is that a good way? Is that a fair way? An increasing number of people are asking these questions. In his book WTF – What’s The Future and Why It’s up To Us Tim O’Reilly is dealing with this theme, along with a lot of other topics that are related to the way we have come to organize our society, and what might be the possible and/or desirable future for it. (Amazing, wonderful book: buy it, borrow it, whatever, but read it and then give it a 5-star review- actually: they should come up with 6-star reviews for books like this one.)

Also the idea of an unconditional  (or universal) basic income (UBI) is mentioned, especially in the context that there simply might, in the relative near future, not be enough jobs for everyone who wants to Continue reading →