El desempleo no es un problema que deba resolverse: es el camino por el que vamos: Del trabajo necesario al tiempo libre: esclavitud, mecanización, inteligencia artificial y la posibilidad de una ciudadanía posempleo

Oscar R. Gomez; Ratan Lal Basu

doi:10.32351/rca.v11.437

Authors

Oscar R. Gomez Fundación MenteClara https://orcid.org/0000-0003-4469-8298
Ratan Lal Basu Presidency College, Calcutta & University of Calcutta, India. https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8178-0664

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.32351/rca.v11.437

Política de Crossmark DOI: https://doi.org/10.32351/politica-crossmark

Keywords:

work, unemployment, artificial intelligence, automation, productivity, leisure, citizenship, universal basic income, Inequality, attention economy

Abstract

The relationship between work, productivity, and leisure has undergone profound transformations throughout history. In the slave societies of Antiquity, certain forms of social organization allowed segments of the population to devote time to political, cultural, religious, and recreational activities through the appropriation of the labor of other human beings. The Industrial Revolution introduced a qualitatively different transformation by enabling machines to progressively replace part of human labor. Today, artificial intelligence extends this process to cognitive and professional tasks. This article proposes an alternative interpretation of the so-called unemployment problem: when a society reaches levels of productivity that make it possible to produce goods and services with a decreasing amount of human labor, the reduction in employment should not necessarily be regarded as an economic failure, but potentially as a liberation of time. The central problem therefore shifts from the creation of jobs to the distribution of the benefits of productivity. The article examines the attention economy, the concentration of benefits derived from digitalization, the redistributive function of the State, and the possibility of partially decoupling material subsistence from employment. Drawing on historical and contemporary precedents, including Keynes's reflections on the future of work, experiences with Universal Basic Income, and current debates surrounding artificial intelligence, the article proposes the hypothesis that AI could enable the democratization of leisure historically reserved for minorities. The decisive question, therefore, would not be how to preserve employment indefinitely, but how to transform increasing productivity into leisure, material security, and citizenship.

Downloads

Download data is not yet available.

Author Biographies

Oscar R. Gomez, Fundación MenteClara

Researcher, educator, and scientific editor. For more than forty years, he has been engaged in research, scientific methodology, and researcher training. He is President of Fundación MenteClara and Editor-in-Chief of the Revista Científica Arbitrada de Fundación MenteClara, an open-access academic journal indexed in national and international scientific information systems. For more than two decades, he has been actively involved in the evaluation, editing, and publication of hundreds of scientific manuscripts, an experience complemented by his research and reflection on the social transformations brought about by technological development. His interests include the relationships between technology, work, productivity, education, and citizenship, as well as the transformations that automation and artificial intelligence are introducing into contemporary forms of social organization. His work combines scientific research with the development of open-access technological platforms for the publication and dissemination of scientific knowledge, incorporating artificial intelligence tools, editorial standards, academic metadata, digital preservation, and interoperability among scientific information systems.
Ratan Lal Basu, Presidency College, Calcutta & University of Calcutta, India.

Doctor of Economics (Kautilya's Arthashastra). He is a prolific writer whose work encompasses fiction, Indology, Ancient History, Economics, International Relations, espionage, scientific interpretations of religious and mythological texts, yoga, and Tantric traditions. He is a graduate of Presidency College, Calcutta, and the University of Calcutta. He retired as Associate Professor of Economics and Professor-in-Charge at a publicly funded university, and subsequently joined the International Institute of Management Sciences (IIMS), Calcutta, and the Auckland Institute of Studies, New Zealand, as Director of their student financing programs. He is Treasurer of the Bengal Economic Association. He is an invited author on topics related to Indology for Cosmopolis, a bilingual scientific journal (French and English) associated with the Encyclopedia and jointly sponsored by the governments of Canada and Belgium. He is also an affiliated author with The Culture Mandala, the journal of Bond University, Australia. He is one of the most prominent critics of the Human Development Index (HDI).

References

Alphabet Inc. (2025). 2024 annual report. https://abc.xyz/assets/99/21/46cafdba41089a12a2d86ea47d44/goog026-annualreport2024-web.pdf

Autor, D. H. (2024). Applying AI to rebuild middle class jobs. National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper, 32140. https://doi.org/10.3386/w32140

Cazzaniga, M., Jaumotte, F., Li, L., Melina, G., Panton, A. J., Pizzinelli, C., Rockall, E. J., & Mendes Tavares, M. (2024). Gen-AI: Artificial intelligence and the future of work (IMF Staff Discussion Note 2024/001). International Monetary Fund. https://doi.org/10.5089/9798400262548.006

Cowen, T. (2018). Why hasn’t economic progress lowered work hours more? Social Philosophy and Policy, 35(2), 284–300. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0265052518000152

Forget, E. L. (2011). The town with no poverty: The health effects of a Canadian guaranteed annual income field experiment. Canadian Public Policy, 37(3), 283–305. https://doi.org/10.3138/cpp.37.3.283

Garlan, Y. (1988). Slavery in ancient Greece (J. Lloyd, Trans.; rev. and expanded ed.). Cornell University Press.

Garland, R. (2018). What is a slave society? The struggle for a forgotten concept. Cambridge University Press.

Gmyrek, P., Berg, J., & Bescond, D. (2023). Generative AI and jobs: A global analysis of potential effects on job quantity and quality (ILO Working Paper 96). International Labour Organization. https://doi.org/10.54394/FHEM8239

Hum, D., & Simpson, W. (2001). A guaranteed annual income? From Mincome to the millennium. Policy Options, 22(1), 78–82.

Kangas, O., Jauhiainen, S., Simanainen, M., & Ylikännö, M. (Eds.). (2021). Experimenting with unconditional basic income: Lessons from the Finnish basic income experiment 2017–2018. Edward Elgar Publishing.

Kaplan, S. A., Aitken, J. A., Allan, B. A., Alliger, G. M., Ballard, T., & Zacher, H. (2025). Revisiting Keynes’ predictions about work and leisure: A discussion of fundamental questions about the nature of modern work. Industrial and Organizational Psychology, 18, 1–22. https://doi.org/10.1017/iop.2024.58

Keynes, J. M. (1930). Economic possibilities for our grandchildren. En Essays in persuasion (pp. 321–332). Macmillan.

Kela. (2023). Experimenting with unconditional basic income: Lessons from the Finnish basic income experiment 2017–2018. Social Insurance Institution of Finland.

Marcuse, H. (1969). An essay on liberation. Beacon Press.

Marx, K. (1991). Capital: A critique of political economy (Vol. 3; D. Fernbach, Trans.). Penguin Books. (Trabajo original publicado en 1894).

Marx, K. (2010). Capital: A critique of political economy (Vol. 1; B. Fowkes, Trans.). Penguin Books. (Trabajo original publicado en 1867).

Mokyr, J. (1990). The lever of riches: Technological creativity and economic progress. Oxford University Press.

Rose, P. W. (2008). Class in archaic Greece. Cambridge University Press.