Part 12/13:
Finally, the breakthroughs in AI capabilities tie into ongoing discussions in post-labor economics. As AI systems become capable of performing tasks traditionally requiring human expertise—ranging from reasoning to complex scientific research—the nature of work and societal organization will shift.
Recent work by authors like myself explores this through the post-labor economics framework, a six-part model that examines automation’s rise, the decline of traditional labor, changes in social contracts, measurement metrics, interventions, and a new societal paradigm post-labor. Enhanced AI reasoning, especially in STEM, accelerates this transition by democratizing access to high-level skills and diminishing the need for traditional labor-intensive expertise.