Drawing on Paul Lafargue's 1883 pamphlet 'The Right to Be Lazy,' this essay explores anxieties about AI displacing workers by connecting them to 19th-century fears about industrial machines. Lafargue, Karl Marx's son-in-law, argued that machines should liberate workers from toil rather than enslave them further, and called for the rationalization of work hours. The piece uses Lafargue's concept of otium — meaningful idleness — to suggest that AI-driven automation could be an opportunity for genuine leisure rather than a catastrophe, if society chooses to frame it that way.
Sort: