First version: 2026-07-26
Last updated: 2026-07-28
I recently created a page on my website on the topic of printing money to pay the living expenses of everyone by default. I wanted to update it to provide more information on why I think creating the system is justified, however what I wanted to write was too long to fit into that page and was a bit off-topic, so I decided to create a new page.
On this page, I discuss the topic of automating work and the incentives it creates for people in society to pretend to work, either by performing unnecessary work, or by completely pretending to work and actually doing no work at all. I suspect that this practice is common, and that for many people, when they are "working from home", they are actually not doing any work, and instead are trying to mislead people who are actually working. In addition to being unethical due to the fact that it creates a type of slavery system in which the people who are actually working are slaves, it appears to me to be the case that this behaviour slows technological progress, causing unnecessary suffering by preventing the advancement of important technologies which could do things like address climate change or improve medical treatments. I personally believe that paying the basic living expenses of everyone by default, particularly by making food, rent, and medical care free, so that anyone who wanted to could choose to work on designing improved technologies rather than having to find a job working for an existing corporation, is one way this problem could be addressed.
In some cases I have described things which I have not personally experienced myself, as I have never been included in a social group of people who are pretending to work. In those cases, I am speculating based on what seems likely to me based on the incentives that appear to exist.
I have been thinking about the incentives that people have when working for corporations or other large organizations. I have a suspicion that it may be the case that, over time, corporations tend to become social clubs in which many people are not actually doing useful work, and are instead engaged in complicated rituals designed to fill time and make it appear that the work they are doing is required to produce the outputs of the corporation even if that is not the case. Individual workers always have an incentive to to make it appear as if their work is required to produce the outputs of the corporation, because otherwise they would be at risk of losing their jobs if people were to notice that the corporation would function without them, and that the corporation would be able to increase its profit margin if the salary of the worker no longer had to be paid. However, in addition to the incentive that individual workers have to do this, as far as I can tell it appears that executives at the corporation also have an incentive to encourage the employees to engage in this behaviour as well.
The reason why executives might want to encourage employees to engage in unnecessary rituals designed to make it appear that their work is required has to do with maintaining the prices that corporation is able to charge for the outputs of the corporation. For work that is not automated and is actually required, there is a straightforward relationship between the minimum price that can be charged for the output of the corporation, and the amount of labour that was required to produce the output. If it takes a worker a certain number of hours to perform a task that is required to produce an output of the corporation, then the corporation has no choice but to pay the market rate that it costs to pay a worker to spend that amount of time performing the required labour. However, the situation changes if the labour being performed by the worker only has to be performed once, perhaps because the worker is being paid to create a system that automates the production of the output, and after that the output of the corporation can be produced without any further labour by a paid worker. In that case, theoretically the corporation has the ability to lower their prices dramatically after producing the initial output.
Unfortunately, the situation in which it is possible to lower prices dramatically after producing the initial output creates a dilemma for the executives of the corporation. The goal of the executives of the corporation is to maximize profit on behalf of the shareholders. With the work now automated, it would theoretically be possible to lay off the employees that created the automated system in order to save the money that the corporation was previously spending on their salaries. Ideally, the executives would prefer to do this while not lowering the prices that they charge their customers, so that their costs decrease while the revenue that the corporation is making from their customers stays the same. This would maximize the profit margin. However, if the corporation did this, and laid off the employees, there is nothing stopping those employees from automating the work again at a competing business which could then charge a lower price for the output of the corporation, and therefore force the original corporation to lower its prices as well due to the competition. For this reason, the corporation has an incentive not to lay off the employees that are able to automate work, in order to prevent this from happening.
For the executives, the ideal solution would be to reassign these employees to other tasks rather than laying them off. However, if this is not possible, perhaps because there are no other tasks that the executives require them to complete, then the second best option would be if the employees instead filled time and acted as if they were still doing work that the corporation required them to perform. If the employees completely stopped working in a very obvious way that people outside of the corporation were able to perceive, then people outside of the corporation would realize that it was possible to automate the work, and might attempt to start competing businesses themselves. Therefore, at the very least, the employees have to make it appear to people outside of the corporation that they are still doing necessary work.
There are multiple approaches that can be taken to convince employees to act as if they were still doing necessary work. One of those is to simply tell them the truth, and inform them that their job is now to simply act as if they were still doing work even if they are not. This can be done if the employees can be trusted to keep the fact that they are not working secret. If this is not the case, and they cannot be trusted to keep the secret, the other option is to assign them work and tell them that the work is necessary even if it is not necessary. This has the downside of the fact that it may require significant effort to mislead the employees and convince them that they are doing something necessary. In many cases, a hybrid approach can be taken in which the employees are assigned unnecessary work, while subtly communicating to them the truth that it is not necessary. This has the benefit of making it easier for the employees to believably act like they are still working because they have some actual tasks to perform even though they are not necessary tasks, while avoiding the significant effort required to fully mislead the employees.
For a software engineer, it is surprisingly easy to come up with unnecessary work. A project can be completely rewritten in order to obtain a marginal benefit, or project can be implemented in a way such that, even though the final result after a series of steps is predictable and could be created immediately, the work instead proceeds through all possible intermediate steps. In some cases, there are benefits to doing these things, which is why it is sometimes difficult to tell that something about them is unnecessary. As well, it is sometimes enjoyable to do certain kinds of work, like rewriting a project. Even though the benefit may only be marginal, it might still be worth doing in some cases. However, when compared to other work that the same employees could be doing, perhaps at a different company or in a different industry, it can seem less necessary. For other fields besides software engineering there are likely other methods that can be used.
On this page, I generally refer to people that are knowingly doing unnecessary tasks as people who are pretending to work, even though technically, the act of misleading other into believing that they are working is actually a form of work. I hope that the reader is able to correctly understand what I mean when I use the phrase. For the people who are doing unnecessary work without realizing that it is unnecessary, I do not view their behaviour as pretending to work, though in many ways their behaviour has a similar impact on society as the people who are pretending to work, and so in some cases they should be included in the group, depending on the context.
Aside from the incentive to pretend to work which is caused by wanting to avoid laying off employees that previously created systems which automate work, there is one other additional incentive which encourages employees to pretend to work, or at least to perform legitimate work slowly. In many cases, if a large project is delayed, the person paying for the project is left with no choice but to pay the same employees additional money in order to complete the project, as those employees are generally still considered to be the experts at completing the work. This can be in the form of additional salary, if the employees are salaried employees. In a sense, the employees hold the project hostage by working on it slowly, forcing the employer to pay them more money in order to complete it.
Even though it is important for the employees to create the appearance to people outside the corporation that everyone inside the corporation is doing necessary work, this is not necessarily the case for other people inside the same corporation. As long as the other people inside the corporation can be trusted to keep the secret, and to not attempt to leave the corporation and start working at a competing business which will charge lower prices or complete the work more quickly, then the employees can speak openly about the fact that they are aware that they are doing unnecessary work. This makes things much easier for the employees. In many cases it is difficult for employees to perform unnecessary work which appears believably required to someone who is paying attention closely. Therefore, the employees that are aware that they are doing unnecessary work have an incentive to try to spend more of their time around people with whom they do not need to keep the secret that they are doing unnecessary work. This incentive causes social groups to be created which have multiple people actively coordinating to create the appearance that they are doing necessary work even though they are not.
Ideally, these social groups of people socializing while they pretend to work would be large enough that employees are able to spend the majority of their time socializing with others who are also pretending to work. This minimizes the amount of time that the employees need to spend actively misleading others and trying to make it appear that they are working. However, there are limits to how large the social groups can be. Since the people inside these social groups have leverage over others in the sense that they know that the others are also pretending to work, which is something that they all wish to keep secret, every person who is inside the group has to be satisfied that they are better off if they keep the secret. The most obvious way to do this is by paying them money to keep the secret. However, the corporation only has a limited amount of money that it can spend on salaries. Therefore, the people inside the social group have an incentive to also use other methods of convincing people to keep the secret. I have not been inside a group like this myself, and so I can only speculate, however it seems possible to me that people might end up using leverage in the form of blackmail, or even the threat of violence.
To maximize the believably of the unnecessary work, one approach that can be used is to have a secret social group which actually includes people from multiple companies. If multiple companies appear to be competing, this makes it more believable that all of the employees are doing necessary work, because people are likely to assume that if they were not then one of the companies would lay off the employees that are doing unnecessary work, and would lower their prices in order to obtain a larger share of the customer base and increase their own revenue. This behaviour of coordinating between companies to keep prices high is something that would clearly be illegal under the various competition laws, and so in my opinion what is most likely occurring is that the various large corporations coordinate without explicitly communicating with each other. This is why we often see large corporations with large numbers of employees selling similar products which appear likely to have been produced using an automated process, and yet the large number of employees stay employed and prices stay high.
For people who are not part of the system and are not receiving the benefits being afforded to the people who are pretending to work, this system is clearly not ideal. People who are outside of these groups still require money in order to pay their living expenses, and many of them are employed in jobs which require physical labour that cannot easily be automated, at least with current technology. If they were aware that the corporations employ large numbers of people who are pretending to work for the purposes of keeping prices high, they would likely object.
There are a few approaches that can be taken to deal with outsiders. For the outsiders that do not appear to have the skills to create automated systems, and are also unlikely to realize on their own that many people at corporations are pretending to work, nothing needs to be done. People working at corporations depend on these outsiders to perform physical labour throughout society and provide services for the people working at corporations. Given that these outsiders themselves require money in order to pay living expenses, and that if they do not receive money they may become homeless or otherwise be physically harmed, these outsiders are effectively unwitting slaves of the people working at corporations who are pretending to work.
For outsiders that either do have the skills to create automated systems, or might be able to discover the fact that many people are pretending to work and credibly might be able to convince other people of that fact, another option is to hire them. People who are receiving a salary from the corporation are less likely to question the behaviour of the corporation, and in many cases the corporation does actually have some necessary work that it requires people to perform. These new employees can either be included in the group that is aware that people are performing unnecessary work or they can be included in the group that is not aware, depending on how likely they are to keep the secret.
However, there is one group of outsiders that is particularly difficult for the corporation to deal with. These are the outsiders who appear to have the skills to create automated systems, while also not being trustworthy enough to keep the secret that the many employees are pretending to work, and also are not gullible enough to be assigned unnecessary work without realizing it. For this group the corporation does not have many options. The people who are keeping the secret have an incentive to do something to cause these outsiders to be unable to work for a competing business which would charge lower prices or complete work more quickly. If there is enough money involved, it seems possible to me that there could be an incentive to harm the reputation of the outsider who would not keep the secret to prevent them from being able to find employment elsewhere, or even potentially to use violence.
The recent rapid advancements in artificial intelligence appear to interact with this system in a significant way. AI is noteworthy in the fact that it is possible to use it to automate a very large number of jobs. Even jobs that that involve physical labour that do not appear to be easily automated using AI are able to be automated more quickly due to the fact that AI can be used to quickly design robots that are able to perform the physical labour. This creates a problem for the social groups inside corporations that are trying to fill time with unnecessary work in order to keep prices high. It seems likely that the number of people who are aware of these groups will increase as it becomes more obvious that people are doing jobs which could be done using AI. Eventually, the number of people who are aware of these groups will likely increase until the entire population is aware. At that point, it seems likely that we will need a new economic system.
As I mentioned in the introduction, I have already created another page on my website in which I have described some ideas for a system which uses money printed by the central bank to support the living expenses of everyone, regardless of whether they are employed or not. One thing that I did not mention on that page is how the social aspect of corporations could be replaced.
One benefit of the current system is that the large organizations which hire people to do unnecessary work actually provide social benefits to the employees that are engaged in the unnecessary work. People need a reason in order to socialize. If all work was completely automated, people would still need to find reasons in order to socialize. Corporations could still perform this function. On my page about printing money, I described how money could be printed on-demand in order to pay a person or a business for providing a service to another person. Corporations could theoretically be paid for the service of providing a social environment. Some of the employees at the corporation could still be doing useful work that is required to produce outputs of the corporation which are sold to generate revenue for the corporation, however others could have less well-defined roles and may not necessarily need to perform useful work. The government could theoretically pay corporations to continue to keep these employees, rather than laying them off, due to the fact that the corporation is providing the service of providing a social environment for the employee.
With this kind of system, however, it does not seem fair for some people in society be provided with a social environment and others to not be provided with one. It seems like it might be ideal if every person was guaranteed to be able to be employed by at least one corporation which is providing a social environment. I am not quite sure how this could be done in practice, since it also does not seem fair to force people to socialize with others that they do not wish to socialize with. I am not completely sure what the solution might be and so this is somewhat of an open question from my perspective.
Personally, I have an image of the future in which corporations are a bit like countries. Many corporations would sell products that are similar to the products produced by other corporations, and the employees inside each corporation would be generally expected to use and promote the products sold by the corporation that they were employed by. In some cases, there could be competitive events that different corporations participated in, and the employees of each corporation would be expected to support their corporation, similar to how a person is expected to support their country at sports events like the Olympics.
In the future, as human civilization expands into space, there could be structures in space, like space stations, which each corporation creates using their own technology. The employees of each corporation could then occupy and operate the space stations owned by their corporation. There could be competitive drone battles, or perhaps large role-playing experiences so that people can participate in experiences that are similar to those portrayed on television shows like Star Trek, with each corporation being conceptually similar to an alien race on Star Trek, each with its own technology and culture. It sounds pretty cool to me.