A few weeks ago, Nicolás Litvinoff wrote a column in the Argentinian newspaper La Nacion, in which he claims that labour, as it is traditionally conceived, has been fatally wounded. There are two alternatives to this situation: deny it, or acknowledge it and start acting in order to prevent collateral damages in our lives.

According to Litvinoff, promises are made from the left and the right on something that will not happen: the creation of jobs in a world that, inevitably, tends to generate a growing number of unemployed people as a consequence of the technological innovations and robots replacing humans.

Most of the current jobs are going through an automation process in which machines are the main actors. Artificial intelligence appears in our daily lives in the form of ATMs, online banking, self-driving cars, financial news developed by computers and many other developments that make the scientific community proud.

Today, we can claim that the jobs that will remain in our hands after the technological revolution will be those in which we may prove a better performance that computer algorithms, even though we still do not know exactly what kind of jobs we are talking about.

Livtinoff states that the good news is that technology that destroys today’s jobs will also create new ways of providing a better life quality to a growing number of unemployed people. Collective concerns on this regard are about the use of technology and the distribution of the wealth it generates.

The question is how we can prepare ourselves for what is going on and for what shall come. Is it possible to separate the concept of labor from the concept of income to benefit from this change of paradigm?

Litvinoff tries to answer those questions using his knowledge on Personal Finances and the notion of “The 3 keys to make money”.

The new unemployed and the unfolding of what is real  

Over the past few decades, the relationship of human capital and market value of a company has gone through a drastic change. Hiring more employees does not necessarily generate corporate wealth. A clear example is Tesla, the automotive company that produces electrical vehicles. Tesla has around 17,000 employees, a very small number when compared to the 200,000 Ford hires. However, due to the sharp increase of its shares price, it has a higher market value (USD 51,000 million against USD 43,000 million).

Given that Tesla is considered the future of the automotive industry, who could think that the labour market will go against this evolution?

The second problem that emerges in this new context connected to the new knowledge that the industry will demand. A large share of citizens could be marginalized due to the simple fact of not having proper training to get a new job.

The odds are that a larger group of unemployed people will emerge, which will have to keep on living and consuming. Nations will have to tend their most basic needs, such as keeping them busy and motivated to prevent them from leaving the system and, eventually, rebel against it.

To live without working

When analyzing the chance of living without working, Litvinoff generally focuses on what is the amount of money you need to reach that financial dream. Now, he suggests imagining a totally different situation: that of people who do not work not because they do not want to do it, but because they can’t. Clearly, the feeling is quite distressing.

Therefore, if we do not start separating the notion of income from the notion of labour, society will do it for us soon. You can dedicate your time to something and make money from another source.

In his article, “The 3 keys to make money”, he states that we must focus on generating additional sources of income using our ideas and the money we are saving.

Understanding this will let us understand that the death of labour is no other thing that the slow and constant reduction of opportunities of generating income through the use of our bodies. However, the rich income flow that comes from ideas and savings should not be affected by the new revolution of the industry.

Source: La Nacion