What works if no-one works?

It’s been a while. I was reading the old homepage copy for Resident Human this week.

Robotics, automation and AI all stand poised to fundamentally change the way our societies operate. At the same time mass technologies, infinitely scalable at almost zero marginal cost have reconfigured our modes of interaction while creating unprecedented amounts of data that are being used to monitor us, model us and market to us. More than 90% of all information ever created was made in the last two years.

We are drowning in a sea of ‘What’ but we are doing less and less to understand ‘why’.

Though progress is fast, human evolution is slow.

Technology is seamless, but people need seams to exist.

Resident Human’s mission is to Put the Soul into the Machine.

We are dedicated to embracing data, technology and innovation, and shaping it to work for people, providing empathetic insight that can shape a future that serves humanity not expediency.

This was written back in 2019. I was fresh out of a role leading insights for Uber Eats APAC and was hoping to parlay that into a future role as a kind of roving empathetic node, interfacing between flesh and code, people and tech, atoms and bits.

It’s sure as fuck didn’t work out that way.

Fast-forward to 2026 and the reality is that the intuitive impulse that drove me to position my work at the time as the ‘Resident Human’ in the room has never been more urgent. Meanwhile those of you who know me outside of my day job or various online ciphers will know that I am leaning hard into my own humanity – and humility – by retraining in wine alongside my day job – working a few shifts a week at the peerless Indie Wine Club in Tooting and studying for various wine exams. The thinking being is that as the messy middle of consulting hollows out, if my current business doesn’t manage to clamber out of the morass to establish a high-touch, high value practice, at least I have an anti-fragile backup plan in an increasingly automated age. No-one wants a robot sommelier.

Or so I thought.

During a recent shift on a busy Saturday, I was serving a table of three young-ish women. They said they were looking for a lighter style of red and had suffered at the hands of a particularly harsh pub Pinot Noir the night before so were looking for something with a little more elegance (my words, not theirs). As I was about to fetch them some options, one of the trio whipped out her phone (I say whipped out, but that’s a lazy writer’s cliche, she unlocked the screen – she had been clutching it since they sat down as if it contained the fragile essence of her very life-force)

“I asked ChatGPT for a smoother red wine with a lighter body; I told it we thought we liked pinot noir but had a bad one yesterday that we felt was too harsh.”

I generally try not to embody the arch stereotype of the wine-gatekeeping waiter. It’s that bullshit that meant I came to this game late, and I fundamentally believe experiencing wine should be about discovery, not knowledge hierarchies, but this hit a nerve. My hedge suddenly looked like a very poor naked short. 

“Why don’t you just head to our shelves, snap a photo and let Chat do the rest? It’ll save me a job and to be honest, it means I can tell my boss that she can cut back on staff going forward and up her margin.”

Zero stars Google Review incoming. ‘Brigitte’ – as I’ll call the man-machine hybrid clutching the iPhone 14 – paused a beat, then started apologising. I might have gone in a little too hard. Anyway, as I smoothed out the figurative ruffles with a belated warm hospitality that I hope covered my bite with the veneer of a joke, I asked what Chat had suggested.

A Merlot.

I think I am safe for now.

But it did make me think. 

We have let loose a 21st century technology in liberal democracies that are operating on a fundamentally 19th Century socio-economic OS. One that has been polished to a lustrous shine by the social-democratic compacts of the 20th century, through workers rights, the invention of the weekend, consumer technologies of pleasure and convenience. Viewed through this lens, the pivotal moment of our post-agrarian  story is when Henry Ford started paying his workers enough to afford the cars they were building. By the end of the Millennium, though unevenly distributed, we’d never had it so good. We might never again.

Whatever you think of Marx, the concepts of Capital and Labour are sometimes useful to analyse where we are, and where we could be heading. As a social historian by training and an optimist by inclination, I am loath to listen to the millenarian narratives about the current cresting wave of new technologies that “this time it’s different”; but for once I think “they” might have a point.

The productive, antagonistic detente between owners and do-ers that liberal democracies have continually negotiated may really be about to collapse. Automation comes for the factories, Drones for the drivers, but this broad suite of AI-powered tech is also coming for the corporate lawyers and even the therapists. When you can automate everything, including knowledge work, where does labour get displaced to? There is no leverage to negotiate with capital when your humans become surplus to requirements. At least the Agricultural Revolution put this surplus labour and burgeoning populations to work in the factories and mines that became the crucible in which our current socio-economic covenant was eventually forged. Of course, the lights have been flashing amber for a while. The platform capitalists are already showing that revenue-per-employee can asymptote to near-infinity. How does capitalist-democracy work when the capitalists don’t need the demos?

There is – there always is – another way. Automate everything, tax the rewards of algorithmic labour strategically and broadly – a robo-taxi doesn’t have a mortgage to pay or kids to read to at night. Or better still directly socialise the benefits, though I know many would be queasy about this dampening innovation by blunting the profit motive. Then retool the system. Use the proceeds to incentivise jobs that are rich in humanity, and then let the machines get on with the rest. Maybe that looks like $100k a year salaries for care workers rather than coders? A universal three-day working week? Universal Basic Income or Service Provision? Perhaps we’ll live in a world of millionaire philosophers? Machines get on with the quotidian parts of life, while humans get on with living well.

Sounds great? But also naively Utopian. Which in truth, it is. Technically this utopia is possible, but the reality is, the same smoothed out 19th century socio-economic power structures, yoked to these technologies make it highly unlikely. Boot up these technologies on the mainframe of late industrial capitalism, and the results will be, well, capitalistic.

But as most labour as we know it becomes increasingly surplus to requirements, we are going to have to face the question of what we do with the surplus, and how we house, feed and fulfil its human potential. All I know is we aren’t going to solve the problem by leaving it to the profit motive and the invisible hand alone.