Kurt Vonnegut’s first novel, Player Piano, was a dystopia set in a future America where almost all manufacturing jobs have been replaced by automation.
It didn’t happen then, but the issue is back in the news. Are there recent books that take on the issue of jobs being lost across all society, either to robots or machines more generally? Individual job loss, like robot cops or somesuch, isn’t what I’m looking for.
By recent I mean this decade, maybe the last decade if the book is wholly devoted to the subject, but not anything 20th century. The book doesn’t have to be labeled as sf. Any future that talks about how the world will change, even if marketed as mainstream, is wanted.
I remember a young adult book where automation was used in response to a severe population decline, but then the population rebounded and most adults were consigned to a lifetime of unemployment (also the life expectancy was only in the 60s). The protagonists were recent graduates of a boarding school who couldn’t find jobs and were assigned to live in a ghetto for the unemployed. Only the employed (or presumably independently wealthy) had civil rights. The protagonists ended up in testing a hyper realistic VR game that turned out to be survival training for an interstellar colony. They didn’t really what was really happening until after they’d been dropped on the new planet with just the clothes on their backs. I can’t remember the title, but I think I may have asked about it on this board before.:o
Saturn’s Children (2008) and Neptune’s Brood (2013) by Charles Stross are in the neighbourhood of what you’re looking for. They’re about societies composed entirely of robots and AI machines because humans have become extinct. (I’ve read Saturn’s Children but I haven’t read Neptune’s Brood.)
Yeah, it’s embarrassing. In my defense, it’s impossible to keep up with the present while spending all my time in the past. The field has grown so huge that hundreds of books might be out there that zoomed right past me.
I’ll check those out. I’m really looking for the effect on humans, though, and how they cope in a world without work.
I realize it falls outside your timeline, but John Varley sort of touches on the subject you’ve described. He doesn’t have any robots in his Eight Worlds series (that I recall) but he shows humans living in a society where all of their needs are catered to them by an AI computer and many people have begun to feel like there’s no purpose to life. If you haven’t read it, I’d recommend Steel Beech (1992) as the work that most directly addresses this theme.
Ah. How about Vinge’s Rainbow’s End, where everyone is desperately trying to keep up with tech and expecting that the job he has today won’t exist in 2 years (actually that description fits the novella that was the precursor to RE better than the novel does - the novella was Fast Times at Fairmont High)
Just a bit before your specified period is Neal Stephenson’s The Diamond Age. (1996). After the nanotech revolution, there is a substantial population of unemployed/underemployed “thetes” (name derived from the lowest free class in ancient Athens).
The setting of the Judge Dredd comics has near universal unemployment because of robot labor. The Midas plague series is set in a world where production is so efficient that consumption has to be enforced. (Those lucky enough to be employed get to live the simple life). Wasn’t there also a twilight zone episode where a manager intent on automating his factory gets replaced by a computer?
Not exactly what you’re after but Autonomous (2017) by Annalee Newitz addresses some of the societal changes advances in robotics and AI might bring.
I liked it a lot.
That would be “Invitation to the Game” which is on my bookshelf somewhere from an ancient Scholastic Book Fair, and not a bad candidate for the OP’s criteria. I really loved the book when I was younger, so seeing it mentioned here makes me itch for a re-read. It probably is a little more youth oriented than a lot of the other suggestions here, but the unemployment problem due to automation is fairly central to the plot.
It imagines a future where anything and everything can be automated by people making expendable, temporary copies of themselves, basically golems. IIRC, the simpler the intended task, the longer the copy would last.
That would pretty much take care of all manufacturing, not to mention other professions, including medicine and law. (Somehow, super-sharp copies capable of such feats are also possible, although shorter lived and more expensive.)
I’d also look into David Brin’s other “near future” works, where he accepts the challenge of trying to imagine the world within the next 50 years. It is far easier to write about today, or 100+ years in the future, as in the former case you just write about what is known today, and in the latter, you imagine a future free of many constraints because, you know, “the future.” Trying to accurately predict what’s coming in 10, 20, 30 years is really hard. He gets a surprisingly large number of things right, if you look at his book “Earth” from the early 1990s, and compare that to today.