{"id":247337,"date":"2026-11-14T11:05:22","date_gmt":"2026-11-14T17:05:22","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2026\/11\/aaron-benanav-on-automation-technological-unemployment-and-ubi"},"modified":"2026-11-14T11:05:22","modified_gmt":"2026-11-14T17:05:22","slug":"aaron-benanav-on-automation-technological-unemployment-and-ubi","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2026\/11\/aaron-benanav-on-automation-technological-unemployment-and-ubi","title":{"rendered":"Aaron Benanav on Automation, Technological Unemployment and UBI"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p><audio controls style=\"width:625px;\"><source src=\"https:\/\/feeds.soundcloud.com\/stream\/833330194-singularity1on1-aaron-benanav.mp3?_=1\" type=\"audio\/mpeg\"><\/audio><\/p>\n<p>Six years ago, two and a half years before ChatGPT, I spent nearly two hours with a historian of unemployment.<\/p>\n<p>Not a futurist. A historian. Aaron Benanav has devoted his career to studying why people can\u2019t find work, and how poorly we measure it when they can\u2019t.<\/p>\n<p>He told me the term \u201ctechnological unemployment\u201d is inaccurate and misleading.<\/p>\n<p>That was contrarian in 2020. In 2026, with CEOs lining up to announce that #AI will hollow out white-collar work, it sounds almost like heresy. So I went back and listened again.<\/p>\n<p>It holds up uncomfortably well.<\/p>\n<p>We dug into the parts of the #automation debate that rarely make headlines: what the productivity data actually shows, why capital so often chooses to replace people rather than empower them, why the left and the right both champion #UBI for opposite reasons, and what Keynes promised his grandchildren (who, it turns out, are us).<\/p>\n<div class=\"more-link-wrapper\"> <a class=\"more-link\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2026\/11\/aaron-benanav-on-automation-technological-unemployment-and-ubi\">Continue reading \u201cAaron Benanav on Automation, Technological Unemployment and UBI\u201d | &gt;<\/a><\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Six years ago, two and a half years before ChatGPT, I spent nearly two hours with a historian of unemployment. Not a futurist. A historian. Aaron Benanav has devoted his career to studying why people can\u2019t find work, and how poorly we measure it when they can\u2019t. He told me the term \u201ctechnological unemployment\u201d is [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":737,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[39,6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-247337","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-economics","category-robotics-ai"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/247337","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/737"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=247337"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/247337\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=247337"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=247337"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=247337"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}