Technology won’t make us poorer, at least not in the aggregate. Distribution could be a thorny problem, but there are worse things than having to come up with political solutions to close a yawning wealth inequality in a time of plenty.

In his latest Financial Times column, Andrew McAfee focuses on a different issue concerning to him in regards to technological unemployment: the devil and idle (non-robotic) hands. He cites the alarming Case-Deaton findings of a scary spike in the mortality rate of white, middle-aged Americans, believing the collapse of industrial jobs and of communities is a matter of causation, with the former prompting the latter.

It’s difficult to know for sure if that’s so, but it’s possible McAfee is on to something. Already it seems we’ve become too much a nation anesthetized by prescription painkillers, fantasy football and smartphones, not willing to take a good look in the mirror, unless it’s the black mirror. Sure, there’s nothing new in feeling lost, but you only get to find yourself through a life lived with purpose. My best guess is that people in a less-workcentric world will eventually find new kinds of purpose, but the transition may be a bumpy one.

An excerpt:

So what happens when the industrial-era jobs that underpinned the middle class start to go away? Voltaire offered a prescient caution when he observed that: “Work saves us from three great evils: boredom, vice, and need.”

Of the three of these, I’m the least worried about need. Trade and technological progress, after all, make a society wealthier in aggregate. The problem that they bring is not one of scarcity — of not enough to go around. Instead, they bring up thorny questions of allocation.

But rather than spending time on that issue here (if you’re interested, Erik Brynjolfsson and I dedicate a lot of our book The Second Machine Age to it), I want to focus on Voltaire’s other two evils, boredom and vice. How bad are they? How worried should we be about them?

I sometimes hear the argument that we shouldn’t be that worried at all. If we don’t need people’s labour, this logic goes, why should we care what they do with their time? Why should traditional notions of boredom and vice matter? If people want to drink, take drugs, engage in casual sex or play video games all day, where’s the harm? These are not the most conventionally respectable or productive activities, but why should we let convention continue to hold sway?•