Many intellectuals - including Arendt - have cautioned that automation will not only hit different strata of the population unevenly but that a society that rests on wage labor, in which the individual’s value depends on his or her productivity, cannot simply abandon its foundation. Her writings from the early 1950s seem to find an echo in contemporary fantasies of a life without labor: in these silicon dreams, technological liberation promises more time for leisure and communal work, the rise of an expansive social system, and a true commitment, for the first time in human history, to remedying the ills of poverty through the distribution of machine-generated wealth. Apolity is what Hannah Arendt calls this state, picking up on the ancient Greek terror of existence outside the city walls. THE HUMAN IS an abstraction that depends on the spread of a condition in which no one lives with anyone anymore.
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