Examining the coming Robotic Age, the death of the Age of Labor, and the rise of the Age of Leisure.

1. Death to the Age of Labor,
a Mythos for the Age of Leisure
1. Labor in the Contemporary Academy
The contemporary academic discussion and debate concerning the nature of human existence revolves to a great
extent on the axis of ‘labor’. Assuming that, as reality has been reduced to passing time and physical space, order
must be created through hierarchical domination (Foucault, 1970; Barnesmoore, 2016a; Barnesmoore, 2016b;
Barnesmoore, 2017)1
, social philosophers and social scientists (as well as private and government sources of
funding for academic inquiry…) focus their attention on questions concerning the optimal means for creating a
materially productive social order. How can we create social structures, cultures, regimes of thought, conceptions
of being, etc. that will facilitate a mode of production that optimizes material production and consumption? What
is the best way to organize (socio-political structures like ‘states and ‘courts’) and cultivate (educational and cultural
structures that structure public emotional and intellectual potential) a mode of human society that best produces,
distributes and consumes goods that allow for survival and ‘progress’.
At the heart of the image of humanity as a laboring being lies the notion of scarcity.
“Trees and Algorithms provide us with useful metaphors for understanding true relationship between scarcity and the desire for
hierarchical domination and competition in ‘beings’ that lack reason. Trees grow straight up when there is direct sunlight. It is only when
sunlight becomes scarce that plants begin to grow (via an internal impetus reflexively-instinctually actualized by external environment)
over each other in order to compete for sunlight (i.e. scarcity brings on the desire for hierarchical domination and competition).
Interestingly, the only other context in which Trees don't grow straight up and down is when form is imposed upon them by external
forces like wind (which can be likened to Modernist social systems that seek to produce social order through external domination by
military and police ‘forces’). Plants only seek to dominate each other in environments of scarcity.
For an algorithmic example of the above metaphor, a computer program designed by Karl Sims (1994a; 1994b) to replicate the
process of Mechanical Evolution in the digital sphere demonstrates the ways in which scarcity works to produce the desire for
hierarchical domination and competition. In the digital simulation, a being is ‘selected’ for survival and continued evolution by capturing
and possessing a green cube located between the being and its ‘opponent’. At a certain point, beings in the simulation stopped evolving in
a manner that allowed them to simply move to the cube quickly and instead began to evolve in a manner that allowed beings to prevent
the competitor from getting to the cube that allowed beings putting the cube in a place where the competitor can not reach it.2
Again,
however, we see that scarcity and discrete individuality are the causal factors in producing the desire for hierarchical domination and
competition. In this light, we argue that social systems like Capitalism (especially Neoliberal Capitalism) that were designed (based on
biomaterialist, discrete conceptions of humanity and subsequent conceptions of human evolution as purely mechanical) to produce
social evolution through scarcity, competition and hierarchical domination actually work to socialize humans in (and thus constrain
human thought, behavior and conception of being to) a mode that negates the potential for conscious evolution, self-mediation of the
biological desires and the animal passions and thus causes ‘devolution’ or a ‘decay of conscious social order’ (which is to say decay of
intimacy with Infinite Substance and thus reason).” (Barnesmoore, 2016a)
2. Mythos for the Age of Leisure
We stand at the brink of a new age. If classified in the terms of contemporary social science, we would call it ‘the
AI-Robotic Age’ and see it as a next step in the progressive technological trajectory from early periods like the
1
Foucault, The Order of Things.
Barnesmoore 2016, “Conscious vs. Mechanical Evolution: Transcending Biocentrist Social Ontologies”, Environment and Social Psychology.
Barnesmoore 2017, “Conscious Evolution, Social Development and Environmental Justice”, Environment and Social Psychology.
2
http://www.karlsims.com/evolved-virtual-creatures.html
and
https://archive.org/details/sims_evolved_virtual_creatures_1994
Sims, K. “Evolving 3D Morphology and Behavior by Competition”. http://www.karlsims.com/papers/alife94.pdf

2. Bronze and Iron Age through the Industrial Age and into a utopian Silicon Age. The coming age, however,
cannot be understood in the linear-progressive terms with which we presently understand the evolution of
presently recorded history as there are multiple ages coming to a close—the technological age of human labor
based industrial production is coming to a close, which would fit well with the linear technological view of human
history, but with the close of the human labor based industrial production age we will also see the end of the much
longer Age of Labor and the rise of the Age of Leisure as mass-physical human labor (i.e. labor to produce food
and industrial goods) will no longer be required for the evolution and survival of humanity.
To elucidate our point we must make a short excursion into our conception of ages and aeons. ‘Ages’
(aeons) manifest as what we might call a fractal pattern. The pattern is formed as a function of ‘eternal forms’
(aeons)3
expressing themselves in the many scales of manifestation. As a tangible example, whether liquid is
traveling in a river, your veins or a tree (different scales), it will always take on the same branching and meandering
form (the same aeon). For the purposes of this discussion, we can say that multiple ‘ages’ manifest on a range of
temporal scales. From the ages of a human life (child, adult, elder) through the ages of the seasons (spring,
summer, fall, winter) to the ages of the celestial host (a lunar year, a solar year, the precession of the equinox, the
Yugas, etc.), many ages of different scales (many aeons manifesting on different scales) are occurring in unison.
Turning towards our discussion of the coming age, the end of the Low-Technological Age (physical labor based
industrial production) also marks the end of the Age of Labor, which has lasted throughout presently recorded
history. While the move from the Pre-Industrial Age to our contemporary Industrial Age marked a change akin to
learning a new physical ability (the move from crawling to walking), the shift from the Age of Labor to the Age of
Leisure is akin to a child shifting their attention from the cultivation of physical skills to the cultivation of mental
and emotional skills.
This shift from the Age of Labor to the Age of Leisure represents a moment that has been described by
many traditions: a Singularity, the Eschaton, the Apocalypse, the death of the Phoenix, etc. In the same way that
one cannot model the behavior of biological matter using inanimate matter, cannot model a tree using only the
seed, cannot model the behavior of rational beings on irrational beings, cannot model the future of post-Trump
US politics based on the past of pre-Trump US politics,4
we cannot predict the future based on the past when a
singularity moment occurs. The dimensional quality of the object of study (in this case the history of society) has
undergone a state change, and so we can no longer model the future based on the past. A singularity moment
‘changes the game’. Given this change in the state of human society, a shift from mastery of the physical world to
mastery of our mental and emotional world, we must envision
The distinction between Bio-Mechanical and Conscious Evolution is illustrative of the difference between
the Age of Labor and the Age of Leisure.5
Bio-Mechanical evolution functions through natural (‘irrational’)
selection, scarcity, competition, etc. Conscious Evolution functions through the direction of will towards the
cultivation of our emotional, mental, intuitive, etc. faculties, towards engagement with transformative ideas,
towards communion with beauty, truth and goodness. In the Age of Labor society was, for the general public,
organized with the intention of cultivating a public that would bring its physical labor to bear in the production of
material goods—survival meant staving of scarcity through the use of physical labor and so our social structures
mirrored the form (aeon) of Bio-Mechanical Evolution. Survival in the Age of Leisure (in technological terms the
AI-Robotic Age) will no longer be tied to our direction of physical labor towards material production (AI-Robots
will replace biological labor) and will instead be tied to wisdom and mastery of our emotional and intellectual
existence as the greatest threat to our survival (given the power afforded by high technology in the AI-Robotic Age)
is ourselves. Be it through weapons and war, pollution of our natural environment or some other extinction level
catastrophe we might bring on with our technology, humanity’s existence will no longer be threatened by
3
See the Chapter ‘Aeon’ in Maurice Nicoll’s Living Time for an in depth discussion of aeons.
4
https://www.academia.edu/30223234/Trump_as_a_Heterotopic_or_Singularity_Moment_A_September_2015_Prediction-Nightmare_Come_to_Pass_
5
Barnesmoore 2016, “Conscious vs. Mechanical Evolution: Transcending Biocentrist Social Ontologies”, Environment and Social Psychology.
Barnesmoore 2017, “Conscious Evolution, Social Development and Environmental Justice”, Environment and Social Psychology.

3. starvation and a lack of shelter but by a lack of wisdom, intuition, emotional maturity, intellect, etc. to properly
design and use our technology. Without physical labor to occupy the majority of humanity, and with a deficit in
cultural evolution that requires a great number of teachers, artists, organizers, planners, thinkers, poets, caretakers,
etc. we must conceptualize society in terms of Conscious Leisure. Conscious Leisure, defined generally as
communion with beauty, goodness and truth (be it through reading a moving poem or watching a beautiful
sunset), will organize society with a telos of conscious evolution rather than material production.
3. Time in the Age of Labor and Leisure
Where in Modernity human existence is, in its reduction to material labor (and the fulfillment of material
desire…), reduced to a linear temporal phenomena, a society designed around the notion of Conscious Leisure as
the teleological imperative of human existence would catalyze the potential for actualization of a mode of human
existence that transcends reflexive articulation by the linear-temporal world (by passing time and physical space).
The flash of lightning in the antediluvian mythological tradition, movements of the mind—inspirations, revelations,
a change in state of mind—occur in a moment. Conscious Evolution, which occurs through movements of the
mind, does not occur in a functional relationship with linear time like the bio-mechanical evolution of our
previous stage of evolution; Conscious Evolution comes through the direction of will towards the cultivation of our
invisible self (through self-observation, through contact with energies like transformative ideas, beautiful
experiences and emotions like love and joy, etc.) and happens in the instant that our state of mind is changed (in
which we see the world in a new light, as illuminated by the flash of lightning). Conscious Evolution (be it a big or
a small change), in short, is not a function of duration in time.
We can evolve more in a single generation than we have through all of presently recorded history because
the evolution of consciousness occurs in a moment; we are not forced to wait for time and natural selection to
grace us with change, as we have been freed from the cold chains of time by the fiery light of our soul-mind. If we
can learn to see the world in a new light, to resonate at a new frequency, then we can leave behind the tyranny of
bio-mechanical evolution imposed upon rational (consciously evolving) beings by social systems that were
designed to produce scarcity, competition and a bio-reductive state of being (a state of being that is fully oriented
towards material survival and the fulfillment of material desires and in which conscious evolution becomes
impossible) and consciously evolve past the absurd madness of the Age of Labor.
Luke R. Barnesmoore is Co-Founder/Director of the University of British Columbia Department of
Geography’s Urban Studies Lab, Executive Director of the Center for Critical Interdisciplinary Studies 501(c)3
and Associate Editor of Environment and Social Psychology (Whioce).