Inside Out | A universal basic income won’t solve the problem of jobs, or the lack of them, in the coming ‘post work’ world

As a working class kid in the UK in the 1960s, the unrelenting financial struggle meant that every school or university holiday, I knuckled down to summer jobs, winter jobs – any jobs – to make ends meet. I watched in perpetual jealousy as lucky middle class kids flew off for winter skiing holidays, or to laze on Mediterranean beaches.

Jealousy aside, by the time I left for university, I had worked on farms, in petrol stations, in can-making and food-freezing factories, in waste recycling yards, and – every Christmas – at the post office delivering mail. Every day through my teenage years started at 5.30am, biking across the town’s suburbs as a newspaper delivery boy. I funded university study by spending summers teaching English language to foreign students, and working behind a bar.

Apart from the cash these different jobs provided, they had a second, even bigger value: they introduced me to the thousands of lifetime jobs out there that I never, under any circumstances, wanted to be forced to do. It did not necessarily show me what I truly wanted to do, but it certainly showed me what futures I wanted to avoid at all costs. It warned me of the drudgery embedded in so many jobs that fill people’s lives over their lifetimes.

Now, half a century later, I see thousands of youngsters who are fretting about how artificial intelligence and robots are going to destroy jobs, and who are biting their nails over whether they will have the skills needed to fill the jobs that are left.

The good news is that many of the jobs being destroyed are exactly those drudge-laden jobs I experienced – and came to hate – in my teenage years. The bad news is that our governments, businesses and educators are only now beginning to address the biggest challenge that has faced the world of work in at least a century.