ABSTRACT
In late April of 2022, at the Annual Conference of the Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology (SIOP), ten individuals presented an Ignite session to over 100 attendees regarding the work that the field of I/O psychology had already done looking toward a future in which paid work is no more. The topics that those presenters put forward differed greatly from one to the next, but they all served a common purpose: to identify, acknowledge, share, and encourage further efforts in determining what, if anything, I/O psychology and its sibling fields can do to predict, explain, and even control our transition toward a future where human existence is not characterized by reliance on (or even availability of) paid work. As an echo of that well-received session, the substance of this chapter is a series of segments that approach various aspects of this topic from those various perspectives, written by some of the presenters from that SIOP session. Notably, each segment focusses on a different point toward different potential paths to a future without paid work, from the near future to further down the line. They are perhaps best consumed as invitations to think about the topic from different perspectives, rather than as a single coherent model or narrative to guide us to or to help us understand such a future. In each case, they draw upon psychological thinking, in part to demonstrate what can be brought to bear on this issue and how it can be conceptualized.
