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But the ability to tag that data may be China’s true A.I. strength, the only one that the United States may not be able to match. In China, this new industry offers a glimpse of a future that the government has long promised: an economy built on technology rather than manufacturing.

“We’re the construction workers in the digital world. Our job is to lay one brick after another,” said Yi Yake, co-founder of a data labeling factory in Jiaxian, a city in central Henan province. “But we play an important role in A.I. Without us, they can’t build the skyscrapers.”

While A.I. engines are superfast learners and good at tackling complex calculations, they lack cognitive abilities that even the average 5-year-old possesses. Small children know that a furry brown cocker spaniel and a black Great Dane are both dogs. They can tell a Ford pickup from a Volkswagen Beetle, and yet they know both are cars.A.I. has to be taught. It must digest vast amounts of tagged photos and videos before it realizes that a black cat and a white cat are both cats. This is where the data factories and their workers come in.

The design is “based on what we know is affordable housing in Puerto Rico for a single family,” says Hector Ralat, an architect based in the firm’s Puerto Rican office. “But the focus was to alter the DNA of that knowledge and to put in the essential components that someone would need to sustain living conditions for at least two weeks, which is the recommended time here for someone to receive aid after a disaster.” The houses will likely cost around $120,000, a number that lets homeowners access favorable interest rates on mortgages. The units can be stacked on top of each other; in Villalba, most of the community will be three stories high (the solar will serve the whole building).

“We just know our product is better than stick-built construction in these types of dangerous environments,” says Paul Galvin, chairman and CEO of SG Blocks, the parent company of SG Residential. “Heavy-gauge steel structures are just designed to a high tolerance for the effects of climate change.” The houses, most of which will have two bedrooms, will start at $90,000 to $130,000. It might be possible to build cheaper houses, Galvin says, but the company is “trying to deliver product that is quality-driven, in that it’s going to be built once and it’s not going to be destroyed every storm.” The company is also working with a bank to create a mortgage that is similar in monthly cost to a car payment. The design can incorporate solar panels.

HiveCube, another modular housing company, is also using shipping containers, and has targeted a much lower cost–the houses start at $39,000 for a two-bedroom home. “We believe that your safety should not be a matter of income, but a given when you are planning to buy a home for your family,” says María Velasco, cofounder of HiveCube. The homes are designed to be fully off the grid, with solar power and batteries, a rainwater collection system, and a gray and black water treatment system that uses plants and bacteria to treat wastewater instead of septic tanks.

things with a zero marginal cost still can work in the capitalist construct -- but as resources instead of products.

The crucial problem isn’t creating new jobs. The crucial problem is creating new jobs that humans perform better than algorithms. Consequently, by 2050 a new class of people might emerge – the useless class. People who are not just unemployed, but unemployable.

The same technology that renders humans useless might also make it feasible to feed and support the unemployable masses through some scheme of universal basic income. The real problem will then be to keep the masses occupied and content. People must engage in purposeful activities, or they go crazy. So what will the useless class do all day?

In any case, the end of work will not necessarily mean the end of meaning, because meaning is generated by imagining rather than by working. Work is essential for meaning only according to some ideologies and lifestyles. Eighteenth-century English country squires, present-day ultra-orthodox Jews, and children in all cultures and eras have found a lot of interest and meaning in life even without working. People in 2050 will probably be able to play deeper games and to construct more complex virtual worlds than in any previous time in history.

If organised forms of political resistance could be efficiently thwarted by such a system, often by subtle assimilation rather than outright suppression, the last barricade against it was the individual’s own refusal to think and respond in the prescribed ways. The hardest task facing any emancipatory politics today is to encourage people to think for themselves, in a way that transcends simple sloganising and the dictates of instrumental reason. True critical thinking requires not just a refusal to identify with the present structures of society and commercial culture, but a deep awareness of the historical tendencies that have brought about the current impasse, and of which all present experience is composed. That impulse, compared to the project of constructively helping the system out of its own periodic crises, retains the spark of a dissidence that might just, one day, throw it into the very crisis that would prompt a general, and genuine, liberation.

So this Great Recession of ours – don’t kid yourself, it ain’t over – is a moral crisis as well as an economic catastrophe. You might even say it’s a spiritual impasse, because it makes us ask what social scaffolding other than work will permit the construction of character – or whether character itself is something we must aspire to. But that is why it’s also an intellectual opportunity: it forces us to imagine a world in which the job no longer builds our character, determines our incomes or dominates our daily lives.What would you do if you didn’t have to work to receive an income?In short, it lets us say: enough already. Fuck work.

So the impending end of work raises the most fundamental questions about what it means to be human. To begin with, what purposes could we choose if the job – economic necessity – didn’t consume most of our waking hours and creative energies? What evident yet unknown possibilities would then appear? How would human nature itself change as the ancient, aristocratic privilege of leisure becomes the birthright of human beings as such?

If it works, then why in the world are we not basing our whole economy on the finite construct of “time”? It would nearly be infallible, versus the legacy commodities model, which is full of holes and reject-able logic.A “time based economy” can be used with any nation state, group, or community based economics model. To make it simple, the value at the transaction would be time dollars in the form of a digital debit.

In the time based economy, each person enrolled, anywhere in the world would have an online account which is controlled by the debit card (not a citizenship card).

The time based economy primarily functions through the education, civics, and knowledge sector.