What is man without his work?

Artificial intelligence is expected to have radically changed society within a few decades. Experts are already discussing the dangers of opaque algorithms and the economic consequences of the disappearance of jobs due to artificial intelligence (AI). But what does the disappearance of work mean for ourselves, our identity? Who are we when work is no longer the center of our lives? What are we going to do with our time?

In AfterWork those questions are central. The Swedish-Italian director Erik Gandini traveled to four countries and spoke to residents about their relationship with their work. The documentary begins in South Korea, with the dystopian image of a dejected daughter sitting next to her father staring at a computer screen. He works every day from seven in the morning to eleven at night. “He is his job,” says his daughter. “If he lets go of that, he has nothing left.”

From the dark scene in South Korea, the journey continues to the historic gardens of Valsanzibio in Padua, Italy. Fredrik Wenzel’s camera moves slowly – who also shoots the films Tourist and The Square turned – through the estate, until a gardener comes into view. Armando Pizzoni comes from a wealthy family and has never had to work, but in his case it has not led to boredom. He gets satisfaction from pruning and creating perfect lines in the hedges of the garden.

Ideal image

It is the ideal image that director Gandini seems to want to portray: having enough money and still getting moving, doing something that makes sense. But before he asks the interviewees at the end of the film what they would do if they received enough money every month, a basic income, he further reinforces the image of the high work morale.

We angrily see an American ethicist talk about the situation in his country, where people are ‘always’ busy (or pretending to be), which has resulted in a large proportion of vacation days not being taken.

An employee of the American consultancy Gallup explains that you can divide employees into three classes: engaged, disengaged and actively disengaged, who drag the rest of the workplace into their disinterest. One billion people worldwide have a job, and only 15 percent of them really value their work, according to the Gallup researcher.

While the statistics get through to the viewer, Gandini shows images of sorters in a recycling factory and we get a glimpse into the van of a delivery woman from the Amazon internet shop. Her employer follows her continuously, via camera systems equipped with artificial intelligence. Despite the workload and control, she says she enjoys her job and the hours alone behind the wheel.

Such a point where there is hardly any distinction between work and leisure can also be seen in Gandini’s visit to the rich oil state of Kuwait. Here dozens of Kuwaitis sometimes hold the same position in the government for a princely salary, while there is hardly anything to do. They watch movies during working hours, eat out of boredom and take home a lethargic attitude. With the Italian paradise at the beginning of the documentary in mind, the situation in Kuwait feels like a warning: if people have nothing meaningful to do, this can also lead to the creation of sham functions, bullshit jobsbecause people simply have to do ‘something’ for their money.

In the documentary, the American philosopher Noam Chomsky dedicates reflections on the influence that automation and artificial intelligence will have on the future of work. He says that technology can be used to free people from “boring and stupid work”. They can invest the time they gain in this way in creative and free work.

Right conditions

The question is how humanity creates the right conditions for this. After all, you not only need time, but also money to do your shopping. A universal basic income, says tech entrepreneur Elon Musk (Tesla, SpaceX, X) in the documentary.

So you can have different opinions about that. For example, an Italian businessman speaks out against a basic income, because it would discourage people from contributing to society. His unemployed wife actually contradicts this. Although she lives on his money, she turns out to be very enterprising. She trains horses, enjoys cooking and fishing.

Gandini then shows again that work does not have to be perfect: a young South Korean tells how he ended up in a burnout due to hard work.

In this way, the director provides a wide range of perspectives for looking at work and the social importance of work. This stimulates you to take a closer look at your own relationship to your job. Does my identity also consist so much of work? And is that bad?

Due to the multitude of examples and views in barely 75 minutes of film, the representation of the individual positions remains relatively superficial. Really probing, confronting interviewees with contradictions – Gandini does not do that. Relatively new phenomena of a more flexible approach to work, such as quiet quittingin which young employees in particular refuse to work longer than agreed, and working via freelance platforms are not discussed.

There is also no answer to the question of who we would be without our work. The interviewees are silent and look thoughtfully into the camera lens when Gandini asks them what they would do with their lives if they had no work and enough money to survive.

And honestly, would you know so soon? AfterWork leaves you with an interesting question for a not too distant future.