Work and words

The pedantic rhetoric about work to be "defended at all costs" is frankly bullshit. It's unclear whether these political relics fail to realize the world they live in or if they realize it but pretend to keep living in the days of their youth, because they don't understand a thing about modernity. Or worse, they are terrified of it. 
They keep wanting to impose the "duty to work" by subversively passing it off as a so-called "right to work." "Everyone has the RIGHT to HAVE a job," they repeat. Don't be fooled; words matter, and they use them well to manipulate us.
In reality, work shouldn't be HAD, work should be DONE. And the right, if anything, is a right to an income, or at least to a decent life, not to work for its own sake, at any cost, even if it's a crap, alienating, repetitive, boring, mechanical, degrading, or even dangerous job.
So if work is DONE by algorithms and machines (read AI and robotics) instead of humans, that's fine anyway, actually it's even better, because it eliminates degradation and danger for people and increases productivity and process efficiency. If you insist on wanting people to do work that is no longer needed, you aren't guaranteeing them a right, you are imposing a duty on them. Is that your political line? To me it's madness, but if you take responsibility for calling it by its proper name, without using deceptive expressions, go right ahead.
Having cleared up the deception of the DUTY to work (the one that must be HAD rather than DONE), let's get to the right. The real one, not duty disguised as right.
If the same (crap) work that men used to do is now done by technology, entrepreneurs will still make their fair profit and the system will continue to enjoy the services and products it needs (if it really needs them). Why, then, should the only ones to lose out be the redundant workers? Industry adopts technologies developed through the joint effort of the entire community, funded also by the contributions of those redundant people. The processes are better, the work is done, and done well too, costs are reduced to a minimum, and profit is guaranteed, if not increased. The merit is shared. The additional cost-cutting that would be achieved by failing to pay the dismissed workers is immoral. People must continue to receive a salary (or something similar) sufficient to live a dignified life, even if they no longer find a place in sectors where activities are carried out without them. The profits are still there, taxes on those profits are collected, the funds for the wages of citizens replaced by technology exist, and they come precisely from the work done by that technology. As long as they don't end up in the wrong pockets.

The grim motives behind the little speeches of clever folks who instrumentally confuse verbs (to have and to do) or nouns (rights and duties) to screw the masses and favor the usual wealth hoarders are easy to expose.
Besides, enlightened entrepreneurs should see the advantage of such a solution: increased productivity, contained risks, social stability, and guaranteed consumption.
Given that, as the great Karl Popper taught us, technology drives politics, economy, and history, you cannot stop the ongoing revolution with semantic tricks, and trying to manage it inappropriately due to political inadequacy or individual greed will not help anyone.
Besides, in the environments where this technological revolution is taking place, this is common knowledge to everyone. Those who haven't caught on yet are stuck in an obsolete vision of society.
And it is high time they "un-obsoleted" themselves.

This post was machine-translated from Italian.