One of the most propulsive forces in our social and economic lives is the rate at which emerging technology transforms every sphere of human labor. Despite the political leverage obtained by fearmongering about immigrants and foreigners, it’s the robots who are actually taking our jobs. It is happening, as former SEIU president Andy Stern warns in his book Raising the Floor, not in a generation or so, but right now, and exponentially in the next 10–15 years.

Self-driving cars and trucks will eliminate millions of jobs, not only for truckers and taxi (and Uber and Lyft) drivers, but for all of the people who provide goods and services for those drivers. AI will take over for thousands of coders and may even soon write articles like this one (warning us of its impending conquest). What to do? The current buzzword—or buzz-acronym—is UBI, which stands for “Universal Basic Income,” a scheme in which everyone would receive a basic wage from the government for doing nothing at all. UBI, its proponents argue, is the most effective way to mitigate the inevitably massive job losses ahead.

Those proponents include not only labor leaders like Stern, but entrepreneurs like Peter Barnes and Elon Musk (listen to him discuss it below), and political philosophers like Georgetown University’s Karl Widerquist. The idea is an old one; its modern articulation originated with Thomas Paine in his 1795 tract Agrarian Justice. But Thomas Paine did not foresee the robot angle. Alan Watts, on the other hand, knew precisely what lay ahead for post-industrial society back in the 1960s, as did many of his contemporaries.

The English Episcopal priest, lecturer, writer, and popularizer of Eastern religion and philosophy in England and the U.S. gave a talk in which he described “what happens when you introduce technology into production.” Technological innovation enables us to “produce enormous quantities of goods… but at the same time, you put people out of work.”

You can say, but it always creates more jobs, there’ll always be more jobs. Yes, but lots of them will be futile jobs. They will be jobs making every kind of frippery and unnecessary contraption, and one will also at the same time beguile the public into feeling that they need and want these completely unnecessary things that aren’t even beautiful.

Watts goes on to say that this “enormous amount of nonsense employment and busywork, bureaucratic and otherwise, has to be created in order to keep people working, because we believe as good Protestants that the devil finds work for idle hands to do.” People who aren’t forced into wage labor for the profit of others, or who don’t themselves seek to become profiteers, will be trouble for the state, or the church, or their family, friends, and neighbors. In such an ethos, the word “leisure” is a pejorative one.

So far, Watts’ insights are right in line with those of Bertrand Russell and Buckminster Fuller, whose critiques of meaningless work we covered in an earlier post. Russell, writes philosopher Gary Gutting, argued “that immense harm is caused by the belief that work is virtuous.” Harm to our intellects, bodies, creativity, scientific curiosity, environment. Watts also suggests that our fixation on jobs is a relic of a pre-technological age. The whole purpose of machinery, after all, he says, is to make drudgery unnecessary.

Those who lose their jobs—or who are forced to take low-paying service work to survive—now must live in greatly diminished circumstances and cannot afford the surplus of cheaply-produced consumer goods churned out by automated factories. This Neoliberal status quo is thoroughly, economically untenable. “The public has to be provided,” says Watts, “with the means of purchasing what the machines produce.” That is, if we insist on perpetuating economies of scaled-up production. The perpetuation of work, however, simply becomes a means of social control.

Watts has his own theories about how we would pay for a UBI, and every advocate since has varied the terms, depending on their level of policy expertise, theoretical bent, or political persuasion. It’s important to point out, however, that UBI has never been a partisan idea. It has been favored by civil rights leaders like Martin Luther King and controversial conservative writers like Charles Murray; by Keynesians and supply-siders alike. A version of UBI at one time found a proponent in Milton Friedman, as well as Richard Nixon, whose UBI proposal, Stern notes, “was passed twice by the House of Representatives.” (See Stern below discuss UBI and this history.)

During the sixties, a lively debate over UBI took place among economists who foresaw the situation Watts describes and also sought to simplify the Byzantine means-tested welfare system. The usual congressional bickering eventually killed Universal Basic Income in 1972, but most Americans would be surprised to discover how close the country actually came to implementing it, under a Republican president. (There are now existing versions of UBI, or revenue sharing schemes in limited form, in Alaska, and several countries around the world, including the largest experiment in history happening in Kenya.)

To learn more about the long history of basic income ideas, see this chronology at the Basic Income Earth Network. Watts mentions his own source for many of his ideas on the subject, Robert Theobald, whose 1963 Free Men and Free Markets defied left and right orthodoxies, and was consistently mistaken for one or the other. (Theobald introduced the term guaranteed basic income.) Watts, who would be 101 today, had other thoughts on economics in his essay “Wealth Versus Money.” Some of these now seem, writes Maria Popova at Brain Pickings, “bittersweetly naïve” in retrospect. But when it came to technological “disruptions” of capitalism and the effect on work, Watts was cannily perceptive. Perhaps his ideas about basic income were as well.

Note: An earlier version of this post appeared on our site in 2017.

Related Content:

When John Maynard Keynes Predicted a 15-Hour Workweek “in a Hundred Year’s Time” (1930)

Bertrand Russell & Buckminster Fuller on Why We Should Work Less, and Live and Learn More

Charles Bukowski Rails Against 9‑to‑5 Jobs in a Brutally Honest Letter (1986)

The Employment: A Prize-Winning Animation About Why We’re So Disenchanted with Work Today

Josh Jones is a writer and musician based in Durham, NC. Follow him at @jdmagness

Trump’s favorite verbal tic is now 1,000 pages of legislation
He keeps using that word. I do not think it means what he thinks it means.
Monica Hesse, WP (5/29/25)

Everybody has what I call a kǒutóuchán 口頭禪 (lit., "oral zen", i.e., "favorite expression", kind of like a mantra).  Mine, in Nepali, is "bāphre bāph!"; Pinkie Wu's, in Cantonese, is "wah!"; a Harvard historian I know loves to say "precisely!"; and so forth and so on.  President Trump's is "beautiful".

Monica Hesse opines:

N.B.:  I have omitted most hyperlinks in the quoted text below.

The verbal tic of President Donald Trump that has always most fascinated me is his predilection for the word “beautiful.” North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un “wrote me beautiful letters and we fell in love.” On the cover of Time magazine, Kamala Harris looked “like the most beautiful actress ever to live” (this quickly devolved into an anti-compliment). On Trump’s first day back in office, he signed an executive order titled “Promoting Beautiful Federal Civic Architecture.” Golf courses are beautiful, but so are White House telephones, farming, fighter jets, notes from the Chinese president, chocolate cake, the Supreme Court, Harambe the gorilla and Christians. Do you know who doesn’t need 30 dolls? “A beautiful baby girl that’s 11 years old.”

Is this a vocabulary deficit? A real estate developer buzzword, such as “spacious” or “walk-in pantry”? Is this a manifestation, a linguistic trick to make it appear that everything is better than fine? In college, did he fulfill a gen ed requirement with a course on the history of aesthetics?

I have gone down a rabbit hole. Did you know that there is a whole field called phonaesthetics, which is the study of how pleasing words are to the ear? Unpleasing sounds are called “cacophonous”; pleasing words are “euphonious.” One of the fathers of this field was J.R.R. Tolkien (yes, that one), who taught English at the University of Oxford and worked on the Oxford English Dictionary and declared that the most melodious word combination in English was "cellar door." Words are more likely to be thought of as euphonious if they have three or more syllables, with the stress on the first syllable. The most euphonious letter is “l,” followed by “m,” “s” and “n”; the most euphonious vowel sounds are short rather than long.

“Beautiful” fits many of those criteria, which makes me wonder if it’s as simple as that. Trump is human, like the rest of us, and he is just as drawn to pleasing words as any of us, and “beautiful” is a more pleasing word than, say, “pretty” — though not as pleasing as “luminous.”

Next, Hesse waxes linguistic:

Then again, the Oxford English Dictionary — and I just paid $10 for a subscription to learn this, so now I have to share it with you — says that “beautiful,” in terms of usage, is about as common as the words “facility,” “solve” and “travel,” and Trump definitely doesn’t use those words with any noteworthy frequency. The OED also tells me that the word peaked in 1850. By 1946, when Trump was born, it was in a steep decline and reached its lowest usage point in 1980, when Trump was 34 years old and a television interviewer was first asking the young tycoon whether he’d ever consider running for president.

Trump uses “beautiful” to describe sleeping gas (“They have a gas that’s a beautiful sleeping gas”). He uses it to describe fossil fuels (“clean, beautiful coal”). He uses it to describe his unrealized health-care plans, airports, his physical body (“If I took this shirt off, you’d see a beautiful, beautiful person”). Politico published a list last year aggregating weird times he’s used the word, and until I clicked on it, I had almost forgotten about when he celebrated the death of ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi by praising “a dog, a beautiful dog” and also the “beautiful, big hole” created by the U.S. military when it blasted through Baghdadi’s house during a raid.

I spend a lot of time preoccupied with language: how it works and why it works and whom it works for. What I think I find most jarring about Trump and “beautiful” is how many times he uses the word to describe something I find to be the opposite. He tweets about the removal of “beautiful” Confederate statues and monuments — but it doesn’t matter how regal the statues look, because they represent something nauseating and tragic. Trump posts an AI-generated video depicting a resort built on the rubble of Gaza, and the resort is supposed to be beautiful, but it only feels horrifying.

…

Which brings me to the reason I am writing this. Trump has named his signature agenda — which the House has passed, which the Senate will consider, which will form and shape America and determine our values — the One Big Beautiful Bill.

The Big Beautiful Bill works for Donald Trump because it uses a common, euphonious word to sell a tantalizing concept: that the federal government is simple instead of being a giant, complicated mess — but one that got that way for a reason. To fix it, you don’t need wonks, economists, the swamp, the “deep state,” lawyers, laws or elaborate tax codes; you just need to clonk it upside the head with the Big Beautiful Bill.

The “the” is intentional. The Big Beautiful Bill is the One Ring of legislation, the only bill you’ll ever need. “Big Beautiful Bill” is a phrase that could lull you into believing it contained only good things. And it does not.

Here's how the proponents of Trump's “Big Beautiful Bill” depicted it on placards when they were ushering it through Congress:

_______________________

ONE BIG

BEAUTIFUL

BILL ACT

_________________________

(images)

Hesse has written a profoundly probing essay on how language functions and means.  The upshot of it all is that we need to add, in addition to its esthetic dimensions, a new Trumpian definition for it in our dictionaries: 

adj. that which performs its intended function efficiently and effectively

This is the engineers' definition of "beautiful".  It reminds me of the mathematicians' definition of "neat" which I learned when I hung around with them in graduate school"

adj. that which arrives at a solution efficiently, effectively, and concisely.

The BBB — in the minds of its proponents.

Selected readings

• "'Bāphre bāph!' — my favorite Nepali expression" (8/12/18)
• "The beauty and power of spelling" (9/3/21)

[Thanks to François Lang]

Feast your eyes on a small segment of the total number of interjections in English:  Aha, Hurray, Oh, Ah, Aw, Ouch, Wow, Alas, Boo, Hey, Oh my God, Ahem, Bah, Cheers, Hmm, Huh, Huzzah, Oops, Yay, Agreement, Amen, Argh, Awesome, Boy….

Interjections may be exclamatory, quizzical, condemnatory, laudatory, and so forth and so on.  They may convey pain, delight, dismay; approbation, disapproval.

Some interjections are neutral:  uh, um.

Some are positive:  woo-hoo, bravo.

Some are negative:  duh, which is disdainful, demeaning, and even insulting.

"Huh? The Valuable Role of Interjections." Holmes, Bob. Knowable Magazine | Annual Reviews, February 24, 2025.

Listen carefully to a spoken conversation and you’ll notice that the speakers use a lot of little quasi-words — mm-hmm, um, huh? and the like — that don’t convey any information about the topic of the conversation itself. For many decades, linguists regarded such utterances as largely irrelevant noise, the flotsam and jetsam that accumulate on the margins of language when speakers aren’t as articulate as they’d like to be.

But these little words may be much more important than that. A few linguists now think that far from being detritus, they may be crucial traffic signals to regulate the flow of conversation as well as tools to negotiate mutual understanding. That puts them at the heart of language itself — and they may be the hardest part of language for artificial intelligence to master.

“Here is this phenomenon that lives right under our nose, that we barely noticed,” says Mark Dingemanse, a linguist at Radboud University in the Netherlands, “that turns out to upend our ideas of what makes complex language even possible in the first place.”

When we come to the next paragraph of Bob Holmes' thought-provoking article, the question of spoken vs. written language, this is something that lies at the heart of my own preoccupation with written vernacular, which is closer to spoken language than classical and literary language.

For most of the history of linguistics, scholars have tended to focus on written language, in large part because that’s what they had records of. But once recordings of conversation became available, they could begin to analyze spoken language the same way as writing.

When they did, they observed that interjections — that is, short utterances of just a word or two that are not part of a larger sentence — were ubiquitous in everyday speech. “One in every seven utterances are one of these things,” says Dingemanse, who explores the use of interjections in the 2024 Annual Review of Linguistics. “You’re going to find one of those little guys flying by every 12 seconds. Apparently, we need them.”

Many of these interjections serve to regulate the flow of conversation. “Think of it as a tool kit for conducting interactions,” says Dingemanse. “If you want to have streamlined conversations, these are the tools you need.” An um or uh from the speaker, for example, signals that they’re about to pause, but aren’t finished speaking. A quick huh? or what? from the listener, on the other hand, can signal a failure of communication that the speaker needs to repair.

On the other hand, interjections are often used as filler words to give the speaker time to think of the next words he wants to say, and these come in a withering variety of personal favorites.  Believe it or not, a classics professor of mine at Dartmouth would say "oink, oink" when he was thinking of what to say next.  The first few times I heard him say "oink, oink" in the middle of a sentence about Socrates or Plato, I almost couldn't believe my ears and had to stifle a burst of laughter.

I've also heard the following used as idiosyncratic interjections:  "OK" (by the speaker or listener), "fantastic" (by the listener), "precisely" (by the listener), the first sotto voce the latter two with exaggerated emphasis.

Unbelievably, I know a professor who is so addicted to the "f" word that they use it as an interjection (as well as a verb and an adjective ["f—in"]) even in faculty meetings.

The article delves into many more aspects of interjections, such as "continuers" (mm-hmm) and "feedback" (wow, yeah, eh?).

Holmes concludes with a biggy: 

Can AI learn to use interjections?

To make artificial intelligence sound more natural, developers are building interjections into its responses. Google’s NotebookLM, for example, offers the option of summarizing information — say, one or more scientific papers — in the form of a podcast hosted by two AI-generated hosts.

On first hearing, the program does a pretty good job: The hosts joke, laugh and insert Mm-hmm and Wow! at superficially appropriate times. But to the ears of a trained linguist, there’s something amiss. (Listen to an example.)  [VHM:  don't miss it!]

“They almost work, but not quite,” says theoretical linguist Martina Wiltschko of the Catalan Institution for Research and Advanced Studies. “They kind of remind me of AI art, where there’s too many fingers. You don’t see it at first, but if you look carefully, you see that something’s wrong.”

One tell is that when the listener mm-hmms or laughs, the speaker pauses while they do so, lending a slightly creepy note to the simulated conversation. “To me, it’s almost like the uncanny valley,” says Wiltschko. “It’s close, but it’s not quite close enough.”

The biggest deficiency, though, is a robust sense of who knows what in the conversation. The AI hosts seem to flip back and forth on which one knows which pieces of information.

“It’s not just what they’re saying, it’s who’s talking in what context, and who knows what,” says Wiltschko. “I would be really surprised if the AI could ever handle that — and human beings handle that with ease.”

All of which leads me to give vent to my favorite Nepali expression, "bāphre bāph!" and to resort to my habitual Cantonese exclamation-continuer "wah!.

Selected readings

• "The evolution of verbal interpolations" (7/6/24) — with valuable bibliography
• "Slang and fillers not allowed" (10/7/21)
• "I'm (like)" (8/30/21)
• "'I feel like'" (8/24/13)
• "I feel like 'I feel like'" (9/2/21)
• "Like thanks" (11/26/15)
• "'Like' youth and sex" (6/28/11)
• "Like, a Christmas gift card" (12/28/06)
• "That, that, that…" (1/24/16) — the (in)famous Mandarin demonstrative filler, "neige, neige, neige"
• "'That, that, that…', part 2" (8/28/20)
• "'That, that, that…', part 3" (9/14/20)
• "A Chinese analog to English 'you know'" (11/22/19)
• "'Bāphre bāph!' — my favorite Nepali expression" (8/12/18)
• "The wonder of Cantonese particles" (5/14/18)
• "New Singaporean and Hong Kong terms in the OED" (5/12/16) — Cantonese "wah"

[Thanks to Ted McClure]