Allocated labour
A system decides what you will do, and people comply — sometimes willingly.
The external half of the allocation problem. A mechanism — a computer, a lottery, a caste — hands out the work, and the society functions. Nobody is deceived about the fact of assignment; the argument is over whether being assigned is compatible with being free.
Le Guin wrote the hardest version. Anarres is an anarchist society with no property, no law and no compulsion, and it still runs a Division of Labour that posts people to jobs. Nothing forces you to accept. Almost everyone accepts, and the novel is unsparing about what happens to the one who does not — how a society without punishment nonetheless finds ways to make refusal unbearable.
This pattern is the one most likely to describe a real post-automation society, because allocation is what institutions do when work stops being economically necessary but socially remains so. Look at the mechanism in each case, and ask what would happen if you said no.
5 works give this answer
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Every hour is scheduled: when to wake, work, walk in ranks, chew each mouthful. Two Personal Hours a day are the only unallocated time anyone has, and the state considers even those a regrettable concession.
Allocated labourBK·1974Start hereThe Dispossessed
On Anarres nobody is compelled to work and there is no property, no wage and no law. A computer posts people to jobs anyway — sometimes for years, sometimes far from the people they love — and almost everyone goes. Refusal is permitted and quietly unsurvivable.
Allocated labourBK·2006Daemon
Take jobs from the network. It pays well, it ranks you, it advances you, and it never explains what any individual task is for. People do the work anyway, and most of them prefer it to the employer they had before.
Allocated labourBK·2011Wool
Everyone holds an assigned trade — porter, mechanic, farmer, IT — for life, in a shaft they will never leave. Children are permitted by lottery. The one job nobody volunteers for is cleaning, and it is a death sentence dressed as maintenance.
Allocated labourBK·2014On Such a Full Sea
Raise fish and vegetables for people you will never meet. Roles are effectively assigned at birth, the work is skilled and genuinely respected, and the community narrates its own life in the first person plural.
Allocated labour