Obsolescence
The work goes, and standing goes with it.
Distinct from idleness because these people are not comfortable. They are surplus, and they know it. The material provision may be adequate; the humiliation is total.
Vonnegut wrote the definitive version before the term AI was in common use, and Player Piano is still the sharpest treatment because it is about class rather than philosophy. The engineers keep their jobs and their dignity. Everyone else is sorted into the Army or a road-repair corps that exists to occupy them, and they understand perfectly well that the roads do not need repairing.
Stross runs it forward at speed: minds that think faster and cheaper simply outbid baseline humans for everything, and the humans become refugees in a solar system being disassembled around them. No malice anywhere in the process.
11 works give this answer
Player Piano
A small engineering and managerial elite still works. Everyone else is sorted into the Army or the Reconstruction and Reclamation Corps — the Reeks and Wrecks — who repair roads that do not need repairing, and drink.
ObsolescenceAD-009-OBS·BK·1953Start hereRing Around the Sun
Less and less. Industry after industry closes because its products stop needing replacement, and the novel follows the unemployment rather than the invention: a business journalist watching an economy dismantled by things that simply keep working.
ObsolescenceAD-010-OBS·BK·1954Start hereThe Caves of Steel
Work a classified job in a sealed City, at a rating that determines where you eat, whether you get a seat on the expressway and how much water you are allotted. Elijah Baley is a C-5. Losing the rating means declassification, and the Medievalist riots are about robots taking the jobs that hold the ratings up.
ObsolescenceAD-015-OBS·BK·1974The Forever War
Mandella returns from combat to an Earth of mass unemployment and state rations, where the economy has restructured around having no use for him. He re-enlists, because the army is the only institution that still has a slot with his name on it.
ObsolescenceAD-017-OBS·BK·1985Schismatrix
Rebuild yourself for whatever the current economy rewards, then watch the reward change. Factions rise and fall around what kind of body is currently useful, and obsolescence arrives as a fashion cycle.
ObsolescenceAD-020-OBS·BK·1988Start hereFalling Free
The quaddies were engineered with four arms and no legs to work in free fall. They are company property, hold assigned trades, are paired by the personnel department, and are genuinely good at the job. Then gravity is solved and a thousand purpose-built people become surplus inventory.
ObsolescenceAD-029-OBS·BK·2005Accelerando
Baseline humans are outbid for matter, energy and attention by minds that think faster and cheaper. They become refugees in a solar system being taken apart around them. No malice is involved at any stage.
ObsolescenceAD-035-OBS·BK·2006Start hereRainbows End
Robert Gu, a celebrated poet cured of Alzheimer's, is sent back to high school in his seventies because everything he was good at is now worthless. Everyone else works in belief circles and shreds of contract labour, assembled and dissolved by the hour.
ObsolescenceAD-053-OBS·TV·2015Start hereHumans
Less each season. Synths do the cleaning, the caring, the factory shifts and eventually the surgery. A teenager gives up studying medicine because a machine will always be better at it, and the show's honest move is that her mother has no answer.
ObsolescenceAD-061-OBS·BK·2017The Last Good Man
Private military contractors manage missions they are increasingly incidental to, job by job, while the machines get better. Everyone involved understands they are supervising their own replacement.
ObsolescenceAD-063-OBS·BK·2018The Calculating Stars
Elma and her colleagues work as human computers for the space programme, doing orbital mathematics by hand, while the machines that will replace them are installed in the next room.
Obsolescence