Would You Still Work If You Didn't Have To?

Engaging, thought provoking lectures by experts, professors and storytellers in Ottawa bars 📚Lecture: Would You Still Work If You Didn't Have To? ⏱️Time: Doors: 6pm Lecture: 7pm 🎤Speaker: Gloria Karina Sánchez-Cuevas (PhD candidate in Ethics and Public Affairs at Carleton University) Here's a question that sounds like a fun hypothetical: if your rent, groceries and bills were covered, would you still work? Most of us say yes. Then if you ask whether everyone else would, the room will probably get a lot less sure. That gap is where this talk begins. AI is arriving in corporate and government offices, creative studios and health clinics, not just on factory floors, and the headlines frame it as a threat. But needing less human labour was supposed to be the dream: in 1930, the famous economist John Maynard Keynes predicted his grandchildren would work 15 hours a week. So why does a technology that could give us back our time feel like a catastrophe? The reason is simple: we've bundled almost everything into our jobs: income, security, status, identity, even our judgement of who "contributes" to society. This lecture unbundles that package. It asks who actually captures the gains when technology makes us more productive, why some of the people building AI are also the loudest champions of a “universal basic income,” and what real-world basic income experiments tell us about whether people stop working when they don't have to. Most importantly, this is not a pitch for basic income. Basic income is the lens, a way of testing our assumptions about work, freedom and fairness. Gloria Karina Sánchez-Cuevas is a university instructor, researcher, and ethics specialist whose work bridges philosophy, public policy, business, and emerging technologies. She is a PhD candidate in Ethics and Public Affairs at Carleton University, where her research explores basic income, social justice, and the relationship between technological change, work, and economic security. She holds an MBA and graduate degrees in both Philosophy and Public Ethics, bringing an interdisciplinary perspective to contemporary social and ethical challenges. Gloria has taught undergraduate and graduate courses in Responsible Artificial Intelligence, Responsible Business Analytics, Business Ethics, Environmental Ethics, and Political Philosophy at the university level. Her academic and applied work focuses on AI ethics and governance, inequality, and the ethical implications of technological innovation. Through teaching, research, and public engagement, she is committed to making complex philosophical questions accessible and encouraging critical conversations about how technology shapes society and how society can shape its technological future.