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Paid to Do Nothing
Vadym Drobot/Alamy Stock Photo
Wish you didn’t have to work? Here’s a job for you: The Korsvägen train station in Gothenburg, Sweden, is going to pay someone to do nothing for the rest of their life. The requirements are simple: The employee needs to show up in the morning and punch a time clock, which turns on the platform lights. At the end of the day, the employee clocks out and the lights go off. In between, they’re free to do whatever they want: read a book, call a friend, even take a nap or go to the movies. The position—which pays $2,320 a month—was dreamed up by Simon Goldin and Jakob Senneby, two Swedish artists. They’re hoping to make a political statement about how our evolving technology is changing the way we work and eliminating many jobs. “In the face of mass automation and artificial intelligence, the impending threat/promise is that we will all become productively superfluous,” they wrote. “We will all be ‘employed at Korsvägen,’ as it were.”