At least two countries love The Great Satan, but we should all fear the Rise of the Machines. Yeah, we know. Sometimes even we despair of how our brains jump from place to place, but a meditation on love for America took us in about three jumps to the joys and terror of a world without work.

Writes Liam Stack, the New York Times reporter and Cairo veteran: “The presidential campaign has exposed deep divides in American society and left many in every political party anxious about the future. During this time of political tension, our neighbors to the north have one thing to say: America is just great. Some Canadians watching as American politics have hit rock bottom in recent weeks decided that the United States needed a cross-border pep talk. Thus was born a social media campaign called “Tell America It’s Great,” complete with a hashtag, a Twitter account and a series of YouTube videos.” What’s the other country that loves America? Egypt. Or at least the People’s Democratic Republic of Enterprise, after the US Treasury’s Undersecretary for International Affairs Nathan Sheets stepped up to the plate this week and bluntly said the US is working with G7 countries to ensure we have the USD 6 bn in third-party funding we need to close the USD 12 bn IMF facility.

What is America? Or any country, really? In large part, a nation’s identity rests on a collection of popularly-shared myths, and vehicles were central to the making of the American myth, whether you’re talking about horses and Manifest Destiny / the Western frontier, Jeeps in the Second World War, or how the post-war availability of automobiles helped create our modern concept of “the teenager.” You don’t have to be a gearhead or a futurist to enjoy “What Happens to American Myth When You Take the Driver Out of It? The self-driving car and the future of the self.”

Which led us immediately to recall last summer’s “A World Without Work,” a look at what the world might be like when Uber replaces the truck drivers and delivery guys on their Vespas, when computerized manufacturing replaces assembly line workers in Beni Suef. The author traveled to a US city that was transformed overnight — in the late 1970s — into a city without work and “a place where the middle class of the 20th century has become a museum exhibit.”

That brought us to a conversation earlier this week about whether a universal guaranteed income might be “a way to ease the transition [to a future with a radically different definition of work]. It’s also a way to provide a floor for people — not necessarily a substitute for work, but a supplement to work that allows them to have a sense of economic security, have consumer buying power. We want to allow people to be entrepreneurs, to take risks and raise kids and do other things without turning the world into the Hunger Games.”