"I wonder what the sticking points are. I know it wasn't easy for us to get universal healthcare either and it's one of the hardest things to scale because it can't be automated as easily."

"Yeah. Not sure what our sticking points are - not really something I've read about much at all."

"I'll have to ask the people I meet with then. Aside from improving healthcare and exploring space are there any major goals your people are working towards at the moment?"

"Politics is a lot of it - we don't have a world government or anything, but a lot of people think we should. Just don't agree on what kind of government or how to go about it. We're also trying to get automation good enough most people can stop working. We've gotten work hours each week to about a fourth what they used to be, though, even if we haven't gotten them to zero."

"I think that's a cultural difference to some degree, we do have shorter working hours than we once did but mostly we've transitioned to doing different things as a result of automation as opposed to less."

"Huh! Having people only work when they want to is a pretty big goal for a lot of people. No one toils in paradise and all that."

"There's been some movement in that direction, but well, we're in a period of rapid restructuring and expansion so most people are pretty invested in what they're doing. There's also a lot of cultural baggage from our previous economic systems that generally stigmatized idleness."

"We generally don't like being idle, either, but most of the things people want to do - like, art - is very culturally valuable but hard to run an economy off of, you know?"

"That makes sense, we're still adjusting as we move closer and closer to being a post-scarcity society. By the time we're done I expect we'll have pretty short workdays as well, though I expect a lot of people will still refer to their personal projects as work for cultural reasons."

"Yeah. And there's lots of stuff you probably just can't automate that still needs doing."

"Definitely, there will always be work to do in government, and medicine is pretty hard to automate in general. Also magic can only be done by people, not machines."

"And someone's gotta design the new machines, even if we get machines fixing each other."

"That too."

He nods, then - "Representative should be here soon. I don't know that I have much more to talk about..."

"Thanks, out of curiosity what is this building for?"

"Community center. Town and regional council meets here, but they're not in session right now and decided to just go ahead and escalate to the next highest council when I contacted them. There's also some clubs that use the meeting spaces - fiber circle, the smaller unions without their own building, some of the bigger homeschooling groups, the debate clubs for the general education kids and the kids getting their academics... Also popular to have neighborhood meetings here, since it's a neutral place more than someone's house is. Some of the medium-sized religious groups also use the council hall for their meetings, if you've got too many folks for someone's house or a library room but not enough for your own place. My main job's making sure people find what room they're looking for, contacting council members if they need contacting, and helping people work out schedules and all. I also keep an eye on the lost and found and make sure the entry area stays tidy and all."

"That's nice, we tend to build places like this too."

"Neat. I guess most social species probably would end up with a similar concept?"

"That seems possible, as I said you're the first other species we've encountered."

"Yeah. We've got possible other sapients on our planet, though we're only really strongly communicating with one, and they don't have a lot of building traditions of their own or anything yet - though they do have communal areas they return to I think? And they'll use buildings we make for them."

"Interesting, we haven't really investigated too closely into the sapience of the species we've encountered in our travels. Though we are trying to be careful about the impact our construction projects have on the local environment. Magic makes that a lot easier."

"It's probably easier to tell if you live on the same planet long term, too..."

"It probably is, we suspect that several species on the world we evolved on might be intelligent. The government I work for doesn't govern any part of that world though."

He nods. "Yeah, trying to communicate's mostly left to locals and curious scientists."

"That makes sense. Does this area specialize at all? Some areas in our culture are famous for their cultivation of a particular crop or for having a particular industry."