I generally agree, but I notice how often in this piece and the quotations that "human beings" are identified as "workers". Perhaps that's part of the problem. Our identities have been bound up in our economic utility for at least a millennium (last names like Baker or Smith are residuals of that.)
The equilibrium between capital and labor has shifted many times, but when capital can BECOME labor instead of employing labor, most of the laws of capitalism go out the window. We will also need to redefine our "self" in terms of something other than economic utility. That will be hard. It will be the work of generations. The author is right -- work is good -- but work doesn't have to mean "that which I must do to eat". My worth as a human is far larger than that. And perhaps, just perhaps, if we can navigate this transition without a Luddite revolution led by unemployed bureaucrats, HR cat ladies, and lawyers... we may get to see that world and the people in it really flourish.
The changes I think will be impossible to predict from here, but only after they have come.
I think that whether something is blue or white collar the easiest thing to replace is what is predictable. An email and an Amazon order both. Facebook is laying off 10,000 this week. I'm betting they aren't brilliant writers of code.
I look at all work carefully now. I doubt the nurse of my most recent Ct scan will be easy to replace, she deals with variable humans all day. Reading the scan I'd think is already mostly replaced by AI and a doctor reviews and confirms. The readings and a detailed write up of findings were a matter of a couple hours. A similar doctor using radiation for treatment costs $2,400 an hour based on the 15 minutes I talked to him.
The talk with the doc I'd think hard to replace. He was giving and receiving specific information and evaluating at the same time. A plumber is not an MD, just the same in watching plumbers I've come to realize they are doing a fairly complex task with many variables that they might not see again for years. Many people can't become licensed plumbers because they aren't bright enough.
Both the doc and the plumber find their work engrossing and stimulating. What is work anyway?
Long ago men were obligated to spend a lot of time hunting animals. The larger the animal the more difficult success, the greater the payout, and the greater the danger. Today some men spend days in extreme environments doing the same thing for enjoyment. I enjoy cooking more than restaurants, is it work?
I think there will always be work, I do hope we aren't forced to do so much of it that it becomes drudgery as many fast food workers will tell you. I like cooking but not two, thirty hour jobs at different businesses to pay rent.
For 35 years white collar has ignored the impoverishment of large segments of the working class, they even contribute to this day by supporting the importation of millions to bring down wages. I really hope this AI brings a realization to college grads that pushing their fellow citizens into poverty was a bad idea.
An interesting short book on similar themes is Bostrom’s “Deep Utopia”. It’s quirky and discursive but seriously addresses the question of what will give life meaning when literally everything a human can do can be done even better by a machine. And that “literally” is literal: playing chess, playing baseball, raising healthy and well-adjusted children, overseeing a multinational corporation, doing fundamental scientific research. His answer is (just barely) that life will *still* have sources of meaning, but they will likely be quite different from those we have today.
Chris talked a lot about the importance of work which is indeed true. But he neglected the more fundamental question: what is work? The nature of work has evolved tremendously over time. Technology has been a key driver of such evolution. AI is another technology and will drive further evolution of work. Work will not disappear but will evolve. What the future work would entail exactly we could hardly imagine. It is almost certainly foolish to extrapolate the current definition of work to predict what the future work would be. There are really only two basic questions for humans: who am I and what is my work? The configurations and evolution of the two questions are infinite and becoming more complex over time. That’s both exciting and inevitable. It’s time to rise up to the challenge, indeed evolutionary responsibility, rather than wasting life on bemoaning the disappearance of what used to be familiar and appeared irreplaceable
A beautiful essay with many beautiful sentences (especially "societies work ...")!
There are already warnings about more quotidian reasons to ban this sort of cocaine-enthused optimism by our oligarch caste. Remember how trucking school was going to be outmoded by automated vehicles? And then that didn't happen, but it turned out that talking like it would happen discouraged future truckers. Or talk to metal shop owners who want to hire welders. There is already a knowledge crisis in the trades, where shops all over the country depend on one or two old guys who know how to fix that shop's frankensteined machines. They're retiring, and they may come out of retirement as consultants, but they're not training replacements. It probably would've solved several current problems and more future ones if we taught writing computer code to high schoolers regardless of its practicality as a career, to keep certain skills alive for the sake of keeping them alive. Young kids today who are used to the "closed box" are not getting from their tablet time the same facility Gen X got from old-fashioned desktop microcomputers. But I'm sure China will be nice to us so it'll all work out.
$1500/hour sounds like the billable rate for lawyers. They have long abused this by using clerks and billing like partners. Now with AI it is likely to be even more abusive. A lawyer dies and shows up at the Pearly Gates where he is met by a big crowd and a brass band. He is puzzled and asked why. St. Peter answers that he is the oldest person to ever appear here. Lawyer says he is 50 years old and keeled over at his desk. St. Peter looks at his accountant and raises an eyebrow. Accountant answers that they just added up all his billed hours.
I like to think about automation on the other side of the coin. If automation takes all the jobs, thus workers incomes, who has money to buy the stuff automation produces or does? I take solace in the fact that at the time of our nations founding, and for millennia before that, most people were self-sustaining farmers.
That wasn't practical in say the 70s, when automation was taking off but plenty of the old economy was still around. What I fear is, the oligarchs are putting together the means to answer that by simply not needing consumer demand any more. Luxurious shelters, AI, servant robots, enough power generation for the coming few, and then a bioengineered plague relieves them of the burden of the "useless eaters," and at that point the only global problem is that those people don't like each other.
In previous centuries, consumer demand was absolutely necessary, and therefore worker pay had to rise. Coke wouldn't be Coke unless literally everyone could buy a Coke. Now our economy is quite literally Elon selling Peter a token that will find its way to Jensen and then on to whoever is the head of Micron, and then back to Elon. Detroit is coming back, there is no middle class, no working class, no poor, Detroit is betting on high end luxury apartments for the already rich. We're not being cut out, we have already been cut out.
I generally agree, but I notice how often in this piece and the quotations that "human beings" are identified as "workers". Perhaps that's part of the problem. Our identities have been bound up in our economic utility for at least a millennium (last names like Baker or Smith are residuals of that.)
The equilibrium between capital and labor has shifted many times, but when capital can BECOME labor instead of employing labor, most of the laws of capitalism go out the window. We will also need to redefine our "self" in terms of something other than economic utility. That will be hard. It will be the work of generations. The author is right -- work is good -- but work doesn't have to mean "that which I must do to eat". My worth as a human is far larger than that. And perhaps, just perhaps, if we can navigate this transition without a Luddite revolution led by unemployed bureaucrats, HR cat ladies, and lawyers... we may get to see that world and the people in it really flourish.
The changes I think will be impossible to predict from here, but only after they have come.
I think that whether something is blue or white collar the easiest thing to replace is what is predictable. An email and an Amazon order both. Facebook is laying off 10,000 this week. I'm betting they aren't brilliant writers of code.
I look at all work carefully now. I doubt the nurse of my most recent Ct scan will be easy to replace, she deals with variable humans all day. Reading the scan I'd think is already mostly replaced by AI and a doctor reviews and confirms. The readings and a detailed write up of findings were a matter of a couple hours. A similar doctor using radiation for treatment costs $2,400 an hour based on the 15 minutes I talked to him.
The talk with the doc I'd think hard to replace. He was giving and receiving specific information and evaluating at the same time. A plumber is not an MD, just the same in watching plumbers I've come to realize they are doing a fairly complex task with many variables that they might not see again for years. Many people can't become licensed plumbers because they aren't bright enough.
Both the doc and the plumber find their work engrossing and stimulating. What is work anyway?
Long ago men were obligated to spend a lot of time hunting animals. The larger the animal the more difficult success, the greater the payout, and the greater the danger. Today some men spend days in extreme environments doing the same thing for enjoyment. I enjoy cooking more than restaurants, is it work?
I think there will always be work, I do hope we aren't forced to do so much of it that it becomes drudgery as many fast food workers will tell you. I like cooking but not two, thirty hour jobs at different businesses to pay rent.
For 35 years white collar has ignored the impoverishment of large segments of the working class, they even contribute to this day by supporting the importation of millions to bring down wages. I really hope this AI brings a realization to college grads that pushing their fellow citizens into poverty was a bad idea.
An interesting short book on similar themes is Bostrom’s “Deep Utopia”. It’s quirky and discursive but seriously addresses the question of what will give life meaning when literally everything a human can do can be done even better by a machine. And that “literally” is literal: playing chess, playing baseball, raising healthy and well-adjusted children, overseeing a multinational corporation, doing fundamental scientific research. His answer is (just barely) that life will *still* have sources of meaning, but they will likely be quite different from those we have today.
Chris talked a lot about the importance of work which is indeed true. But he neglected the more fundamental question: what is work? The nature of work has evolved tremendously over time. Technology has been a key driver of such evolution. AI is another technology and will drive further evolution of work. Work will not disappear but will evolve. What the future work would entail exactly we could hardly imagine. It is almost certainly foolish to extrapolate the current definition of work to predict what the future work would be. There are really only two basic questions for humans: who am I and what is my work? The configurations and evolution of the two questions are infinite and becoming more complex over time. That’s both exciting and inevitable. It’s time to rise up to the challenge, indeed evolutionary responsibility, rather than wasting life on bemoaning the disappearance of what used to be familiar and appeared irreplaceable
Perish the thought.
Outstanding, Chris. Love this.
A beautiful essay with many beautiful sentences (especially "societies work ...")!
There are already warnings about more quotidian reasons to ban this sort of cocaine-enthused optimism by our oligarch caste. Remember how trucking school was going to be outmoded by automated vehicles? And then that didn't happen, but it turned out that talking like it would happen discouraged future truckers. Or talk to metal shop owners who want to hire welders. There is already a knowledge crisis in the trades, where shops all over the country depend on one or two old guys who know how to fix that shop's frankensteined machines. They're retiring, and they may come out of retirement as consultants, but they're not training replacements. It probably would've solved several current problems and more future ones if we taught writing computer code to high schoolers regardless of its practicality as a career, to keep certain skills alive for the sake of keeping them alive. Young kids today who are used to the "closed box" are not getting from their tablet time the same facility Gen X got from old-fashioned desktop microcomputers. But I'm sure China will be nice to us so it'll all work out.
$1500/hour sounds like the billable rate for lawyers. They have long abused this by using clerks and billing like partners. Now with AI it is likely to be even more abusive. A lawyer dies and shows up at the Pearly Gates where he is met by a big crowd and a brass band. He is puzzled and asked why. St. Peter answers that he is the oldest person to ever appear here. Lawyer says he is 50 years old and keeled over at his desk. St. Peter looks at his accountant and raises an eyebrow. Accountant answers that they just added up all his billed hours.
Excellent piece. Work is uplifting.
I like to think about automation on the other side of the coin. If automation takes all the jobs, thus workers incomes, who has money to buy the stuff automation produces or does? I take solace in the fact that at the time of our nations founding, and for millennia before that, most people were self-sustaining farmers.
That wasn't practical in say the 70s, when automation was taking off but plenty of the old economy was still around. What I fear is, the oligarchs are putting together the means to answer that by simply not needing consumer demand any more. Luxurious shelters, AI, servant robots, enough power generation for the coming few, and then a bioengineered plague relieves them of the burden of the "useless eaters," and at that point the only global problem is that those people don't like each other.
Meh. Thats a pretty fantastical scenario based more on lifestyle thinking.
In previous centuries, consumer demand was absolutely necessary, and therefore worker pay had to rise. Coke wouldn't be Coke unless literally everyone could buy a Coke. Now our economy is quite literally Elon selling Peter a token that will find its way to Jensen and then on to whoever is the head of Micron, and then back to Elon. Detroit is coming back, there is no middle class, no working class, no poor, Detroit is betting on high end luxury apartments for the already rich. We're not being cut out, we have already been cut out.