Work's not the problem
Considering the automation of the human condition
Life sucks for the vast majority of the people, and for the rest, it’s maybe just slightly annoying, or boring. Either way, we’re in constant need of overcoming life’s random crap, which we can only do via an activity that we call work, in the most general sense. There’s much work to do, always. Just look around us!
I’m not even talking about anything complicated. Have you ever used any tool or any app? Have you ever flown anywhere? Have you ever been sick? A lot of things need work. Have you watched movies lately? Somebody has to shoot something better.
There are much more complicated things than apps, of course. Worst of all, there’s rarely such a thing as purely individual happiness. Generally, you can’t be happy while everyone around you is suffering. Is it sane? Is it smart? To be so dependent on other people, around us, not suffering, not starving, not going crazy? Some people can avoid this, and be happy among misery, maybe even because of the misery around them. Most of us can’t, so we have to support others and try to do some work to improve their lives as well.
A lot of work is needed. Work that often nobody really does, because, first of all, everyone is too busy doing some other work, and secondly, contrary to what a particularly American fantasy tells, no, even a well-motivated entrepreneur typically can’t just barge into a random industry and start to randomly improve things. There’s no such thing as a world leisurely improved solely by the efforts of satisfied people with nice hobbies1.
Like Max Weber's state must keep using violence to prevent violence, automation constantly requires work to prevent work. You can’t fully automate away the crappiness of life because this crappiness is ultimately situated in your daily human experience. Somebody with this experience needs to guide the automation process. That’s work. Getting that experience is also work. Getting and processing the experience—even second-hand—of being underserved by automation is itself work.
Bracket the automation fantasy, what's it for? The real question is: what’s the problem with work? This activity that supposedly improves everything, why avoiding it is the biggest dream?
Well, we’re taught two horrible ideas:
Work is a heavy burden to be avoided, something that's never properly valuable, and never properly rewarded.
Overcoming life’s crappiness, at the end of the day, comes down to money.
It is from these two ideas that spawn the big contemporary fantasies: dreams of sudden wealth, or of something like Universal Basic Income.
Those two are terrible ideas because they’re wrong. No, actually, in our current reality, work truly is difficult and rarely well-compensated, and without money you can't overcome much. But these ideas only reinforce the unhealthy attitude to work that makes them so relatable. There’s absolutely no need for work to suck so much!
Rejecting the two horrible ideas on a personal level doesn’t change the current reality. It’s still worth it because work remains that rare thing which – unlike intelligence or money – is itself the process of creating conditions for realizing its own possibilities. You can't think your way to happiness through sheer intellect, you can't buy the ability to improve the world with money, but you can work towards being able to work to improve your life.
A great point of the Modern Monetary Theory is that neoclassical economics logic of society requiring unemployment to function is viciously wrong. That logic is cruelly simple: by keeping around a few percentages of miserably, desperately unemployed, society “motivates” people to work shitty jobs for the shitty wages they get.
When Nikita Khrushchev visited Ford’s factory, he reportedly asked why so many workers were washing windows since it didn’t directly contribute to production. Ford allegedly replied that clean windows allowed his workers to see the long lines of unemployed people waiting at the factory gates, eager for a job — a powerful motivator. This story may be apocryphal, but it certainly captures the essence of Ford’s approach to labor.
MMT is right to question this logic. This very approach is what’s making working so miserable, underpaid, and often pointless. The artificial scarcity of jobs is a mind-killer. It makes us treat shitty jobs as a privilege and good, helpful jobs as folly – think of the well-paid corporate drones leaving to become nurses or teachers.
“UBI + Automation” utopia is misguided because it never accepts that proper work is a valuable thing. It continues this thread of work being miserable. Its answer to the world needing constant improvement, and constant human involvement is that somebody will do it as a hobby. What’s missing here is any notion of responsibility. There’s never enough responsible hobbyist effort for anything to stop sucking. As an extreme example – you can’t put a hobbyist into organizing something like a response to a catastrophe2. It’s a career, decades of not just slowly learning how to deal with something terrible, but also of proving to others that they can trust you with that – it’s not something you just decide to do one evening after woodworking starts to feel boring.
It’s sad to have a discussion about UBI and hear yet again many variations of "it'll be great not to work, I can focus on creativity" – as if creativity were somehow the opposite of work. Perhaps the idea here is that what they call "creativity" is simply irresponsible work – a hobby. Well, it's not the case for the most artists we admire so much that we almost depend on them for our well-being.
The tragedy is that a society trying to overcome its problems with money rather than work will never escape its miserable state. Even economically, it simply doesn't work.
At the end of the day, in any foreseeable future, the world will continue to suck, and there will be work for everyone to do. Will we be paid for it, will we be called upon to do it, will we be granted responsibility to do that work, that’s the big question. We’re willing, in fact, we’re already working as much as we can. But it seems likely that the plan is for us to be paid a meager sum to shut up and put up with what it is.
EA’s claims notwithstanding.
You can’t automate responses to black-swan-level catastrophes, that’s what they are, by definition.
UBI, or something like it, is inevitable. You think in a world with billionaires it’s acceptable to have kids go hungry or people living on the street? There needs to be some base level we as a society should tolerate. Whatever you want on top of that is yours to pursue.
The other factor to consider is that all this tech and automation will be used by the largest companies to get even larger. These companies already have an advantage. Imagine in a few years with no regulations or oversight. You think they’re ever gonna stop growing? Wealth funnels up, inequality grows and leads to chaos. What if people want to work and there’s just no work to do cause it’s cheaper to use robots, how are people going to access housing and food?