You will never plow a field if you only turn it over in your mind. —Irish Proverb I’ve been thinking about the future of work. With a quick search on “jobless future”, I found a fascinating blog/essay on some predictions for AI and robots by Rodney Brooks, a roboticist and entrepreneur at MIT, called “ My Dated Predictions “. (He means his predictions with dates attached, not predictions that he’s made in the past that have now become dated.) Another article by James Pethokoukis then took Brooks’ predictions and distilled them down to the eleven most important steps (the TLDR version of Brooks’ essay) in an article posted on the public policy blog at the American Enterprise Institute. Both articles feed into this new angst that I see floating around the Internet, about this so-called “jobless” society. Everyone is up-in-arms about the end of work, or certainly, the end of unskilled work. First, let’s define it for this context (definition mine). Work – n. An activity involving effort to afford the worker and their family necessities for survival, such as food, clothing, shelter, transportation, and education. A Brief History of Work Three hundred years ago, work for most people was toiling in someone else’s fields, when workers’ labor and often their bodies were owned by a lord and master. “Joe Lunchbucket” was “Guiseppe Sharecropper” back then. And his life sucked, and his wife’s life sucked, and then she died in childbirth and he died in his duke’s army. One hundred fifty years ago brought the industrial age, and with it, a great migration to cities. People didn’t migrate to cities because they heard that there was a revolution going on; workers migrated to cities because there was literally nowhere else to find work. Rural agricultural work and artisanal cottage industries were simultaneously industrialized and then mechanized. It’s easy to idealize the past. Oh, look at the golden era sixty years ago when one income was enough to sustain an entire family, with the patriarch working 40 hours a week, with the knowledge that he would retire from that job with a good pension. Or even better, what about those people ten thousand years ago who never even had to worry about pensions or retiring or even working at all? Hunting and gathering sound pretty good. According to some, Paleolithic people had to work only a few hours a day to meet all their needs, and they lived in such idyllic perfection that we should try to emulate them now instead of suffering in our emasculating horror of a labor-specialized civilization. [Note: Anthropologists will tell you that almost all of pre-modern life revolves around energy conservation. You work like heck hunting and gathering for a few hours, and then you crash out. Most of your caveman’s “free time” was low-energy idling, sitting there by the cave fire overlooking the canyon, enjoying the sunset and trying not to move except to draw some stuff on the cave walls, because you would starve if you were too active. (This new world consists of a disconnect between calorie-consumption and energy expenditure. No wonder we’re all fat. —Ed. )] Work Today Today? We’re all worried about being replaced by robots and AI and we’ll no longer have full-time work — or work at all. What is Joe going to do now? Who knows. He probably doesn’t work 40 hours a week already. If you average him in with all his neighbors over age fifteen, they probably do 20 hours a week between them as it is. His standard of living isn’t too bad. He is awash in a society with a surplus of consumer goods. His real problem is that what he knows how to do—that is, repetitive machine operation—isn’t valuable anymore. Some people are still required to work the machines, but they are doing highly skilled work. Joe may not want to learn the new skills. He works himself into a froth about people becoming slackers. And yet, compared to our “work as long as God’s sun shines down” serf ancestors, we are the slackers. We are in a moral panic over “a jobless society” —a distinction that barely exists, mostly because by being in a moral panic, we can obscure the fact that we all have it incredibly well. The definition of work may change—and, I would argue—already has. I can work a few days in an office to buy enough steak to last me a long time, or I can spend a week hunting bison, with much the same result. Which is more valid and more valuable “work”? The value of work in a free-market labor economy is determined by how easy you are to replace. When it becomes cheaper to have a completely automated factory than it is to employ a workforce, then the workforce goes to the unemployment lines. The real moral imperative is to ensure that there is work for these newly displaced workers to do. How Can We Predict the Future? Ultimately, one of the most important things to do in the future is to let go of the present. We struggle to grasp the peculiarities of whatever age we currently live in, and we assume these things are an indelible part of human life. Imagine if you heard someone talking about how the future of humanity will take the form of a gigantic interconnected network of fax machines. Ridiculous, right? And yet, that’s what was predicted in Back to the Future II , made in 1985, when predicting 2015. youtu.be/UlEFqR4SaVA I feel like we forget all those things, we romanticize and also fail to really use our imagination... maybe all we seek from futurism is self-flattery, and that is why it fails so often. People who personally feel stymied in their lives, battered around by forces they don’t understand, are drawn to fantasies of powerful, free, Paleolithic forebears who didn’t have to deal with paperwork, and to dramatic fantasies of singularity, AI takeover, apocalyptic simplification of the terms of life. But exactly zero of that is about anything else aside from our own selves — it has nothing to do with actual Paleolithic people, nothing to do with how labor actually works, and it certainly has nothing to do with actual technology or our actual emerging future. That is what makes future prediction so hard. I guess a better way to put it is: be skeptical. Question your own assumptions and find answers to your questions. And be skeptical of those answers, too. To my mind, the most interesting question we could be asking is, how do we adjust to doing less work? What work should we do when we’re not working? What kind of economy is a job-free one? What does that even mean? Stay tuned when I try to answer that question later this week when I attend DesignCon. —Meera![]()
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