A World Without Work
3 major problems we'll have to solve in a world full of automation
Hello humans,
Everyone’s losing their bearings thanks to chatGPT, including people in my society Whatsapp group. That was an absolute shocker because the only discussions that happen in the group are on whether the kids should be jailed for urinating in the parking lot.
This new experience of talking to a human-like machine, even though it often gives wrong answers and bullshits better than me in the Viva exam, has given rise to a whole host of emotions.
Some are welcoming it with open arms and are already getting wet dreams about a world where productivity gets a 1000x boost overnight. Others are dissing on these hype mongers. Most are expressing their worries about how this might lead to massive disruptions in the job market.
It is natural to feel that way. And as the tech improves over time, it’s pretty likely that a lot of work that humans do today might get automated. That’s the least original thing I’ve said in the last 300 days.
But what are the consequences of such a shift?
Today’s piece is not a debate about whether this tech will also end up creating new jobs to make up for the displacement it creates. This has happened many times in the history of automation. ATMs, for example, increased the number of bank teller jobs instead of reducing them because the increased productivity freed them up to hawk more of the bank’s shit and sell them to unwitting customers. Business boomed, and more people were needed to sell even more.
But this time, things do seem to be different and it’s reasonable to assume that soon, a lot of things that we thought only humans could excel at are increasingly being done by machines.
So if we assume that over the years, the number of jobs left for humans would go down as machines take over ever-increasing parts of the economy, where will it leave us?
There are 3 major challenges that this transition is going to present us with, and we’ll have to solve them at the same time. It’s an alarming list, so let’s look at each of them and what their implications will mean for human society:
Inequality
The world’s inequality has been on the rise and is soon about to reach the worst levels of all time. The top 10% of the richest people today own about 70% of all wealth while the bottom 50% owns a meager 2%! This is a multi-decade trend that is only set to get worse.
The reason we find ourselves in such a situation is the increasing importance of traditional capital and conversely, the falling potential of human capital- I explained this in my 2022 Mental Models list. Those who own traditional assets- stocks, real estate, industries, etc are able to multiply their wealth at a much faster rate than those who have none of these and have to build their wealth from scratch, solely by using their labor (and hence, ‘human capital’). The reason is simple- we live in a world where the rate of return on traditional capital is much higher than the rate at which the economy grows. Just look at the 30-year growth rate of NIFTY 50 and compare it with the growth rate of India’s GDP and the picture will be clear.
Extrapolate this picture into the future and you can see why it’s relevant to our discussion. Disruptive new technologies- from chatbots to robotics companies, will continue to make the difference between those who own capital vs those who don’t even wider, and it’ll be even harder to work on reducing inequalities in a world where the demand for human labor is just not there. It’s the classic “Rich get richer” problem on steroids thanks to all the automation, and entering this era without a UBI-type solution might wreak havoc.
Humankind has always been concerned with enlarging the economic pie. But in a world of unprecedented wealth, we’ll have to shift our focus urgently toward solving the distribution problem.
Political Power
The second nasty problem we’ll have to contend with is the unsustainable levels of political power hoarded by big tech companies. This is already happening in many ways and is set to become an even deadlier problem as AI tools become ubiquitous.
Facebook can swing elections with its ads. If Tesla becomes a leader in self-driving cars, it’ll effectively be able to regulate the speed limit- something that’s actually decided by the lawmakers. Big data can be used for mass surveillance- it’s already happening in so many ways.
Imagine what can happen if we become overly dependent on these AI assistants and chatbots that are beginning to emerge. Companies that command these powerful technologies will have unprecedented power over our lives and the ability to affect our freedom and liberty with a snap. Algorithms are already quite biased and have been known to discriminate against people of color as well as women when it comes to deciding who’s eligible for a loan or a new job opening.
In a world where our lives can’t operate without some of these technologies, we will find ourselves at the mercy of these companies and very often be manipulated into doing what they want us to do without even realizing it, just as it happens with social media-based attention engineering.
Meaning
The most critical, though, seems to be the problem of meaning. Last week I wrote about bullshit jobs and how they restrict the essential meaning-making function of our work.
We work because it gives meaning to our lives. It also makes us feel worthy because we’re contributing to society and keeps us occupied, thereby preventing us from spending too much time on Reddit threads that require us to be 18+.
We’re so conditioned to spending most of our waking hours laboring away in cubicles that it’s hard to imagine what’d happen if those 10 hours were simply turned into a free slot where you can do whatever the hell you want. Max Weber said that work has become the new opium of the masses and without it, we’d not know what to do. Watching retired people getting frustrated and early retirees running back to work faster than they ran back to their ex-girlfriends provides some indication of what it’s like to have nothing to do and stare at the ceiling fan till late evening. For a fun demonstration of this effect, watch the movie Sharmaji Namkeen.
We even have actual data on the effects of unemployment. Studies done in the Austrian village of Marienthal showed how unemployment led to higher levels of depression, slowed down people’s walking speed, caused drop-outs from political meetings and fairs, and was just a total sucker-punch to the human spirit.
Our minds may first think about the money but I reckon that the problem of meaning will turn out to be the thorniest to solve in a world where our resumes are subjected to the Shift+Delete treatment.
We spoke about the big problems that await us, but it’s not at all doom and gloom. Some of the smartest thinkers are working on solving these problems, and there are interesting solutions from UBI to conditional basic incomes and increased taxation to political oversight boards. We’ll discuss these very soon.
If you liked today’s piece, share it with your techno-utopian friends and have a nice debate. And let me know if it turns violent, I’d love to hear the details.