By Alex Shenderov, PhD
Member of the ApFi Scientific Council
There are several key trends that appear likely to shape the way we work in the coming decades. One of these trends is superabundance: it takes less and less effort to meet more and more exotic human needs, not to mention basic ones. As a result, more resources, most importantly human talent, are freed up. This could be a possibility to do more, or to work less, or both.
Some focus on the “work less” option and suggest that with superabundance, human work could become unnecessary, and humans useless. The most important question in twenty-first-century economics, they believe, is what to do with all the people becoming superfluous from technological unemployment. One possibility is the adoption of a universal basic income (UBI) and filling everyone’s time on a 100% volunteer/hobbyist basis. Another possibility is finding new uses for specifically human labor, such as settling the universe while taking care of our Earth.
The choice between these scenarios will have profound effects on human health and well-being. Work is that gives workers other benefits besides earning a living, such as social contacts and mental and/or physical exercise. Reduced labor demand is known to lead to psychological and cultural breakdown and – importantly - fertility declines. Continued social engagement in the form of work appears to be crucial for maintaining social cohesion and promoting human flourishing.
The distinction between work and volunteerism seems to be the level of accountability. An elective activity is something that, when things get hard, you can quit without compromising your social standing. At work, you can't do that. Accordingly, the resources that society entrusts workers (in exchange for accountability for spending those resources) are usually far in excess of those available to activists/hobbyists.
Machines increasingly replace humans in occupations meeting the current needs of society. Hence more resources, including human talent, are freed up to convert some elective activities into work - if the society chooses to assign those activities sufficient priority so that allocating serious resources is justified. However, society appears to be having trouble funding socially important work, with eccentric billionaires (occasionally and haphazardly) picking up the slack.
As a side note, rearranging social priorities to reallocate resources at a relevant time scale strains the agility of democracies, long-term foresight of markets, and stereoscopic vision of autocracies and eccentric billionaires. New, Internet-enabled forms of governance may be relevant here.
The fundamental question here is, what do we need ourselves for? Some believe, openly or otherwise, that, increasingly, we just don’t. As long as our ambitions are parochial and pastoralist, this appears to be the only logical choice.
You can’t have infinite growth on a finite planet, neo-Malthusians insist - so (they say) we need to go back to the happy times when people were few, and their days (neo-Malthusians believe, despite ample evidence to the contrary) were spent happily dancing barefoot in dewy grass. De-growth, they say, will save the planet. Research, however, shows de-growth to be a death spiral for human civilization that will lead to an empty planet. The same research shows that a stagnant but stable (“sustainable”) pastoralist society is a utopian delusion: inherent feedback loops will send it either forth to the stars, or back to the caves.
The neo-Malthusian supposition that our growth is resource-limited can be instantly cured by the simple exercise of going outside on a clear night and looking up. The zero-sum-game delusion makes no sense when we have hard time finding use for ourselves. The instant we shake its spell, the demand for human labor shoots up. The 58.5 man-hours humans spent exploring the Moon required 5.2 billion man-hours of work down here on Earth. Sure, some of that Earth-bound labor could now be performed by robots; but that would mean more humans, not fewer, can focus on exploring new worlds. And that’s where we outshine robots every day and twice on Sunday: we are the ones that make irrational decisions in an alien environment. In the adaptation department, we the slightly irrational humans outperform the pre-programmed robots the way Internet outperforms carrier pigeons. The one trained human geologist that visited the Moon, accomplished more in a few hours walking around there than preprogrammed robots without, ahem, adult supervision, managed to do in decades. That’s where the future of human labor is – if we choose to have the ambition to settle space.
Why should we? According to humanist view, an ambitious civilization climbing the Kardashev scale to the stars is its home biosphere’s evolutionary adaptation. Space is a shooting gallery, and every life-bearing planet will one day be sterilized one way or another. The only way a biosphere can immortalize itself is to evolve a civilization that can protect it from global catastrophes - and/or plant its copies elsewhere. With this as a long-term goal, humans are unlikely to become uselessness any time soon, - if ever.
In conclusion, the future of work is likely to be shaped by superabundance. Whether or not human work, - and, by extension, continued existence of humans, - serves any useful purpose will not be determined solely by the ability of our machines to excel at tasks we have already invented for them (and invented them for). It will also depend on humans choosing what “useful purpose” stands for.
References:
Superabundance: The Story of Population Growth, Innovation, and Human Flourishing on an Infinitely Bountiful Planet, by Marian L. Tupy, Gale L. Pooley, and George Gilder
World Without Work, by Daniel Susskind
AI will create 'useless class' of human, predicts bestselling historian, by Guardian
Homo Exploratoris: Is Humanity an Apprentice God?, by Alex Shenderov
A World Without Work, by Derek Thompson
Short- and long-term effects of unemployment on fertility, by Janet Currie and Hannes Schwandt
30+ Eye-Opening Volunteering Statistics for 2022, by Barry Elad
The NOAA Marine Debris Program
The Ocean Cleanup receives $25 million
Debunked: A quote by Yuval Noah Harari that technology will 'replace people' is missing context
Some focus on the “work less” option and suggest that with superabundance, human work could become unnecessary, and humans useless. The most important question in twenty-first-century economics, they believe, is what to do with all the people becoming superfluous from technological unemployment. One possibility is the adoption of a universal basic income (UBI) and filling everyone’s time on a 100% volunteer/hobbyist basis. Another possibility is finding new uses for specifically human labor, such as settling the universe while taking care of our Earth.
The choice between these scenarios will have profound effects on human health and well-being. Work is that gives workers other benefits besides earning a living, such as social contacts and mental and/or physical exercise. Reduced labor demand is known to lead to psychological and cultural breakdown and – importantly - fertility declines. Continued social engagement in the form of work appears to be crucial for maintaining social cohesion and promoting human flourishing.
The distinction between work and volunteerism seems to be the level of accountability. An elective activity is something that, when things get hard, you can quit without compromising your social standing. At work, you can't do that. Accordingly, the resources that society entrusts workers (in exchange for accountability for spending those resources) are usually far in excess of those available to activists/hobbyists.
Machines increasingly replace humans in occupations meeting the current needs of society. Hence more resources, including human talent, are freed up to convert some elective activities into work - if the society chooses to assign those activities sufficient priority so that allocating serious resources is justified. However, society appears to be having trouble funding socially important work, with eccentric billionaires (occasionally and haphazardly) picking up the slack.
As a side note, rearranging social priorities to reallocate resources at a relevant time scale strains the agility of democracies, long-term foresight of markets, and stereoscopic vision of autocracies and eccentric billionaires. New, Internet-enabled forms of governance may be relevant here.
The fundamental question here is, what do we need ourselves for? Some believe, openly or otherwise, that, increasingly, we just don’t. As long as our ambitions are parochial and pastoralist, this appears to be the only logical choice.
You can’t have infinite growth on a finite planet, neo-Malthusians insist - so (they say) we need to go back to the happy times when people were few, and their days (neo-Malthusians believe, despite ample evidence to the contrary) were spent happily dancing barefoot in dewy grass. De-growth, they say, will save the planet. Research, however, shows de-growth to be a death spiral for human civilization that will lead to an empty planet. The same research shows that a stagnant but stable (“sustainable”) pastoralist society is a utopian delusion: inherent feedback loops will send it either forth to the stars, or back to the caves.
The neo-Malthusian supposition that our growth is resource-limited can be instantly cured by the simple exercise of going outside on a clear night and looking up. The zero-sum-game delusion makes no sense when we have hard time finding use for ourselves. The instant we shake its spell, the demand for human labor shoots up. The 58.5 man-hours humans spent exploring the Moon required 5.2 billion man-hours of work down here on Earth. Sure, some of that Earth-bound labor could now be performed by robots; but that would mean more humans, not fewer, can focus on exploring new worlds. And that’s where we outshine robots every day and twice on Sunday: we are the ones that make irrational decisions in an alien environment. In the adaptation department, we the slightly irrational humans outperform the pre-programmed robots the way Internet outperforms carrier pigeons. The one trained human geologist that visited the Moon, accomplished more in a few hours walking around there than preprogrammed robots without, ahem, adult supervision, managed to do in decades. That’s where the future of human labor is – if we choose to have the ambition to settle space.
Why should we? According to humanist view, an ambitious civilization climbing the Kardashev scale to the stars is its home biosphere’s evolutionary adaptation. Space is a shooting gallery, and every life-bearing planet will one day be sterilized one way or another. The only way a biosphere can immortalize itself is to evolve a civilization that can protect it from global catastrophes - and/or plant its copies elsewhere. With this as a long-term goal, humans are unlikely to become uselessness any time soon, - if ever.
In conclusion, the future of work is likely to be shaped by superabundance. Whether or not human work, - and, by extension, continued existence of humans, - serves any useful purpose will not be determined solely by the ability of our machines to excel at tasks we have already invented for them (and invented them for). It will also depend on humans choosing what “useful purpose” stands for.
References:
Superabundance: The Story of Population Growth, Innovation, and Human Flourishing on an Infinitely Bountiful Planet, by Marian L. Tupy, Gale L. Pooley, and George Gilder
World Without Work, by Daniel Susskind
AI will create 'useless class' of human, predicts bestselling historian, by Guardian
Homo Exploratoris: Is Humanity an Apprentice God?, by Alex Shenderov
A World Without Work, by Derek Thompson
Short- and long-term effects of unemployment on fertility, by Janet Currie and Hannes Schwandt
30+ Eye-Opening Volunteering Statistics for 2022, by Barry Elad
The NOAA Marine Debris Program
The Ocean Cleanup receives $25 million
Debunked: A quote by Yuval Noah Harari that technology will 'replace people' is missing context
