One of my favorite daydreams is to imagine giving pearls of wisdom to a curious younger person. What’s homework for? Why should I care about sports, or math, or gym class? What do I really need to know? Is college hard? Why should I study? Nobody needs my answers to these questions, of course. Even people who want the answers need to figure them out for themselves.
But not long ago, my 9-year-old niece asked me what my job was, and I didn’t know how to answer. “Scrivener” isn’t a word a child understands. I said I work for an insurance company and she asked like State Farm?
What the hell do I have to say that a child actually wants to know? What about my job is relevant to a child who’s just outgrowing Busytown and wants to know what actual grownups do all day?
Not much, really. And less every day. At some point she might as well be asking me about my work as a viscount or switchboard operator: those are historical curiosities, not jobs.
I’ve been worried about this post titled Commodified Intelligence, which argues that AI is devaluing labor faster than we’re ready to accept or understand. Jobs teaching web development are in free fall right now, the author notes, and jobs like mine are falling right behind them. In my last post, I noted how Paul Fussell explains that low-prestige, low-class jobs are those where the worker is disposable and has no independence. AI is already making a lot of what used to be white-collar jobs into disposable-worker jobs, which is to say, downgrading them.
That’s a lot of people used to being in charge of something. A lot of people who find purpose and power in their work. A lot of people who are going to realize they’re disposable and powerless. And a lot of people who are going to have to remember that human rights don’t include necessities.
The more people become reverse centaurs, suboordinate humans tasked with helping their machines, the closer we get to a world where, “the best you can hope for is a universal basic income, pegged to a meaningful percentage of existing compute.”
That’s a bleak view of what some people like to call “fully automated luxury communism,” a Star Trek-like post-scarcity future where material needs are met, and people seek meaning through achievement, service, and art. But the premise is the same: the machines are going to climb up that value chain, replacing labor. And then what will labor do? If we believe the optimists, labor will find new meaning in new activities. If we believe the pessimists, labor will be discarded as obsolete, and only capital will matter.
Another view of the post-work future is After Work, We’ll Have Each Other, which investigates historical antecedents including 18th-century courts, a 1950s Italian enclave in Boston’s soon-to-be-demolished West End, and the upper-class housewives of the 1980s American upper Midwest. What the author finds is a bleak series of status games based on familial connection and conformity. Perhaps our jobs-based status games are horrible now, she argues, but imagine a life where your actual contribution to the world has no bearing at all on your status.
So, we’re becoming reverse centaurs. The work we do is losing status, but it’s also losing relevance: what you do isn’t something anyone’s going to give a shit about anymore. Once we’re all reverse centaurs, it won’t matter.
So, imagine a society where everyone’s pretty much alienated from the work that they perform. Some of us love work, some of us hate it, but it’s pretty much the same work, and it doesn’t have a ton of direct application to anything at all. It’s a series of tasks and hobbies. Imagine that we all get up every day and wear the clothes and eat the meals assigned to us, sign on or commute to our assigned location, do our chores and our tasks. We’re overseen by some algorithm or policy that sets our schedules by the day, week, and year.
In this world, obviously, we’ll have status games covering who’s in and who’s out. In fact, when the work is irrelevant, the status is ever more important. Not your achievement, not your output, not your learning, not your kindness, your love, your uniqueness, but your position on this game board, and how you enforce everyone else’s position relative to yours.
Imagine, in other words, the entire world turned into high school.
More Bad News
- A return to the flood issue at Florida real estate showings
- Ericksson has finally noticed his party is riddled with Nazis. See also the Unpopular Front responses Better Late than Never and From Shitpost to Bullshit.
