The Future of Work: The Work Phenomenon

(The following is a continuation of an update / article shared last week. It was written without ChatGPT, or other tools.)

To imagine the impact Humanoid Robots (or automation in general) might have on work, it might be helpful to form a clear idea about what work is. This is not easy, of course. The concept of ‘work’ is broad and can be given numerous connotations.

For the purposes of this article, I think it is most crucial to consider a definition of work that links ‘human effort’ to the ‘obtaining of something vital to human survival.’ Though even this is not straightforward. As mentioned in the introduction, the phenomenon of human work has evolved throughout the millennia – and what was essential to human survival in one generation has not necessarily been essential in other generations. 

Nevertheless, all of modern humanity would have to have evolved out of some essential effort to survive – whether through the unending hunt for food; or the growing of food; or, in our modern era, the working to get money with which to buy food, etc. 

The 'recent' addition of money into this effort / survival dynamic, by the way, is probably noteworthy, as well something to consider when pondering about the impact advanced machines might have on our relationship to work -- because the addition of money is clearly already an ‘artificial’ imposition on work. For example, if one is hired to unload a box truck at a grocery store, money is not technically needed to perform this task – one could successfully unload a box truck without also being paid to do so. Thus the earning of money is associated with, but distinct from, the unloading of a box truck. By contrast, if one successfully hunts a deer and kills it, then the payment for succeeding is the killed deer itself (which can then be eaten) – and so the ‘pay’ is inherently folded into the act.  

Furthermore, our modern notion of work seems to more obviously illuminate (and separate) other secondary aspects of work that would -- in the days of archaic hunting -- perhaps been much more economically unified. For example, a person hired to oversee a grocery store's inventory would not only have to perform the single repetitive task of unloading crates from the box truck, they would have also to perform various other secondary tasks (showing up to work on time; interacting cordially with co-workers; and managing all personal affairs in such a manner that it is possible to continue to perform this work on a daily basis). And as many modern workers can attest to, oftentimes these more secondary tasks are far more difficult to execute regularly than the one, basic task for which they were hired to perform -- perhaps because these secondary tasks are often so encumbered with distinct logistical considerations, relationships, and exertions of energy. But they are nevertheless necessary to the basic task of unloading that box truck.

Now all of this said, where might the Humanoid Robot (or automation) come in?

To begin, the Humanoid Robot (or automated workforce) would only be designed to perform the specific repetitive tasks that are essential for the job to be considered complete. And as far as the employer was concerned, they wouldn’t need a robot to manage its’ own private time, or to behave cordially (in a human sense) with co-workers – and there wouldn’t generally be a need for the robot to go anywhere besides the shop in which it operated. And thus the Humanoid Robot would simply need to, in the above example, unload crates from the box truck. 

From this, we might predict that the addition of the Humanoid Robot into the so-called human work phenomenon could add even more degrees of separation between our human effort and our general survival than what we currently know in our monetary economy. Subsequently, this separation could spaghettifi this relationship to non-existence. Ultimately, and finally, this addition into our economy could fractionate and atrophy the 'whole work' ability that many humans used to have -- and make us a sort of lost, over-fed peoples with innumerable, useless and incompatible abilities (far more than we moderns are now).

Exploring these matters seems rather existential, even psychedelic. It’s as though there are more and more obstacles that stand in the way of our appreciating basic, long-taken for granted things – and the expense of energy to understand these things does not satisfy, but adds to, whatever other concerns there might be in living a truly human life.