IMPACT COMMUNICATION
AND INNOVATION
AND INNOVATION
In article a piece for the Harvard Business Review, Robert C. Wolcott reflects on how most humans throughout history have worked not because they wanted to, but because they had to. “Many found comfort, value, and meaning in their efforts, but others defined work as a necessity to be avoided if possible,” the author writes.
Works such as Work as Life, written by German philosopher Dietmar Kamper, present this historical perspective on how the meaning of work has changed over time, transforming from a penalty into a guiding activity for our lives. In a brief overview, Wolcott touches on areas like philosophy and history, while also taking into account the economic issues involved in looking at the future of work or what would be ideal for different societies and thinkers.
In the case of Aristotle, for example, the pinnacle of human existence would be achieved through human freedom—that is, “an individual free from any concern for the necessities of life and with almost complete personal agency.” In other words, as Wolcott explains, Aristotle did not consider great merchants to be free, as their minds were always preoccupied with acquisition and the pace of their business.
The promise of artificial intelligence and automation raises new questions about the role of work in our lives. Many of us will remain focused for decades on our physical or financial production activities, but as technology provides services and products at ever-lower costs, human beings will become more inclined to discover new roles—roles that are not necessarily tied to how we understand work today.
The challenge, however, as recently proposed by economist Brian Arthur, will not be so much economic as it will be political. That is, how will the advantages and perks of technology be distributed? Arthur understands that given the way we can see chasms forming between elites and the rest of society in the current political landscape of the United States and Europe, the future does not hold anything very different.
However, Wolcott believes that later, but still within this century, “societies will figure out how to distribute the production benefits of technology for two primary reasons: because it will be easier and because we must.” Over time, the author reinforces, technology will make production increasingly greater with less effort. “For now, history suggests that the concentration of wealth in so few hands generates social pressures that will be addressed either through politics or violence, or both.”
But this raises another question, a more uncomfortable challenge: as the benefits of technology become more widely available—through reform or revolution—more people will ask themselves: “If technology can do almost everything, then what should I do, and why?”
This type of scenario has, in a way, been experienced since the Industrial Revolution, as technology began to make this transition for a larger portion of humanity that would no longer have to dedicate so much effort to accessing essential products. This, however, did not eradicate the large number of people who still face a daily struggle for their own survival. Even so, Wolcott argues that as artificial intelligence and robotic systems improve and become more targeted, work will increasingly become something unnecessary—something close to what John Maynard Keynes described in Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren as “technological unemployment,” that is, a context in which technology replaces human labor faster than we are able to discover new jobs.
Keynes predicted that this would be only “a temporary phase of maladjustment” and that, within a century, humanity could overcome its fundamental economic challenge and be freed from the biological necessity to work.
This is an extremely hopeful vision, but also a complicated and dangerous path. Keynes warned: “If the economic problem is solved, mankind will be deprived of its traditional purpose… Yet there is no country and no people, I think, who can look forward to the age of leisure and of abundance without a dread.”
Even with apprehension, Keynes imagined how people could dedicate themselves and redirect their interests and fears when they no longer needed to focus on work, on the effort to find the basic means of survival. Thus, deprived of one of our most traditional and primary goals in life, Wolcott asks, how could we avoid a nihilistic future in the style of the dystopia Brave New World, by Aldous Huxley? “How will we define our sense of purpose, meaning, and value?”
To answer these questions, Wolcott brings up the work of philosopher and historian Hannah Arendt, who, in the 1950s, designed a framework for human activity in her book The Human Condition. There, the author defines three levels of human existence based on a Greek reference, which is summarized in the concept of Vita Activa.
That is, labor (labor) generates metabolic needs, such as food, which is one of the important elements for our survival. On the other hand, work (work)creates new physical artifacts and infrastructures that define our world and often transcend us—from our homes to consumer goods and works of art. Action (action) brings an interactive and communicative side to the activities performed between and by human beings, that is, the public sphere. It is in this realm that we can explore and define what distinguishes us as human beings and where we seek our immortality.
Over the next 100 years, artificial intelligence and robotic systems will increasingly dominate labor and work, producing the metabolic needs and physical artifacts of human life, allowing more of us to ascend (Arendt truly presents this as an ascent—this is a qualitative value judgment) to the level of action. Of course, some people may choose labor and work, but choice is the main difference.
As Wolcott reminds us, most Greek philosophers prioritized contemplation over action as the primary goal of human beings. However, Arendt went against this notion by defending action, which seems to be a line of thought similar to today's culture. “Ultimately, however, action and contemplation work best when allied. We have the opportunity—perhaps the responsibility—to turn our social and curious nature into action andand contemplation,” writes the author of the article for the Harvard Business Review.
We will face dramatic adjustments to our Vita Activa over the coming decades, each of us asking what to do and why. I am hopeful that our grandchildren will be free to live a life of engagement and exploration—or simply to have a garden or cook. If we are lucky, this will be more of a choice than a necessity.
When Arendt begins The Human Condition with a warning for a society in which workers are on the verge of being freed from the obligations of labor, the danger that arises is that this society may not know what other great or meaningful things can be done to make this freedom worth fighting for. As Wolcott reinforces, Arendt directed this challenge especially at communist ideology, which has the glorification of labor as one of its characteristics.
Finally, Wolcott ends his article by posing one last question: “When our machines free us from more and more tasks, to what will we turn our attention?” In my view, this type of anxiety does not seem so concerning if we take into account that it stems from a possible break with the traditional logic that has structured our lives for so many centuries.
That is, we are conditioned to organize our lives along a timeline consisting of birth, years of study, work, family, and death. But this logic is increasingly being subverted. New educational approaches, such as families who choose to homeschool their children, already subvert the institutional logic of school. People who enter the job market without a college degree, or those who, even with a degree, find a way to monetize beyond their formal training or a traditional job, are also moving away from this linear sequence.
Likewise, new family structures bring, within the very notion of our society and liquid lives, a moment of transition, an interregnum, in which we are organizing ourselves out of disorganization, in search of a society where working will be optional and new meanings can be given to our lives and our existence that are not necessarily conditioned by what we do professionally or how we are compensated.
After all, it is not our profession that defines us as human beings, but it is what facilitates the pursuit of happiness when we can combine an activity that satisfies us with a reward for it—something that, however, is not necessarily true for a vast portion of the population, whether due to a lack of opportunity, unfair pay, or many other variables that, nevertheless (and with luck), could be readjusted as the very notion of work is subverted by the removal of the necessity of survival, a characteristic so intrinsically linked to our current condition.
