All Jobs Go To Heaven
Self-driving cars were still a dorky subject in 2015 when I started this blog, but one of the points I tried to drive home to friends and naysayers was the cultural impact of artificial intelligence — and how autonomous vehicles are the harbingers of that impact, as far as your average citizen is concerned.
Nowhere in the next decade will automation efficiencies be more palpable than with cars, and part of that claim is the looming job loss. Three million truck driver jobs, a few million more in taxi and livery drivers… in total, an estimated 3% of the workforce being put out to pasture at the hands of self-driving technology. And the analysts crunching those numbers aren’t even thinking ahead.
This is absolutely not humanity’s first rodeo regarding automation of labor, but as politicians and corporations continue to lean heavily on job hysteria for their own selfish gains, it’s vital that we tear down the taboo of what the hell a job really means, rather than take up arms against our own future to protect a revisionist past.
We have unprecedented progress ahead of us. We have permanent unemployment to look forward to, and good news: everyone gets a gold watch. All jobs go to heaven.
Challenge your perspective on the future of work in the next two steps; this is all we can ask of any human, but it should be asked of us all.
Step 1: Unpack The Word
Words are extremely dangerous communication tools in that they often represent abstract or compound ideas; as such, meaning lies in the eye of the beholder, which ruins the point of creating a word in the first place. Most of us would crumble within seconds of being challenged to defend our definitions of such self-evident words as privacy, freedom, or happiness.
Over time, we’ve thrust the word “jobs” into a similar stratosphere of complexity. Do not overlook this reality. You and I are saying the same word and nodding our heads, but we don’t agree on what it means. More importantly, your conscious and your subconscious probably don’t agree on it either. This is literally the opposite of what words were invented to do — it’s consensual miscommunication.
We shouldn’t make arguments in defense of a concept if we don’t know what we’re actually defending. So let’s at least make some attempt to break “jobs” down into two visceral, underlying components: income and purpose.
Keep in mind that beyond basic physiological needs, there is a high degree of subjectivity and fluctuation in our personal perceptions of need vs. fulfillment.
What’s more, we don’t have to align on these components. If we disagree on the concepts rather than that single mysterious word they roll up to, then we’re making good progress.
Income (The Promise Of)
We perform work because we have needs, and those needs can’t be met without effort. Work is any effort to produce desired outcomes; let’s call these outcomes resources. If your ancestors were hungry, they needed to hunt down or gather food. If your modern-day, civilized self is hungry, you need to generate some fiat currency, which you then trade for food. We’re all on the same page here, yes? Then let’s be lazy and call these modern resources income. Whether it’s your paycheck or Caveman Joe’s slab of bison meat, we perform work to generate income, which in turn satisfies our needs.
You can generate income in any number of ways (gambling, stealing, discovering, begging), but for most of us, the inconsistency and social rejections of those aforementioned approaches do not constitute the makings of an acceptable lifestyle: gambling can only be a job if you’re comfortable living with all the challenges it brings. No, most of us are looking for a steady, morally decent stream of resources with which to offset the costs that come with satisfying our wants and needs.
Does that mean we must have jobs to satisfy our needs? If income offsets costs to satisfy needs, we could solve the problem more intelligently by decreasing the costs. Needs met freely do not require income. Needs met efficiently require less income… like a basic income. If technology exists to improve our efficiencies, then any progress made in the name of efficiency will mitigate expenses, thus decreasing the necessity for income. Ergo, we only have income because we have inefficiencies — when the inefficiencies have disappeared, the expenses cease to exist, as does the income. If you cringe at the notion of a guaranteed income — or welfare state, if you prefer to think of it that way — just understand that such a model tied to technological progress eventually brings everything down to zero by design: both the welfare, and the costs of any needs such welfare satisfies.
Defending income itself under the umbrella of jobs ignores efficiency and expenses entirely. How do corporations and politicians succeed in convincing taxpayers to spend $456,000 of their own money to buy one new job? By equating that one new job with income opportunity, and burying the rest of the equation.
If 3% of America’s workforce stands to lose their jobs to autonomous vehicles that are designed to end collisions and traffic, the hundreds of billions of dollars saved in annual traffic accidents alone could pay their current salaries. All of them.
The problem is that a huge share of our mentality around jobs is tied to the wrong idea: the notion that income itself is the need. You could argue this logic is particularly toxic in economies where the more income you make, the more likely you are to become convinced that the success of your work is tied to the purpose of it. That is, the engorged income bleeds into the purpose, and obfuscates the overall social value of that work.
So then, the real concept in play is that you need a healthy balance between income and the costs they satisfy, so an income of zero is perfectly fine as long as the costs are also zero. Therefore, a job is not its income — a job is its promise to minimize need. You can work to lower expenses just as you would work to increase income… notably, working towards automation creates efficiencies, which minimizes the need, which eventually sends that job to heaven once the need no longer exists.
Purpose (The Sense Of)
I said above that gambling isn’t a predictable or socially acceptable means of generating income, and so for most of us, it isn’t a “job” per se. But if that were true, insurance companies, investment banks and the stock market wouldn’t exist.
Insurance is sure as hell gambling, but it creates jobs because a large enough proportion of the population consistently deems it worth trading their resources for. The work has purpose: a high degree of overall social value.
You can see this play out on a spectrum within insurance sectors themselves: automotive insurance is so important to society that it’s a federal law. Home insurance is important enough that most people opt for it, but since it’s less likely to affect others, it isn’t required. Travel insurance, on the other hand, is not deemed very important at all, and therefore justifies fewer jobs. People are willing to risk their travel investments… not so much their mortgages.
So, by the very fact that people are offering up their resources in exchange for the security insurance provides, it can be assumed that working in insurance has purpose, which fulfills the part of one’s work that income only indirectly addresses: the sense that what you’re doing in this world is right, and useful, and significant.
If you want to get really deep, we could speculate that the reason one’s sense of purpose cannot be fulfilled by income alone is that humans have an underlying fear of insignificance, manifested by discomfort in the boredom we experience when we aren’t actively working. In those moments, knowing you have income doesn’t squash the fear (or discomfort), but knowing you have purpose does.
We already talked about how income can cloud a job’s purpose. But just like income, a bloated sense of purpose can also be cancerous, and automotive sector jobs are a prime example.
A third-generation Ford factory worker in the Midwest may see automation as a threat because it forces a change in his narrative… the narrative that gives his life purpose.
His dad worked at the factory. And his dad’s dad worked at the factory. Building Fords is what his family — his town — contributes to society, and without that, there’s no story to tell. No purpose.
Let’s call bullshit on that. His dad’s dad was likely an immigrant, or unemployed, or working in poor conditions at a railyard or coal mine, when the opportunity to work for Ford showed up in his town. He didn’t travel the world looking for inspiration in his labor; he didn’t accept the job after evaluating its broader impact on society; he took the job because it made his life better. He took it for selfish reasons, indefensible to the rest of society (beyond the notion that the survival of his family is a relatable purpose, and even that is debatable as industrialized societies are far past the point of valuing population increases. Remember, many of those who immigrated in prior generations didn’t want him here at all.)
Purpose had nothing to do with his work. That’s why he didn’t care when these factories started building military equipment to feed world wars, just as his counterparts in Germany didn’t care. The job fulfilled income, and his own sense of survival fulfilled purpose.
Fast-forward to the current generation, and one could imagine how three generations have managed to weave an opportunistic blue-collar job into a noble myth that should never be torn down, regardless of whether society actually finds the work valuable. Silly as that may be, it’s notable, because it reveals where the actual sense of purpose is being created.
It isn’t the factory job giving this man purpose — it is that three-generation-long story he can tell himself which gives purpose. We tell stories of all kinds to make sense of the world, and suppress that fear of insignificance. We tell stories so that we don’t have to wake up every day asking ourselves, “what’s the point?” And that is the retort you hear in backlash against centuries of automation: if you take my job, what is the point of my life?
There is no point. There never was a point. If there is anything humanity can agree on as a “point”, it is progress… which means we’re obstructing the point whenever we beg society to keep us employed at jobs that have outlived their usefulness. It’s imperative we decouple our purpose from specific jobs, yet we’re horrible at it, because it requires telling an uncomfortable story. Reality is uncomfortable.
A job is not inherent purpose — a job is the feedback loop that keeps us pointed in a virtuous direction. Therefore, we ought not to marry ourselves to the static idea of a job, but instead, seek continual confirmation that the job is on course, and redirect when it strays. And, if the feedback loop says our labor is no longer needed, it means the need has been minimized, which again, sends that job to heaven. As far as what that means to the person who occupied the job… that’s Step 2.
Step 2: Zoom Out For Perspective
So, jobs are really just a convoluted means of measuring the efficiency in our labor towards progress. If that’s the case, what does technology do to jobs?
The chart we’ll build below is one way to think about it, outside the frantic microscope of current events or specific points in history.
This chart trends human progress. The x-axis speaks to Automation: work made unnecessary. The y-axis speaks to Innovation: work made possible.
Let’s add some points of reference:
The point of origin for both Automation and Innovation is Absolute Manual Labor.
While it’s likely this world never existed for man, it’s an environment where all work is done in its most primitive form: if you need food, you hunt down an animal. Not with tools or techniques, not through the shared intelligence or strategy of a group, not with the benefit of experiential wisdom. Just raw work. You see, you chase, you catch, you kill, you eat, you meet your need.
The end point for Automation is the Elimination Of Manual Labor.
This simply means there is no more work to be done by man in the traditional sense. It doesn’t necessitate that we reach a utopia, or even reach a generally satisfying existence; only that we are collectively satisfied to do no more work.
The end point for Innovation is Artificial Intelligence. We can debate that one, but it’s crucial to the discussion at hand regarding job automation and the future of work.
Just know that AI in this respect is the superhuman AI (AGI) many fantasize about, but which has yet to be created by man. It’s a theoretical point in human innovation wherein our work creates something that no longer needs us to augment its own progress.
So, it follows that the end point where both axes converge is the notion of Post-Human Progress.
Beyond this point, the chart would cease to be relevant; that’s by design.
Whatever work might be done from this point forward in the name of progress, it would be done without human participation.
Given this framework, we can use the axes to chart the existence of jobs as human progress unfolds.
If technology delivers innovation, it creates jobs, and the line moves up. If technology delivers automation, it kills jobs, and the line moves to the right.
The chart’s design, then, offers the opportunity to draw a diagonal line we’ll call Harmonious Augmentation.
This is a hypothetical reality, wherein innovation towards Super-Human Progress happens so steadily that the resultant automation of work is an inseparable function of the process.
One might imagine this reality would instill an honorable tradition within our culture: that of teaching and nurturing one’s own technological replacement, with a sunsetting into retirement as the reward, powered by the technology’s newly achieved efficiency.
Again, that was a hypothetical reality. Most people don’t see technology and jobs traveling a harmonious path. Instead, a more popular view maintains that technology — by design — kills jobs.
The purpose behind this chart’s design is to reveal the fault in such logic. If technology only killed jobs, we’d eventually have no one working despite the awareness that there was still important work to be done. Human ingenuity wouldn’t stand for it, and in fact, never has. If the automation of jobs can’t satisfy all the known labor, there will be jobs created to meet the need for that labor.
The alternative view, often held in higher regard by elites than by the general populous, is that technology invariably creates jobs.
This too, is incorrect, though perhaps less incorrect. If technology always made more work possible than it made unnecessary, society would eventually be doing super-human work with human laborers. By definition, this isn’t possible. But we could be doing super-human work using super-human laborers, which is why this argument is “less incorrect”: technology creates more opportunity than it kills… just not for us.
Our reality, when smoothed across the history of progress (rather than scaled down to a brief anomaly over years or decades, which is where people often develop one of the current opposing beliefs), does in fact loosely resemble Harmonious Augmentation.
The technology we build both creates and kills jobs… but that ought to be utterly irrelevant, because what it’s really doing is progressing towards a super-human acceleration point of progress. Generally, that’s what we’re working towards, even if we don’t realize it in the moment.
What makes that reality difficult to get behind is also what plagues our perceptions of technology and its impact on jobs: we’ve planned our economies under the assumption that jobs will always be plentiful, which is the exact opposite of what our jobs are working to achieve. That’s why we’d see fluctuations from the Harmonious Augmentation line… it’s society trying to grasp the impact of major technological leaps, and failing to see the bigger picture.
We should have built a different structure from the beginning, based on progress, and the constant feedback loop ensuring that labor tracks towards it. In other words, as our progress improved efficiency, the human laborers who were removed from the labor market as a result should have seen comfortable transitions to indefinite “retirement”, so to speak.
Is that a difficult plan to execute? Hell yes; I’m nowhere near the smartest person in the room and I wouldn’t have the first clue. I don’t envy the people who built our economic structure, and I don’t fault them for being short-sighted.
But: I do ask that we stop championing their oversight and dismiss any alternative as being un-American. If it’s the American way to look at someone who lost their job to automation and say, “sucks for you, fella!”, then the American way is laughably ignorant. We all lose our jobs eventually, by design. Treating every technological shift as some anomalous lightning strike that luckily didn’t hit your house is asinine and doomed to result in utter economic confusion.
Jobs are not here to be protected. We are making progress, and life is getting better for everyone because of it, but it’s often happening despite the design of our economy. All jobs go to heaven; acknowledge the reality that our progress decreases the need for human labor, and encourage better planning for our future. It’s so much more fulfilling to write the story than to keep revising someone else’s.
