Philosopher Harvey Lederman comments; a long, but far from exhaustive, excerpt:
For the last two and a half years, since the release of ChatGPT, I’ve been suffering from fits of dread. It’s not every minute, or even every day, but maybe once a week, I’m hit by it—slackjawed, staring into the middle distance—frozen by the prospect that someday, maybe pretty soon, everyone will lose their job….
Does the coming automation of work foretell, as my fits seem to say, an irreparable loss of value in human life?….
I was brought up, maybe like you, to value hard work and achievement. In our house, scientists were heroes, and discoveries grand prizes of life. I was a diligent, obedient kid, and eagerly imbibed what I was taught. I came to feel that one way a person’s life could go well was to make a discovery, to figure something out.
I had the sense already then that geographical discovery was played out…..
We may be living now in a similar twilight age for human exploration in the realm of ideas. Akshay Venkatesh, whose discoveries earned him the 2018 Fields Medal, mathematics’ highest honor, has written that, the “mechanization of our cognitive processes will alter our understanding of what mathematics is”. Terry Tao, a 2006 Fields Medalist, expects that in just two years AI will be a copilot for working mathematicians. He envisions a future where thousands of theorems are proven all at once by mechanized minds….
The core of my dread isn’t based on the idea that human redundancy will come in two years rather than twenty, or, for that matter, two hundred. It’s a more abstract dread, if that’s a thing, dread about what it would mean for human values, or anyway my values, if automation “succeeds”: if all mathematics—and, indeed all work—is done by motor, not by human hands and brains….
If discovery is valuable in its own right, the loss of discovery could be an irreparable loss for humankind.
A part of me would like this to be true. But over these last strange years, I’ve come to think it’s not. What matters, I now think, isn’t being the first to figure something out, but the consequences of the discovery: the joy the discoverer gets, the understanding itself, or the real life problem their knowledge solves.
But the advance of automation would mean the end of much more than human discovery. It could mean the end of all necessary work. Already in 1920, the Czech playwright Karel Capek asked what a world like that would mean for the values in human life. In the first act of R.U.R.—the play which introduced the modern use of the word “robot”—Capek has Henry Domin, the manager of Rossum’s Universal Robots (the R.U.R. of the title), offer his corporation’s utopian pitch. “In ten years”, he says, their robots will “produce so much corn, so much cloth, so much everything” that “There will be no poverty.” “Everybody will be free from worry and liberated from the degradation of labor.” The company’s engineer, Alquist, isn’t convinced. Alquist (who, incidentally, ten years later, will be the only human living, when the robots have killed the rest) retorts that “There was something good in service and something great in humility”, “some kind of virtue in toil and weariness”.
Service—work that meets others’ significant needs and wants— is, unlike discovery, clearly good in and of itself. However we work— as nurses, doctors, teachers, therapists, ministers, lawyers, bankers, or, really, anything at all—working to meet others’ needs makes our own lives go well. But, as Capek saw, all such work could disappear….
In Automation and Utopia: Human Flourishing in a World without Work, the Irish lawyer and philosopher John Danaher imagines an antiwork techno-utopia, with plenty of room for lying flat [i.e., leisure]. As Danaher puts it: “Work is bad for most people most of the time.”“We should do what we can to hasten the obsolescence of humans in the arena of work.”
The young Karl Marx would have seen both Domin’s and Danaher’s utopias as a catastrophe for human life. In his notebooks from 1844, Marx describes an ornate and almost epic process, where, by meeting the needs of others through production, we come to recognize the other in ourselves, and through that recognition, come at last to self-consciousness, the full actualization of our human nature. The end of needed work, for the Marx of these notes, would be the impossibility of fully realizing our nature, the end, in a way, of humanity itself….
Today, I feel part of our grand human projects—the advancement of knowledge, the creation of art, the effort to make the world a better place. I’m not in any way a star player on the team. My own work is off in a little backwater of human thought. And I can’t understand all the details of the big moves by the real stars. But even so, I understand enough of our collective work to feel, in some small way, part of our joint effort. All that will change. If I were to be transported to the brilliant future of the bots, I wouldn’t understand them or their work enough to feel part of the grand projects of their day. Their work would have become, to me, as alien as ours is to a roach.
But I’m still persuaded that the hardline pessimists are wrong. Work is far from the most important value in our lives. A post-instrumental world could be full of much more important goods— from rich love of family and friends, to new undreamt of works of art—which would more than compensate the loss of value from the loss of our work.
Harvey had asked me for my reaction to his comments about Marx, so I will focus only on that (but emphasize, again, that his full discussion is even more nuanced than my long excerpt does justice to). Discussing the Marx of 1844, Harvey writes: “by meeting the needs of others through production, we come to recognize the other in ourselves, and through that recognition, come at last to self-consciousness, the full actualization of our human nature.” While the Marx of 1844 is still under the (malign) influence of Hegel (over the next two years he breaks decisively with Hegel), this is an even more Hegelian reading of the argument in the 1844 Manuscripts than I think is warranted. One of the core ideas of the early Marx is that human beings by nature need to engage in productive (creative) activity, in particular, they want to produce things not to meet material needs but because they want to produce them, for aesthetic or other reasons. Marx calls this “spontaneous activity,” and it represents an ideal of freedom that Marx accepts throughout his life. If AI rendered work in the service of others unnecessary, that would be fine, since the essence of “spontaneous” work for Marx is that it is not necessary to meet material needs (although it might do so). The real challenge presented by the AI future, in which most human labor is rendered unnecessary, is who controls the immense productive power of that technology. If it is used to liberate humans from “necessary” labor (i.e., labor to meet human needs), then it will bring about, for the first time in human history, a humane society. If, instead, it is used to enrich the rich, the rest be damned, that is a different story. It is, as Rosa Luxembourg said, a choice between “barbarism and socialism.”
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