There’s a sentiment among physicists that the only way to learn is to do. This is why so much of physics education, particularly for undergraduates, has historically been to assign them a plethora of pen-on-paper problems. Identify the physics trick, do the hour of mathematics that follows, and repeat this until you can easily do the physics trick in your sleep.
You see similar practices in many fields of study, along with job training. You can abstractly understand the thing that you’ve set off to do, but you don’t actually have an intimate understanding of the individual moving parts, the nuts and bolts, the tiny trials and tribulations that you run into while actually doing the work yourself. The common wisdom is that the experience of these little steps help shape your understanding of the broader whole; that insight is often found in unexpected places.
It’s easy to shrug off the importance of this understanding, since these are small problems that can usually be solved along the way; the “important thing” is the original abstract concept or direction of the project. It’s interesting that, now that the new age has arrived – full of tools that can do all the small, inconsequential bits of a task – we suddenly find ourselves on a precipice. Although we had previously thought that it would be amazing to absolve ourselves of the boring, rote parts of our jobs, we have started to look around and see a wide swathe of people who no longer understand the inner workings of tasks.
This is terrifying, I suspect because it represents an erosion of our previous culture and selves. Now that the new world is here, we’re locked in: we can’t go back, because we’ve forgotten how to actually go back. And the greatest fear is not of dependence on these new tools, but of the permeating, whispering fear that if it suddenly were to all go away, forcing us to return to the old ways like an infant ripped from a womb, would we survive?
There is a real concern for forgotten knowledge, for culture that has been buried and put to rest. But these ways have been put to rest specifically because they no longer are relevant to the environment that we currently find ourselves in. Do we mourn for the lost knowledge of children who no longer know how to use an oil lamp, or don’t know how to properly protect themselves in an air raid drill?
There is, of course, a segment of the workforce which is finding out that their jobs can be done by AI tools. This appears to realistically be a smaller segment of the population than tech and political leaders would have you believe, but it is nevertheless real and it is happening.
The perspective here is two-fold. First, if these jobs were truly entirely automatable by AI tools, then I say good riddance to those jobs. They were probably bullshit (in the Graeberian sense) anyways, and any value that they provided to society or business came from things which have since been shown to be intrinsically un-human. Of course, this raises the question of whether something intangible is in-fact lost by automating these jobs, but I ultimately find it hard to believe that the products and outputs of mega-corporations (who have already de-humanized and alienated their workforce) will suffer in quality from the loss of humanity in their workflows and processes. There is a case to be made that we are automating the wrong jobs (it appears that many middle management roles can be efficiently automated, yet these are typically not the first jobs to be given to an AI), suggesting that we are choosing which jobs to automate based on value judgments rather than evaluations of efficiency, which is a more serious but separate question.
Second, the reason that the loss of these jobs is a problem at all is because our society requires that people work to survive. And even this wouldn’t be a problem if we were creating an equal number of jobs elsewhere that utilized the human connection and could not be automated; unfortunately, this is not the case. So, rather than improve efficiency and free up time for people to engage in acts of humanity such as creating or ingesting art, spending time with family, or taking care of their bodies and souls, we cast these people aside. They are deemed societal failures because they don’t have the skills or fortune required to contribute in the limited ways that we value (which produce capital). In this way, if we aren’t careful, the adoption of AI tools can actually drive dehumanization and alienation rather than empowerment and progression of societal good.
Additionally, we seem to be creating a population of individuals who, because they haven’t experienced difficulty or friction in the tasks in their lives, appear utterly inept and incompetent when confronted with something that requires even a small amount of effort. While tragic, I view this as a failure of the educational system rather than a societal one. Further, it isn’t all of society; there have always been losers in the world, and we shouldn’t expect that to change anytime soon. There are still gifted, driven individuals. While there are significant problems with engagement and capability among many people, I believe (or at least hope) that what we’re seeing is a momentary dip that will fix itself in a generation or two.
I often find myself comparing our present situation to when the printing press was invented. Before printing existed, books were hard to come by, because they had to be painstakingly copied by hand, often by monks or other ascetics. But, the books that did exist were beautiful works of art, many times containing entire pages filled with hand-drawn scenes and symbols. Why do we not, then, mourn the loss of this time? Is it because we are now too far separated from it, our souls existing in an entirely different place, unable to truly connect with antiquated ideas? Or do the ideas become antiquated because they are truly irrelevant? Do we only fight against the most recent cultural shift because it is so clearly visible in the dust of our footsteps? Or is it legitimately worth fighting against?
I am far from the first to say that progress rarely moves without collateral damage. As society moves forward, many things of real value are indeed lost. And it is curious that the arrow of time has consistently marched towards greater technology and interconnectivity when these things don’t seem to similarly progress our spiritual goals. Yet, as we began printing books, many things of real value were likewise gained: literacy spread across the world, and more ideas could be heard than ever before. Perhaps we are prone to focusing on what we have lost rather than what has been gained, or perhaps loss is just easier to see. Or, maybe this has to do with how loss comes unwillingly and without engagement, whereas the subsequent gains require effort and alignment with the rest of society.
Returning to my original point: what is actually lost now that we don’t have to do the in-between steps of many complex tasks? This sort of thing has happened in the past before, and we seem to have gotten along fine. We’ve lost so many niche and situational tidbits over the millenia humans have been around. Yet, the Sun rises each morning, and we can eat, work, and sleep without issue. Surely, things can’t be that bad?
I mentioned these ideas to a software engineer friend of mine at a wedding, and he said something which has been ringing around my head for a while. “The type of tedium changes, but the tedium doesn’t disappear.” I’ve come to believe that this is really the crux of this discussion. Do we actually need the particular flavor of tedium that arose between 1995 and 2020, or do we as people just benefit – or crave, even – some sort of tedium? I think what we’re realizing is that we appreciate tedium, regardless of what it actually looks like. It connects us with our surroundings, both physical environment and people. It gives us a moment to disconnect from the abstract and engage with things that are evidently, utterly true. It embeds us within reality.
I wonder how much of our current fear comes from the Protestant work ethic, having been infused at the most base level of our Western culture, dictating that the value of a thing arises from the suffering and effort that it took to create it. If anyone can paint the Mona Lisa, then what’s the value in it? Or, more accurately; if you had spent 30 years as a starving artist to hone your craft, you too could have painted a Mona Lisa. If you can go grab a Mona Lisa at any time with little effort, suddenly this doesn’t just tank the value of art and experience, but it undermines the very foundation of our culture. I think this is why the recent disruptions are so utterly terrifying to many: they threaten to erase our very soul.
But, to me, the only thing that has been made clear is that our souls are mired in slime. Why are we assigning value to work, rather than the experience of life? Our assumptions and goals have become so misaligned with our own existence that we have since learned to fear the light. We have learned to love our experience from within the cave. And so, a little erasure seems to me a good thing. Progress can’t erase who we fundamentally are as humanity – it can only strip away the gilded calves and bronze bulls that we misguidedly build, blocking our view of that which lies beyond. This gives us a new chance to reconnect with ourselves.
From a technology standpoint, the important thing to keep in mind is to ensure that we’re generating net positives from the new tools. We don’t want to merely shift effort from one place to another; spending 4 hours reviewing the same amount of code as would have been written in 4 hours produces the same output, but is much more intellectually draining for the human. We need to find ways of empowering people to have new opportunities for expression and exploration than they would have without these tools.
And, for the love of God (although I think this is incredibly unlikely), please let us shift our values so that the time we save with our new technology can be used for deepening the human experience, instead of producing 10x output across the same amount of working hours for the same amount of pay. The work that we’re now automating could only be done by humans in the past – Why shift the intellectual work off of the human if you aren’t going to use the time saved for intrinsically human activities? Our role as people is to do, not necessarily to work, and our contributions to humanity have to be things that these tools cannot do. Otherwise, tomorrow you’ll wake up, and the tools will be doing your job, and then what do you have to give to yourself or humanity?
So, I actually don’t think that it’s a problem that our new tools are eliminating the tedium of yesterday. We’ll find new sources of thankless tasks – we’re very good at it. Rather than write lines of code, we’ll have to sketch the architecture and review it. Rather than design the slide deck, we’ll have to think carefully about the content. We will still wash dishes, and we will still take showers. And that’s a good thing.