A World Without Work
This is a book about future of the world as seen through economist’s eyes. The world where machines/algorithm replaces humans. What I find most interesting though is in the last chapter where meaningful, purposeful or well-live life was discussed. It’s quite timely as we are all in lockdown. Our daily routines have been put into disarray. All of sudden, we have time in our hands more than what we know what to do with it. So instead of technological unemployment, which was discussed extensively in the book, we currently have pandemic unemployment.
Laying the groundwork on problems of technological unemployment
In the twenty-first century, technological progress will solve one problem, the question of how to make the pie large enough for everyone to live on. But, it will replace it with three others: the problems of inequality, power, and purpose. These problems will require us to engage with some of the most difficult questions we can ask – about what the state should and should not do, about the nature of our obligations to our fellow human beings, about what it means to live a meaningful life.
Examples of ‘humans are no longer required’ were given. Associated Press has begun to use algorithms to compose their sports coverage and earnings reports, now producing about fifteen times as many of the latter as when they relied upon human writers alone. About a third of the content published by Bloomberg News is generated in a similar way. Putting words together is usually regarded as creative activity and naturally reserved for human beings. It doesn’t seem to be the case now.
‘Affective computing’, is when computer is designed to respond in such a way that seem like they have feelings, emotion or empathy. Think of chatbot that affectionately responds to our queries. This makes interactions with humans much smoother, may increase customer satisfaction scores. There are systems, for example, that can look at a person’s face and tell whether they are happy, confused, surprised, or delighted. A Chinese professor at Sichuan University, uses such a program to tell whether his students are bored during class. Even in the realm of feelings, emotion, it’s not immune to the machine encroachment.
Not only does the machine can interact with human in a human-like way, it now can pick up human emotions, which is fed back to the way machine responds to humans. The loop of human interactions is, therefore, completed.
We don’t really need to discuss robots replacing people in routine physical job in manufacturing as automation has obviously happened, now creative works like journalism or works that require human touch like customer relations, call centres get replaced too.
Study of effects of unemployment during the great depression
Even amid the misery of unemployment, men would still benefit from having unlimited free time.’ Instead, it was found that, ‘cut off from their work, they drift gradually out of an ordered existence into one that is undisciplined and empty’, to the point that when asked to explain how they spent their days, they were ‘unable to recall anything worth mentioning’.
On inequality
In the most prosperous parts of the world, we are seeing a move towards societies with greater income inequality. This is because the valuable capital is being shared out in an increasingly unequal way. As a result, the income that flows to those who hold that capital is increasingly unequal, too
When some people arrive in this world, the lottery of life might or might not have granted them some unique talents and abilities, might or might not have placed them with particularly pleasant and affluent parents. These sorts of initial imbalances are unavoidable. But that is not true of all the imbalances that follow. There is no reason why those who are born with good luck should be the only people able to gather up valuable capital. Standing between the unavoidable initial imbalances and the ultimate inequality of income is the full spread of institutions that we, as a society, decide to build together: our schools and universities, our taxation and welfare systems, our labour unions and minimum wage laws, to name just a few. These change not only how capital is distributed to begin with, but also what the eventual returns on that capital look like. They determine how this economic prosperity is shared across society.
On education as an investment
If you go to college in the United States, it will cost you about $102,000 on average (in tuition and four years of forgone salary while studying), but as a college graduate you can expect to earn more than twice the amount you would earn with only a high school diploma. Put another way, a college degree in the US has an average annual return of more than 15 per cent, leaving stocks (about 7 per cent) and bonds, gold, and real estate (less than 3 per cent) trailing far behind.
On the surface that seems like a good investment. Peter Thiel believes that many of these people would have earned just as much, had they not gone to college, and that universities are ‘just good at identifying talented people rather than adding value’. There’s a study that looked into this issue and used statistical tool like logistic regression to remove confounding factors such as ‘ability bias’ in this case. Once it is accounted for, universities still appear to have a positive impact. Talented people might earn more than others in any case, but education helps them earn even more than they would otherwise.
Several Nobel laureates in Economics think that formal education has very little to do with giving students new skills or making them more productive workers. Instead, these economists argue that a large chunk of education is a wasteful phenomenon known as ‘signalling’. In this view, education may well increase people’s wages not because it makes them more able, but because it is difficult – so only people who are already very able before they start school are able to complete it. So just as a peacock signals his virility. One study suggested that up to 80 per cent of the financial reward from education is actually just this ability to stand out from others. On this view, education really has very little to do with giving people new skills at all.
On elearning
Teaching in a classroom is unavoidably ‘one size fits all’. Teachers cannot tailor their material to the specific needs of every student. Tailored tuition is known to be very effective: an average student who receives one-to-one tuition will tend to outperform 98 per cent of ordinary students in a traditional classroom. An intensive tutoring system, although it is very effective, is prohibitively expensive. ‘Adaptive’ or ‘personalized’ learning systems promise to solve this problem, tailoring what is taught to each student but at a far lower cost than the human alternative. Providing a class online is almost the same whether it’s seen by 100 people or 100,000, a pleasing financial situation where the per student cost falls as more students use the service.
Why work is important.
People feel that a job is not simply a source of income but of meaning, purpose, and direction in life as well. It is the way to achieve ‘the fullness of life’. Work matters not just for a worker’s own sense of meaning; it has an important social dimension as well, allowing people to show others that they live a purposeful life, and offering them a chance to gain status and social esteem. Work means more than securing a wage – and so, in their eyes, the offer of a Universal Basic Income from those in fantastically well-paid jobs might have felt more like hush money, or a bribe, perhaps even an attempt to monopolize a source of life’s meaning and deny it to others.
The threat of technological unemployment has another face to it. It will deprive people not only of income, but also of significance; it will hollow out not just the labour market, but also the sense of purpose in many people’s lives. In a world with less work, we will face a problem that has little to do with economics at all: how to find meaning in life when a major source of it disappears.
Counter-points of work as a source of meaning, purpose, direction, status and social esteem.
The attitudes were different in the ancient world. Back then, work was often thought to be degrading rather than meaningful. Aristotle wrote that ‘citizens must not lead the life of artisans or tradesmen, for such a life is ignoble and inimical to excellence.’ He believed that meaning could only come through leisure, and that the only purpose of work is to pay for leisure time: ‘We work in order to enjoy leisure, just as we make war in order to enjoy peace.’ In old myths and religious scriptures, work often makes an appearance as a punishment, rather than the font of a meaningful life.
Religion no longer dominates everyday life in the way it once did. What has taken its place? It is the work that we do. For most of us, work is the new opium. Like a drug, it provides some people with a pleasurable burst of purpose. But at the same time, it intoxicates and disorientates, distracting us from looking for meaning elsewhere like a hamster in a wheel, blindly running not knowing to where it is heading.
This makes me think that if work is not fulfilling, but providing financial comforts, we could and should seek fulfilment elsewhere. Why do we need to find fulfilment at work?? When the day that technological unemployment has universally come, I’m sure we can find meaning in our lives outside of work provided that physical needs are met.