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.
At first, I thought these slackjawed fits were just a passing thing. I’m a philosophy professor; staring into the middle distance isn’t exactly an unknown disease among my kind. But as the years have begun to pass and the fits have not, I’ve begun to wonder if there’s something deeper to my dread. Does the coming automation of work foretell, as my fits seem to say, an irreparable loss of value in human life?
The titans of artificial intelligence tell us that there’s nothing to fear. Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic, the maker of Claude, suggests that “historical hunter-gatherer societies might have imagined that life is meaningless without hunting” and “that our well-fed technological society is devoid of purpose.” But, of course, we don’t see our lives that way. Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, sounds so similar, the text could have been written by ChatGPT. Even if the jobs of the future will look as “fake” to us as ours do to “a subsistence farmer,” Altman has “no doubt they will feel incredibly important and satisfying to the people doing them.”
Alongside these optimists, there are plenty of pessimists who, like me, are filled with dread. Pope Leo XIV has decried the threats AI poses to “human dignity, labor and justice.” Bill Gates has written about his fear that “if we solved big problems like hunger and disease, and the world kept getting more peaceful: What purpose would humans have then?” And Douglas Hofstadter, the computer scientist and author of Gödel, Escher, Bach, has spoken eloquently of his terror and depression at “an oncoming tsunami that is going to catch all of humanity off guard.”
Who should we believe? The optimists with their bright visions of a world without work, or the pessimists who fear the end of a key source of meaning 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 who 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. I loved the heroes of the great Polar Age, but I saw them — especially Roald Amundsen and Robert Falcon Scott — as the last of their kind. In December 1911, Amundsen reached the South Pole using skis and dogsleds. Scott reached it a month later, in January 1912, after ditching the motorized sleds he’d hoped would help and man-hauling the rest of the way. As the black dot of Amundsen’s flag came into view on the ice, Scott was devastated to reach this “awful place…without the reward of priority.” He would never make it back.
Scott’s motors failed him, but they spelled the end of the great Polar Age. Even Amundsen took to motors on his return: In 1924 he made a failed attempt for the North Pole in a plane, and, in 1926, he successfully flew over it in a dirigible. Already the skis and dogsleds of the decade before were outdated heroics of a bygone world.
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.” Terence 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.
Now, I don’t know any more than the next person where our current technology is headed, or how fast. The core of my dread isn’t based on the idea that human redundancy will come in two years rather than 20, or, for that matter, 200. 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” and all mathematics — and indeed all work — is done by motor, not by human hands and brains.
A world like that wouldn’t be good news for my childhood dreams. Venkatesh and Tao, like Amundsen and Scott, live meaningful lives, lives of purpose. But worthwhile discoveries like theirs are a scarce resource. A territory, once seen, can’t be seen first again. If mechanized minds consume all the empty space on the intellectual map, lives dedicated to discovery won’t be lives that humans can lead.
The right kind of pessimist sees here an important argument for dread. 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. Alexander Fleming discovered penicillin, and through that work saved thousands, perhaps millions, of lives. But if it were to emerge, in the annals of an outlandish future, that an alien discovered penicillin thousands of years before Fleming did, we wouldn’t think that Fleming’s life was worse just because he wasn’t first. He eliminated great suffering from human life; the alien discoverer, if they’re out there, did not. So, I’ve come to see, it’s not discoveries themselves that matter. It’s what they bring about.
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 Čapek 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” — Čapek 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, 10 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 Čapek saw, all such work could disappear. In a “post-instrumental” world, where people are comparatively useless and the bots meet all our important needs, there would be no needed work for us to do, no suffering to eliminate, no diseases to cure. Could the end of such work be a better reason for dread?
The hardline pessimists say that it is. They say that the end all needed work would not only be a loss of some value to humanity, as everyone should agree. For them it would be a loss to humanity on balance, an overall loss, that couldn’t be compensated in another way.
I feel a lot of pull to this pessimistic thought. But once again, I’ve come to think it’s wrong. For one thing, pessimists often overlook just how bad most work actually is. In May 2021, Luo Huazhang, a 31-year-old ex-factory worker in Sichuan wrote a viral post entitled “Lying Flat is Justice.” Luo had searched at length for a job that, unlike his factory job, would allow him time for himself, but he couldn’t find one. So he quit, biked to Tibet and back, and commenced his lifestyle of “lying flat,” doing what he pleased, reading philosophy, contemplating the world. The idea struck a chord with overworked young Chinese, who, it emerged, did not find “something great” in their “humility.” The movement inspired memes, selfies flat on one’s back, and even an anthem.
That same year, as the Great Resignation in the United States took off, the subreddit r/antiwork played to similar discontent. Started in 2013, under the motto “Unemployment for all, not only the rich!”, the forum went viral in 2021, starting with a screenshot of a quitting worker’s texts to his supervisor (“No thanks. Have a good life”), and culminating in labor-actions as members first supported striking workers at Kellogg’s by spamming their job application site and then attempted to support a similar strike at McDonald’s. It wasn’t just young Chinese who hated their jobs.
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. 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 in which, 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.
But such pessimistic lamentations have come to seem to me no more than misplaced machismo. Sure, Marx’s and my culture, the ethos of our post-industrial professional class, might make us regret a world without work. But we shouldn’t confuse the way two philosophers were brought up with the fundamental values of human life. What stranger narcissism could there be than bemoaning the end of others’ suffering, disease, and need, just because it deprives you of the chance to be a hero?
The first summer after the release of ChatGPT — the first summer of my fits of dread — I stayed with my in-laws in Val Camonica, a valley in the Italian Alps. The houses in their village, Sellero, are empty and getting emptier; the people on the streets are old and getting older. The kids that are left — my wife’s elementary school class had, even then, a full complement of four—often leave for better lives. But my in-laws are connected to this place, to the houses and streets where they grew up. They see the changes too, of course. On the mountains above, the Adamello, Italy’s largest glacier, is retreating faster every year. But while the shows on Netflix change, the same mushrooms appear in the summer, and the same chestnuts are collected in the fall.
Walking in the mountains of Val Camonica that summer, I tried to find parallels for my sense of impending loss…
To read the rest of Lederman’s essay, visit Shtetl-Optimized, the blog of UT Austin computer science professor Scott Aaronson.