Revisiting TDNW: The Future of Work

One year ago, I ventured to proclaim that no job - howsoever creative or 'subjective' - would be safe from the clutches of technology, especially AI, in The Dragon Needs Wings. GPT-4 has rested any doubts I had about my prediction. There are a limited list of jobs which are safe from the strangling grip of technology - not journalism, not design, not even voice-acting! For all you know, this article could be the machination of statistical inference algorithms (I assure you it is not, but who am I?). The world seeks answers, while others have jumped to neo-Luddite conclusions. Compared to last year, fears of losing jobs to AI is a very real threat today. But why are we so afraid?

Part I: Work

For as long as we can collectively remember, humans have worked. Initially, job occupations were standardised and routine, with several tasks being the purview of a single individual. From hunting to protecting, farming to trading - life was simple. How could it not be, when everyone did everything, pooling resources in a form of economy one could only call 'tribalism' today. And then, we made the city. Lives and job occupations grew steadily complex and specialised as humans began to group themselves in larger and larger settlements - until settlements developed which removed themselves from the need to farm or hunt, depending on others to do so. The creation, in other words, of the urban.

Suddenly, for the first time in history, we had the freedom to do what we pleased - if we were born in the right place at the right time. In this specific context, that was approximately 9,500 years ago in Mesopotamia. From the proto-cities of Eridu to the sprawling megapolis of Tokyo or Delhi, it's quite simple to lose track of who we were and what we did. Most importantly, why we did what we did. Why did we work, basically? For food, shelter, protection, reproduction, children. Back then, human populations numbered below millions. Every person was a part of a tribe, doing an adequate amount of work for its collective sustenance - which Yuval Noah Harari believed to be lesser work than the average human does today.

The critical component of why we worked harder, however, was what propelled us from middle food chain primates to the subjugators of nature - progress. Why did we want progress, why did we wish to get better? The answer, ironically, is to do less work. All of human ingenuity and innovation has focused on its ability to do more work using lesser resources. In other words, all of our progress today owes a significant tribute to the human desire for laziness.

Today, work runs the world - from farming to medicine, entertainment to groceries. And every day, the amount of work required grows - but so does the workforce. In the last thirty years, the global labour force has increased by more than 1.2 billion participants. With increasing automation replacing human labour, there has been a sizeable shift towards a more service-oriented economy. Today's highest-paid jobs are not governance (technically, when we don't consider corruption and its brethren), they are in management and entrepreneurship. After a long run, the amount of work needed has begun to fall behind the number of workers available. And AI is no respite to this trend.

Part II: AI and Jobless Growth

After more than 30,000 years of work, the human race is finally here. There is less work than there are workers. This has been the long-awaited destination of human work - to reduce it. And yet, nobody appears euphoric or overjoyed. Instead, we find a deep-set fear of automation and how it will ruin us. In line with profoundly American philosophy, some ask what is the point of existence without work. Others follow Wells' gloomy predictions of humans degenerating into intellectually-regressive Eloi. The most important and basic question on every mind, however, is: how will we survive?

Food, shelter, internet - to possess anything today requires money. And money can only be earned (for most of the world) by working. Thus, replacement of their jobs by AI is a terrifying prospect for most. Yet, the concern is not truly AI: it is the lack of money on a widescale basis. It is true, AI has the potential to possibly take over jobs ranging from writing to designing. Interestingly enough, low-skill labour like garbage collection or sweat shops have a lower risk of automation than higher skilled labour.

For the past thirty years (at least), there has been a rising trend of 'jobless growth' in OECD and certain developing nations. In this, the economy has had considerable leaps, but mainly due to automated and more productive services, than a rise in general employment levels. This trend will only be further motivated by the rise of AIs like GPT-4. This begs an important question regarding our future. What are we to do about work? What are we to do without it?

Part III: Work ≠ Survival

To restate my book's argument on this subject, so long as work remains the only means of survival, we can only have one of two scenarios. Firstly, in the unlikely event that capitalism is dethroned and a new system arises where work is the means of survival, the development of AI would halt, or slow down to a fraction of its current pace, not due to the lack of competition, but due to overwhelming popular pressure. Secondly, in the more likely event that capitalism remains, the development of AI would continue incessantly and uncaringly, resulting in dystopian destitution (or similar exploitation) of those without the golden keys to AI.

This is effortlessly simple to explain. Under a new, popular system, AI falls. Under the current one, people fall. In both, the consequence to the world is catastrophic - AI symbolises the very nature and essence of our undying need for progress. We do not (and should not) progress for progress' sake. The aim of the human race reaches yet another milestone with AI - and to stop at that place would be cataclysmic to societal development. For aeons we have strived towards working lesser and lesser - that was what we called progress.

Today, the problem is not a lack of work: it's the lack of money that follows. A lack of work in today's system entails compounding problems paying the bill of survival. But if AI has the potential to do the job of a thousand workers - then why should a thousand workers survive? Where is the pay that they would have received going? The answer, in a capitalist setting, is the deep pockets of 'shareholders' and 'owners'.

The fears and hypotheses of Marx, which he expressed most palatably in the Communist Manifesto, can be seen blatantly exhibited by the capitalist interaction with AI: the salaries and profits of owners are the net exploitation of labour minus reinvested capital. Thus, in any system (no matter the amount and stringency of regulation), AI will only help line the pockets of the already wealthy few. And yet, despite our knowledge and hatred of this exploitation, we cannot live without it: our society is so depraved that a man must prostitute his labour to barely survive, let alone live.

Secondly, for the richer, or well-to-do, sections of society, an important question remains. What do you do with freedom, when AI can do everything? This question is not critical, in my opinion, however, it can be resolved by asking - when was the last time you cooked something even when you could have ordered it from a restaurant? When was the last time you spent your time, money and effort doing your favoured style of art, although you could have bought it from an artist? Humans have lives beyond work - perhaps more fulfilling ones. However, having lived most of our written history in a society which ostracised the unemployed, we often cannot understand why one would spend their resources for no perceivable economic purpose, when they could easily procure them at far lesser rates. After all, making art has a significantly higher opportunity cost than buying it (generally, ceteris paribus).

So, how do we solve this new crisis of employment and AI? We need to divorce work from being a means of survival. Work ≠ Survival. A more extensive guide and opinion on the same can be found in my book, The Dragon Needs Wings, by Aryan Dixit.