GoKawiilThis article originally appeared in Issue 15: Work. Subscribe to the print magazine to get future issues delivered to your door.
What will people do all day? I mean, of course, if the AIs surpass us at all economically necessary forms of labor.
There’s an emerging consensus on this point, assuming we’re all still alive and not subjects of a cyberpunk feudalist dystopia. When the machines can do everything else, our relationships will be what’s left.
Maybe we won’t have to work at all. Or maybe we’ll still have something that superficially resembles modern employment, just concentrated in what economist Alex Imas calls “the relational sector” in his essay “What Will Become Scarce.” We’ll always need humans to supply the human touch. And how will we get those relational jobs? Relationships, obviously. It’s not what you know, it’s who you know, since everyone knows everything anyway.
What is really being suggested here is less a continuation of modern work than a return to a much older cultural understanding of labor. Imas makes this point directly: “Before industrialization, it was difficult to separate a product from the person who made it … Economic transactions had a distinct social component that was innately linked to the consumption experience.”
Relatedly, before industrialization, there was very little sense that working, in itself, could be dignified or meaningful. We were not defined by our jobs but by our participation in a densely interconnected social world. And we might be again. That’s the natural consequence of all these relationalist predictions — a world where our connections to other humans are what give us structure, identity, and meaning.
I am afraid they’re right.
Power and sex among apes
Making sweeping statements about the relationship between technology and cultural change is always a risk, and I’d rather avoid it until it’s absolutely necessary. At the same time, our degree of ignorance about the future is greatly exaggerated. If the future looks anything like the past — and there’s good reason to believe it will — then we can make progress with case studies.
Let’s start with 18th-century aristocrats. Aristocrats are (typically) rich, which we certainly will be if we have robots capable of all normal nonrelational labor. More importantly, when they did need to acquire material resources, they did it through leveraging their connections to obtain more land or a lucrative position at court — no drudgery necessary.
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