97 | John Danaher on Our Coming Automated Utopia

Humans build machines, in part, to relieve themselves from the burden of work on difficult, repetitive tasks. And yet, despite the fact that machines are everywhere, most of us are still working pretty hard. But maybe that’s about to change. Futurists like John Danaher believe that society is finally on the brink of making a transition to a world in which work would be optional, rather than mandatory — and he thinks that’s a very good thing. It will take some adjusting, personally as well as economically, but he envisions a future in which human creativity and artistic impulse can flourish in a world free of the demands of working for a living. We talk about what that would entail, whether it’s realistic, and what comes next.

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John Danaher received an LLM degree from Trinity College Dublin and a Ph.D. from University College, Cork. He is currently Senior Lecturer in the School of Law at the National University of Ireland, Galway. His research is situated at the overlap of legal studies and philosophy, and frequently involves questions of technology, automation, and the future. He is the coeditor of Robot Sex: Social and Ethical Implications, and author of the recent book Automation and Utopia: Human Flourishing in a World Without Work. He writes frequently for publications such as The Atlantic, The Guardian, and The Irish Times, and is the host of his own podcast, Philosophical Disquisitions.

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0:00:00 Sean Carroll: Hello, everyone, and welcome to the Mindscape Podcast. I’m your host, Sean Carroll.

0:00:04 SC: If you were following the presidential primary campaign here in the United States here in 2020, one of the most unusual candidates was Andrew Yang, who had a set of very specific interesting messages that we don’t usually hear in presidential campaigns. He was very concerned in particular about the oncoming wave of automation that’s going to change the nature of the workforce. And so, his idea was that robots, or automated technologies more generally, would gradually replace people’s jobs, and therefore, we had to provide a universal basic income to let people live and flourish in a world that had much less work in it. So aside from what economic policy you think is the best idea, this question of whether or not automation really will replace people’s jobs is a very important one. So that’s what we’re going to discuss today. Our guest is John Danaher, who’s a senior lecturer in the law school at the National University of Ireland and his interests are in the intersection of law, neuroscience, technology, especially artificial intelligence and so forth.

0:01:10 SC: John has his own podcast called Philosophical Disquisitions, that you can find a link to in the blog post, and he’s written a book called Automation and Utopia: Human Flourishing in a World Without Work. So to put it very simplistically, we’ll get into more details in the podcast, of course, but basically, John says, “Yes, automation is coming. Yes, it’s going to put us all out of work. And yes, that is awesome because once we don’t need to work, we can do all these other wonderful things.” And so the question is, well, what are these wonderful things? Will we really do them? Will we feel fulfilled without a job to go to 9 to 5? Is there some moral hazard associated with not being a working person, with having all the leisure time you want? So John tries to make the argument that it’s actually kind of the good thing that you might expect naively. You’re still allowed to work, you could do things, but we’ll have a much better society and much better individual lives when we can choose what work to do, what work not to do.

0:02:08 SC: It’s extremely thought-provoking and very futuristic in a down-to-Earth way. This is something that might actually be approaching us, so it’s important I think to think these issues through to be prepared for what might be a very, very dramatic change in how we organize human society. I should note that we had an audio issue for the first 20 minutes of this podcast. It’s not really bad, it’s just that the wrong microphone was getting used. So… And then we switch after 20 minutes is over. So, if you persevere through the first 20 minutes, the audio quality will get a lot better. Just ’cause despite both being podcasters, the technology sometimes baffles us. And with that, let’s go.

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0:03:04 SC: John Danaher, welcome to the Mindscape Podcast.

0:03:07 John Danaher: Thank you, Sean, it’s a pleasure to be here. I’m actually a big fan of this podcast, so it’s a bit of a thrill to be on it.

0:03:13 SC: Well, before I forget, we should advocate your podcast, right? Do you have one?

0:03:18 JD: I do, yeah. So I run a blog called Philosophical Disquisitions. It’s a cumbersome title, but I picked it years ago and I’m sticking with it, and I have a podcast of the same name associated with that. It’s mainly about the philosophy of technology and the ethics of technology, but I do some occasional audio essays about other topics.

0:03:38 SC: Cool, we will definitely link to it in the blog post I put up for this episode, but speaking of technology and philosophy and so forth, but you’re not a professional philosopher, or is that your training? You’re in a law school, right?

0:03:50 JD: Yeah, I’m… So I’m not a philosopher by training, more by application, I suppose. I… My typical joke is that to lawyers I’m a philosopher. And to philosophers I’m a lawyer.

0:04:01 SC: Oh, I know that one well, yes. [chuckle] Okay, so you’re… We’re going to get into this story that you advocate about giving ourselves over to the robots taking over and why that might be a good thing, but I wanted to start as you start in the book because you have some great numbers, some great stories to really drive home how fast things are changing. Just to quote one, you say that 100,000, sorry, 10,000 years ago, the percentage of the vertebrate biomass on Earth that was either human beings or our controlled animals, our livestock and our pets, was 0.1% of the vertebrate biomass on Earth. And by now it’s closer to 98%. So we have won, the human beings have taken over. Is that safe to say?

0:04:53 JD: Yeah, so that’s a statistic that I’ve encountered. It’s actually something that Daniel Dennett uses a lot in talks so that’s where I got it from. And since I published the book, people have pointed out to me that it… I don’t know if that’s a fully reliable statistic, whether it really is 98%. It’s an estimate based on a number of assumptions that could be questionable, but I think the general gist of it, which is that humans and human livestock and animals and human agriculture now really dominate the planet in an unprecedented way, in comparison to what was the case before the agricultural revolution.

0:05:25 SC: Yeah, I’m willing to believe that it’s not 98%, but we’re arguing about whether it’s 96%, not whether it’s 40%, like it is most of what’s going on here on Earth right now, I would think. And then you go through the various revolutions we’ve had with agriculture and technology and so forth and it really drives home not just human dominance of the planet, but how rapidly it is all happening, right?

0:05:47 JD: Right, and people are probably familiar with some of these graphs that you show of the number of calories consumed or burned per person per country since the industrial revolution. And you see this hockey stick-like graph where if you zoom out, it looks like nothing happened until 1750, and suddenly everything is happening.

[chuckle]

0:06:00 SC: And even 10,000 years is an incredibly short time, historically speaking. The lesson I take from this that is relevant to where we’re going to go in the conversation is we are nowhere near equilibrium, right? Our situation is incredibly rapidly changing, and therefore, we have every justification for imagining that a thousand years from now, things are going to be dramatically different in some way, whether or not we can predict what that way is going to be.

0:06:00 JD: Right, yeah. So the assumption that the future is going to look much like the past, at least at a certain time horizon, looks like a dubious assumption. I don’t know if this is a good idea to bring it up, but I was just listening to your interview with Martin Reese which was released this week, which probably means nothing by the time this comes out. I don’t know when this will actually come out, but he made a similar point about people building cathedrals in the Middle Ages, why do they do that when they wouldn’t live to see them? Because they presume that their children would live in a very similar world and appreciate the same things and how nowadays that assumption looks, a lot of us are questioning that more because it feels like the future might be radically different from the past.

0:07:16 SC: Yeah, absolutely, and by the way, it is always appropriate to mention previous podcast episodes that we’ve done and you can do the same thing for your own podcast episodes, that’s perfectly fine. So the part of this rapid change that you care about is broadly construed automation, or I guess more specifically, the effect it’s having on jobs and work. We used to be hunter-gatherers and basically everyone had a job either hunting or gathering or doing the support work for hunters and gatherers, and things have changed a lot. Why don’t you just give us your potted quick explanation of how work has changed over the years?

0:07:55 JD: Yeah, the basic story is that the tasks that humans used to perform are increasingly being performed by machines or through a lot of technological assistance, so even if you don’t have tasks that are fully automated, you have tasks that are automated to such a percentage that the human-performed element of the task is quite limited. And you can see this in many different sectors of society, so that’s one of the things I try to do in the opening chapter of this book, so to sketch different domains of society and how we’re seeing this trend towards what I call human obsolescence. It’s probably a dramatic way of putting it, or a strong way of putting it, but I think the trend is very clear. Again, agriculture, if you want to start with that example, you have fairly precipitous declines in the number of human beings employed in agriculture since the 1800s or 1900s. Most European economies and the US, the majority of workers worked in agriculture in the 1800s up until the early 1900s, and now we’re talking about less than 5% of humans employed in agriculture.

0:09:06 JD: These are statistics actually that I based from Max Roser, Our World in Data, who has a lot of nice charts and information about this. A similar story is true in manufacturing, although I think there, it’s much more apparent to people, because manufacturing is one of the industries that is most clearly automated because the science of automation are so visible there. So the stereotypical image of the production line, like a motor car factory or something, is a clear illustration of this trend towards automation. We also see it in other areas, so I look at the impact on the professions, the rise of automated assistance in medicine, in law as well and also in science. I talk about some examples.

0:09:54 JD: And you’re more familiar with this than I would be, but there are clearly, increasingly science is a big data enterprise, there’s lots of computerized systems with performing statistical analysis and calculations, but there’s also some initial evidence that we’re creating robots that can perform their own experiments as a team and the University of Aberystwyth in Wales that have created these robots, Adam and Eve, that run their own experiments. They come up with their own hypotheses and tests their own… Sorry, experimentally test these hypotheses, reach conclusions. So it’s a time when we’re seeing this kind of rapid trend towards automation in many different sectors and oftentimes when people discuss this topic, they focus on just one sector of society rather than all of them. And one of the things I wanted to do is try and give a wide sketch of all these different domains of activity.

0:10:41 SC: Yeah, actually, I really liked an example that you had, which is completely obvious, and I feel bad for not just figuring it out myself, but the financial trading literally on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange, the idea that that has more or less gone away, and now, we just use the Stock Exchange as a backdrop for video cameras, TV shows and things like that, but all of it has become automated in the real world. I knew that intellectually, but the vivid picture of the trading floor more or less disappearing really hit home.

0:11:14 JD: Yeah, so this notion that the trading floor is a place where you got lots of people crowding together, barking buy and sell orders at each other, kind of the image you see in a movie from the 1980s, Trading Places, with Eddie Murphy and Dan Aykroyd.

0:11:28 SC: Oh, yeah, classic.

0:11:31 JD: That’s the stereotypical view of the market. Nowadays, yes, most trading activity takes place digitally, in fact, most trading activity is performed by algorithms. The estimates are a little bit tricky here, but most people will assume on pretty good grounds, it’s more than 50% of all trades are executed by algorithms automatically.

0:11:51 SC: Yeah, like I said, I knew this intellectually, but after reading your book, I was moved to go look at the data here. I think that it’s true that the literal size of the New York Stock Exchange floor peaked in the 1990s. It expanded, but then it’s been shrinking ever since. They’ve literally been cutting off the floor space because they need it less and less. So it says something about how our society is changing.

0:12:15 JD: Yeah, there’s also… There’s a regulatory reason for that as well, which is just to do with the nationalization of markets in the US. So the physical location of New York is less important than it ever was, partly due to technology, but also partly due to changes in regulation.

0:12:29 SC: Oh, well, it’s always these details that make the story [chuckle] a little bit less romantic, but okay. But, okay that gives us a bit of a background and I think that probably most listeners get it, that there’s a lot of more automation, but let’s be… Let’s dig into what it does mean across the different sectors. I have this feeling that throughout the last several hundred years, this and that particular industry has become automated, but it’s always been the case that jobs for human beings have popped up somewhere else, right?

0:13:03 SC: Like we’ve lost a lot of farming jobs and a lot of industrial jobs, but there’s jobs in doing other things that have popped up. And you’re trying to make the much stronger case that we’re entering a zone where some jobs will be automated and there won’t be replacements for them and the total number of jobs to be done by humans is going to precipitously decline.

0:13:23 JD: Yeah. I think that you have to be a little bit careful when we talk about this topic. So I’m going to do maybe something boring and philosophical, which is to define some of the terms that get bandied around in conversations.

0:13:33 SC: Please, no, we appreciate that. You’ve come to the right podcast.

0:13:36 JD: So I frame my discussion in the book about the automation of work. And I do that partly because that’s the way in which a lot of people talk about it, but it is a little bit misleading in the sense that work is a very vague term and people mean different things by it. So what I mean by it is the performance of skills in return for some kind of economic reward. So at least for me, work isn’t any particular activity or task; it is rather a condition under which humans perform tasks. So it’s a little bit of an abstract notion. And a job then is effectively a socially or economically defined role that is made up of a bunch of tasks, things that you do in which you then receive some kind of economic reward in return for doing those tasks. So if you’re a taxi driver, you drive people around from here to there, according to their wishes you might small talk with them or something. So these are all tasks that make up that job.

0:14:32 JD: And when we talk about the automation of work and the automation of jobs, it’s misleading to assume that technology necessarily displaces work and necessarily displaces jobs, ’cause what technology really does is it tends to change the tasks that make up jobs and make up work. So this kind of links into your point, which is that because jobs are really defined as collections of tasks, we might automate 40% of those tasks, but there’s oftentimes other tasks that humans can move into and that often humans have an comparative advantage in performing relative to machines. So automation doesn’t necessarily lead to the displacement of jobs. We can sometimes redefine our roles so that we can focus on different tasks.

0:15:21 SC: Yes.

0:15:22 JD: And so this is what we see historically, is that technology has very clearly had a disruptive impact on lots of jobs, but it hasn’t necessarily led to wide-scale unemployment, because people have moved into other kinds of jobs that are defined by different sets of tasks. And some economists refer to this as the complementarity effect of technology. So a lot of times we focus on the substitution effect of technology, that technology substitutes for human labor. But oftentimes, there are complementary tasks humans can perform alongside machines that kinda opens up a whole vista or new space of work for the future. And this is why we haven’t seen this trend towards kind of structural unemployment over the long term as a result of technology.

0:16:09 SC: Yeah. I think the point of jobs as a category are socially constructed, is a very good one. It’s not literally something that needs to be done, it’s a way we’re choosing to organize our society to give people reward, monetary rewards for doing these tasks, like you say. So if that’s true how can we ever say that we’re confident that jobs are going to go away or that the need for human beings to do jobs will become less and less. Can we always invent new constructions of what we mean by a job?

0:16:39 JD: Yeah, look. So it’s possible that you read my book as arguing for the extreme thesis that all work is going away. But what I would say is that I don’t think that’s something that necessarily happens. I think it’s something that depends to a large extent on how society responds to automation. So I’m not a technological determinist or a fatalist about these things. I think there are choices that we make individually, societally and institutionally that will make a difference to this as to whether we always find new jobs. But I am skeptical about the potential for us to always find new complementary tasks that humans can perform alongside robots or AI which will be solutions for kind of mass employment.

0:17:28 JD: And there are a few different reasons for my scepticism, and I discuss four of them in the book. One is just that there is some preliminary data suggesting that when employers turn to robots or automation, it doesn’t tend to increase the overall level of work or it doesn’t have a neutral effect on work. It tends to actually reduce the number of workers demanded. So there’s some interesting empirical work done by Daron Acemoglu and Pascual Restrepo. I think they’re both in MIT. And they did work on the US labor markets where they suggested that for every robot a company uses in the US it tends to displace either between three and six workers. So it was a kind of a net loss of employment. It was data based on from 1990 to 2007. And then more recently they did a study of French companies who automated and they saw a similar effect.

0:18:24 JD: Number one, that this companies tended to increase their productivity fairly dramatically and they had a larger share of the overall productivity in the French market, and also they tended to reduce the number of workers that they employed. So there is that initial empirical data. It’s just two studies I’m mentioning here, which suggests that the use of robots in particular doesn’t lead to gains or a neutral level of employment. It seems to lead to net losses overall.

0:18:55 SC: But isn’t that… I think I’m sort of just pushing a little bit because I’m probably going to agree with your thesis overall, but that data seems to indicate that within those particular industries robots came in and human beings went out, but then other industries come up. We have kinds of jobs we didn’t have before so, but you want to argue that we’re at a point now where, I think you want to argue, tell me, that it’s good that jobs are going away, that we should imagine moving toward a future where we don’t even… Or we’re not sad that there are fewer jobs for human beings.

0:19:02 JD: And just to say one thing on the empirical evidence. So Acemoglu and Restrepo do look at the scenarios to whether there are jobs being created in other sectors of the economy, at least when they did the study in the US, and they didn’t find a net gain. So when they looked within particular industries, they saw a higher level of net loss. But even when they looked across industries, they saw still a net loss overall for every robot employed today. And one of their points, which I think is a good one, they said this is at a point in time when there’s actually been relatively little use of robots. From 1992 to 2007, there was relatively little uptake of robotization in US industries. And since then, it’s actually increasing, and we probably expect it to increase in the future. So, this was one point.

0:20:18 SC: Yeah, maybe we should also talk about, just to make things a little bit more concrete, what are the kinds of jobs where it’s easy to imagine robots taking over, or automation taking over, and the ones where it’s hard? You mentioned fruit picking as one where it’s hard, but it’s nevertheless becoming true, perhaps. And then, there’s also more intrinsically human jobs, like government or being a scientist or being an artist. And you’re trying to make the case that, even in those, we can imagine robots doing what human beings currently do.

0:20:53 JD: Yeah. There’s a roboticist called Hans Moravec, who formulated this thing called Moravec’s Paradox back in the 1980s, where he talked about how actually high-level cognitive jobs are oftentimes the easiest things to automate, because they tend to be very easy to formulate an algorithm to perform those tasks. Whereas physical, manual labor is often the most difficult thing to automate, because it relies on unpredictable, or less easily controlled, stochastic variables. And I don’t know if his framing of it is correct. I think what most people would say nowadays is that routine work is easily automatable, and anything that’s non-routine is a little bit more difficult to automate. Although the new kids of AI that we are developing seem to be getting better at performing even these non-routine tasks, the things that we thought, traditionally, were hard to automate.

0:21:50 JD: So yeah, that’s just one point on what kinds of jobs we can expect to see automated. It seems to be that, probably, more and more jobs we can expect to see automated, based on current technological trends. And that’s true even if there are limits to the current systems of AI that we currently deploy, because I think there’s a lot of room for different uses of the technology that we currently have that haven’t been tried out yet. I think I’ve kind of lost the thread of your original question now, so…

0:22:19 SC: [chuckle] Well, I’m just trying to raise this idea that I’m sure is in many people’s minds, that sure, I can imagine financial trading or building cars being replaced by robots, but I can’t imagine being a pop star or being a law professor being replaced by robots, right?

0:22:40 JD: Right, it’s certainly, intuitively plausible to me that artistic jobs or entertainment industry jobs are probably not going to be subject to wide-scale automation. There are people who are building holographic pop stars in Asian countries. I’ve seen several examples of this. And there are people who are building, or creating algorithms that can make the next Beatles album. That’s a famous example from a few years ago. But I doubt that… I’m sceptical as to whether people will be that interested in robot, or computer-created art. I think it’s interesting as a novelty, initially, but I think there is something in art that we like the human origin and the human story behind it, and that often counts for more than just the end product. And we see this anyway in debates about art and forgery. A perfect forgery is never as good as the original artwork. Why is that? I think part of the reason is that we care about the origin of artworks more than we care about, let’s say, the origin of furniture or laptops, broadly speaking.

0:23:51 JD: Some people do care about the origin of those things, but that tends to be a luxury good. But the idea of automating pop stars, that shouldn’t provide much reassurance for people. The notion that that is a type of work that’s going to be relatively resilient to automation shouldn’t be that reassuring, because that’s never been a job for the masses of people. These are always jobs reserved for the elite few. These are so-called superstar markets, where the handful of individuals tend to extract most of the value from those markets. So yeah, I don’t think we should be reassured about that notion. There are other kinds of jobs that we might expect to hold up, or be more resilient to automation, like care work, or any form of work where the human touch seems to be important. But I’m not entirely convinced that they will be that resilient to automation either, because oftentimes these are jobs that few humans really want to perform. One of the debates where this comes up most is in care of the elderly, for example. A lot of people argue that we shouldn’t use robots to automate the care of the elderly, and I think they have good, ethical reasons for thinking that we mightn’t want to do that.

0:25:05 JD: But I think there is a significant pressure to do it, because a lot of people don’t like performing that kind of dirty care work, so to speak. And also, there’s a demographic challenge here as well, which is, we’ve got increasing aging populations, and we need to do something to care for them. One of the countries where you see the most automation of care work is in Japan, which is one of the oldest populations in the world. That’s partly due to reasons of restricting immigration into Japan, but it’s also partly because of that demographic challenge that younger generations in Japan don’t really want to perform this kind of work, or aren’t able to perform this kind of work.

0:25:41 SC: Right. Yeah, I remember Kate Darling, for example, who I did have on a previous podcast, developing robots to help care for elderly people. So, that does sound like the kind of thing where you, when you first say the words, people are like, “Oh, no, that could never be done in automation.” But maybe it could, once you just think about it a little bit more. There’s probably a lot of examples of that.

0:25:46 JD: Yeah, and just to be clear, I’m not necessarily saying that robots are going to do a better job in those industries. There are some industries where robots clearly would do a better job than humans, because these are industries that pride themselves on speed and precision. So, I think, financial trading is another good example of that. But it’s just that, even if robots are less good than humans at performing them, there mightn’t be a huge supply of human labor into those industries for other demographic or social reasons.

0:26:29 SC: Okay, but we’re mostly here not to say that automation is taking over, but you want to argue, I think the more novel part of your argument is, “And that’s good.” Your book is called Automation and Utopia, and I think that you’re doing a good thing, by sort of at least… The labeling is a little bit extremist, you’re much more measured in the actual text, but you’re saying, “Let’s just imagine a world where work becomes completely optional.” So what do you have against work? [chuckle] What are your arguments that it would be better if we didn’t have to have jobs to earn a living?

0:27:04 JD: Yeah, and so I think this is oftentimes the key question, what I call in the book, the desirability question, which is, “Do we want for humans to keep working and remain competitive with machines or to find other jobs for them that complement machines?” And one of my… This is the more radical view in the book, is that we probably shouldn’t want that. And there are several reasons for it, and I explore them in a chapter, I think I have five different arguments for thinking that work is a bad thing, and in fact that it’s something that’s being made worse by technology in a lot of instances. So the argument is probably complex insofar as it breaks down into five parts, but very briefly, the reasons why I think work is a bad thing and we should encourage its automation, is that work tends to undermine freedom of choice, it tends to exert this kind of dominating influence over our lives.

0:27:56 JD: I think technology is making work worse for a lot of people. It’s leading to the fissuring of the workplace, a lot more outsourcing, a lot more short-term contract work, precarious work, gig work, seems to be an increasing phenomenon of technologically brokered marketplaces like Uber and Deliveroo or other companies like this. And also, there’s a significant amount of inequality in work nowadays, both in terms of income disparity, which appears to have been growing since the 1980s. And there’s an interesting story you can tell there that that increase in income disparity seems to have been correlated with a period of time where you see increased automation in middle income, middle skill jobs in, particularly in the US.

0:28:42 JD: And so there’s inequality in terms of income, but there’s also, I think, another interesting form of inequality in work, which is inequality in terms of the quality or meaningfulness of the work, which is a phenomenon that is discussed by a guy called David Autor, an MIT-based economist, does a lot of work on manufacturing and outsourcing. But he talks about this polarization effect on the labor market as a result of technology, that people are pushed into either low skill, low income work, or high skill, high income work. And just for people listening to this, economists define low skill in a, maybe a counter-intuitive way, in that it’s just the amount of years of education you need to enter a job, it defines whether it’s high or low skill. So there’s lots of low skill work that is highly skilled.

0:29:29 SC: It’s not really a measure of skill, but the sort of background prerequisites you need to take up the job.

0:29:34 JD: Yeah, exactly. So people are pushed into these lower skilled forms of works which are often more arduous and more difficult, tends to be complex physical manual work, which is not always pleasant and has lots of maybe health and long-term health repercussions for people involved in it. But most people go into that low skill bracket because there are relatively fewer high skill, high income jobs, and there’s also higher barriers to entry into those jobs. So you see this polarization effect in terms of the quality of work, the meaningfulness of the work that people perform.

0:30:07 JD: Another reason for not favoring employment is that I think work is increasingly colonizing our lives, to use a strong term, in that because the labor market is increasingly competitive and work is more precarious as a result of technology, people spend a lot more time and attention on up-skilling themselves, trying to make themselves employable, worrying about employment. So even if we’re not spending more time at work, and there’s some evidence to suggest that the amount of hours that people spend per year working has gone down, we’re spending a lot more time thinking about work and caring about work.

0:30:47 JD: I have one anecdote in the book which I think is illustrative of this, it actually comes from another author, David Frayne, who wrote an interesting ethnography of workers in the UK a few years back. And he describes this story where he was interviewing a 12-year-old boy in a local school ’cause he was doing some classes with the local school, some extra-curricular classes. And he asked this boy why he did the class and did he enjoy it, and the boy said, “Yeah, it was enjoyable,” but the main reason why he did it is that it would ultimately look good on his CV, which is a very odd thing for, I think, a 12-year-old to be caring about, which is building up their CV and their employability.

[laughter]

0:31:25 JD: Now, that’s anecdata, but that’s, I think, illustrative of a general trend. And the other final reason I have for thinking that the automation of work is a good thing, is that when you look at some of the evidence on whether people enjoy work, that there’s some evidence to suggest that they tend to be quite dissatisfied with work. So the… Gallup, they do these large surveys of the global workforce every few years, and one of the consistent findings from their surveys over the past 15 years or so, is that most people express dissatisfaction with the work that they’re doing. They don’t feel fully engaged by it. And I think partly that’s driven by the highly competitive and precarious nature of the workplace, that people think they could be doing better, or they’re worried about the security of their jobs.

0:32:17 SC: Well, maybe, yeah, maybe it’s worth expanding a little bit on the point that you raised, but I think is worth diving into, about the gig economy and about the structure of work these days, where jobs seem to be a bit more ephemeral. I’m not sure how much data there is saying if that’s true, but it’s certainly the feeling we get. And I could imagine that there’s something structural about the modern age which makes employment less secure and less long-term. Is that an accurate assessment?

0:32:28 JD: Yeah, there’s an interesting book about this actually by a guy called Andrew Weil called The Fissured Workplace, where he explores why this happened historically. So really in the middle part of the 20th century there was a trend towards very large corporate organizations which, you know… You had a company like, let’s say, Ford Motor Cars, who employed lots of people and lots of very diverse workers under the same corporate umbrella. So they would hire catering staff, they’d hire accountant workers, they’d hire IT, they’d hire security guards, and groundskeepers, and so on, all employed within the same organization.

0:33:26 JD: And since the 1970s, there’s been a shift away from that notion of the big corporation that hires everybody to do all the tasks that are relevant to the, whatever products they’re producing or whatever service they’re providing. And instead, what you find is that companies are focusing on what they view as their core competency, and then they’re outsourcing a lot of the other forms of work, to part-time contractors or other companies that specialize in, say, the provision of accounting services, or security staff, and so on.

0:34:00 JD: And why has that happened? Well, there are a couple of reasons why that’s happened. One is that it actually tends to be a more attractive way of arranging a corporation from the perspective of shareholders and consumers, because it tends to increase the returns to shareholders, ’cause you reduce the cost that you paid oftentimes when you do this kind of fissuring and outsourcing, and it tends to also reduce the cost to consumers, there tends to be more productivity. But workers tend to get the worst deal in this arrangement.

0:34:28 SC: Yeah.

0:34:29 JD: And also technology has facilitated this in so far as one reason traditionally why you wouldn’t outsource workers is that you wouldn’t be able to easily monitor them and ensure that they were complying with corporate standards. But the advances in surveillance technology have enabled greater consistency and enforcement of corporate standards. And one area where this is really transparent is in truck drivers and the amount of ongoing surveillance of truck drivers, which has been true for quite some time now. But this trend towards increased surveillance is creeping into other industries as well.

0:35:05 SC: And it certainly sounds reminiscent too in the academic context of a shift towards adjunct professors, short-term contracts rather than tenured professors who are going to be there for many decades.

0:35:18 JD: Yeah. So that’s another illustration of this phenomenon, of this drive towards precarious forms of labor. I haven’t really investigated in detail the reasons for that in academia. I think part of it probably has to do something like the research funding culture, that people get bought out on research grants and tend to employ part-time labor to cover their teaching allocation. That’s a trend at least in the UK and Ireland, and it’s probably more attractive as well from a managerial perspective, that it allows you to efficiently deliver mass higher education on a tight budget or cut budget.

0:35:58 SC: Yeah. Okay. So, this argument seems to amount to not an intrinsic indictment of work, but a change in how work is organized in our society that sort of makes it less rewarding and stable and psychologically helpful. And maybe this is a sign of this shift, this transition that we’re in the middle of, from a everybody work society into a people don’t necessarily work society.

0:36:27 JD: Yeah. So it could be what we’re observing now is friction or teething problems as we transition from one society to the other. And to underlie a point that you just made, and I think it’s an important one, is that, my critique of work isn’t that the work is intrinsically bad, because if you go back to the definition that I offered earlier of work, work isn’t any particular activity. It is rather a condition under which we perform an activity.

0:36:51 SC: Yeah.

0:36:51 JD: And my argument is that the conditions under which we perform work, perform our jobs tend to be getting worse for the majority of workers. That’s not to say that there aren’t people who benefit from the current system, there clearly are. But the majority seem to be losing out on the current arrangement.

0:37:09 SC: Well, we’d be remiss if we didn’t at least bring up the arguments that I’m sure some people are thinking, that there is an intrinsic value to work. That the work ethic is a good thing to have, that people get a sense of identity or even meaningfulness from the jobs that they do. And so, couldn’t someone say the thing to do is not to give in to the elimination of work, but to reorganize the economy, so that jobs are more secure and rewarding.

0:37:37 JD: Yeah. So there is a widespread discussion of this in the philosophical literature about work, which is, meaningful work is what we should care about and work is oftentimes the important part of people’s identity and sense of meaning and purpose in life. And I’m very sensitive to that concern. That’s something I care about. But if you take the one example of this that I discuss in the book, there’s a couple of philosophers who wrote an article called The Goods of Work Other than Money, and they identify four things that people get out of work, apart from an income. They get a sense of mastery over some skill set. They get to form alliances and friendships with people in the workplace, so they have the sense of community. They also get to contribute to their societies in some way, sometimes positive, maybe sometimes not so positive, but it’s oftentimes the main way in which we people contribute to society is through their work. And also, they get a sense of social recognition and status, which of course, people care about a lot. They want to be respected and recognized by their peers. And so if people didn’t work, they’d lose these four things. So what are you going to about it?

0:38:44 JD: And my response to that is, you could lose those four things. That’s definitely true. But the question I would have is, is whether work is the only way in which we can get a sense of mastery, contribute to our societies, have a sense of community, and gain recognition. And I’m not convinced that it is the only way that we can get those things. I think there might be other fora that we can look into for pursuing those non-income related goods of work.

0:39:00 SC: It’s a pretty dramatic shift, right? I don’t how… What do we count, if 10,000 years ago when people were hunter-gatherers. Do we count that as work? It is doing a kind of job, but what I want to say is that literally throughout all history, people have worked, and you’re suggesting, you’re not the only one to suggest, but that that’s coming to an end. And there’s going to be some nostalgia for that period of human history, right?

0:39:00 JD: Oh, absolutely. The thing about hunter-gatherers, there was a very interesting paper written back in the ’60s, I think, by Marshall Sahlins, called The Original Leisure Society. Yuval Noah Harari made a lot of this in one of his books, I think the first one, Sapiens. So, it’s this notion that actually hunter-gatherers were the original leisure society ’cause they spent very little time every day working. In terms of getting their food, they spent a couple of hours doing that, and then the rest of their day was quite leisurely. And they seemed to derive a lot of kind of meaning and satisfaction from that.

0:40:15 JD: One thing I would say is that the level of attachment and nostalgia you have for work is probably a function of the kind of work that you currently do. So people like you and I, who are in these high skill jobs where we’re rewarded for complex, creative problem-solving. And…

0:40:35 SC: We like to complain but we have it pretty good. [chuckle]

0:40:37 JD: Yeah, there’s things we can complain about, but we have it pretty good and we also have a lot of autonomy over what we do, which a lot of workers don’t have. We are probably the people who are most attached to the current system and most worried about losing out of that because our work is such a core part of our identity. And this is actually one of the things I mention in the book is that for me, the notion that I would lose my job would… That would be significant, I think. I would definitely feel that as a loss because my work is so intrinsic to my sense of who I am. But I think I have to be sensitive to the fact that I am in a relatively privileged position and not everyone feels the same way. And lots and lots of people nowadays get most of their satisfaction and sense of purpose and meaning from non-work-related activities. From their families, from community work, from their hobbies and other interests.

0:41:26 SC: Well, good, and that leads us into, I think, the big pay-off here. You imagine a couple of different scenarios for how we could cope with this transition into a world where work was not taken for granted, as something everyone has to do, and then you argue that this could be a good thing. So, I won’t put the words into your mouth. Tell us how we could make a transition and why it might be good.

0:41:51 JD: Yeah, there’s a way that I set this up in the book and there’s also a part of this discussion which I’ve left out so far, which is that I have a long discussion of all the negative things that technology does to our lives as well and the ways in which it can compromise our freedom and our autonomy and our attention and all that, even in a non-work domain. But setting that to the side…

0:42:15 SC: Well, actually, I think that’s fair and maybe it’s my fault for not bringing that up. Let’s give a couple of minutes to say that, because I think it is a point worth making. What is your argument about the downsides of technology? ‘Cause there are techno utopians, techno pessimists, and then there’s probably good arguments on both sides, but it’s worth having them in the back of our brains as we contemplate this transition.

0:42:37 JD: Right. So this notion that we are going to abandon work and what are we going to do as a result, well, there are satirical dystopian versions of what that might entail that don’t look very pleasant. And one of them that I discuss in the book is from the Pixar movie WALL-E, which is one model of what a future in which automated technology has become widespread is like and it doesn’t look to be a very pleasant one.

0:43:03 JD: So for people who aren’t familiar with the movie, it depicts a future in which the Earth has been completely despoiled by technology and it’s… Pollution is rampant and the world is covered in trash and humans have migrated onto these off-planet ships. They’re trying to find a new home, humans have become incredibly obese, they ride around in these motorized chairs all day, they get fed a constant stream of light entertainment and fast food.

0:43:33 JD: And all around them on these interstellar ships that they’re traveling on are these robots that really do all the work. And that doesn’t look like a very pleasant future, because it seems to reduce humans to this kind of passive state where we enjoy some of the benefits that technology brings to our lives, the conveniences of technology, but we don’t really do anything. So we’re not the agents that are controlling our future in any meaningful sense.

0:44:00 JD: And because, at least in the modern era and liberal Western societies, we tend to really pride and value our sense of agency and autonomy, this looks like a serious threat that automated technologies could pose to us, that they could cut us out of the picture and reduce us to essentially servants of the machine, so to speak.

0:44:21 SC: Yeah, I think that… [chuckle] I think that is something to worry about, but we have some choice in how we’re going to shape it. So, how do we avoid that?

0:44:30 JD: Yeah, this is how I set it up in the book, is that if you imagine that as a negative future that we want to avoid, well, there’s two things we can do or two ways of responding to it, and a way of thinking about the challenge that technology poses to us. Which is that, increasingly, technology seems to be pushing humans out of the cognitive niche, it’s a concept from evolutionary psychology and evolutionary anthropology that I borrow as a metaphor for discussing this in the book.

0:45:01 JD: So humans have evolved, that we’ve become successful because of our cognitive powers and our capacity for complex problem-solving, but increasingly, we are ceding that territory to machines. So what do we do in response? Well, there’s really two things we can do. We can race against… I’m sorry, yeah, fight back against the machines in a sense by trying to become more like them, more like the machines that are replacing us.

0:45:23 SC: Try to compete with them, basically, right?

0:45:26 JD: I call this the cyborg solution to our problem, or the pursuit of the cyborg utopia, that’s the way I put it in the book. Or we can cede the territory to machines and retreat to something else, and I call this pursuing the virtual utopia or virtual life. And I try to investigate the benefits and costs of both of those solutions to the problem and I think there’s merit to both of them. But ultimately, I try to make the case for thinking that pursuing the virtual life is more appealing than it might initially sound to be.

0:46:00 SC: Okay, but let’s dig into the one you don’t like as much first, the cyborgization. How literal are we taking this? Are you imagining literally that I’m going to look like the Borg where I have metal pieces hanging on to me or is it a slightly more metaphorical version of a cyborg you have in mind?

0:46:18 JD: So I think you can take both perspectives on it, right? And I suppose, really, there’s a sliding scale of cyborg-like futures for us. There is the future in which we really just become very closely integrated with machines, maybe we replace the majority of our biological components with machine-like equivalents, something like the Borg from Star Trek. Or the other view, way of looking at it, which is actually a view that is favored in some philosophical circles, which is that humans have always been a technological species, we’ve always had these very close, almost symbiotic relationships with the technology that we create. So we’ve always been cyborgs, in a sense, and we’re becoming more cyborg-like because we’re becoming more dependent on technology, but that technology is still external to us, it’s not integrated into our biology.

0:47:10 JD: So I think there’s those kinda two ways of understanding it, either you directly integrate the technology into our biological systems, possibly even replacing them, or you just have these very close dependency or interdependency relationships with technological artifacts that remain external to your body.

0:47:27 SC: So in particular, I know that certain companies are pursuing some kind of brain-computer interfaces or even neural implants that will sort of hook us into the internet or to computers directly. Is that a step along the way towards cyborgization?

0:47:47 JD: Yeah, I think… So Elon Musk is probably the example you’re thinking of, the Neuralink company is one of the ones that’s attracted a lot of media attention, anyway. Well, I mean, brain-computer interfaces are widespread, and have been for quite some time, and they’re used for therapeutic reasons. Brain implants are used for therapeutic reasons. There also, there’s a large community of cyborg hackers who, people who in their own basements, or kitchen laboratories, try to implant RFID chips into their arms, or other, maybe slightly more complex forms of brain-computer interface. So, yeah, those are some of the possibilities. One of the people I cite in the book as an illustration of an actual living cyborg is an artist called Neil Harbisson, who I think is based in Spain, but he’s from Northern Ireland originally. And he wears this device that’s implanted into the back of his skull that allows him to hear colors, essentially, ’cause he’s born color-blind, and he has this device that converts light waves into sound waves.

0:48:52 JD: So he’s just kind of like… Or technologically created synesthesia, if you like. And he’s using technology to augment or explore different sensory forms of engagement with the world, so that’s a more experimental use. He defines himself as a cyborg and there’s some interesting interviews with him where he says that he doesn’t think that he uses technology in his life, he thinks that he is a bit of technology, he… I think he’s founded something called the Transpecies Society for people who have a non-human identity, basically. So there are people out there who are very actively pursuing this kind of highly technologized form of cyborg existence.

0:49:32 SC: And how exactly does this save us from work or from leaving work? I’m missing a little connection there.

0:49:41 JD: Yeah, it doesn’t necessarily save us from leaving work, what it does is that is, if we are losing competence and power to machines, if the kind of WALL-E dystopia is a realistic one, the concern is that we won’t be good at doing anything anymore and we’ll need machines to do everything for us. Becoming cyborg-like is possibly a way of augmenting or enhancing our capacity so that we don’t lose out to machines. But you’ve perhaps hinted at one of the big risks of doing this, which I discuss in the book, is that that would probably seem to be a way of perpetuating the economy in its current form, in the sense that… Well, if humans are augmented they become efficient at performing tasks and people want to employ them again.

0:50:27 JD: And in fact, I would have some fears about this, that this might double down on many of the worst aspects of the labor market as we currently see them, the aspects that I mentioned earlier on in this discussion. So for example, I complained about the highly competitive nature of the labor market nowadays. One of the ways in which that competition manifests itself today is in education, competition for upskilling. In the future, if we pursue this kind of cyborg path, it might manifest itself in the way of competition for cyborg implants and that might also lead to increasing inequality and disparity in the workplace if these cyborg implants are things that are only affordable by the elite few.

0:51:08 SC: Even in Harry Potter, he had a much better broom than everybody else and that did help him in the quidditch matches. So technological competition is something that is very hard to escape.

0:51:19 JD: Exactly, yeah, yeah. And I think there are other risks associated with trying to pursue the cyborg path. One person who’s put this, I think, rather well, and this is a complex problem, so I’m going to treat it rather glibly here, but there’s a Irish journalist called Mark O’Connell, who wrote this interesting book where he followed a lot of transhumanists, or people who are interested in cyborg identities and that. And he pointed out there was an odd paradox or tension in their views, which is that a lot of them are very concerned about how inefficient human biology is, and how poorly designed our biological machinery is and they have this sense that we are constrained and lack freedom as a result of the constraints of biology.

0:52:08 JD: And they want to replace that with technology and want us to become more technological, like people like Ray Kurzweil that want to create digital copies or uploads of the human mind. And he argues that this seems odd, insofar as you’re replacing the biological prison potentially with a technological prison. So you’re substituting one kind of un-freedom for another kind of un-freedom, because who controls the technological infrastructure that you replace yourself with. At the moment it seems unlikely that it’s going to be individuals, it’s probably more likely going to be corporations or people who have this specialist know-how to create these kinds of technologies. So you might end up enslaving yourself to technology and becoming less free as a result of cyborg organization. So I think that’s another serious concern with this solution to our predicament or our problem.

0:53:00 SC: Yeah, I think it makes sense. I’m not sure if it’s true or not, because I don’t trust my ability to predict the future, but I think it’s a sensible argument you’re making that sure, we can try to out-compete the robots by joining them, but then we’re still stuck in this cycle of being beholden to larger power and economic structures that don’t always have our good fortunes in mind. And especially if they’ve now figured out how to make human beings more replaceable, less permanently employed, etcetera, that would only get worse if we were cyborgs, I would imagine.

0:53:38 JD: Yeah, I think you make an important point, which is something that is worth emphasizing, which is that I don’t engage in a prediction game here. I wouldn’t be confident of predicting the future in any sense. I think, is that like a Woody Allen quote about predicting the future is hard? Prediction is hard, particularly when it’s about the future, something like that.

0:54:00 SC: I believe it’s Niels Bohr, believe it or not.

0:54:02 JD: Okay, sorry. I was wrong.

0:54:05 SC: I only say that because I thought it was Yogi Berra and I was wrong. [laughter]

0:54:10 JD: I think, yeah, I think I’m getting confused that there’s a similar Woody Allen quote, but anyway, the less we mention him, the better.

0:54:18 SC: That’s fine.

0:54:22 JD: So I’m really trying to sketch different scenarios in the book and trying to evaluate them using philosophical methods. And I hope that the logic and structure of the arguments that I lay out is clear so that people can easily critique it if they think it’s wrong, or if that some of the assumptions underlying it are wrong. Part of what I wanted to do in the book was to illustrate a way of thinking about the future that isn’t cheer-leading for a particular future or saying that we’re all going to doom and gloom and it is trying to be fair to different possibilities, even though I take stances on some issues. Yeah, my confidence level in some of the claims I make wouldn’t be particularly high.

0:55:05 SC: Well, yeah, predicting is hard, but I think you do… My impression is you were arguing, and I’m sort of sympathetic to it, that the more dramatic transition to the future is actually potentially a better one. One in which we don’t try to out-compete with the robots, but we say, “You know what, robots, good, take over all of our work, we’re going to start doing something else.” And you talk about this as sort of a virtual reality version of the future where games and creativity play an important role. So why don’t you sketch out what that might entail?

0:55:39 JD: Yeah, this is in many ways the trickiest part of the book, and it’s probably the part of the book that I’ve had the most trouble explaining to people afterwards. So my simple answer to your question is that you probably need to read the 60 pages in the book that are dedicated to it, to understand what I’m saying, but I’ll try my best to summarize. So what I say in the book, is that there’s a stereotypical view of what a virtual reality future might look like. And there is another more counterintuitive view, and I favor the counterintuitive view. And I think it could be a good thing. So the stereotypical view is that a virtual future is one in which we all plug into the matrix or plug into some computer-generated virtual environment. So, yeah, for those of you who are familiar with it, one of the examples I use in the book is Neal Stephenson’s novel Snow Crash, where he talks about the metaverse as something that people spend a lot of time living and experimenting in. And I think that that could be understood as a vision of a virtual future.

0:56:40 JD: But there are some tensions within that, insofar as a lot of the things that take place in computer-generated environments are in my mind quite real, in that you have real friendships and real conversations with people. Sometimes you can really harm or hurt people in virtual interactions. I talk about this phenomenon as well of virtual assault, assaults committed via a computer avatar virtual environment. And so it’s not clear to me that that’s really a virtual world entirely; philosophically, a strict sense of what virtual would mean. So the other alternative view, the counterintuitive view, is that in a sense, humans have always been a virtual species. This is kind of the counterpoint to this notion that we’ve always been cyborgs. We’ve also always kind of been virtual in the sense that we’ve always used technology to create insulated environments or niches in which we can survive that are hidden or shielded from a lot of real world effects, right? And I’m not talking to you right now in the real natural world, so to speak. I’m inside a nicely, centrally-heated home.

0:57:57 SC: I mean, we manifestly are talking to each other in the real world, mediated by this wonderful electronic piece of technology. So I think that’s exactly to your point, that there’s maybe not a hard and fast line between real real and virtual real.

0:58:07 JD: Exactly. So the counterintuitive view is really that we have been using technology to create environments that are more and more conforming to our desires and needs, and are less constrained by some of the limits of the physical or natural world. And we can continue to pursue this trend in such a way that we have ever more control over the kinds of environments in which we interact. And that’s the kind of vision of the virtual future that I care about. There’s a related point here, which is that some people argue that a lot of current existence is a kind of virtual reality game. Some people, like David Graeber, who’s an anthropologist, he said a lot of work is virtual reality, it’s a lot of bullshit jobs, to use his phrase. I don’t know if this is a censored podcast, so I apologize.

0:59:07 SC: We’re allowed to say that. Go ahead. Yeah.

0:59:09 JD: Yeah. And then there’s people like Yuval Noah Harari, he’s written a few books about this where he talks about religion as being a virtual reality game. It’s probably a claim that’s going to offend a lot of religious believers.

[laughter]

0:59:23 JD: And also consumer capitalism as being a virtual reality game, that there’s nothing… We don’t have to live life the way we’re currently living it, it’s kind of a socially constructed fact. And it might be a social constructed fact that not a lot of us have control over, but the more control we get over it, the more virtual it starts to seem to us. And that’s kind of the… Yeah.

0:59:45 SC: I think I understand that perspective, but it seems to be stretching the meaning of the word virtual beyond what is really useful. These are all more examples of the social construction of reality, and the point being made is, that… Not even reality being socially constructed, but the human rules and regulations that we invent are clearly invented and we invent a whole bunch of different ones depending on the context and we can continue to invent them with or without electronic aids. And so this is a sense of the word virtual reality in which we are being a little bit more self-conscious about the construction of our ways of living.

1:00:28 JD: Yeah. So you’ve kind of actually summarized the point better than I’ve ever been able to summarize it myself. And so I’d agree that this is kind of a stretch from how people typically understand virtual reality, and that’s why I talked about the stereotypical view initially, but I actually think that this counterintuitive understanding of it is more appropriate. And again, I have a long-ish discussion of the philosophical reasons for thinking that in the book. But yeah, the more self-conscious we are about the arbitrary rules and regulations we use to construct our engagement with the world, the more of a virtual life we’re living. And the kind of apotheosis of this trend is where we start to realize that everything we’re doing is essentially a game and we have control over the rules of that game.

1:01:13 SC: Yeah, when reading your book, the word game also struck me a little bit. There’s sort of both narrow and broad definitions of that. I’ve talked on the podcast about the idea of games and how important they are, but people really these days, I think some people are going to think of playing Fortnite or something on your computer where it’s a video shoot ’em up kind of game or some sort of matching game on your smartphone. Whereas there’s this broader notion of sort of a structured activity with a goal, right?

1:01:45 JD: Yeah.

1:01:45 SC: Where we clearly make up the rules. But baseball is a game and knitting is a game and chess is a game. And in some sense, the financial markets or universities or novel writing is a different form of game.

1:02:00 JD: Yeah. So I think that’s right and I think people will probably run towards this maybe computer game scenario or understanding of it, but I do adopt this broader definition of a structured activity with a goal and also, crucially, one that is dictated or guided by arbitrary rules. This is a definition of games that actually comes from a book by Bernard Suits, he’s a philosopher who wrote an interesting quirky book in the 1970s called The Grasshopper. It’s a dialogue, Plato-style dialogue, where they talk about the definition of a game and the notion of utopia. And so I draw heavily on that in the book when I discuss this idea, but I think… So I do think technology plays an important role in how game-like our existence can be, in one sense, which is that technology gives us more opportunities to construct more kinds of games, ’cause it’s more control over the arbitrary rules we use to structure our lives.

1:03:01 JD: Now, to go back to the point that the financial market is a game, in a sense, that’s true. And that’s something that I’m conscious of, and work in the modern world could be viewed as a game, but what I think is different about the modern world and the future that I’m sketching is that, at the moment, work is largely a necessity for people. It’s something that they have to do. They don’t have a choice. So the future I’m imagining, this virtual future, is one in which you actually do have a choice over the kinds of game that you get to play.

1:03:30 SC: Good. By that construction, that sounds like something good. I just want to sort of push a little bit on the word arbitrary that you’ve used to describe the rules of the game. I would not call rules of any game arbitrary, like the rules of basketball are not arbitrary, we made them up, but we made them up with a goal in mind. There are changes to the rules which would clearly make the game worse and there are changes that would make it better, so it’s not like they were random, which I think is a sense that people get from using the word arbitrary.

1:04:00 JD: Yeah, I know. That’s a fair point. So I guess they’re contingent in some sense or they’re unconstrained in some sense by… So, oh, well, that might not be entirely right either, but so… They are an exercise of choice and there are better and worse games and more interesting games, and a large part of that is the function of the kinds of rules that we choose to structure our activities.

1:04:24 SC: Okay. Good.

1:04:24 JD: Yeah.

1:04:24 SC: So but let’s… I think we’re talking about details too much and not fleshing out the big picture here. You have your… Tell us more about what it would mean to replace our current system of you have to work to earn a salary, and earn a living with a world where there were games, in some very broad sense of the term, that you could choose to be involved in, and that was where you found your sort of daily activity and meaning, rather than in your income-earning role in life.

1:04:40 JD: Right. So, one part of this conversation which we haven’t really touched upon and part of the reason for that is that I don’t really touch upon it in the book, which is that everything I’m saying is contingent upon the notion that people aren’t suffering tremendous hardship as a result of unemployment and from losing an income. And so I set that issue to the side in the book. And there are interesting debates and proposals around things like the basic income guarantee as a way of solving the loss of income that people have as a result of jobs. I’m looking more at this notion of the loss of meaning associated with jobs and how we could find meaning in another forum. So…

1:05:28 SC: But, sorry. So we are assuming that there is either basic income or some version of that, where everyone has enough money to survive and get through the day.

1:05:38 JD: Yeah. I’m probably even more abstract in general than that, insofar as I would say that we have to have some way of solving the potential deprivation that people would have as a result of losing their jobs. The loss of material wealth, let’s say.

1:05:53 SC: Right.

1:05:53 JD: You could resolve that through an income that people have to purchase services, but there are other ways in which you could address the loss of material wealth as well, which wouldn’t necessarily mean that we all get an income.

1:06:04 SC: Got it.

1:06:05 JD: So that there are different proposals out there for that. But yeah, yeah, I’m setting that to the side and I’m assuming that. And then I’m looking at the kind of meaning.

1:06:12 SC: What do we do with our time, then, right, yeah. This is the obvious question. Like, let’s imagine that we had no material wants. And I think, just to let the audience know, probably you and I both agree that that is a highly non-trivial question that should be discussed, but it’s just not the question we’re interested in right here. We’re saying, if that were solved, what would we do, right?

1:06:34 JD: Exactly, yeah. And this is… This is a thought experiment, in a sense. It’s a long, elaborate thought experiment about if something was the case, what would follow. And this is something that I’ve got a lot push back on since I’ve written the book, which is that I didn’t discuss climate change and other disasters that are facing humanity. And part of my response to that is that no book can be about everything.

1:06:57 SC: That’s fair, yeah.

1:06:57 JD: I just wanted to set some issues aside to explore this kind of space of thinking. So the future that I’m envisioning is one in which we end up really having a choice over the kinds of activity that we pursue in life. And I view these as games, ’cause we get to kinda choose the rules that apply to our lives. Would that be a good thing, is one way of thinking about it. And would it address the non-income related goods that we might lose through work. So as I mentioned earlier, the sense of mastery, social contribution, community building, social recognition. Can we find those things in games? And I think we can. You can get a sense of mastery over games, a sense of skill over a game, over the rules of a game, and competency in the performance of a game. You can contribute to society through games, insofar as you can kind of add to the pleasure and meaning in other people’s lives by playing games with them. You can make their lives better by participating in these activities. You can also gain a sense of social recognition through games. In fact, it’s one of the main ways in which people currently gain self-esteem or self-recognition is through pursuit of game-like activities, and being rewarded for their competency in games.

1:08:10 SC: Or how many likes you get on Instagram, right? That’s a version of a game.

1:08:14 JD: Yeah, although that might be a negative version of the game, in one sense, right? And this is one thing is all that I would be sensitive to discuss maybe a little bit briefly in the book is that it’s not like a game… A future in which we all play games would be perfect. There’d still be the role for competition. And there are forms of scarcity in the world of games that probably correspond to the forms of scarcity we see in the current world, in terms of material scarcity or income-related scarcity, in that if people care about being the best at a game, that’s a kind of scarcity being the top-ranked performer.

1:08:53 JD: So there are potential negatives and downsides to playing games. But one thing I like about this vision of the future is that I think it can be a recipe for kind of mass satisfaction and appeal. And it’s not something that is limited to an elite few people to make a… Live a meaningful life. Games are things that can be pursued by everybody. It also enables what I think is an open and dynamic future, insofar as that there is a essentially an infinite horizon of games that we could possibly explore. And I think this is something that’s important about thinking positively about the future, is that the future should, as much as possible, be an open horizon, and not kind of stagnant and closed down in some sense. And oftentimes, it’s when we have a sense that the future is closed and that society is stagnant that the most pessimism and dystopianism tends to creep in.

1:09:48 SC: Well, yeah, I think that it’s an attractive picture in some ways, but questions do arise that I have. And I’m going to give you a chance to take a swat at them. And the one you just… The issue you just mentioned is one of them. You say that there’s an infinite horizon of possibilities, but the flip side of that is… Or at least the counter-argument is, what if there’s not? What if we just get bored? What if we sort of… It turns out that our creativity for inventing new ways to keep ourselves amused or engaged or active isn’t as infinite as we hoped it was? Is that something to worry about, or something to make our peace with?

1:10:31 JD: So, there’s two things to say here. One is that, even if the landscape of games isn’t infinite, there are… There’s often a kind of… A relatively limitless possibility space within individual games. People have been playing chess for thousands of years, and a lot of people still find it intrinsically fascinating, that there’s lots of room left to explore in it, even though machines are better than humans at it, so a human performing chess is still a popular sport.

1:10:55 SC: Yeah.

1:10:55 JD: So yeah, within an individual game, there’s often room for exploring lots of different spaces within that game. So that’s one point. The other point is that, would we get bored and would we kind of run out of things? I think of, at a limit, of course we would. If we lived forever, literally, if our lives were infinite, yeah, we’d end up doing everything and we might become complacent and bored. I just think, it seems to me at the moment, a good bet to suggest that there’s lots of possibilities left to explore and lots of new game spaces to explore, insofar as we see lots of new games continually being invented that might not gain mass traction or appeal right now, but if they become the main focus of our lives, then we have the opportunities to explore them.

1:11:52 SC: I think that’s fair.

1:11:54 JD: So it’s just a bet I would have that we’re unlikely to run out of things in any kind of meaningful human time horizon. At the limit, we probably would.

1:12:03 SC: Okay. Maybe a more realistic worry is the following. We talked about the social construction of the rules, maybe they’re aren’t arbitrary, but at least we did make them up. And I think that when it comes to more conventional notions of work where you’re building something and at the end of the day, there’s a chair or an automobile that was created by the labor of yourself and others. Even if the rules of that social role were made up by somebody, they don’t feel like they’re made up by somebody, they feel natural or they feel necessary or they feel imposed by the constraints of just living. Is there some worry that things begin to seem less meaningful to us if the rules are obviously socially constructed? Like if we’re just making up rules of games in order for us to play them, does that make us less fulfilled somehow? And I can sort of guess the answer, but I’m asking the question in a leading way.

1:13:01 JD: Yeah, this is a wider debate in the philosophy on the meaning of life, which is do you need some external narrative or structure in which your life is situated in order for it to have meaning? Or do we embrace the more radical existentialist view, which is that we get to choose what the meaning is? And I tend to favor the latter view, but I would qualify it in one sense, in that it is of course true that if we invent games, we might have an initially specified rule set that is clearly arbitrary. But we discover things about the games that we play that were unexpected or unanticipated given that initial rule set, and we might find the need to add new rules to the game, so to speak.

1:13:47 JD: So to use one example, the rules of football, or soccer to an American audience, didn’t include things about players not being allowed to pass the ball directly back to the goalkeeper at one point in time, and the goalkeeper being able to pick up the ball. They changed that rule because they thought it’d be more interesting. Things like the offside rule, these have been added to the game over time, because they realized that the initial set of rules wasn’t sufficiently interesting, and that there are aspects of the game they didn’t appreciate until they started to play it more. And so there are, I think, constraints within the world of games that we don’t initially appreciate and the rule-bound nature of games isn’t fully transparent to us.

1:14:36 SC: Well, and I think another answer you could have given is, everyone knows that we made up the rules of football and this does not stop people from being really, really passionately interested in it, as a matter of empirical fact.

1:14:49 JD: Yeah. That’s another point which is that oftentimes things that are clearly arbitrary as a matter of sociological fact and anthropological fact do take on an out-sized importance in society and actually become the most important thing in a society, which is kind of an odd feature. But yeah, the fact that they are contingent and socially constructed doesn’t seem to have stopped anyone to date from finding a lot of meaning within them.

1:15:18 SC: Okay. So maybe my most serious question here is… You mentioned the fact, when you’re talking about work as it’s presently constructed that there are these power structures, there’s corporations and wealthy individuals, and there’s inequality that can be exacerbated by the current economic set-up. Do we have any reason to think that won’t be just as bad in the virtual utopia? Isn’t there at least as much room for power to be concentrated in certain hands and abused right along with it?

1:15:54 JD: So, I definitely think there is room for there to be power inequalities and dynamics, and things that need to be addressed. So the… Again, the point I would make about that is that the virtual utopia isn’t going to be perfect in any sense. The hope is just that it’s going to be better than what we currently have. But do we have reasons to think it’s going to be better than we currently have? I think there are some reasons for optimism, insofar as if you cut out the material necessity of work, so we don’t… One of the reasons why the power dynamics within the existing economy are so meaningful and salient to people is because people have to work to survive and to live. If you cut out that kind of material necessity, and if everyone gets provided with a sufficient amount to have a reasonable quality of life, they have more freedom then to choose the kinds of activities that they pursue. The hope is that the power dynamics that might exist will become less meaningful and less salient to them. And this is also one area in which technology can help, which goes back to one of my earlier points is that, technology is still part of this virtual utopia, in that technology gives people more options.

1:17:07 SC: Okay. I do think that… I get the feeling from our conversation that a lot of these… That it’s harder than I might have thought to separate out the question of finding meaning in constructed activities from the question of how do you pay for it and where do the material goods come from. I totally respect the intellectual move of trying to separate the question of universal income or the equivalent thereof from the question of what are we going to do with our time. But I suspect that in reality, there’s a very strong feedback between the two of them and they’re going to go hand-in-hand.

1:17:16 JD: Yeah, no, I think that’s fair and I think that’s right, that you’re not going to unlock this utopian future that I’m imagining, unless you solve the problems of material deprivation or have a world of relative abundance for the majority.

1:18:00 SC: I’m sure I’m going to get a bunch of comments on the podcast saying that we could have solved all these if Andrew Yang had been elected President of the United States. But we missed our chance on that one. But I don’t know, are you in favor of universal basic income? Let me just ask that as an aside. I think I am, but I think that we’re not close to being able to implement it yet. And it’s going to be an incremental move toward it rather than a big leap.

1:18:26 JD: Yeah, broadly speaking, I’m a fan of the idea. And one of the reasons I’m a fan of the idea actually doesn’t have anything to do with technology. I think there are lots of interesting ethical reasons to favor a basic income that aren’t linked to automation, which is just that a basic income allows for more opportunity and freedom of choice in life. And that tends to be the main ground on which philosophers have defended the notion. The automation narrative has only really taken center stage in the debate around basic income in the past decade or so. But people have been arguing for it for a very long time for other reasons. And if people are interested, I have a longish series on my blog about the philosophy of the basic income where I explore the reasons to be in favor of it.

1:19:08 SC: Okay. I think you’ve given us a lot to think about. Let me close with a more provocative aspect of the whole question. So we have jobs in the current system, we work, we get income from that. That’s a big part of our self-identity of who we are, but there’s another big part, which is relationships. Family, love, friendship, things like that. Is there a parallel argument about how those aspects of our lives could become virtual, whether it’s love or family or friendship?

1:19:39 JD: Well, I said two things about that. One is that the vision of the future that I’m sketching in this conversation in the book doesn’t rule out the idea that we’ll have relationships and families. And I say this several times in the book that all those things would still be available to us. That’s one issue. Whether we can have virtual relationships and virtual companionships… Well, I think we can, and I’ve written several papers on this, about whether we can have robot friends or robot lovers, I’ve written quite a bit about this over the years. And I think we can, under certain conditions. I can go into those if you want but that would probably lead to a much longer conversation.

1:20:19 SC: We’ll link to your website, don’t worry.

1:20:23 JD: Just very briefly, I define myself as ethical behaviorist when it comes to our interactions with virtual others or machine-like others. In that, if they look and act like humans or are the same roughly as humans in all important respects, then we can have meaningful relationships with them. So there is a possibility for relationships with machines.

1:20:45 SC: Yeah, I think that your attitude in the book and towards these things is one I’m very much in favor of, namely that it is very hard to predict what’s going to happen. But it makes all the sense in the world to imagine all the scenarios we can imagine because things are changing super-duper rapidly. And exactly because we can predict, it’s good not to be sanguine. It’s good to really try to flesh out ahead of time what the implications of these things could be. And personally I’d be all in favor of disconnecting the need to earn a living from the way we choose to spend our time during the day.

1:21:23 JD: Yeah, and really it is about breaking that link. That’s what is going to be what’s valuable to us. And the other thing I would say as well, just on a final note, is that this notion of sketching lots of different scenarios and plans, I would view that as being the main thing that I do, which is that I try to imagine different possible futures and evaluate them using different ethical norms and principles, so that we get a sense of the broadness of the axiological landscape into which we are navigating.

1:21:54 SC: You’d better define the word axiological. I know what it means but…

1:21:58 JD: Axiology is the study of values. The different kinds of values associated with these features, right?

1:22:03 SC: Yeah. I find myself at the end of many of my podcast interviews, saying, “Well, it’s a brave new world. Things are going to be changing a lot.” And I think this is definitely an example of that. So John Danaher, thanks so much for your insights here, this was a fun conversation.

1:22:15 JD: Thanks a lot, Sean. It was great.

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9 thoughts on “97 | John Danaher on Our Coming Automated Utopia”

  1. I am going to leave a general comment… I really do enjoy listening to the MindScape Podcast. Mainly, because it provides a platform to get exposed to different views/thoughts/comments… Personally, I think it really doesn’t matter how sensible the thoughts are (of course, those you interview have a high intellectual position in the world), what is important is the realization that we get to think and contemplate. Our busy life these days doesn’t allow us to sit and think and enjoy the moments of “awe”. It is a mind ESCAPE for me — a way to fill my loneliness by enjoying to listen to people who devoted their life to think. There were many instances, I disagreed with them, but that didn’t make me not enjoy the podcast.
    Dr. Carroll– I think one should be very open-minded and should be very open to new ideas and thoughts and to me , you definitely are. I admire your efforts for producing this podcast and I want to express my appreciation. Thank you!

  2. When reading your 2011 article on making tenure and listening to this I wonder if someone like my 6 year old daughter would be employed at a top university by AI or senior staff. Will the senior staff be human or AI?

  3. Pingback: Sean Carroll's Mindscape Podcast: John Danaher on Our Coming Automated Utopia | 3 Quarks Daily

  4. A hungry belly rules economic thought. Reality is the bottleneck preventing this utopia. I would think with global economic catastrophe currently, gig work, human rights, and race to the bottom for worker’s rights makes the utopia ideas and ideals moot. Currently, radical Free Market Capitalism and Free Market Chinese Authoritarianism seem to be ascendant. Neither of these values the worker, and neither of these yield a ground from which to grow compassionate alternatives to the formal idea of work. Without practical, concrete applications, it is equivalent to dreaming about perpetual motion machines.
    On a side note, It is a distant sousing to susy cosmologists, sure the Higgs would yield a Rosetta Stone to super symmetries.

  5. Quite a while back John Carse published ‘Finite and Infinite Games’, where the distinction is (roughly) this: In the finite case, the game is rules-based, zero-sum; player A’s gain is player B’s loss; the game is time limited the aim of playing is, of course, to win. Damn that payer B!

    The infinite game has no goal, the pleasure or satisfaction of playing, apart. There are no rules; or only those one imposes on oneself. It’s not clear if the notion of ‘winning’ has any meaning; other than how satisfied/dissatisfied one is with one’s own performance. But there’s no algorithm for determining a win.(More points within a given time, eg) Play, really, at its most exuberant and joyous best. Your favorite 3 – 10 yr old will instruct you eloquently on this – or any creative person, whether musician, artist, mathematician, or physicist. (I condescend to permit many other possibilities!)

    I have to say, as an ex-Catholic kid, that the ‘infinite’ game has a hint of the Godlike in it … part of where we got some of our notions of gods.

    One of the most interesting (and controversial with ‘Protestant work ethic’ Mr Scrooge or Gradgrind,), is that a Basic Income would quite handily play (sorry) into promoting the possibility of such creativity. which, they would say, has nothing to do with the daily grind of wresting food from a reluctant world – surely the Moral Purpose and End of life! End of joy, anyhow, is my retort.

    A ‘Turing Test’ equivalent for synthetic .beings is: do we and they play together with neither feeling the inferior?

    Unrelated matter – Sean: as a grad student at U of Waterloo in the late 1970s, I got the full ‘Shut up and damn well quantum calculate!’ treatment from more profs than would be kind to mention! I remained unbowed. Even then, it was clear to me the Schrodinger’s Equation shall be the whole of the Law – thereby setting you free – in all possible worlds! In this one, at least, many thanks for your books, videos and – most recently ‘Something Deeply Hidden.’ Now less so!”

  6. Fátima Pereira

    Minha atividade, meu jogo, área financeira.
    Muito competitivo, insegurança a medio/longo prazo. Não há horários. Quase não há direito, vida pessoal (principalmente area comercial).
    Remunerações baixas, v/s dedicação, resultados, e tempo dedicado à empresa. Pessoalmente, sinto como uma necessidade, trabalhar, e, julgo, será a opinião da maioria das pessoas.
    Talvez, reorganização da economia. Uma das hipóteses.
    Futuro virtual-existência de opção sobre os tipos de jogos, que jogo. Eliminação da necessidade material de trabalho. Renda Básica Universal. Novos jogos a serem explorados.
    Porque não? Não é perfeito. Mas, talvez as pessoas possam Viver!
    Obrigada, Sean Carroll
    Obrigada, John Danaher

  7. I’m curious how UBI deals with scarce resources. I get that people can still work with first stage UBI but on our supposed future where there isn’t much work to do who gets the penthouse apartment and who gets the basement? Who gets the beach front house and who gets the backroom in the alley? I imagine on path where things getting worse and worse as the few people who society values/needs get all the perks and the rest of us just get whatever scraps we’re assigned.

  8. Many similar themes to those in Bertrand Russell’s In Praise of Idleness.

    Would love to hear Danaher’s commentary on that essay

  9. The field of epistemology has mostly been concerned with the traditional definition of knowledge, which relates a mental state to an objective truth. However the skeptical view that knowledge is impossible is so enticing because that definition of knowledge includes a tautology – that there is already knowledge of objective truth available with which to compare that mental state before one can judge whether knowledge is knowledge. In short, you cannot know anything unless “something” already knows. Whether that something exists is another piece of knowledge that cannot be known unless something else knows it, and so on.

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