AI and a Post-Labor World

AI and Automation in the Workforce 

There is a lot of mainstream discourse about AI and labor. Specifically, how AI will change the job market. The take I see again and again is some variation of fear about how AI will replace jobs, making it harder and harder for humans to find work. Some portrayals are more optimistic, harkening back to the industrial or technological revolution to reassure us that new jobs we can’t yet fathom are sure to come around. Some portrayals are more dire, warning of inevitable economic stress or perhaps urging governmental action to combat the impending crisis by protecting human jobs.

What I hardly ever see is an exploration of how we might transition to a future where human labor is no longer necessary. As AI and automation improve, we will quickly reach a point where there is very little, if any, human labor required to provide necessities– and even luxuries– to every person on earth. Even now, we don’t need forty hour workweeks for all working age adults globally to support the needs of humanity. Of course, we haven’t adequately distributed necessities such that all needs are met, but it’s certainly not human labor-hours holding us back. 

The better AI gets, the less human labor will be required to support us. We’ve seen this happen with the invention of countless new technologies: a manuscript that might have taken a year for a monk to copy by hand can now have thousands of copies printed in a day at the press of a button; goods that might have taken weeks to ship with a boat crew attending to them now take just two pilots, working in tandem with an autopilot of course, a matter of hours. It is no great leap of the imagination to think that that button might someday be pressed by the phantom hand of an AI or that that autopilot might one day fly solo. 

Of course, we’ve had the printing press for a long time, and airplanes aren’t exactly brand new either, yet each of those technologies has an industry surrounding it with plentiful jobs for humans. Why would AI be any different? 

Let’s assume that as work in a few sectors is replaced by AI, a few new ones pop up. Perhaps they are dedicated to some meta AI management or they are simply spurred by the human desire for strange new luxuries as they are invented. Regardless, AI will be able to take those over too. Once AI is good enough to replace humans in a few fields, it will either already be good enough for the trivial switch to whatever new industry comes along, or that next update will come relatively quickly, leaving an even better foundation for it to expand to the next new task. The difference between any two mentally healthy humans is not so great on the grand scale of intelligence: if an AI is good enough to replace one of us, it’s close to replacing all of us.

All previous revolutionary inventions have decimated at most a few industries at a time. AI has the potential to blow up just about all of them simultaneously, and play whac-a-mole with any new industries that try to rise from the ashes. 

I’ll grant that I may have lost people at this point. It seems to be a prevailing view that there are things we humans can do that an AI will never be able to touch. You may think that some jobs– maybe especially jobs like yours– are safe. I disagree. But that’s not necessary for the point of this particular essay. I’ll undoubtedly write about AI more in the future, but for now I hope we can all agree that AI is poised to drastically reduce the amount of human labor required for the sustenance of society. Industries working on the necessities– agriculture, cargo shipping, transportation, sanitation, energy extraction, technological assembly, and so on– are particularly vulnerable. Sure, we may start to value human art or creativity more, but what does an economy look like when we’re all employed solely in producing extraneous luxury goods, made valuable not by any concrete feature, but instead only by the knowledge that they were crafted by human hands? 

It certainly should not look like today’s world, where it’s second nature to view a job as necessary to survive. If living can already be guaranteed without lifting a human finger, there’s quite literally no need to “make a living.” It’s already been made. Even if you don’t believe AI will be able to wipe out more cerebral industries, it will no doubt increase their efficiency to a point where very little human labor is required for their continuation

Any way you spin it, the future requires far less human labor to provide us with the lives we want. Taking a step back from the economic lens we’ve been conditioned to see the world through, we should be ecstatic. Like hunter gatherers discovering agriculture, we should rejoice at our newfound ability to work less and spend more time on whatever we please. Instead, we are so psychologically chained to our conception of labor economics that we instead keep on thoughtlessly repeating the mantra “fewer jobs is bad.” We’re so blinded by this that we miss the possibility of utopia before us. We’ve forgotten that work was only ever meant to be a means to an end. 

The Path to a Post-Labor World

Of course, everything I have said is purely theoretical. The first step towards a post-labor utopia is realizing that it is possible. But that doesn’t mean that it’s particularly easy. If we stick to the current trajectory without ever altering our mindset, there are certainly AI-related possibilities worth fearing. 

It might be that competition for the dwindling jobs available increases until we hit a disastrous breaking point. Or perhaps with lower demand for human labor, it will become so cheap that it’s preferable to hire armies of humans than purchase the energy and materials required for automation. If we allow ourselves to retain our mentality, we may well end up in a period of competition with AI. Regardless of the result of that competition, if we end up at that point, we have already lost in every meaningful sense. 

There are many who share my vision of utopia that think it nearly inevitable. Usually, these are people who have quite short timelines for their predictions of the development of AGI, an AI that would outpace us in every way and rapidly invent new technologies beyond our comprehension. And I do grant that if we develop AI so powerful that it begins to puzzle out the workings of the universe at a rate exponentially beyond our abilities, it becomes really hard to predict anything about our lives. Miracles beyond our comprehension are just that– beyond our comprehension. But these visionaries looking towards a sci-fi futuristic heaven scarcely spend time on the details of what that transition would look like in the near future. 

I may share their dreams, but I struggle to see an easy path there. Our conception of labor is one of the first big hurdles I see along the way. We are already beginning to see a world in which we’re competing with AI. Automation has long diminished and threatened the jobs of many assembly workers or repetitive manual laborers. There are now well-founded rumblings of fear as new technologies like ChatGPT start to come for the jobs of writers, artists, administrative assistants, programmers, and so forth. 

There needs to be a point where we stop trying to compete with it. As more companies adopt AI to be used in tandem with human workers, fewer hours of human labor are needed. Of course, this means companies have an incentive to hire fewer people. However that is primarily because we still view forty-hour work weeks as a standard. As I see it, a first step in the right direction would be to lower that standard to thirty-hour work weeks. As AI improves and even less human labor is required, that number should lower further. 

I’m sure this transition seems deeply unappealing at first. If you’re barely scraping by working a full-time job, the concept of having your hours reduced and waiting on the economy to re-equilibrate around that change may seem daunting at best. But ultimately, we are stuck in a bit of a tough place when it comes to our mentality surrounding work. The world where norms are changed to see twenty or thirty hours as full-time is undoubtedly a better one for everyone, including someone barely scraping by on forty hours a week today. It’s a high entry cost to start moving to that world, but it will be well worth it when we do. 

I’m sure smarter minds than me will have strong opinions about how we might move in this direction– whether it be with large unions attuned to the use of AI,  through a more top-down legal maneuver, or something clever I’m missing. My point is simply that we need to be thinking about this. We’re already entering into a competition with AI that we really don’t want to enter. Why are we trying to cling to full-time jobs when we could instead be enjoying the increased free time we’ve earned through technological development? We can’t enjoy a post-labor world if we don’t take steps along that path as it becomes available. 

AI is steadily increasing efficiency and reducing the need for human labor. We should keep up our end by actually reducing our work to match, and acknowledging that a post-labor world is not a threat but a goal. 

“It Doesn’t Work Like That.”

I’m not naive: I’m well aware that this is not a simple move. The competition which emerges from a capitalist system fights strongly against this. As I said, I see a very real possibility that we remain on our current trajectory and compete with AI until we’re miserable, falling into the inefficient trap of competing over scraps of labor and patting ourselves on the back if we manage to do the same labor as a machine for less money. 

But that world sucks. And it is, at least in principle, avoidable. 

If I’m being honest in my prediction, I do unfortunately agree that we’ll probably be stuck on this trajectory for a while, at least until we hit more of a breaking point. Still, if half the developed world woke up tomorrow with this realization, we might stand a chance at a gentler transition. The first step is to agree on what the goal is. Once we have a shared vision of a post-labor future, we can begin to move intentionally towards it.