How Artificial Intelligence is Destroying Meaningful Work
The development of Artificial Intelligence (AI) is slowly weaving itself into the fabric of many established industries. In a recent report McKinsey estimated that 60% of todays jobs will have at least some portion of automation in the future. Medicine, teaching, and law are all professions which are seeing the beginning of the implementation of AI. These are a few professions, of many, where the individual finds real meaning in what they do. The blind development of AI automation threatens to destroy humans ability to discover meaningful work.
Most discussions around AI focus on how governments are going to maintain employment in the future when job automation is going to be common place. But what is not mentioned is how jobs that are affected by technology will maintain a sense of meaning for the individual. More and more jobs are becoming mundane as individuals become slaves to the technology that removes the skill from their practices.
Defining meaningful work is difficult. It is not just something that the individual is interested in. That approach is subject to each individual preference. Rather:
‘Meaningful work is that which actualises human potentials: creativity, autonomy, abilities and talents, identity, sociality’ and is ‘necessary to fulfil a human end or purpose e.g. happiness, self-development and well-being, or personal development’.
Work should be part of the process of self-actualisation. Opposing the pure economics view that work is simply a means to an end, meaningful work is part of the development of the individual. The worker is not just an efficient vehicle in creating a product or delivering a service. That would make the worker a subordinate to the economic system. Instead, the job is there to serve the worker so that he/she can improve on their own well-being and fulfilment. However, the growth of technology does not consider the well-being of the human individual.
Romano Guardini makes the challenge in The End of the Modern World that ‘technology has taken away the uniqueness with which man had once viewed his own existence’. During technological change humans can be treated like objects. The intrinsic value that each individual human holds can be lost in a technological jungle.
The economist Adam Smith made a similar observation in The Wealth of Nations warning that ‘the man whose whole life is spent in performing a few simple operations has no occasion to extend his understanding, or to exercise his invention…and generally becomes as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human creature to become’.
Problems arise when technology erodes opportunities to find meaningful work. Often our drive to push technology forward has led to the ignoring of the worker. But, with considered thought, technology can be used to co-operate with the individual to create meaningful work, not remove it. The development future technologies requires greater awareness of how technology can complement meaningful work rather than reduce it.
