Pax Silica and the Meaning of Work
Work. What does that word mean these days?
To my 17-year-old self, disagreement on this point produced a moment of public shame and, since I was 17 at the time, was memorable enough that I can recall it today at age 34.
The scene was an early round of a Scholars Bowl tournament, probably in some small town in rural Kansas. The moderator asked, “What physical quantity carries the units of Joules in the S.I. system?” I was really into Physics at this point in my life. I had probably consumed a little too much coffee that morning. I knew the answer. I buzzed in.
“Energy!” I responded with a level of confidence that it would take me a decade to realize was obnoxious.
“Incorrect.” Silence. Time expires. “The correct answer is ‘work.’” Next question.
Suddenly the room felt cold on my arms. My neck. I was embarrassed.
But I was also confused. Work is a type of energy. Both answers were correct, but my answer wasn’t on the paper in front of the judge.
The First Law of Thermodynamics is essentially stating that work is one type of energy but not the only type. In the preferred unit system of theoretical physicists, sometimes creepily called God’s Units, any dimensionful quantity from the mass of an electron (8.19x10^{-14} Joules) to the surface area of the event horizon of the supermassive black hole at the center of the galaxy we call home (10^{72} 1/Joules²) can be represented in some power of Joules. Clearly myself and the judge did not have the same idea of what the word “work” means in that moment.
In everyday conversation, I’d argue “work” is best described by the statistical patterns of usage in which it is found in samples of natural language. That is, when people say “it takes hard work” or “get back to work” or “I’m going to work” or “she worked for it” or “he works for them,” that’s the definition we ought to use in order to minimize confusion. When I hear those phrases, I think we are usually talking about something that exchanges free will for money.
In the Soviet-era novel “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich,” Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn describes the conditions of the gulag in which the narrator has been sentenced to work in vivid terms. They are not working for money, but I think most people would agree those prisoners trapped in the gulag system were doing work. They built buildings. They had to lift the bricks from the ground up to their planned position on the wall. That work could be measured in many ways, including the fundamental definition provided by the field of Physics.
In 1960 the United States Internal Revenue Service created an informational video to explain how computing machines were being used to automate tasks. As the complexity of the economy was growing, the agency had no choice but to embrace the tools of its time and use computers to help with accounting. Where previously a human being would add numbers to perform accounting calculations, now a computer could do that.
The amount of work involved in lifting bricks can be measured in Joules. The amount of work involved in adding two floating point numbers is a bit harder to convert into units of Joules, but on a rhetorical human level, this is also a type of work. Historically it was accomplished by humans intentionally discharging their free will.
Silicon is what a solar panel is made of and solar panels are making the cost of electricity, which in today’s electrified world I’d argue is the most liquid form of energy, fall with no end in sight. Similarly, fifty years ago Silicon made the cost of an addition operation fall with no end in sight and five decades on the consequences of the words “no end in sight” are hard to ignore.
[Reference: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Performance_per_watt]
[Reference: https://www.top500.org/green500/]
[Reference: https://www.top500.org/green500/lists/2018/06/]
In 1951, the first commercial computer in the United States, the Univac-I, performed 0.015 operations per Joule. On the June 2018 listing of the most power efficient supercomputers in the world, the Shoubu system B in Japan was able to perform 18.4 billion FLoating point OPerationS per Joule of energy. In the last 67 years, the amount of work that Silicon can do in terms of just raw arithmetic has skyrocketed by a factor of one trillion. Meanwhile people in 2018 are not that much better at addition than they were in 1951. That’s what happens when there’s “no end in sight” to a technological scaling.
Photo-voltaic power looks similarly positioned to drop the price of electrical energy per kWh at the point of demand in the coming decades. This will make the price of computation continue to fall and the price of even things like lifting a 1 kilogram brick up by 1 meter, 9.8 Joules, fall as well.
If humans continue to hold on to the old notions of “work” we are destined to be out-competed within a few decades. The process has already begun. We need a new system.
By my read, most of the conflicts in the world today, large and small, are fundamentally economic in origin. If we are headed into a period in which economic scarcity will be at least temporarily defeated, our species should demand that those gains be put first toward the resolution of conflicts and the equalization of human lives. That future that reflects our values, or at least the values I was taught as a child in USD 259 Public Schools in Kansas, is within reach. Money should not be a problem. There is no scarcity of it in the future whether we like it or not.
I’d like to end with some advice I wish I could give to a younger version of myself, if I were 17 instead of 34 today. I would advise: Treat people well. Exempt no one from mercy. Practice empathy. Do not neglect moral mandates. Learn science. Understand technology. Use your time wisely. If the world looks like it’s changing too fast, don’t try to fight it. Instead, learn to surf the wave. The future is peaceful.
2018.09.03, Labor Day
The author would like to acknowledge a private communication with Prof. Nabil Iqbal of Durham University.
