On Automation, The Loss Of Jobs, & The Creation Of Opportunities

“How would you explain to someone who is going to lose their job because of robotics or automation that this is really an opportunity?”

Robots teach humans what humans are. Jobs are evil, and they must be destroyed for humans to be free. Jobs are evil, but work is good. There is an infinite amount of work to be done, and the only limit to the creation of work is the human imagination. So as soon as work is destroyed by automation, new work is created by imagination. The highest work of a human is to imagine new work.

LET THERE BE LIGHT!!! Like gods, humans speak things into existence. The first, and the great, invention is values. To value something is the first step in the creative process. Why do we value things? That is a mystery. But the creative activity is to imagine something that is possible and desirable, and then to bring it forth by craft and skill. This is what the Greeks called tekné, from which we derive technology.

The world does not stand still. The 20th century post-war ideal of a plush career job in the United States was a bizarre historical phenomenon. The natural state of things is more competitive, and we must adapt to nature. Machine jobs and human jobs are in a dialectic. Machine jobs eat human jobs. New, harder, human jobs get created. Then those get eaten. Then new, harder, human jobs get created. How long will this dialectic play out? It may play out for centuries. The false assumption is that human jobs will be suddenly eliminated.

The challenge is not: how do we expand our regulatory, education and welfare states to keep up with automation? It is: how do we eliminate our regulatory, education and welfare states to accelerate automation, so that humans can reclaim their place as creators?

Unemployment in this country is at a historic low. The real political drama is not unemployment, but the commoditization of jobs. There are infinite human jobs to be done, but most of them are digital — so American workers now have to compete with the entire English speaking world, which is rapidly expanding.

The best way to get a late 20th century style “job” in the early 21st century is to become a software engineer. Less commoditized jobs, like software engineering, are incredibly well compensated — because there is so much more demand than supply. If you don’t have natural engineering talent, there are plenty of other specialist roles — product managers, operations managers, executive assistants, designers, writers — that are in high demand in a technology-driven economy. To retrain, do not go back to school. Get a job that lets you learn on the job.

Expectations need to be reset, and massive deregulation needs to occur. Labor laws — from minimum wage laws to employee classification to mandatory benefits — prevent Americans with competing against overseas labor for digital work. Housing laws — from environmental regulation, to building permits, to trade unions, to post-2008 lending regulation — prevent American cities from rising higher, and American workers from doing physical work. Manufacturing already left these shores for similar reasons in the late 20th century. So what is left? We cannot all be bankers. And anyways, Numerai will put hedge fund managers out of a job before taxi drivers.

Robotics and automation are advancing, and will continue to advance, but unfortunately, they will not eliminate all human jobs for decades, if not centuries, to come. Humans are still better than computers at, like, most things. Most things that matter, anyways. All creative, strategic, problem-solving, systems design, abstract thinking, relationship building, deal making, art creating, and goal setting — cannot be automated, because it is not systematize-able. It exists outside the system. By their very nature, all of these activities involve jumping outside of the system. Nothing short of an artificial sentience can achieve this — and that is a hypothetical beyond our practical time horizon.

Automation and robots rarely eliminate jobs entirely. Excepting quantitative or processing tasks, which computers are naturally better at, most automation is focused on eliminating extremely basic, low-level functions. Most advances provide marginal efficiency gains. If 5% of your job is eliminated, it is the least essential 5%. So your job is not eliminated — and you’re not going to be paid less— you’ve just been made more productive. You’re going to be expected to get more accomplished, and to do harder, more creative, and more abstract work — hallelujah!—and you’re probably going to get paid more as a result.

If human jobs are, sadly, with us, for the foreseeable future — then why do so many people struggle to find work? Aside from the great injury done to them by regulators, workers are also victims of the education system, which has taught them to be victims — instead of teaching them how to think. There is only one class to be taken, only one lesson to learn — above all lessons: learn how to learn. And of course, to learn how to learn, you must learn why to learn: the individual must develop a reason, generate a motive, cultivate a great and insatiable desire — for what? For some end that can only be achieved by means of learning.

The education system fails at this. It produces automatons that are hardly better than robots — that want nothing other than what they are taught to want, can do nothing other than what they are taught to do, that are perfectly compliant and open to suggestion, and whose morality consists of following the rules and expecting a sure reward — and so, are fit for nothing better than a job. No wonder, then, that they complain at being replaced.

Learning has never been easier or cheaper. All of the world’s information is in my pocket at all times. The best information is cheap, the rest is free. There is no longer any excuse not to make something of yourself; something irreplaceable — to make yourself a brand, to give yourself a name, to profess a skill, to possess a style.

Universal basic income is the problem, not the solution. The problem of underemployment and dependency was created by ideas just like UBI, as discussed: the well-intentioned regulatory state hurts workers, the well-intentioned education system hurts workers. UBI is inflationary: it makes everything worse, slower, and more expensive.

But the gospel of capitalism is deflationary: better, faster, cheaper. And the safest safety net is a rich society full of opportunities and abundant with high quality cheap goods. In the future, a month’s worth of groceries cost 10c — because they are made by robots. A month’s rent for a luxury apartment costs $100, because the building was built 100 miles away from the city — which is still only 10 minutes away because of automated flying cars. Unemployment is a choice, because you can plug into a labor network at any time on the internet, and start earning money based on performance. The regulatory, education and welfare states are obstacles to achieving this possible and desirable future.

The future of education is medieval apprenticeship. My great hope and ambition is to create a company that is capable of creating infinite entry-level human jobs that require no prior skills or training other than a mastery of English, and the possession of a great attitude. These workers then begin to participate in the economic machine, the great world-factory, the digital assembly line, one step ahead of the robots. We teach them how to do some process that has not yet been automated. Then we teach them how to do many. Then we teach them how to upgrade processes. Then we teach them how to build processes. Then we teach them how to design systems. Then we teach them how to manage people who design systems. And so on, until they are finally free of all jobs, and are able to do the work of imagining new work.

The first law of thermodynamics observes that energy can neither be created nor destroyed. The first law of automation observes that work can be created faster than it is destroyed. Organization can never catch up to creativity. You can generate 100 ideas in an hour. It may take a decade to execute on a single one. This essential asymmetry is so severe that no matter how fast the forces of organization — automation, robotics, and machine technology in general — become, it suggests that they will never catch up to the inherent explosiveness of imagination.

Which begs ancient questions: Where is imagination coming from? Are we remembering the future? Are the gods of Aeon invading these shadowlands, this middle earth? The muses are whispering. The ideas are invading. The spirit is moving over time; hovering over the surface of the waters. The word became flesh and dwelt among us.

The great debate of our times is: what does the future look like? Is there a possible and desirable future that we should be striving for? The best answer to that question, I think, is the pluralistic one. Society should not impose one monolithic, dogmatic set of values on individuals. The Once And Future Renaissance is the hope that automation sets us free to become fully human, and to pursue our own, individual, ideas for what is possible and desirable.

Technology is revealing aspects of reality we had not anticipated, and concealing aspects we had taken for granted. We are afraid of what is coming. We lament what is passing. And we are agents for forces beyond our comprehension.

But the master welcomes what is coming, and lets go of what is passing. He becomes a channel, an instrument — the force flows through him, and he provides no resistance. He steps into the clearing, and is the first to explore the new possibilities that have just arisen — in so doing, he expands the clearing for others to follow. There is always something new arising in the system, and something old passing away. He is bringing forth the new, challenging the old.

Congratulations, you lost your job! This is an opportunity. Now you’re free to apply to work at Invisible.

Level up.