Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas - 97 | John Danaher on Our Coming Automated Utopia

Episode Date: May 18, 2020

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. Support Mindscape on Patreon. 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. Web site and blog NUI Galway web page Google Scholar publications Amazon.com author page Talk on The Algorithmic Self in Love Philosophical Disquisitions podcast Twitter

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If you're a QuickBooks customer looking to grow your business without the growing pains, you need the Intuit ERP. Upgrade to Intuit Enterprise Suite in a matter of hours. It's the AI Native ERP from the makers of QuickBooks. Learn more at Intuit.com slash ERP. Hello, everyone, and welcome to the Mindscape podcast. I'm your host, Sean Carroll. 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 is 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 Dannaher, 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. 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. 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 because despite both being podcasters, the technology sometimes baffles us. And with that, let's go. John Danneher, welcome to the Mindscape podcast. 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. Well, before I forget, we should advocate your podcast, right? Do you have one? I do, yes. 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 philosophy of technology and the ethics of technology, but I do some occasional audio essays about other topics. 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?

Yeah, so I'm not a philosopher by training, but more by application, I suppose. My typical joke is that to lawyers, I'm a philosopher, and to philosophers, I'm a lawyer. Oh, I know that one well, yes. Okay, so 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 10,000 years ago, the percentage of the vertebrate biomass on Earth

that was either human beings or our controlled animals, right, 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? Yeah, so that's a statistic that I recount. It's actually something that Daniel Dennett uses a lot in talks of this,

so that's where I got it from. And since I've published the book, people have pointed out to me that 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. 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%. 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? Right. And, I mean, People are probably familiar with some of these graphs that you show of, you know, 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. And even 10,000 years is an incredibly short time, historically speaking.

I mean, 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? Like 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, dramatically different in some way, whether or not we can predict what that way is going to be. 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. You know, I don't know if this is a good idea to bring I was just listening to your interview with Martin Rees, 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 presumed 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. 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 gather. and things have changed a lot. I mean, why don't you just give us your potted quick explanation of how work has changed over the years? Yeah, so the basic story is that the tasks that humans use to perform are increasingly being performed by machines or through kind of 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 tried to do in the opening chapter of this book, so I can 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, you know,

most European economies in the U.S. 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. Yeah. These are statistics actually that I base from they're called Max Rouser, our world and data. He has a lot of nice charts and information about this.

Similar story 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 signs 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. But we also see it in another area. 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. You're more familiar with this than I would be, but there are increasingly science is a big data enterprise, there's lots of computerized assistance 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 in the university of Abarwist with in Wales that have created these robots Adam and Eve that run their own experiments. They come up with their own hypotheses and test their own... experimentally test these hypotheses and 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 to try and give a wide sketch of all these different domains of activity.

Yeah, actually, I really liked an example that you had which is completely obvious, and I feel bad for sort of not just figuring it out myself, but the financial trading literally on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange, the idea that that is more or less gone away, and now we just use the stock exchange as a backdrop for video cameras, you know, TV shows and things like that, but all of it has become automated in the real world.

I mean, I knew that intellectually, but the vivid picture of the trading floor more or less disappearing really hit home. Yeah, so this notion that the trading floor is a place where you've got lots of people crowding together, barking, 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... Oh, yeah, classic. Dan Aykroyd, you know, that's the stereotypical view of the market. Nowadays, yes, most trading activity takes place digitally, and in fact, most trading activity is performed by algorithms.

The estimates are a little bit tricky here, but most people will assume that. on pretty good grounds that it's more than 50% of all trades are executed by algorithms automatically. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, like I said, I sort of knew this intellectually, but after reading your book, I was moved to go look at the data here. Now, it was, 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, you know, cutting off the floor space because they need it less and less. So it says something about how our society is changing. Yeah, I mean, there's also, yeah, there's a regulatory reason for that as well, which is just to do with the nationalization of markets in the U.S.

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. Ah, well, it's always these details that make the story a little bit less romantic, but okay. But, okay, so, I mean, that gives us a bit of a background, and I think that probably most listeners get it, that there's a lot of more audience. But let's be, let's dig into what it does mean across the different sectors. I mean, 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? Like, we've lost a lot of farming jobs and a lot of industrial jobs, but there's jobs 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. Yeah, I mean, I think 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 bandy to bound in conversation. We appreciate that.

You've come to the right podcast. Right. 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, and which you then receive some kind of economic reward in return for doing those tasks. So, you know, 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. 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. Because 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 are often, humans have a 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. 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.

Some economists refer to this as the complementarity effect of technology. So a lot of times we focus on the substitution effect of technology, the technology substitutes for human labor. But oftentimes, there are complementary tasks. Human can perform alongside machines that kind of opens up a whole vista or new space of work for the future. And this is why we haven't seen. this trend towards structural unemployment

over the long term as a result of technology. Hey everyone, it's Cal Penn. I'm the host of Earsay, the Audible and I Heart audiobook club. This week on the podcast, I am sitting down with Ray Porter, the narrator

of Andy Weir's audiobook Project Hail Mary, massive sci-fi adventure about survival and science, and what happens when you wake up alone very far from earth. I really had to make a decision because I caught myself getting that frog in my throat and starting to get teary as I'm narrating some of these sections and it's like, okay, yo, yeah,

yo, is this indulgent? And I really thought about it. I was like, no, at this point, it would kind of be betraying the trust the author and the listener have in telling this story if I don't go through it. But there's places in this book that deeply emotionally affected me and I left it on the mic. That's great. Because it served the story. People, will say like, oh my God, I cried at the end. It's like, yeah, dude, me too. Listen to Earsay, the Audible and IHeart Audio Club on the IHeart Radio app or wherever you get your podcasts. My best skin ever at 45? Give me a theme song and a best skin care award because it feels like this, right? That's farmhouse fresh skin, all right? I'm blowing. And everyone asks how. The best skin

Care is Farmhouse Fresh, and the award is you, your best you. Visit farmhousefresh skincare.com and use code radio for a free starter routine with any purchase. Yeah, I mean, I think the point that jobs as a category are socially constructed is a very good one, right? It's not literally something that needs to be done. It's a way we're choosing to organize our society to give people monetary rewards for doing these tasks, like you say. So if that's true, how can we ever see? say that we're confident that jobs are going to go away or that, you know, 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? Yeah, I mean, 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 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.

And, I mean, there are a few different reasons for my skepticism. And I discussed 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 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 Darreness and Muglu and Pascal 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's kind of a net loss of employment. That was data based on from 1990 to 2007. And then more recently, they did a study of French companies who automated and they saw similar effect, number one,

that these 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 neutral level of employment.

It seems to lead to net losses overall. But isn't that, I mean, 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, right? I mean, we have kinds of jobs we didn't have before. 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, we're not sad that there are fewer jobs for human jobs. Right. I mean, just to say one thing on the empirical evidence, so Isamoglo 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 net gain. So when they looked at within particular industries, they saw a higher level of net. loss, but even when they looked across industries, they saw a still a net loss overall for every robot employee. One of their points, which I think is good one, is that this is at a point in time when there's actually been relatively little use of robots. So from 1990 to 2007, there was relatively little uptake of robotization in the US

industries. And since then, it's actually increasing, and we probably expect it to increase in the future. So that's just one point. 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 mention fruit picking as one where it's hard, but it's nevertheless becoming true, perhaps. And then there's also, you know, 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. Yeah. So, I mean, there's a roboticist called Hans Moravik who formulated this thing called Moravex paradox back in the 1980s where we 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 kind of 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 their routine work is easily automatable. And anything that's non-routine is a little bit more difficult to automate, although the new kinds 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. So, yeah, that's just one point on like what kinds of jobs we can expect to see 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 throne of your original question, though. Well, you know, I think I'm just trying to, you know, raise this idea that I'm sure is in many people's minds, that, sure, I can imagine, you know, 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? Right.

So it's certainly intuitively plausible to me that artistic jobs or entertainment industry jobs are probably not going to be subject to kind of wide-scale automation. There are people who are building, you know, holographic pop stars in Asian countries. I think I've seen several examples of this and there are people who are building or creating algorithms that can make the next Beatles album. a famous example from a few years ago. But I doubt that... I'm skeptical 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 that often counts for more than just the end product. 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, some people do care about the origin of those things, but that tends to be a luxury good. But the idea of, you know, 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 should 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 a handful of individuals tend to extract most of the value from those markets. So, yeah, I don't think we should be reassured by 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 anything. form of work where the human touch is deemed 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. I mean, 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 might want to do that.

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 increasingly aging populations and we need to do something to care for them. So, I mean, one of the countries where you see the most automation of care workers in Japan, which is one of the oldest populations of the world. That's partly due to reasons of restricting immigration into Japan,

but it's also, I think, 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. 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. Yeah, and just to be clear, I'm not necessarily saying that robots are going to do

a better job in those industries. 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 there's, even if robots are less good than humans at performing them, there might be a huge supply of human labor into those industries for other demographic or social reasons. 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, right? 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, like, let's just imagine a world where work becomes completely optional. So what do you have against work? What are your arguments that it would be better if we didn't have to have jobs to earn a living? Yeah. So I think this is oftentimes the key question that what I call in the book the desirability question, which is like, do we want to, 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 and so far 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. I think technology is making work worse for a lot of people. It's leading to the fissuring of the workplace, a lot of 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, particularly in the US. 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 Oter, 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 maybe a counterintuitive way in that it's just the amount of years of education you need to enter a job. It defines whether it's higher or low-skill. So there's lots of low-skill work that is highly skilled. Right. It's not really measure of skill, but the sort of background prerequisites you need to take up the job. Yeah, exactly. So people are pushed into these lower-scale forms of works, which are often more arduous and more difficult.

Tends to be kind of 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-scale bracket because there are relatively fewer high-scale. 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. Another reason for not favoring employment is that I think work is increasingly colonizing our lives, to use a strong term, that because the labor market is increasingly competitive and work is more precarious as a result of technology, people spend a lot more time attention on upskilling 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. I mean, I have one anecdote in the book, which I think is illustrative of this. It actually comes from another author, David Frain, 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 because he was doing some classes with the local school, some extracurricular 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 like a very odd thing for, I think, a 12-year-old to be caring about, which is like building up their CV and their... and their employability. Now, that's that's annaic data, but that's, I think, illustrative of a general trend.

And the other final reason I have, like 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, there's some evidence suggests that they tend to be quite dissatisfied with work. So the gallop, they do these large surveys

of the global workforce every few years. 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. My best skin ever at 45? Give me a theme song and a best skincare award. Because it feels like this. Right there.

That's Farmhouse Fresh Skin, all right? I'm blowing. And everyone asks how. The best skincare is Farmhouse Fresh, and the award is you, your best you. Visit Farmhousefreshskincare.com and use code radio for a free starter routine with any purchase. Well, maybe, yeah, I mean, maybe it's worth expanding a little bit

on the point that you raised, but I think it 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 that that's true, but it's certainly the feeling we get. And I could imagine that there is something structural about the modern age, which makes employment less secure and less long term. Is that an accurate assessment?

Yeah, there's an interesting book about this, actually, by a guy called Andrew Weil, called The Fisherd 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 Motorcars, who employed lots of people and lots of very diverse workers under the same corporate umbrella. So, you know, they would hire catering staff. They'd hire accountant workers. They'd hire IT. They'd hire security guards and groundskeepers, so on.

all employed within the same organization. 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. and to part-time contractors or other companies that specialize in, say, the provision of accounting services or security staff and so on. And why has that happened?

Well, there are a couple of reasons why that's happened. One is that it's 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 because you reduce the costs that you pay oftentimes when you do this kind of fishering. and outsourcing. And it tends to also reduce costs to consumers. It tends to be more productivity. But workers tend to get the worst deal in this arrangement. 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 kind of greater consistency and, enforcement of corporate standards. And one area where this is like really transparent is in truck drivers and the amount of ongoing surveillance of truck driver drivers, which has been true for

quite some time now. But this trend towards increased surveillance is creeping in in other industries as well. And it certainly sounds reminiscent to in the academic context of a shift towards adjunct professors, right? Short term contracts rather than tenured professors who are going to be there for many decades. Yeah, so that's another illustration of this phenomenon, this drive towards precarious forms of labor. I mean, 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,

and 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 kind of tight budget or cut budget. Yeah. But, 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. right? I mean, so, and maybe this is a sign of this shift, this transition that we're in the middle of, from everybody works society into a people don't necessarily work society? Yeah, so it could be what we're observing now is kind of friction or teething problems as we transition from one society to the other.

And, I mean, to underlie a point that you just made, and I think it's a important one, is that my critique of work isn't that work is intrinsically bad, because if you go back to the definition that I offered earlier work, work isn't any particular activity. It is rather a condition under which we perform an activity. 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.

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, right? 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? Yeah, so there is a widespread discussion of this in the kind of philosophical literature about work, which is, you know, meaningful work is what we should care about. And work is oftentimes a important part of people's identity and sense of meaning and purpose in life. And I'm very

sensitive to that concern or that's something I care about. But if you take 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 get 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 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 would lose these four things. So what are you going to do about it? And my response to that is that you could lose those four things. That's definitely true. But the question I would have 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. I mean, it's a pretty dramatic shift, right? I mean, I don't know. What do we count? If 10,000 years ago, when people were hunter-gatherers, do we count that as work? I mean, it was doing a kind of job. But what I want to say is that literally throughout all of history, people have worked. And you're suggesting, 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? Oh, I mean, absolutely. I mean, the thing about hunter-gatherers, there's a very interesting paper written back in the 60s, I think, by Marshall Salons called the Original Leisure Society. Yovall 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 because they spent very little time every day working. I mean, 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 for that. 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, you know, we're rewarded for complex, creative problem-solving. We like to complain, but we have it pretty good. Yeah, I mean, the 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 work we 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 mentioned 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. Well, good. And that leads us into, you know, I think the big payoff 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. Yeah, I mean, this is a way that I set this up in the book.

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. Well, actually, you know, I think that's fair and maybe it's my fault for not bringing that up. Let's give a couple minutes to say that because I think it is a point worth making. I mean, what is your argument about the downsides of technology? Because there are techno-utopians, techno-pessimists, and 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. Right. So, I mean, this notion that we, you know, we're going to abandon work and what are we going to do as a result, well, there are kind of satirical, dystopian versions of what that might entail that don't look very, very pleasant. So I'm one of them that I discuss in the book is from the Pixar movie Wally, 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. 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, you know, 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 at these motorized chairs all day. They get fed a constant stream of, light entertainment and fast food, 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 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. 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 automating 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. Yeah, 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? Yeah, so 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,

is a concept from evolutionary psychology and evolutionary anthropology that I borrow as a metaphor for discussing this in the book. 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 seeding that territory to machines. So what do we do in response? Well, there's really two things we can do. We can race against, or say, yeah, fight back against the machines in a sense by trying to become more like them, more like the machines that are replacing us. Try to compete with them basically, right? 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 the 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. Hey, everyone. It's Cal Penn. I'm the host of Earsay, the Audible and I Heart audiobook club. This week on the podcast, I am sitting down with Ray Porter, the narrator of Andy Weir's audiobook Project Hail Mary.

massive sci-fi adventure about survival and science. And what happens when you wake up alone very far from Earth? I really had to make a decision because I caught myself getting that frog in my throat and starting to get teary as I'm narrating some of these sections. And it's like, okay, yo, yeah, yo, is this indulgent? And I really thought about it. I was like, no, at this point, it would kind of be betraying the trust the author and the listener have in telling this story if I don't go through it. But there's places in this book that deeply emotionally affected me, and I left it on the mic. That's great.

Because it served the story. People will say like, oh, my God, I cried at the end. It's like, yeah, dude, me too. Listen to Earsay, the Audible and IHeart Audio Book Club on the IHeart Radio app or wherever you get your podcasts. My Best Skin Ever at 45? Give me a theme song and a best skincare award, because it feels like this. Right. Can you feel it? That's Farmhouse Fresh Skin, all right?

I'm glowing, and everyone asks how. The best skincare is Farmhouse Fresh, and the award is you, your best you. Visit Farmhouse Fresh skincare.com and use code radio for a free starter routine with any purchase. Okay, but let's 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? 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 equivalence, 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. So I think there's those kind of 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. So, I mean, 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? Yeah, I think so Elon Musk is probably the example. You're thinking of the neural link company is one of the ones that attracted a lot of media attention anyway. 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's a large community of cyboric 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, I mean, those are some of the possibilities. One of the people I cite in the book or as an illustration of an actual living cyborg as an artist called Neil Harbourg. 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, because he's born colorblind, and he has this device that converts light waves into sound waves.

So he's just kind of like 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 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. I think he's founded something called the trans-species 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. distance. And how exactly does this save us from work or from leaving work? I mean, I'm missing a little connection there. Yeah. So it doesn't necessarily save us from needing work. So what it does is that if we are losing competence and power to machines, if the kind of wally dy 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 that to machines.

But I mean, you've perhaps hinted at one of the big risks of doing this, which I discussed 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. 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 feud. I mean, even in Harry Potter, he had a much better broom than everybody else, and that did help him in the Quiddish matches. So the technological competition is something that is very hard to escape. 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 an Irish journalist called Mark O'Connell. They 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.

And they want to replace that with technology and want us to become more technological. 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 unfreedom for another kind of unfreedom 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 cyber organization. So, I think that's another serious concern with this solution to our predicament or our problem. Yeah, I mean, 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, et cetera, you know, that would only get worse if we were cyborings, I would imagine. Yeah, I mean, I think you make an important point, which is something is worth emphasizing, which is that, you know, 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, is that like a Woody Allen quote about predicting the future is hard? Or prediction is hard particularly when it's about the future, something like that.

I believe it's Neil's Boar, believe it or not. Okay, sorry. I was wrong. I only say that because I thought it was Yogi Berra and I was wrong. I think, yeah, I think I'm getting confused

in that there's a similar Woody Allen quote. But anyway, the less we mention him, the better. That's fine. So I'm really kind of trying to sketch different scenarios in the book and trying to evaluate them using kind of 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 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 kind of cheerily. leading for a particular future or saying that we're all going to doom and gloom, it is trying to be fair to different possibilities, even though I take stances on some issues. My confidence level in some of the claims I make wouldn't be particularly high. 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 we 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? 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 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 familiar with it, one of the examples I use in the book is Neil Stevenson's novel Snowcrash, where he talks about the metaverse is something that people spend a lot of time living and experimenting in.

And, you know, I think that's, that could be understood as a vision of a virtual future, 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 know, you have real friendships and real conversations with people. And sometimes you can really harm or hurt people in virtual interactions. So I talk about this phenomenon as well of virtual assault. Assault committed via a computer avatar virtual environment. And so, you know, it's not clear to me that that's really a virtual world entirely, in a philosophically 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. And 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, you know, I'm not talking to you right now in the real natural world, so to speak. I'm inside a nicely centrally heated home. And 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 fast line between Real Real and Virtual Real. Exactly. So the counter. intuitive view is really that we have been using technology to kind of 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.

I mean, 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 Graber, who's an anthropologist argues a lot of work is virtual reality, a lot of bullshit jobs, to use his phrase. I don't know if this is a censored podcast, so I apologize. We're allowed to say that.

go ahead. Yeah. And then there's people like Yuval Noah Harari, who'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. And also like consumer capitalism as being like 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 socially 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... 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, right? And the point being made is that, I mean, 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 contexts, 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're being a little bit more self-conscious about the construction of our ways of living.

Yeah, I mean, so you've kind of actually summarized the point better than I've ever been able to summarize it myself. And so I 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 longish 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. Yeah, when reading your book, you know, the word game also struck me a little bit. There's sort of both narrow and broad definitions of that. You know, 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, you know, something on your computer where, you know, 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, 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. Yeah. So I think that's right. And I think people will, 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 I'm 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 Soutts, a philosopher who wrote an interesting quirky book in the 1970s called The Grasshopper. It's a dialogue, kind of 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 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. And it gives us more control over the arbitrary rules we use to construct. our lives. Now, I mean, to go back to the point that, you know, the financial market is a game in a sense, that's, that's true. And so that's something that I, 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. Good. And 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. Like 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. Yeah, that's a fair point. So I guess they are, they're contingent in some sense,

or they're unconstrained in some sense by, well, I mean, that mightn't 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. Good. So, but I think we're talking about details too much and not fleshing out the big picture here. I mean, 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. Right. So, I mean, one part of this conversation, which we haven't really touched upon, and part of the reason of that is that I don't really touch upon 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 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 this notion of the loss of meaning associated with jobs and how we could find meaning in another forum.

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. Yeah, I mean, 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. 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. Got it. So there are different proposals out there for that.

But yeah, I'm setting that to the side and I'm assuming that. And then I'm looking at the kind of meaning. What do we do with our time then? Right. Yeah, this is the obvious question. Like, let's imagine that we had no material once. 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? Exactly, yeah. And 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 to pushback on since I've written the book, which is that I didn't discuss, you know, climate change and other disasters that are facing humanity. And part of my response to that is no book can be about everything. I just wanted to set some issues as I to explore this kind of space of thinking. So the future that I've envisioned 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 because we get to kind of 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 the rules of a game and competency in the performance of a game.

You can contribute to society through games. And so far 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. Or how many likes you get on Instagram, right?

That's a version of a game. Yeah, although, I mean, that might be a negative version of a game in one sense, right? And this is one thing that I would be sensitive to and 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. You know, there'd still be the role for competition. And there are forms of scarcity in the world of games that might correspond to the forms of scarcity we see in the current world in terms of material scarcity or income-related scarcity in that. people care about being the best at a game

that's a kind of scarcity being the top ranked performer 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 it's not something that is limited to an elite few people to 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 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. Well, yeah, I mean, I think that it's an attractive picture in some ways, but, you know, 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 mentioned, 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? So, I mean, there's two things to say here. One is that even if the landscape of games isn't infinite, there are, there's often, kind of a relatively limitless possibility space within individual games. You know, 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 performed chess is still a popular sport. So within an individual game, there's often room for exploring lots of different spaces within that game. So that's what point. The other point is that would we get bored and would we kind of run out of things? I think at a limit, of course we would. Right.

I mean, 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. explore. And so far as we see lots of new games continually being invented, they might gain kind of mass traction or appeal right now, but if they become the main focus of our lives, then we have the opportunity to explore them. I think that's fair. So it's just a beth 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. Okay, maybe a more realistic worry is the following. Um, We talked about the social construction of the rules. Maybe they're not 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 sort of. 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. Yeah, this is kind of a wider debate in the philosophy on the meaning of life, which is, like, do you need some kind of 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 at anticipated given that initial rule set. And we might find the need to add new rules to the game, so to speak. So, I mean, to use one example, you know, the rules of football or soccer to an American audience, you know, it 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 would 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 kind of interesting and that their aspects of the game they didn't appreciate until they started to play it more. So there are, I think, constraints within the world of games that we don't initially appreciate.

And, yeah, the rule-bound nature of games isn't fully transparent to us. Well, and I think, I mean, 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, right? As a matter of empirical fact. Yeah, I mean, so that's another point, which is that oftentimes things that are clearly arbitrary as a matter of sociological fact and anthropological fact to take on an outsized importance in society and actually become the most important thing in a society. Yeah. 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. 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, you know, there's corporations and wealthy individuals and there's inequality that can be exacerbated by the current economic setup. Do we have any reason to think that won't be just as bad in the virtual utopia? I mean, isn't there at least as much room for power to be concentrated in certain hands and abused right along with it? So I definitely think there is room for there to be power, you know, power inequalities

and dynamics and things that need to be addressed. So the, again, 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 for thinking 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. And so we don't, like 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. Right. 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 than 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 alien 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 and that technology gives people more options. Okay. I mean, I do think that I get that 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 mean, 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. Yeah, I think that's fair and I think that's right. You're not going to unlock this utopian future that I'm imagining unless you solve the problems of kind of material deprivation or have a world of relative abundance for the majority.

I'm sure I'm going to get a bunch of comments on the podcast. saying that, you know, 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 on, as an aside. I think I am, but I think that we're not sort of close to being able implement it yet, and it's going to be an incremental move toward it rather than a big leap. Yeah, like I'm broadly speaking, I'm a fan of the idea. And one of the reasons I'm a final, 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 kind of 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 the. Okay, I mean, 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. there a parallel argument about how those aspects of our lives could become virtual, whether it's love or family or friendship? I say 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 that have written quite a bit about this over the years, and I think we can under certain conditions. I mean, I can go to those if you want, but that would probably lead too much longer conversation again. We'll link to your website. Don't worry. I mean, just very briefly, I define myself as an ethical behaviorist when it comes to our interactions with virtual others or machine-like others. And that if they look and act like humans or 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.

Yeah, I mean, 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 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't predict, it's good not to be sanguine. It's good to really, you know, try to flesh out ahead of time what the implications of some 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. Yeah. And it, I mean, 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 mean, 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 kind of ethical norms and principles so that we get a sense of the broadness of the axial landscape into which we are navigating. You've got to define the word axiological. I know what it means, but axiology is the study of values, the different kinds of values associated with these features, right?

I find myself at the end of many of my podcast interviews saying, oh, 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 Dan Err, thanks so much for your insights here. This is a fun conversation. Thanks a lot, John. It was great. You're confused about your credit score.

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