The "end of work" is our opportunity to be human

In his 1930 essay “Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren,” John Maynard Keynes predicted, “that the standard of life in progressive countries one hundred years hence will be between four and eight times as high as it is today.”

Using real GDP per capita as a proxy for standard of life, it appears he was right.

Keynes also foresaw this growth would be driven by technical improvements and accompanied by what he called a “new disease” -- namely, “technological unemployment … due to our discovery of means of economising the use of labor outrunning the pace at which we can find new uses for labour.”

What I don’t think Keynes could have predicted with such uncanny accuracy, is that if he had lived to see his predictions come true, he might have had a robot cooking his eggs in the morning.

The other day my friend showed me this video of a robot chef that cooks 2,000 different meals. With 20 motors, 24 joints and 129 sensors, the robo-chef mimics the same movements as human hands.

These robots are already working at restaurants in Japan. How long until they replace 2,290,800 cooks and 127,500 chefs (roughly 1.5% of the U.S. labor force)?

In Europe earlier this year, self-driving truck convoys made by Volvo, Daimler, and Volkswagen traveled from Sweden, Denmark, Belgium and Germany to all arrive at the port of Rotterdam in the Netherlands. In San Francisco, former Googlers have launched a startup called Otto which retrofits vehicles with driverless capabilities for just $30,000. The average trucker’s wage is around $40,000 per year.

Morgan Stanley estimates the freight industry will save $168 billion annually by switching to autonomous drivers, leaving 3.5 million human drivers out of a job.

To really “drive” (haha) home this point, here’s a map of the most common job in each U.S. state in 2014:

Telemarketers, assembly line workers, insurance underwriters, tax preparers, data entry keyers, bank tellers, accounting clerks -- all jobs with an 0.98 or higher probability of automation according to a 2013 Oxford study by Frey and Osborne. The study estimates that 47% of total U.S. employment is at risk.

While some academics predict the “end of work,” tech mogul Marc Andreessen has called the idea of a jobless future a “Luddite fallacy” and MIT economist David Autor thinks this is just another case of “automation anxiety.” Autor argues that computers cannot replace humans for tasks that require “flexibility, judgment, and common sense.” He also cites historical evidence that computers and humans actually prove to be complements in the workforce, not substitutes.

I agree with Andreessen and Autor. But I think this goes deeper than tech and labor economics. Even if advancements in AI and machine learning make computers capable of flexibility and common sense, human work won’t go away.

Ray Kurzweil, Director of Engineering at Google, says that 65% of jobs in America today are information jobs that did not exist 25 years ago. He says, “We're constantly creating and inventing new jobs and things to do.”

Because we want to work. Even when we don’t need to work, even as our GDP per capita has increased to levels our ancestors couldn’t have dreamed of a few centuries ago, we still create work to keep busy. Because it’s all we’ve ever known, ever since the caveman invented fire, we’ve been naturally selected to survive, to work.

“The economic problem, the struggle for subsistence,” Keynes writes, “always has been hitherto the primary, most pressing problem of the human race -- not only of the human race, but of the whole of the biological kingdom from the beginnings of life in its most primitive forms … Thus we have been expressly evolved by nature -- with all our impulses and deepest instincts -- for the purpose of solving the economic problem. If the economic problem is solved, mankind will be deprived of its traditional purpose.”

In my philosophy class we watched a documentary on particle physics. Stanford physicist Savas Dimopoulos muses aloud, “Why do humans do science? Why do they do art? The things that are least important for our survival are the very things that make us human.”

A robot economy is our opportunity to be human.

But it’s not really about the robots. It seems to be our machines that separate man from all other animals, but robo-chefs and driverless trucks are just the tip of the iceberg: the latest symptoms of economic progress that has delivered us to an unprecedentedly high standard of life.

There is no unique reason why artificial intelligence -- rather than, say, time travel or teleportation -- happens to be the technological advancement that corresponds with this point in economic history when a growing percentage of the population no longer needs to work to survive.

Because the bigger issue, the part of the iceberg underwater, is not tech; it’s the economies of scale and efficiencies that allow us to squeeze out more value from our resources than we need -- this is what makes “long-term unemployment a business-as-usual forecast.”

A group of more than 300 experts from across university, business, think tanks and government contributed to a Millennium Project survey that found the following global unemployment rates by 2050 by 10-year increments:

So, what will capitalist societies find to occupy their time on weekdays from 9 to 5?

Keynes says the wealthiest are our advance guard -- those already rich enough who needn’t work. And the outlook isn’t good. He cites nervous breakdowns of well-to-do housewives “who have been deprived by their wealth of their traditional tasks and occupations.”

What’s more, a 2012 study found a positive correlation between a country’s GDP and its citizens’ risk of mood disorder. The study reports, “An evolutionary mismatch between past human environments and modern-day living, may be central to rising rates of depression.”

In his 1946 book “Man’s Search for Meaning,” Austrian psychologist Viktor Frankl has an explanation he calls the “existential vacuum” -- a loss of meaning that occurs when man’s behavior is no longer guided by survival instincts.

“Progressive automation will probably lead to an enormous increase in the leisure hours available to the average worker. The pity of it is that many of these will not know what to do with all their newly acquired free time.”

Frankl also cites an example similar to Keynes’ “nervous breakdown” which he calls “Sunday neurosis” -- “that kind of depression which afflicts people who become aware of the lack of content in their lives when the rush of the busy week is over and the void within themselves becomes manifest.”

And on the other side of the social chasm, while the economic benefits of automation seem to be existentially frustrating the bored rich, the poor and hungry -- who surely still exist even despite our economies of abundance, and whose economic problems are certainly no less important than the mental health problems of the wealthy -- will see disproportionately less of these benefits trickle down.

Income gaps between the rich and poor continue to widen rapidly. The richest 1% now have more than the rest of the world combined. If computerization of jobs hollows out the middle class and polarizes the labor market, rich-poor gaps may widen even further, as profit from artificial intelligence and other technologies continues to trickle up to the very wealthy.

In 1932, FDR delivered the Commonwealth Club Address, recognizing this as a distribution, not a production problem:

“A mere builder of more industrial plants, a creator of more railroad systems, and organizer of more corporations, is as likely to be a danger as a help … Our task now is not discovery or exploitation of natural resources, or necessarily producing more goods. It is the soberer, less dramatic business of administering resources and plants already in hand … of distributing wealth and products more equitably, of adapting existing economic organizations to the service of the people.”

The tech magnates won’t stop. Musk will build driverless Tesla models, IBM will improve Watson, startups will keep the periphery cutting-edge, and universities (hopefully) will educate more and more coders and engineers.

The capitalist engine is robust -- fueled naturally by our avarice. Rather than fight progress, we need to develop an accommodating dynamic social structure that is equally enterprising.

At some point, we will fail to invent enough human roles to keep unemployment at bay. Even if we managed to create enough jobs, the futility of human work will become apparent in the face of such economic abundance.

So for the first time in history, the majority of mankind will have the luxury of asking themselves: what should I do? And when no longer buttressed by the universal survival paradigm, that moral question regresses to an existential one: who am I?

I can imagine one solution that would kill two birds with one stone. If the answer for the rich to that existential question becomes: I am altruistic; I should help the poor. Then we solve both problems --- mental health and rich-poor gap -- simultaneously, at least until the poor are raised to equality, and then all of humanity on the economic frontier will face the existential crisis together.

Keynes writes, “Thus for the first time since his creation man will be faced with his real, his permanent problem -- how to use his freedom from pressing economic cares, how to occupy the leisure, which science and compound interest will have won for him, to live wisely and agreeably and well. The strenuous purposeful money-makers may carry all of us along with them into the lap of economic abundance. But it will be those peoples, who can keep alive, and cultivate into a fuller perfection, the art of life itself and do not sell themselves for the means of life, who will be able to enjoy the abundance when it comes.”

If the "end of work" comes, I think a dystopian socioeconomic future is a real possibility -- with a chasm between the have's and have not's, where the have's suffer existential frustration, and the have not's still face the economic problem.

It’s our responsibility (young people, academics, policy makers, entrepreneurs) to build our institutions around a workless, or at least a less-work, future.

If we mitigate the risks of mental disease and inequality, I think we can emerge into a global renaissance of creativity, a new generation of art and culture, that is fueled no longer just by economic incentive, but instead by a genuine life hunger.

The end of work is our opportunity to be human -- not just to survive, but to live.

Cole Feldman grew up on a farm in Kansas. Now he studies finance and philosophy at Notre Dame. He blogs here about startups, education, tech and lifehacks. He is the author of Self, a book about self-actualization. The only thing he loves more than creating is helping others create.

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