Work: A Redefinition of What it Means to be Human
The future of work doesn’t involve us.
That is a big statement, I know. But it’s one that’s true. Increasingly jobs are being automated by the use of technology. We’re seeing self-service stores without clerks emerge. Our factories use advanced robots to do many of the stages of production that workers used to do. All areas of our industries are becoming increasingly automated and intelligent with the use of technology either replacing or supplementing our global workforce.
But there’s only so long this can last.
In the future delivery drivers will be replaced by automated electric vans. Factories will be 100% automated using advanced robotics. Store workers won’t exist as automated payment systems take the place of clerks. Even food production will be almost entirely automated. Nearly all areas of human work on this planet will be replaced by intelligent technology.
Perhaps for a while the only jobs that will survive are those that require expert specialised knowledge and experience such as doctors, nurses, and carers.
The problem with this is that there will be very few jobs left for people to occupy. Leaving the vast majority of the world’s population without a viable job option. This is why we need to rethink who we are humans. Where we need to advance beyond a working species into a thinking and creating species.
Since the dawn of industry in ancient times when we went from being a hunter gatherer species to being a farming species, and then an industrial species, we have delegated work. This ability to delegate work and to specialise in different types of work allowed us to make massive advances in knowledge and technology that we wouldn’t have been able to do otherwise. Our ability to invent and create jobs, and the job market, was arguable the one social idea that led to humanity becoming so advanced. Without that we’d probably just be a hunter gatherer species still and we certainly wouldn’t have any of the technology or culture we currently have.
For millennia we’ve been the working species that has created jobs for itself and constantly grown culture and knowledge as a result. The problem with this is that we will rapidly reach a point where we have worked ourselves into no longer having any jobs to do. Our technology will automate jobs and make us obsolete.
This however gives us the unique opportunity to transition ourselves from a job-based species to an ideas-based species. Ideas and our ability to think and create are the backbone of everything we’ve achieved as a species. This would be a natural transition and perhaps you could describe this as an inevitable transition into something that has always been our ultimate ability: To think, to imagine, and then to create.
With all our time freed up from working, and all our human creativity and ideas given time to come alive, imagine the incredible things we can do as a species: The incredible inventions, the scientific discoveries, the art, and the exploration we’ll have time for.
Moving beyond work is not just inevitable it’s necessary for us to make humanity better and to safeguard our world.
I believe the concept of money will also probably have to evolve. Money is heavily linked to the job market. Yet when there are no jobs how will we quantify money? The initial stages of this transition will probably look something like the idea of a universal income for each person in the world. This idea involves giving every person a wage each month that will make it possible for them to pay for everything essential without having to do without anything.
There are big issues with a universal income though, the most challenging of which is that if all jobs are made obsolete then money itself becomes irrelevant. If we paid everyone the same wage then it would no longer have any value. One thing that we can see about humanity is that people like to buy and to have more than others. Paying every person on the planet the same wage isn’t socially viable. And so we have a big problem to resolve.
The best solution to this problem that I can think of is to incentivise ideas in the way we currently incentivise traditional work. Ideas themselves may become a kind of currency. With the very best ideas being rewarded financially. This also encourages people to think, creating the competitive environment that will help the best ideas to thrive, and in doing so to accelerate the advancement of technology and science.
This is also an incredibly fair system. Unfortunately in the past the people who made scientific breakthroughs and/or had the best ideas, often didn’t benefit from them financially. Whereas when the very system that decides value in the world is based around ideas and knowledge then the right people will be rewarded. The smartest and the most persistent people who create benefits for us all through their ideas and discoveries will rightfully be the richest people in our future world.
This is what we really need as a species if we want to survive and also accomplish far greater things than we have so far. Transitioning to an ideas-based species instead of a jobs-based species opens up the doors to being able to explore the Universe. To become a multiplanetal species and also a multigalaxy species. For this we need to focus our collective intelligence not on menial tasks like boxing products in warehouses, but on ideas. Our technology will allow us to free up the vast majority of our species from menial work and use our intelligences to accelerate our species quicker than we’ve ever done before.
Think of the industrial revolution for example. It allowed for growth and discoveries that happened faster than at any point in history. Within a few hundred years it led to cars, space travel, antibiotics, computers, the internet, satellites, mobile phones, and a whole range of inventions and discoveries that have completely transformed how we live. All of these discoveries and inventions came from ideas and people experimenting.
The next big revolution will be the ideas revolution. It’ll happen once most of our jobs have been automated by technology that has made human workers obsolete. This freeing up of mental time and power for the use of ideas and discoveries will create an even faster revolution than the industrial one. The ideas revolution will change our species rapidly. It’s inevitable and it’s coming.
Unlike many people who think automation will be bad for jobs, I know the opposite is in fact true: It will free up vital creative potential to be used to innovate more rapidly than we’ve ever done before as a species. Automation is going to be one of the most beneficial things that we’ve ever created. The faster we automate the vast majority of our jobs the sooner we can make massive leaps in technological, scientific and cultural advancement. We can go from being a species that works on menial jobs, to a species that works on ideas. And in doing so we redefine what work is, what it means, and its purpose.
The future of work as we define it now doesn’t involve us. But the future of work that we create does. The future of work is ideas. The future of work is discovery. The future of work is experimentation. The future of work is ours to create.
