A World Without Work
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A World Without Work: Technology, Automation, and How We Should Respond, by Daniel Susskind
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Help, help, we’re all going to die
In which Daniel Susskind grasps a flagon of Ray Kurzweil’s home-made Kool-Aid and bets the farm.
Susskind will doubtless find enough gullible general counsel, anxious to seem at the technological vanguard — and interested mugs like me, who are suckers for sci fi alternative histories — at least to recoup his advance but, like the consistent output of his father over the last three decades, A World Without Work will not signpost, let alone dent, the immutable trajectory of modern employment, failing as it does to understand how humans, organisations and economies work, while ignoring — neigh, contradicting — the whole history of technology, from the plough.
Technology has never destroyed overall labour, and Susskind gives no good grounds for believing it will suddenly start now.
No innovation since the wheel has failed to create unexpected diversity, or opportunity — that’s more or less the definition of an innovation, really — or more subsidiary complexity & inefficiency as a by-product. Both the opportunities and the inefficiencies "need" human, not automated, midwifery, to imaginatively exploit (for the former) and effectively manage (for the latter).
Nothing that the information revolution has yet thrown up suggests any of that has changed.
Hand-waving about chess and go-playing supercomputers— there is a lot of that in A World Without Work — does not advance the argument. Both are hermetically sealed games on small, finite boards with simple sets of unvarying rules between two players sharing a common objective. They are entirely deterministic, and you can see that, at the limit, the player with the superior number-crunching power must win. Yet, even on a 64x64 board, the complexity quickly becomes unmanageable.
Life is not a two-person board-game on a small-board with fixed rules a static, common objective. Go and Chess are very poor analogies for life.
Computers can only follow rules. This is by design. A computer which could not be relied on to process instructions with absolute fidelity would be a bad computer. Good computers cannot think, they cannot imagine, they cannot handle ambiguity — if they even have a mental life, it exists in a flat space with no future or past. Computer language, by design, has no tense. It is not a symbolic structure, in that its vocabulary does not represent anything.</ref>See: Code and language.</ref> Machines are linguistically, structurally incapable of interpreting, let alone coining metaphor, and cannot reason by analogy or manage the ambivalence needed to manage innovation.
Until they can do these things, they can only aid — in in almost all circumstances, complicate — the already over-complicated networks we all inhabit. and this is before one considers the purblind, irrational sociology that propels most organisations, because it propels individuals in those organisations. Like the academy, in which Daniel Susskind’s millenarianism thrives, computers function best in a theoretical, platonic universe governed by unchanging and unambiguous physical rules, and populated by rational agents. In that world, Susskind might have as point, but even there I doubt it.
But in the conflicted, dirty, unpredictable universe we find ourselves in out here in TV land, there will continue to be plenty of work, as there always has been, administrating, governing, auditing, advising, rent-seeking — not to mention speculating and bullshitting about the former — as long as the computer-enhanced tight-coupled complexity of our networks doesn't wipe us out first.