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I never really gave much thought to “work” when I was young. My job was simply to be a decent student, and that wasn’t all that difficult. So when I first went off to college, it was with the frankly naïve intent of studying medicine. The choice was mostly due to familiarity; it was my father’s trade.
Unfortunately, it was also a personal ambition barely sufficient to motivate persevering through two, miserable quarters of pre-med general chemistry. So by the end of that second quarter, a more carefully considered change-of-major landed me in the Physics department.
Years later, assessing options for a graduate program, the kinds of studies that led to academic careers mostly converged into a single discipline. A tantalizingly seductive approach to a “Theory-of-Everything” had swept through university physics; and thereupon, cloistered tribes of professors had rushed to publish themselves into an institutional dead-end. Fortunately, I had the clarity-of-mind to listen when a couple of hushed subversives quietly advised that I avoid the rabbit hole.
So the graduate path I chose instead took a less scholarly route, responding to a practical problem. It was a first foray into application through engineering, and I found that I really liked the idea of producing something tangible. It was science actualized… tool-making, refined through untold millennia into exquisitely-polished technology. It felt to me like art. And ultimately, it was profitable.
I’ve worked a lot with machines ever since. It wasn’t always intentional. While I was living in Southeast Asia, I became pretty familiar with blown-off legs. The condition is a common, long-term consequence of farming war-contaminated mud in a landscape salted with millions of landmines and the unexploded leftovers of cluster bombs. As a result, I learned a great deal about knees.
From an engineering perspective, knees are one of those numerous human examples of either natural selection, or of intelligent design by a deity apparently qualified only to wield Crayons. Considering its placement at the ends of two levers and its use in the propulsion of an entire body, the joint doesn’t have enough cushioning, range-of-motion, or reinforcement. And its forward bending, “plantigrade” hinge makes it inefficient for running, puts the joint in the way while climbing, and exposes it to impacts.
There’s a reason knee injuries are so common in humans; they’re an engineering disaster. But the problem with replacing a human knee isn’t that it’s so difficult to design something that functions as well, or even better. Rather, the trouble is in getting it to function in tandem with the frail, organic mess that constitutes the rest of a human body.
As evolutionary contrivances, we’re essentially Rube Goldberg contraptions, kludged parts precariously hauling around a few gallons of rusty salt-water and the associated structural and chemical machinery demanded by the need to keep some 170-billion delicate brain-cells alive and entertained while swimming in a fragile, two-quart aquarium. The arrangement sufficed to a level of reproductive viability in the natural environment. But now we live in the IKEA age.
Technology attempts to solve our shortcomings with sometimes surprising, if not unintended results. During my brain’s usual, self-affected, four-shot infusion of espresso this morning, it was also entertaining itself by listening to a truly brilliant MIT-engineer/friend as he described his own amazement upon viewing a machine that at first seemed to be rendering a thin piece of wire into dust.
The machine was an electron-beam mill, and it was carving microscopic parts. His surprise wasn’t caused by the machine or what it had created; he was familiar with the technology and its capabilities. Rather, it was the result of a sudden realization that technology hadn’t simply made some form of human labor obsolete… it had made it superfluous.
He went on to describe his own sudden realization that this machine hadn’t taken away a single human job. Instead, it was doing something that no human could ever have done with any amount of skill. In this case, microscopic examination of one of those bits of “dust” revealed a precisely rendered gear.
The first human technologies, perhaps sharpened sticks and usefully-shaped rocks, simply made our own labors more economical. They made our reach farther, our strength more concentrated, and thus our utilization of energy more efficient. And efficiency is the prime-mover of natural selection.
But every tool that nature provides a body: a stronger beak, thicker skin, longer legs, bigger eyes… also comes at a cost: more energy, greater complexity, less adaptability… However, when the benefit of a new adaptation exceeds its cost, then the investment is evolutionarily profitable, and the investors proliferate.
A complex enough brain, however, allows a species to very rapidly create solutions — and to abandon them just as quickly when they become a burden. That first sharpened stick trumped a million-years of physical evolution — with a disposable adaptation. Controlling fire would give us back-door access to the very rules of the game. A few hundred-thousands of years from that stick, the blink of an eye in Earth’s history, and nearly eight-billion humans are testimony to the evolutionary power of our control over technology.
But the tools themselves have also evolved and become more efficient. They no longer need a human hand, and the collective fires blaze with far too much heat for people to gather around. They’ve started to think and to create on their own. They do things that no human could ever do, or will ever do. They have their own needs. And some of us now find a place, though perhaps not so much purpose, in making sure those needs are met.
Humanity thrives by its innovation, at least the part with access. And the result is a seemingly unlimited choice of things: things we buy, things we use, things we do, even the things we are. The descendants of those sharpened sticks and glowing coals now give us efficient access to unlimited “friends” and endless distractions, on-demand, disposable, and cheaply replaced.
So where does that leave us?
My engineer-friend is an optimist. So two-hundred lettuce-pickers are put out of work when the computer-driven, GPS-guided harvester arrives. It was back-breaking work anyway, and it benefits everyone when food-production becomes more efficient. It’s a misguided bond of duty to think that misery and hardship somehow bring salvation, even at fifteen-dollars an hour. And there are more important things to do, things that don’t involve things.
Perhaps.
Technology is rapidly approaching a point where much human labor will simply be superfluous to the survival, even the prosperity of humankind. So perhaps we will instead be able to turn our efforts toward ways to thrive. And in that spirit, we can choose to re-define the nature of “work,” and what gives our work value.
Passion and the creation of a common history are the two great binding factors in what we call “love.” And now, our tools extend our reach in new ways, re-defining the idea of “community”. We no longer need to adopt the family caste or its traditions, or marry the people we grew up with. We don’t even have to follow the family trade.
So maybe the truly important jobs in a fully technological society should revolve around expressions of the human spirit, and in the creation of a shared progress toward well-being. This kind work will always, by its very definition, be the domain of people.
Perhaps.
But then those same tools that increase our social reach also conspire to dissipate its force into a chaotic tide of unlimited possibilities. And things too easily obtained become just as easily neglected, thrown away, replaced. Eight-billion people adrift in a sea of things, without purpose, searching for answers in the wrong places. And therein lies another possibility, of cloistered tribes and grim Theories-of-Everything, of forbidding mud and artificial knees, of the profitable, the indifferent result of natural-selection… superfluous humanity.
Photo: The sensitive hand of a robot developed to assist hospital patients and the elderly at the Department of Mechanical Engineering, Sugano Laboratory at Waseda University in Tokyo.
Luminous Aether 
I absolutely love your writing. Such an insightful tour through human development.
Your ending raises questions that are unanswerable except with the benefit of hindsight from some future perch, though the idea can perhaps be explored now. Will be become superfluous? I suppose we could start by asking whether some portion of humanity has already chosen to be meaningless, which though perhaps not exactly the same, does presage future potential. Has technology (the “internets”) made us so connected, so stimulated, so overwhelmed, that we choose to limit its inputs solely as a means to reinforce our preformed conclusions, biases, and prejudices? This election year in itself provides ample evidence of such. Certainly it’s getting harder to “become one with nature,” or even to avoid the cacophonous din of “civilization” (such as it is) that presses on our every moment.
I’ll think about this more. I don’t have any particular fear of technology per se. There are always things that people can do that keep their hands (plumbing, electrician, construction) or mind (theory of everything, consulting, writing) duly employed. My concern is what people choose to do with their brief moments of existence. It seems many choose not to do anything, which is perhaps reflective of your suggestion of humanity becoming superfluous.
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Having just returned from a quick loop through the high country, becoming “one with nature,” I’m also reminded that I most certainly don’t want to live a world where people die from minor infections or injuries or starvation, or even where I can’t enjoy a hot shower (or coffee) in safe water. I’m certainly not anti-technology.
However, I wholly agree that in at least some cases, “some portion of humanity has already chosen to be meaningless…” And the kinds of technologies that humans now have at their fingertips (or thumb-tips) seem to encourage the trend. Communications technologies have reached a point where they can distract from virtually every moment of one’s existence — and not necessarily productively. From Pokemon to FOX, we’re encouraged to fill our moments with meaningless, if not self-destructive distraction. Why not redirect that potential into something beneficial to humanity — even if it’s simply expressions oneness or of beauty?
I also worry that we have, by our own evolutionary success, made ourselves into rather cheap commodities, moreover precariously dependent upon some inefficient technologies. What becomes of humanity when one of those systems breaks down or runs out of resources? It takes a great deal of faith to believe that something new will save those billions of lives when the well (or source of fertilizer) eventually runs dry.
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So true about self-destructive distraction, though I think the difference between now and the past is the types of distraction. Now we have the thumb-tip kind, before it was the “idiot box,” and before that it was drugs, and on and on. I’ve been writing about Abraham Lincoln’s early life this week and it’s clear there were plenty of people finding distractions (i.e., wasting their lives) in fighting, shooting, and drinking, while Lincoln chose always activities that he felt improved himself intellectually. He later worked to improve the lives of others. All while some played the 19th century equivalent of the mind-numbing Pokemon or whatever.
My point is that not everyone chooses to be worthless (not the right word but it’ll do). Personally, I’m going more than a bit stir-crazy since my operation during this period of forced “nothing too strenuous.” I’ve taken to keeping the door open near my laptop so I can at least see an occasional squirrel or chipmunk. I’m definitely thinking I need to get back to nature soon, and more.
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I suppose that there have always been people who choose to waste their lives, and for a variety of reasons. But I subscribe to the idea that humans are, for the most part, imitators. As kids and adolescents (and even many adults), we tend to expect the same potential from our own lives as we see around ourselves. Few people expect, or consequently attempt to truly change their cultural castes. Those who do are few and far between, and they tend to stand out. In a world of glorified entertainers, pro-wrestlers, athletes, pop-stars, Kardashians… these become the focus of latent ambitions. There are just the occasional Lincolns toward which to cast one’s focus.
Curious what we glorify. But then I guess there’s not so much profit in simply aspiring to be a responsible human being.
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Doubt I could count myself as standing out from the crowd, but I do subscribe to something Lincoln supposedly once said: I’m a slow walker, but I never walk back. Somehow I keep failing forward. 🙂
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Several thoughts wander through my mind after reading this and whilst editing and debugging some automated practice problems for engineering students. My coffee is not espresso. One can stop at the gas station about ten miles from here to get coffee, but that seems hardly worth it.
1. I’m amazed at how fast the transition from subsistence agriculture to manufacturing to creative leisure can occur. I do wonder about the near identical nature of manufacturing, slavery, share-cropping, indentured service, and most sorts of modern jobs. I’m sure many folks have written about those similarities.
2. Many folks seem to venture on a directed random walk and then seek fulfillment/justification/rationalization later. I suppose philanthropy happens that way.
3. Hasn’t been long since raising children and belonging to a religion were pretty much it for most.
Perhaps my coffee is too weak.
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1. Once the information source that feeds natural selection shifts from chemistry to more malleable and directed cognitive activity, the rate at which change can take place increases exponentially. Thought is Lamarckian in that respect, striving to adapt rather than having to rely upon random variation. As for the way humanity fits into the picture, the definitions may change, but the “work” is pretty much the same. Slavery, share-cropping, indentured service — institutionalized poverty, illegal immigration, usurious economic systems — they all accomplish pretty much the same things within a society.
2. Absolutely! But then, how many of us really know where we’re going when we start our walks? I once commented here that if I could travel in time, that I would want to go back to give myself some advice. But then, realizing that I probably wouldn’t have listened, I decided that it might be better to go the other direction and ask for the advice.
3. The human sense of place seems to adapt easily to “more,” but not so well to “less,” even when that’s still more than enough. Makes me wonder what people might aspire to in the future, and how they’ll look at this time — perhaps with the same kind of observation — perhaps with envy.
And I apparently metabolize caffeine, as well as theobromine, quite efficiently.
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I would like to learn a few more things.
I did learn chemistry and to some extent a little medicine just came along for the ride. But kitchens smell better than hospitals. Given the opportunity, I’d like to keep much of that knowledge and learn a bit more practical application in the mechanical and medical arts. But I find that I really lose sense of time when working on just a handful of things. I enjoy those moments, but I also regret the loss of time.
Yes, much of lots of popular economics is based on growth. I don’t think that is changeable. If one doesn’t strive for more, another will.
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Sorry for such a slow reply. I discovered that the keyboard on the old server that I usually use for this site is extremely caffeine intolerant. Appears to have been terminal.
Seems a paradox of life is to enjoy it, but without “wasting” time. That is, I suppose, unless one has a hedonistic streak. But as a champion of the concept of a block universe, I can always appeal to a fixed destiny. “Spinoza made me do it.”
And that said, I sometimes wonder if it’s even possible to overcome those win-lose survival instincts that cause us to strive for things we don’t need — or maybe don’t even want. Explains much about why so many humans will work against their own interests.
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Guilt is a tough cactus to embrace; we all have our own tastes in wasting time. And perhaps those times are just one of many possible choices for exercising the brain in something sort of like sleep or play.
It is fun to have young critters around experimenting with new stimuli regardless of their seeming futility. Keeping that sort of experimentation going is a nice goal. My father retired to watching sports on tv; granfather retired to playing solitaire (literally wore out dozens of decks of cards in 20 years).
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Well, I’m certainly not motivated by the same kinds of things as when I was younger. I find that how I enjoy deeply has become more thoughtful and meditative, and less associated with adrenaline or stupor. I’ve come to value greatly the self-discipline I developed when I was younger, but in ways I couldn’t have predicted in my youth.
I turned on the TV intentionally last week, wondering if the old tube set still worked (it does). It gets about 20 free Roku channels — mostly news of the “info-tainment” variety. I ended up watching about an hour of a guy who self-documented a trip through Nepal. Mildly interesting, but mostly just made me want to go there myself. I’m not good with most passive entertainment, with the possible exception of music. So I can’t imagine not being able to actively participate in things. To be honest, I’m not sure I’d survive something like a joint replacement. But I also can’t say what will motivate me when that day comes.
I’ve been watching my Mom grow old with some mixed emotions (mine — maybe hers too). She still keeps busy in socially productive ways, but I get the feeling it’s more about distraction than joy. My father never really retired; but he also never really got “old.” He had a heart attack in his early 60’s, right after an 11-mile run. Terribly selfish, I know… but that’s how I want to go.
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I think it is easy to underestimate survival instincts, but yes I appreciate the desire for an uncomplicated end. I’ve only sat through two serious discussions about DNR’s. One discussion lead to shutting down an automatic defibrillator in the patient. I sat through the procedure, but the whole time I kept thinking “What an odd job this person has, going around from room to room turning off implanted devices.”
Fairly technologically skilled.
Waiting around for death while on a sedative seems sort of pointless. The array of hospice drugs is equally as odd to me.
When I get incapacitated from lower back (disc) once in a while, I get a few bottles of water, a few empty bottles, some fruit and nuts, and a couple of audio books. Visual entertainment is somehow just too busy or perhaps controlling for me.
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I’ve wondered about a pacemaker. Yes indeed, an odd job. But it makes sense.
Japanese culture has somewhat less difficulty considering death. Buddhism doesn’t have as a central tenet an aspiration toward eternal life. In fact, that would be seen as a sort of curse. It’s more a philosophy about minimizing suffering in this life, and finding peace in one’s mind. And since clarity of thought is a big part of the practice, simply “existing” rather defeats the whole point.
Audio books work for me on long drives or flights. For whatever reason, I just don’t fully engage with visual entertainment. Last time I was in a theater, I saw the film, Avatar — which makes it 2009. I’ll catch an occasional movie during a flight, but they usually just put me to sleep (almost as good as liquor and Dramamine). TV is just for news, but I can read it off a dozen websites faster and with more objectivity. Can’t imagine being stuck in a bed.
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Well, we are all living different lives, and doing different things, some very different, but we share the fact we are Human, and what we do with our lives, sometimes it’s our privilege, sometimes not, depending the hand you got at the game of life, and what you did with them, even if it was a lousy hand!
Like already a very bad knee problem, on top of it’s bad design.
Simply we adapt, and learn to live with it. We can bitch about it, but we go on, or take to leave by the final exit door.
As for our future?
Thankfully as Humans we all reach the final exit door, life goes fast, as we age we become pretty aware of it, and years start to weigh on us, so much we may be happy that death is a fact of life.
I remember Mother telling me, not knowing she was terminally ill, and doctors already gave us a few days at most, not living in the some town with my brothers, and sister, Mother trusted me and said to me;
“Don’t tell your brothers, and sister, but I am ready to go, living it’s just unbearable now!”
Ironically my sister, and brothers beforehand, made me promise not to tell her, as to not frighten her!
My point? The existential problem ends along with life, we do not need to worry about it.
So I will not preach what to do with life, after all that’s our choice, or not completely.
Acceptance, in my view, can make it more tolerable, but I cannot speak for everybody.
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We all contend with our own shadows. I merely choose not to give mine any more attention than necessary. My own maraṇasati moment was many years ago, on the side of a mountain, and that kind of fear has long since lost its grip on my spirit. And my mom said the same thing to me. Still, I keep the photos on the living room shrine to the memory of connections that no longer exist.
So indeed, the existential problem both begins and ends with one’s life. But in the interval between, I’ll accept what I can from the journey.
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Amen! And that’s the juicy part, and the only one we can take a bite from, until our last heartbeat.😉
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