Tag: writing

Notes on the Machine: No Jobs in the Future

Chris KhatschLeave a comment

You’re worried that, sooner or later, AI will replace you and you will be unemployed (and eventually even become unemployable). How will you be able to provide for your family, then? What will you do when they tell you that you will never find a job again because all jobs have been handed over to machines? You don’t know.

Sometimes, you allow your mind to drift and visit the future, where humans are not required to produce anything anymore because everything is produced by the Great Machine. You find it easy to imagine a world without work, where artificial intelligence (with its fifty trillion tentacles) does all the work. But somehow you find it very hard to imagine a role humans can play in that world. No, you cannot think up one important role they can play.

Your mind hovers over the cities of the future like an all-seeing invisible eye looking for humans. In some cities, there are no humans at all. In other cities, humans are there, but their roles are obsolete, and they just hang about idly waiting for something to happen to them. Yet, here and there, there is a city or two in which you detect higher human activity. But what are they all doing? Eating, drinking, and playing all the time. Some of them are making handmade bracelets while others are painting. A lot of them are sunbathing. A few of them are reading books. But what are they really doing? They seem to be waiting… waiting for you to give them ideas.

Now, you think: When this happens, I may not need to worry about providing for my family because, very likely, we’d have entered a post-scarcity world, where there’s absolutely everything abundantly for absolutely everyone. (That is the best case scenario, after all, isn’t it?)

“A job is not simply a source of income but of meaning, purpose, and direction in life as well,” Daniel Susskind writes in A World Without Work. What he says may not be undoubtedly true, but that is how you (and everybody else) have been programmed. Susskind writes, “In a world with less work, we will face a problem that has little to do with economics at all: how to find meaning in life when a major source of it disappears.” And then he quotes Keynes who says, “There is no country and no people, I think, who can look forward to the age of leisure and abundance without a dread. For we have been trained too long to strive and not to enjoy.”

When there’s no more work, what will you do? Who will you become?

Something tells you that gaming will replace work for most people. These individuals will plug themselves into an open-world game where simulations of work keep everyone busy…

And then, there will be others who prefer leisure, who will eat, sleep, and consume slop, and slowly drown in the infinite ocean of simulacra and simulation…

But nothing is inevitable yet. Not yet.

Unstructured Reflections on Boredom: A Blurry Definition of Boredom

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In Part Two of Human, All Too Human, Nietzsche writes: “The proverb, ‘The Hungarian is far too lazy to feel bored,’ gives food for thought. Only the highest and most active animals are capable of being bored. The boredom of God on the seventh day of Creation would be a subject for a great poet.”1 Nietzsche isn’t talking about simple boredom here, which Peter Toohey, who has written one of the most boring books on boredom, defines as “a social emotion of mild disgust produced by a temporarily unavoidable and predictable circumstance.”2 What Nietzsche is talking about is existential boredom, which Toohey cannot fathom.3 (Existential) (but also situational) boredom isn’t laziness, but an excess of energy yearning to be spent elsewhere. It crawls out of your spirit’s deepest and darkest cave when one kind of energy is exhausted and another kind begins to stir. It comes to inform you that something unwelcome is gnawing at your being, chomping on your vitality, eating your time. But only the truly blessed are blessed with the curse of boredom. To be bored by something means that the reciprocity between you and the object has been severed: you no longer have anything worthy to give it, it has nothing worthy to give you, and your attention to it is now forced rather than voluntary. (The bored man is the prisoner of the now that he needs to escape from. The present situation is unwanted, unpleasant, intolerable, et cetera. Note: The “present situation” can be a two-hour workshop and it can also be a whole lifetime.) Boredom is your spirit’s way of transcending the current situation. It is a striving toward a higher or more meaningful mode of being. It is not emptiness but unspent possibility, the tension between what is and what could be, potentialities activated (but pending), a body without organs… When boredom crawls out of your spirit’s cave, it does not know what it wants. All it knows is that it does not want what it has right now. Eventually, it finds a new direction (or an object it desires), and so it crawls towards it. Boredom is a transitional state. It is a movement or, rather, an initiator of movement… But note: Simply moving from one activity to another does not solve boredom. One can pay attention and still be bored. One can be entertained and still be bored. Entertainment is often merely a stimulation without inner engagement or meaning; therefore, not a solution to boredom, but an escape from it. The movement must be from the boring activity to a meaningful activity. “Boredom,” Lars Svendsen writes, “is not a question of work or freedom but of meaning.”4 Boredom, therefore, is a good thing, as Nietzsche implies, and it can be the fertile ground for something meaningful…

Notes and References

[1] Naturally, I do not mean to offend Hungarians. I do not even know where the stereotype comes from. I’m only quoting Nietzsche here. (Nietzsche, Friedrich. Human, All Too Human. Wordsworth Editions Limited, 2014.)

[2] Toohey, Peter. Boredom, A Lively History. Yale University Press, 2012.

[3] A quote from Peter Toohey’s Boredom: “Might not this existential form of boredom, this philosophical or even religious sickness, be best characterized as depression?”

[4] Svendsen, Lars. A Philosophy of Boredom. Reaktion Books, 2011.

Notes and Quotes from Adorno and Horkheimer's Dialectic of Enlightenment

On Art and Advertisement: Notes and Quotes from Dialectic of Enlightenment

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Reading Dialectic of Enlightenment made me accept the sad reality that truly autonomous works, whether artistic or philosophical, are made invisible or infertile by the system.

The artist or philosopher has to first sacrifice his originality (i.e., individuality) to be allowed to enter the field he wants to play in. He has to follow the rules of the game and, occasionally, to refresh the dynamic, (pretend to) break some rules that are pre-approved to be broken by the culture industry. The artist, for instance, to become an artist, must allow his spirit to flow through the workflow (and be shaped by the standards) set by the culture industry, which either approves, absorbs, or marginalizes the works produced. As Adorno and Horkheimer put it, “The whole world is made to pass through the filter of the culture industry.” (So, if you dream on becoming an artist, first get the checklist provided by the culture industry, and then get to work.)

Secondly, it is not enough for the artist (or philosopher) to produce works digestible by the system; one must also self-advertise as self-advertising (in our hyperreal universe) is the underlying premise of existence. When one exits or stops posting on social media, he simply ceases to exist. Without self-advertising, no matter how great or unique one’s voice is, it won’t be heard. (The system is asking, “If you don’t believe in yourself enough to brag and boast about your works, how can you expect others to accept who you’re claiming to be?”)

And unfortunately, my dear friend, the sad reality’s borders extend even farther. It isn’t enough to go through the system submissively and then advertise the (pre-approved) creative work that you produced. No… By the time you get there, you’ll find out that art has been commodified and, therefore, art is no longer art. It’s a mere (entertaining) product that is advertised to be sold. No matter what your art is trying to communicate, there will be a price tag on it and that will be its true value. Other than what the artwork pretends to be saying, what today’s art is screaming is nothing other than, “Please buy me!”

Even “art for art’s sake” is dead.

The (real) art in the culture industry is not art, it is advertisement.

Quotes from Dialectic of Enlightenment

Not to conform means to be rendered powerless, economically and therefore spiritually — to be “self-employed.”

– Adorno & Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment

Not only are the hit songs, stars, and soap operas cyclically recurrent and rigidly invariable types, but the specific content of the entertainment itself is derived from them and only appears to change. The details are interchangeable.

– Adorno & Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment

The triumph of advertising in the culture industry is that consumers feel compelled to buy and use its products even though they see through them.

– Adorno & Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment