#28 - What we will

Art, AI and our free time

In his 1931 book An Essay on Typography Eric Gill wrote that “while it is clear that the determining principle of an industrial world… is such as we have described—the perfection of mechanical manufacture, the obliteration of all intellectual responsibility in the workman, the relegation of all humane interests to non-working hours & the consequent effort to reduce working hours to a minimum—it is equally clear that the outward appearance of our world shows at present very little of the principle which inspires it.” Instead he notes

One the one hand is the dream of those who imagine a perfectly organised system of mass production; every article of use made to a good standard pattern; a perfected system of marketing and transport, whether Communist or Capitalist; the hours of labour, both for masters & men, reduced to a few hours a day, & a long leisure time devoted to amusement & love-making, even to the pursuit of the thing which they call Art—it will be encouraged by the state, & doubtless prizes will be offered…

We are it would seem still very much dreaming of this. Around the same time that Gill wrote and published this essay, John Maynard Keynes—economist and author of The Economic Consequences of the Peace—wrote in an essay titled “ Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren” that by 2030, the likelihood of the necessity of the long work-week would have passed and that the desire among some to continue to work would be satisfied by a fifteen-hour work week. He wrote that

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 anything, we might be working more now. It is in fact harder to separate the work self from the personal self, with the rise of smart phone technology and the possibility of remote working.

I am trying to gather my thoughts on all of these things, not least in the wake of the emergence of the incredibly powerful generative AI we have seen emerge in the past twelve months or so. There is something perverse in the idea that we have turned over to AI the ability to create images and texts, while we continuously feed the ever hungry algorithm that increasingly directs our desires and reinforces our sense of self under what Shoshana Zuboff termed a number of years ago now Surveillance Capitalism.

In the past number of years I have read a lot of different books—some new, some old—that touch in various ways on these themes. While there is understandable fear about people automating their jobs out of existence, something which is longer only going to affect only those who did repetitive task-based jobs, as has been the way in the history of industrial development, but is also increasingly likely to impact those whose jobs required tacit knowledge, or “judgement”: doctors, accountants, programmers, etc. etc. As Daniel Susskind notes:

If machines do not need to copy human intelligence to be highly capable, the vast gaps in science’s current understanding of intelligence matter far less than is commonly supposed… if machines do not need to replicate human intelligence to be highly capable, there is no reason to think that what human beings are currently able to do represents a limit on what future machines might accomplish.

Susskind, in his book A World Without Work, notes that there are a number of mismatches that exist—skills, identity, place—to create the clear problems of the current employment market: that there are many high-skilled jobs and those considered (wrongly in my view) as “low” or “semi”-skilled jobs, with not much in the middle. But many of the jobs in the middle, are those that undoubtedly fit into what anthropologist David Graeber characterised as “bullshit jobs”. One of the problems with the proliferation of such “bullshit jobs”—jobs that often garner high wages but offer little in the way of satisfaction—is that it has led to two apparently contradictory states held simultaneously, according to Graeber, in what he calls the “paradox of modern work”:

1. Most people’s sense of dignity and self-worth is caught up in working for a living.

2. Most people hate their jobs.

Here lies the problem we face with automation. On the one hand, many people will undoubtedly be free to pursue something else if the job they have—and hate—is automated out of existence.

On the other hand, people are faced with the dilemma Keynes pointed to for people when faced with the challenge of “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.”

Visions of a post-work world are necessary and can be found. Some of them are even quite old. Paul Lafargue’s The Right to be Lazy was published in 1883, and was reissued as a NYRB classic in late 2022. Lafargue’s work concerns itself with the idea that being unproductive is one of the best available ways for us to resist what was then the still emerging industrial capitalist societies whose logic still dominates our lives today. He wrote about how in Greek antiquity, Antipater wrote a poem celebrating the invention of the water mill for grinding grain as a tool of emancipation for enslaved women, but

Sadly, the leisure the pagan poet envisioned has not come to pass. The blind passion and perverse murderousness of work has transformed the machine from an instrument of emancipation into an instrument that enslaves free beings: its productivity impoverishes them… Every machinated minute…equals hundred hours of a working woman’s labour or, alternatively, every minute of machine work gives the worker ten days rest.

Lafargue noted that

As the machine perfects and eliminates man’s work with ever-increasing swiftness and precision, the worker, instead of extending his periods of rest accordingly, redoubles his ardour, as if he wished to vie with the machine. What an absurd and murderous competition!

And from Lafargue in the 1880s we can go all the way to the present and a book like Jenny Odell’s How to Do Nothing, a book which challenges us in a variety of ways to consider essentially what we do with our free time and how to resist what we call the attention economy.

Discussing the emergence of the battle for the eight hour workday which was often argued for under the banner of “eight hours for work, eight hours for rest, eight hours for what we will”, Odell notes that today we find ourselves:

In a situation where our every waking moment has become the time in which we make our living, and when we submit even our leisure for numerical evaluation via likes on Facebook and Instagram, constantly checking on its performance like one checks a stock, monitoring the ongoing development of our personal brand, time becomes an economic resource that we can no longer justify spending on ‘nothing’. It provides no return on investment; it is simply too expensive. This is a cruel confluence of time and space: just as we lose noncommercial spaces, we also see all of our owntime and our actions as potentially commercial. Just as public space gives way to faix public retail spaces or weird corporate privatized parks, so we are sold the idea of compromised leisure, a fremium leisure that is a very far cry from ‘what we will’.

This is all very much in mind after visiting the enormous Norsk Industuriarbeidermuseum at Rjukan this summer with Miriam, where among the many exhibits dealing with the sabotage of the heavy water plant at the hydroelectric plant there during the Nazi occupation, there was also an exhibition about the Rjukan plants role in the fight for the eight-hour workday in Norway.

There, the workers who had organised themselves, took it into their own hands to finish work after an eight hour day in 1918 in protest at the gross inflation being experienced in Norway during the First World War, and forced the owners of the plant into accepting an eight-hour work day a year before it became the law nationally in 1919.

This discussion seems to be especially current, and a new movie has just come out in Norway, Sulis 1907, which tells the story of mineworkers at Sulitjelma organising themselves. Indeed, the miners of Sulitjelma would in the 1920s argue for the first time for the six-hour day. In the 1930s, this idea was revived in part because it would mean spreading work around in an especially tight economic situation during the Depression.

An important discussion is ongoing around these ideas: we need perhaps to move beyond the idea of how many hours a week we work (many tasks being automated making them quicker) but also, in a world of increased blended and remote work, as well as flexitime, it may be that for many greater job-sharing, a three or four-day week as much as an eight-hour or even six-hour, five-day week may be the way forward.

As more work is automated, and as AI impinges further into more and more areas, it will be important to think more seriously about “job guarantees”, some form of (universal) basic income as an addition to—and not a replacement for—current social welfare systems. Rather than resist the machine, instead as Richard Sennet suggests in The Craftsman “The enlightened way to use a machine is to judge its powers, fashion its uses, in light of our own limits rather than the machine’s potential. We should not compete against the machine.”

If we embrace the emancipatory possibility of the machine then, what are we facing?

A world completely without work seems unlikely—there will always be things to be done—but most seem to agree that in the coming years the nature of work is bound to change. Guy Standing, a strong proponent of basic income, writes of the fourth technological revolution that

All levels of jobs and occupation are being affected. The resultant economic uncertainty is creating widespread insecurity; this supports calls for a basic income as the only feasible way of restoring economic security, to keep that uncertainty under some form of social control.

In a world where we might work less, and work differently, we would need to think anew of how to use our time. Instead of using automation and AI to create artworks: images, sounds, texts, and to do carework (by which I mean everything from teaching to medical care) we should be thinking instead of how to use these tools to free us up to spend more time with our children, our families, our elderly and our sick, making and creating, from other less necessary work. To do work where person to person connection matters. As David Graeber noted in the final section of Bullshit Jobs:

Even a modest Basic Income program could become a stepping-stone toward the most profound transformation of all: to unlatch work from livelihood entirely.

So the question remains for us to ask and answer, if we had more than the nominal eight hours a day for “what we will”, what might we do?

On the Bookwheel

Eric Gill, An Essay on Typography, Penguin Modern Classics: 2013

David Graeber, Bullshit Jobs, Penguin: 2019

Paul Lafargue (trans.Alex Andrisse), The Right to be Lazy and other Writings, NYRB Classics: 2023

Jenny Odell, How to do Nothing: Resisting the AnIttention Economy, Melville House: 2019

Richard Sennet, The Craftsman, Penguin: 2009

Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams, Inventing the Future: Postcapitalism and a World Without Work, Verso: 2016

Guy Standing, Basic Income: And How We Can Make It Happen, Pelican: 2017

Daniel Susskind, A World Without Work, Penguin: 2021