Why AI will not lead to a "post labor" economy
I've been a remote worker for over a decade.
I have been blessed to work for companies where remote first was the regnant philosophy for hiring and promotion, long before Covid.
Software companies and consultancies had an advantage because they could embrace non-traditional work arrangements for several reasons.
First, there was the desire to use technology to help their business and their customers. Before the advent of AI, this meant hiring the best people and turning them loose because the role was about work, not sitting in traffic for hours a day. People who are not burdened by a stressful trek in traffic show up to work – ready to work. They are usually way more grateful to their company because the company has given them a boon – time. Time is money, and it's also quality of life. The average American worker does not understand this at all, or if they do, they may feel powerless to obtain it. Some genuinely do not want it because they find frequent contact with other humans to be necessary fuel for their existence. Other people are energizing.
Before AI and Covid, these progressive outliers in the remote office space were looking for competitive advantage and saw no reason to isolate the search for talent to a 45-minute commute distance to a physical office. As I've mentioned before in other posts, "Where do you live?" was usually the first question in technical interviews in the old days. It wasn't, "Tell me how you would approach this problem...," or, "What kinds of interesting challenges have you solved recently in your career?"
When companies hire on this basis, they end up with very substandard business cultures populated by low-quality workers. The tasks could be better performed by folks living in other parts of the country, especially in rural or small towns, where quality of life can be higher because work is in a slower, less stressful urban setting. It's a fact that talented people – if given any choice – will pick places that are more livable. Vermont on a decent income? Sure! A quiet area of the Pacific Northwest, away from Sea-Tac? Of course!
When Covid came around, remote work became necessary in the mind of many business leaders since we were sold images of dead bodies stacked up in the street by our "health care" officials. We now know, of course, that Covid was not a threat to anyone save the elderly or those with pre-existing conditions. Still, the great experiment was tried, and depending on whom you ask, the remote office was a blessing – or a curse. Employees liked it; middle managers hated it.
I don't wish to belabor the pros and cons of remote work in this post. It's largely an irrelevant issue, as those companies that were already established in the remote-office mindset will remain so, while the many who tried it (and failed) will go back to the butts-in-seat model.
There are reasons why remote offices fail with certain companies, and it has little or nothing to do with the model per se, and more to do with the empire-building of corporate departments and heavy commercial real estate investments, especially by larger corporations. Add the political angle, where government sees mass commuting as a form of tax harvesting of humans. Take away the cattle; the parasites who make up the "public service" sector are deprived of blood – <<smacks lips>> – precious blood – to drink.
This is precisely why a general AI, were it ever to roll out, would disrupt the very fabric of the mammalian dominance hierarchy.
St. Augustine's libido dominandi – the lust to control, to rule, to wield power over another – is probably more intoxicating than sex and undergirds the entire social system we have. As an introvert, I've never craved it. Well, I've craved the power to make screaming kids stop being a nuisance in public, but this is a very unrefined form of the libido. Having ears hurt by a squealing, angry child is reactive anyway and not what Augustine had in mind when he discussed it.
But the system we have of control, of being able to rationalize making humans who could do their jobs from a remote place, despite the explosion in technology centered on communication, sit in a car and then in an office, reveals the lie that is progress. As high-speed internet improves, as high-definition cameras and connected, super-powerful devices proliferate, we are required to continue on with the business of sitting in metal boxes to make it to another box, the cubicle, in a place that is overpriced, falling apart, and stressful.
When ChatGPT became a thing a few years ago, various figures came out, like YouTuber David Shapiro, who began painting a picture of the "post-labor" economy. The idea was that we would all be let loose to go home, collect our UBI checks, and pursue our own passions and interests. The failure to recognize libido dominandi is a critical weakness in most political theory and happy-path economic models. Shapiro is, like me, an introvert, and we sometimes overlook the obvious things that extroverts take for granted as "normal."
Original Sin is a Christian doctrine, and while I do not subscribe to its literal background, I recognize in its core a very profound truth about human nature, or the human predicament, however you want to frame it. Buddhism has the kilesas and these, like the sinful nature of man post-Fall as presented in Genesis, is a recognition of a deep pattern of inclinations, of unwholesome dispositions that make life very painful. Even the best life lived is filled with disappointment. The life of heavenly beings is the most deluded of all because they can never really see dukkha clearly. There is a saying that if one could perceive dukkha – see its true face for just a moment, a fraction of a second – one would obtain enlightenment.
Most humans will gladly avoid the gauntlet cast by either religion as painful truths, maybe superstitions, even as they reveal themselves from moment to moment, if we but pause and look. I'm not conflating Original Sin with Buddhism here, only pointing out some concordance between the two. This might be summed up: "Things are not supposed to be this way, and the world kind of sucks for most of us." Religion has at its core the need to make sense of pain, suffering, and death, to provide a transcendent remedy.
There are certain personality types who fail at remote office. They can't manage themselves, their time, their responsibilities when given the freedom. They drift away from the computers and smartphones, end up walking the dog for three hours a day, or playing Call of Duty, and so on. These creatures require the "structured" environment of square, bland cube farms, of people watching over them and telling them what to do, when to do it, and so on. I've known a few honest souls who admitted they would still go into the office because, without the structure and routine, their work would suffer.
"Oh man, I'm not one of those people..."
They're out there, everywhere. And they are the food for libido dominandi systems, not because they are bad, but because they are the majority, probably the "normal" ones. Humans are social creatures by nature.
So if you think David Shapiro's "post-labor" world of economic freedom, of Star Trek-levels of abundance, is probably unlikely, you're correct. Humans in a Super AI world will not be allowed to draw nice UBI checks and "manage" themselves. The human animal, the form created by a long biological process of evolution, was not designed for freedom and self-direction. There have always been oddballs who would spend a lot of time on their own, but humans are social creatures, as I said. We need one another to survive, and the life of the ascetic, the wanderer, is a harsh and lonely one, which we naturally abhor. Working from home can be a kind of asceticism, a hermetic life.
I'm not arguing against freedom and personal prosperity. I've managed myself well for decades and have done okay, but there aren't many people like me. I've had to accept that most adults are just overgrown children who are lost, the inevitable fodder for control systems if they cannot learn to self-direct. The Super AI world just means they become the property of a few oligarchs who sit atop the pile, working the joystick and moving with the power of a god, shaping and controlling human life. The need to submit and to place the burden of existence in the hands of a "power" is the root of theistic religions. It's an incredibly powerful draw, and to dismiss it is to misunderstand most social arrangements. A god sitting atop the hierarchy meshes with our basic mammalian brain structure. Most of us who fall into the worker-bee category delight in tasks that don't involve making big strategic decisions or mollifying the dainty sensitivities of the too-sensitive.
This is the corollary of libido dominandi: The need to submit to an external thing, object, or being, to relinquish anxiety over one's fate to someone else who seems skillful, confident, and imbued with a vision of survival. The loud politician with a plan to make the country great again, if he's insistent enough, can win an election because most of us want someone who is confident – even when wrong – since our own self-trust is low. Big egos go places even when they don't have the brains or EQ to match it.
Telling humans to go home, build their own lives under their own steam, is a kind of terror-inducing proposition in a near-future AGI world. It's much worse than telling someone, "Hey, you need to work from home, manage your own time and keep up good communication with your team until this pandemic blows over..." When the latter fails, you call them back to the office or send them into poverty and homelessness (in the extreme case).
Many companies failed to maintain remote work, and return-to-office (RTO) is the future for them, even as the economy continues to worsen and the labor market shrinks. Many IT professionals who got used to the remote office were forced by RTO to drive for hours every day, pay for an extra car and insurance, and sit in front of a screen to participate in... virtual meetings. In other words, to perform the same exact activities at their computer that they did while working in their dining room under Covid.
Bill Gates recently conceded that climate change is not going to have that much impact on the planet. 2026 is just a few short days away as I write this, and the 2030 predictions of burning hellfire from global warming, droughts, mass starvation, and so on have, like earlier dire prophecies, failed to materialize. It seems Gates and the elites understand this, and they also recognize that AI's massive water and energy needs will trump any calls to reduce carbon emissions. The LLMs caught the global oligarchy off guard, and it's now clear that they did not account for the early appearance of LLMs in their vision for future tech and society. The pre-chatbot Grand Narrative was supposed to be about a new techno-superstructure aimed at reshaping society in the face of man-made carbon pollution and attendant planetary overheating.
The data centers continue to spread across the country, consuming massive amounts of energy and water and imposing higher costs on everyone. It's okay, though, because it's AI and all that shit about climate change; well, it's not important anymore. Bill Gates is bidding to reactivate Three Mile Island as a nuclear power plant.
The office of prophet in Abrahamic religions was given to someone willing to speak hard moral truths to individuals and their societies. Personal morality was linked to the collective's health and well-being; if you treat the widow poorly, others will. When others do so, who will take care of you in hard times? In the modern world, social sin and collective guilt have replaced the urgency for one's own moral reform. Social sin – "society made me do it!" – overtakes the need to practice and cultivate sila – virtue.
AI exposes the scam of climate change, and talk of carbon footprints and so on has declined drastically in the last couple of years. Watching the full retreat of global capitalism from its plans for an ultimate control grid – carbon taxes, credits, and so on – in the face of AI is, of course, not a victory for the independent-minded, self-regulating person who just wants to be left alone.
What we call Artificial Intelligence, as Sir Roger Penrose avers, is anything but. AI does not reason, feel, imagine, or create anything at all. Nothing. It is adequate at synthesizing information in response to particular prompts based on sophisticated training models which rest on probabilities, but AI will, like most humans, never have initiative or self-ownership, self-agency. I'm convinced by my own peculiar set of life experiences that humans are mostly biological machines. In certain configurations of reality, the possibility of waking up from the machine-rendered world opens to a few people who walk through the door. Or at least peek in – and the glimpse they get is enough to direct them for a few more lifetimes. Still, humans are much more complicated as biological machines than any AI will ever be.
These biological machines are programmed by evolution to function in specific, predictable ways. I've not figured out from a dhamma perspective what the truth is. "Pure consciousness" is of course all the rage in alternative circles now, becoming the new Atman, the new deity to replace whatever Yahwist variants were around in most of the countries of the world. AI and the pure consciousness it represents will produce a very different world. Not better, probably worse in some ways because we lack any historical models to guide us.
AI is at this point a superior monitor. Whatever it is fed, it can use to identify patterns and trends. Many will think of a future where people are disappeared to dark dungeons or freezing ice sheets on the ass end of nowhere. In reality, AI will be used much more subtly to shape opinions without being over the top. Yes, it will monitor dissidents and keep tabs on them, but life will just become more inconvenient, more miserable for them. Most of the human throng will still be commuting to jobs they aren't needed for. Visceral images of human suffering, like those seen from Gaza, still have the power to evoke strong reactions. It's not the velvet glove of a streamlined, IoT-backed AI control system, but rather the replay of older mass-killing tropes. Gore, blood, pieces of humans scattered over a blasted-out ruin.
I sense a new pandemic on the horizon, coinciding with the problem of humans. We are a big issue right now because, while fertility has dropped globally and there are parts of the civilized world where towns are being reclaimed by the wilderness and wild animals, there remain too many of us to keep entangled plausibly in work when AI and robots take over production. We can imagine a system in which work to produce goods and services is replaced by mandatory community hours which consume time, forcing you to live in a city where you report to a community of "caring individuals" who give you various tasks related to personal development. This isn't self-improvement, of course, because the very name shows agency and ownership of oneself. I am improving my-self. If I am placed in a new set of forced activities for self-improvement, then it's just another form of conditioning being planned and executed by a system.
No, this future world will be something far worse than an office job in a cube farm. You'll probably be forced to study banal topics, participate in group therapy classes, conduct class projects on various distasteful subjects. All of it will be developed by the very best AI, of course, with the consultation and vision of human thought leaders.
The people living in this new system will be the survivors of great calamities, the kind that will take care of the state's infinite financial obligations. Some might call this the Great Reset.
