Do we really want AI to make working optional?

Much of the current conversation about artificial intelligence and the future of work rests on a seemingly straightforward assumption: work is something human beings would rather not have to do.

Elon Musk has taken this argument particularly far, suggesting that advances in artificial intelligence and robotics could usher in an age of such extraordinary abundance that work itself may become optional. In this imagined future, machines produce what we need, material scarcity diminishes and people are freed from the necessity of earning a living.

Economically, some version of this may eventually prove possible. Psychologically, however, there is a rather significant problem with it.

Human beings do not work simply because we need money.

Work gives structure to our lives. It places demands upon us, provides relationships, status, competence, responsibility and a sense of progression. It locates us within society and, perhaps most importantly, gives us the experience that something beyond ourselves requires our presence and participation.

Take this away and the question is not simply what people will do all day, but what will make them feel necessary?

Freud and the psychological importance of work

Freud is often associated with the idea that psychological health rests upon our capacity “to love and to work”. There is some uncertainty as to whether he ever expressed the idea in precisely this neat aphoristic form, but it nevertheless captures something fundamental in psychoanalytic thinking.

For Freud, work was important partly because it binds us to reality.

We begin life in a state in which our needs and desires dominate our psychological world. Growing up involves gradually discovering that reality does not organise itself around those desires. We must tolerate frustration, postpone gratification, negotiate with other people and accept that the external world places limits upon us. Work continually reinforces this encounter with reality.

A patient, a customer, a classroom, a piece of wood, a business, a garden or a machine makes demands upon us. Something has to be done and it has to be done sufficiently well. Reality, unlike fantasy, pushes back. This can be frustrating, of course, but it is also psychologically developmental.

Through work we discover that we can affect the world whilst simultaneously learning that the world is not under our omnipotent control. We develop competence through encountering our limitations rather than simply imagining our capacities.

This is one reason genuine self-esteem tends to emerge through experience rather than affirmation. There is an important difference between being told that we are capable and discovering that we can actually do something.

Employment and work are not the same thing

It is important here to distinguish work from employment.

There is nothing inherently psychologically enriching about spending forty hours a week doing something repetitive, exploitative or meaningless simply because we require a salary. If AI and robotics can eliminate much of this, few people will mourn its disappearance. But eliminating the economic necessity of employment is quite different from eliminating the human need to work.

Work in the psychological sense is considerably broader: raising children is work, caring for elderly parents is work, writing, gardening, building, studying, cooking, volunteering, practising a musical instrument and participating in one’s community can all constitute work.

What they share is not payment. They involve applying ourselves to something outside ourselves that is embedded in the social collective.

What happens when nobody needs you?

Imagine a future in which machines can write better than most writers, diagnose more accurately than most doctors, program better than most programmers and eventually perform much of the skilled physical work currently undertaken by human beings. The economic consequences would be enormous; so would the narcissistic consequences.

Losing a job because a machine can perform it does not merely mean losing an income. It would mean losing purpose and self-esteem. It would leave us with the existential question: What am I for? A universal basic income, or whatever mechanism an abundant technological society develops for distributing wealth, does not answer this question.

The problem with endless leisure

The fantasy accompanying many visions of technological abundance is that human beings will finally be free to enjoy themselves.

People may paint, travel, read, study, exercise, spend time with their children and pursue interests for which working life previously left insufficient room. There is no reason to assume that everybody deprived of employment would become psychologically unwell. But there is equally little reason to assume that permanent leisure would produce universal flourishing.

Leisure derives part of its meaning from its relationship to obligation. The weekend feels different because Monday exists. A holiday is pleasurable in no small part because ordinary life has temporarily been suspended. Remove obligation altogether and leisure can gradually cease to feel like leisure.

We already see something of this in people who unexpectedly lose the structures around which their lives have been organised. Retirement can be liberating for some people and profoundly destabilising for others. Redundancy often produces psychological consequences that extend considerably beyond financial anxiety. People lose routines, colleagues, identities and a sense of usefulness.

An abundant society might therefore discover a strange paradox: people could possess more material freedom than any previous generation whilst struggling increasingly with purposelessness.

Work as containment

Psychoanalysis offers another way of understanding the importance of work. Human beings are not simply rational creatures seeking comfort. We are also driven by aggression, sexuality, envy, competition, dependency and narcissistic needs. Civilisation has always required ways of containing these forces and directing them towards socially productive ends. Freud called this process sublimation.

Work is one of the principal ways in which human beings transform instinctual energy into something constructive. We compete, build, create, repair, discover, organise and care. Our aggression can become ambition; our narcissism can become mastery; our desire for recognition can encourage achievement. For example, a sadistic drive can direct a person either into criminality or into becoming a surgeon.

If millions of people were suddenly freed from the requirement to work, those underlying human drives would not disappear with their employment contracts, but would find somewhere else to go.

For many people that may mean creativity, relationships, learning and community. For others it could mean addiction, grievance, extreme forms of identity and belonging, aggression or retreat into increasingly immersive virtual worlds. Material abundance is therefore no guarantee of social stability.

A population can be economically provided for and psychologically dislocated at the same time, and this is something we are already seeing in the West with rising mental health problems, particularly amongst the young.

We have already lost many of the structures that contained us

For much of human history identity was substantially inherited rather than invented. People were embedded within family, locality, religion, social class, profession, trade and, very often, land. Not to mention sexual orientation and gender identity.

Those structures could be extraordinarily restrictive; paradoxically, however, structures constrain us precisely because they embed us in a collective meaning.

Increasingly we are expected to construct our own identities, determine our own values, choose our own communities and discover our own meaning. In some cases this can be freeing, but this has brought with it a collective loss of protective meaning and purpose.

Work remains one of the few powerful organising structures that modern society has retained.

We ask people what they do remarkably soon after meeting them. This is not simply an enquiry about how they earn money. Occupation tells us something about where somebody sits in the social world. If AI progressively removes this structure as well, we may discover how much psychological weight it had quietly been carrying.

Perhaps the future is not a world without work?

The mistake may therefore be imagining that technological progress should ultimately liberate humanity from work. A better aspiration might be to liberate people from meaningless employment whilst preserving meaningful work.

If machines eventually become capable of providing most of what human beings materially require, society will face a challenge considerably more complicated than deciding how the resulting wealth should be distributed.

We will need institutions, communities and cultures through which people can contribute, develop competence, assume responsibility and experience themselves as necessary to others.

Perhaps people will work fewer hours. Perhaps caring, craftsmanship, education, community participation and creative activity will acquire greater importance. Perhaps occupations currently poorly rewarded because they produce little conventional economic value will come to be understood differently.

But I doubt that a psychologically healthy future consists of billions of people consuming unlimited entertainment while machines attend to reality on their behalf. Human beings need more than comfort and hedonism to face life.

Freud understood something that technological utopianism can easily overlook. Civilisation is not simply a mechanism for producing sufficient goods to satisfy human wants, but a structure through which unruly, conflicted human beings find ways of living alongside one another. Work has always been one of the foundations of that structure.

Artificial intelligence may eventually solve much of the economic problem of work. If it does, we may discover that the psychological problem of not working is considerably harder to solve.