Architectonic Labor

Adam Smith’s famous 18th-century pin factory visit gave him a glimpse of the future. Workers performing fragmentary tasks could produce tens of thousands of pins a day while one worker by himself might not be able to make even a single pin. The productive benefits were too obvious to resist. If the factory owner divides the labor in his factory into its smallest components, then production would multiply beyond measure. And multiply it did. The principle Smith observed would generate more material prosperity for society over the next two centuries than in all of human history before it. But Smith also saw a cost. The worker who spends his life performing “a few simple operations … naturally loses, therefore, the habit of such [exertion of his mind], and generally becomes as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human creature to become.” It was clear to him that the division of labor would enrich us and diminish our human faculties at the same time.

Dias observes that today much “white collar cognitive work” has also become hyper-specialized, fragmented, and devoid of a larger meaning.  Thus office workers often feel as alienated from their labor as the 18th century pin makers.

In contrast, Dias cites what the French political theorist Yves R. Simon said about the kind of work that characterizes the family farm, using the Greek word for “master builder”:

Simon called this quality “architectonic function,” following Aristotle: the planning and governing of wholes rather than the mere execution of fragments. The farmer doesn’t execute tasks assigned by someone else. He plans the year. He reads the weather and the soil. He adjusts to nature’s resistance. He bears the consequences of his decisions. And he integrates everything he does around the needs of his household: real human goods rooted in the concrete life of his family. The work was communal as well as individual. The whole family labored together across seasons and generations, and the farmer’s daily encounter with the land kept him grounded in the physical world and its rhythms.

Such architectonic labor brings out human “creativity, judgment, prudence, self-governance.”  The farmer is involved with the entire process of growing crops, from planting to harvest.  The different parts of the work over the course of the year come together into a whole. Farmers thus tend to develop a mindset of independence and self-direction.  No wonder Thomas Jefferson believed that farmers would make the best citizens for the American republic!  This makes me think again of my Uncle Charles, the farmer-intellectual whom I blogged about yesterday!

Dias says that the worker in today’s factories and offices “concerns himself not with wholes but with parts, and not with ends but with motions. He is disconnected from the final product. His reasoning faculties go unused and his creativity is not merely unrewarded but actively suppressed. In Simon’s terms, he becomes a worker of parts rather than wholes, directed by distant experts and deprived of self-governance in his labor. He executes someone else’s plan without ever exercising the judgment required to form one of his own.”

It occurred to me that some occupations today are still “architectonic.”  Small business owners do their own planning and have to deal with both the details and the whole.  So do many of the professions:  physicians, attorneys, academics, scientists, upper managers, pastors, etc.  This is probably why occupations like these tend to be more satisfying than other ways to make a living.  And why those in them sometimes say that “this isn’t my job, it’s my vocation.”

Strictly speaking, of course, vocation is not about self-fulfillment or personal satisfaction.  It’s about loving and serving one’s neighbors.  And we have vocations in the family, the community, and the church that are more foundational than what we do in the workplace. (Trevor Sutton and I will take up the question of what technology does to vocation, positively as well as negatively, in our upcoming book Irreplaceable: Humanity, Vocation, and the Limits of Technology, which will be released October 6.)

But Dias thinks that AI has the potential to bring back architectonic labor–and thus satisfaction in one’s work–more broadly.

AI is becoming a tool that lets people plan, direct, and execute complex projects, not by replacing their judgment but by amplifying their capacity to act on it. In a world where automation frees people from menial tasks, AI can help them pursue and achieve more ambitious projects of their own.

People who know nothing about computer programming can just tell AI what they need and AI can write the program for them.  “What once required years of specialized training now lies within reach of anyone willing to learn how to direct these new instruments.” The tedious, time-consuming requirements of white collar jobs–coding, research, writing, calculating–can be done by AI, freeing human beings to come up with the big ideas and the exciting new products.  “This is democratized intelligence, available to anyone,” says Dias. “The person selects the ends and AI executes the means. For the first time since the Industrial Revolution began, we may have instruments that could make architectonic work widely accessible again.”

Here I am skeptical.  The world needs lots of farmers.  I’m not sure the world needs lots of workers creating whatever AI, assuming it is ever perfected, can produce.  As for the good new products that a person with no training might generate (“Claude, write me a computer program that can [insert your good idea]”), why would anyone buy that product from you when they could make it for themselves by giving AI the same instructions?

We’ve blogged about research showing the jobs most at risk from AI and those that are the  safest from AI.  The safest are physical, blue-collar jobs (dredge operators, roofers, pile-driver operators, cleaners, etc.).  Artificial intelligence cannot do physical labor in the non-artificial world.  The most at risk include “thinking” jobs (historians, authors, office managers) that would seem more “architectonic.”  I’ve heard it said that with AI we won’t need as many surgeons. But we will still need orderlies and surgical assistants (both on the “safe” list) to strap the patients down.  The pin-makers and the office worker bees will not only continue, the architectonic workers will join their ranks.

My fear is that AI will make the worker less architectonic, not more.  “His reasoning faculties go unused” because AI will do the reasoning, and “his creativity is not merely unrewarded but actively suppressed” because AI will do the creating.

Illustration:  AI Employee Engagement via eMedia AI,  CC BY-NC 4.0