Some people are claiming that the impact on work of the impending AI revolution will be a good thing. In their telling, AI will free us from the drudgery that constitutes much of our work today, enabling us to spend our time with the more fulfilling parts of work, such as creativity and human relationships.
The conservative social scientist Arthur Brooks makes that argument in his Free Press column entitled It’s 2028: AI Has Made Your Life Much Happier. Presented as an answer to the Citrini memo that was all doom and gloom about how AI would destroy so many jobs by 2028 that it would bring down the whole economy (we blogged about that here), Brooks says that unlike some other technology, AI will give us happier, more meaningful lives.
He begins by distinguishing between “complex” problems, such those of relationships, love, meaning, faith, suffering, and the other big concerns of human life, and “complicated” problems, the practical side of human life that can be solved by effort, cognition, and technology.
Our work usually involves both: elements of “complex” problems (such as the hows and whys, the relationships with colleagues and customers, the creative dimension of our labors) and the “complicated” problems (such as writing reports and e-mails, configuring equipment, logistical planning, the physical parts of our job).
Brooks says that AI will take over the “complicated” parts of our work–all of the tedium and “busy work”–allowing us to devote ourselves completely to the “complex” parts of our work, leading us all to a greater level of satisfaction and sense of meaning. Brooks says,
AI is different from every other complicated problem to date, and here’s why: It has freed us from a huge amount of our most tedious, quotidian complicated problems—for example, what we need to do to support our families, but certainly wouldn’t do if we didn’t have to. This included nearly every routine intellectual or physical task, all types of data work, endless email correspondence, and—thanks be to God—the vast majority of meetings.
Thus, by 2028, just two years from today, according to Brook’s “thought experiment,” “a new day began to dawn for human flourishing”:
Life’s tiresome, complicated problems no longer had to occupy such a large part of people’s lives. And not just the awful meetings and tedious emails from their old jobs, but also the headaches of personal finance and logistics of family life. Even many big worries receded, as policy-oriented AI mostly stabilized the macroeconomy, making markets blessedly boring.
Today, in 2028, most people affected have realized that they can let technology take care of life’s complicated problems while they fill their abundant time in the complex spaces of life’s deep meaning: falling in love, exploring philosophy and religious faith, appreciating beauty of all types, even coming to understand the nature of their own natural suffering. A new kind of life entrepreneurship has begun to dawn: Real-life friendships flourish, people are having more babies than they did in decades, colleges overflow with philosophy and the humanities, houses of worship are bursting at the seams, and an appreciation of art and nature is growing.
First of all, as Brooks himself says, “A classic error is to seek a complicated solution to a complex problem—which makes the problem worse.” This is what happened with social media, he says, a “complicated” technological solution designed to solve the “complex” problem of loneliness by enhancing human connections. Instead, social media became “a substitute for in-person relationships and wound up [making its users] feeling lonelier and more isolated.” He admits that some people are using AI to do the same thing, but for reasons he doesn’t really explain he believes that people will stop doing that. But will they? Won’t technology that emulates the human mind and human communication make this problem worse?
But set that aside for now. Catholic sociologist Anne Hendershott answers Brook’s thesis by arguing that the very parts of work that Brooks dismisses as drudgery and tedious are where the dignity of labor is to be found. She has written an article for the Catholic Thing entitled The Dignity of Work in Catholic Social Thought. What she says, I think, can also apply in a Lutheran understanding of work and in Christian social thought more broadly:
Brooks imagines a future in which artificial intelligence frees us from what he calls the “complicated” tasks of life. In fact, Brooks treats routine intellectual labor as if it were merely a nuisance – email, drafting, data work, repetitive problem sets, the slow accumulation of skill.
Brooks’s vision begins from a premise that the Catholic tradition has long rejected: that work is primarily a burden to be escaped. In Catholic thought, work is not an obstacle to human flourishing but one of its primary engines. It is the arena in which we cultivate moral character and responsibility.
For a faithful Catholic, work is the daily practice through which we participate in Creation and contribute to the common good. A society that treats work as a problem to be eliminated misunderstands both human nature and the moral structure of ordinary life.
Brooks draws a sharp line between “complicated” tasks (solvable, mechanical) and “complex” ones (relational, existential). He seems to believe that these tasks are separate. But in practice, the two are intertwined.
The complicated work of preparing a lesson, grading a paper, drafting a report, or creating a budget is not separate from the meaning of teaching, mentoring, leading, consulting, strategizing, or forecasting. It is the substance of the vocation itself.
When AI removes the substance, it risks removing the vocation.
She alludes to the work of teaching and learning, which I’d like to go into in more detail. We teachers tend to enjoy interacting with students in the classroom, while disliking grading papers and preparing lesson plans. We are being told that AI could do the grading, the research for class preparation, putting together lesson plans, and writing tests.
On the student side, Hendershott tells about Einstein, an AI program that”logs into Canvas [an online education program] every day, watches lectures, reads essays, writes papers, participates in discussions, and submits your homework automatically.” Not only that, as I learned on the Einstein website, it will also do the online teachers‘ work:
By simply uploading a video, PowerPoint presentation, or document, educators can instantly create a fully immersive virtual course. Our advanced AI system automatically segments the content into logical mini-courses, generates relevant quizzes, voice-over (where necessary) and deploys an intelligent AI tutor to guide students through their learning journey.
AI can spare teachers the drudgery of the work of teaching. It can spare students the drudgery of reading assignments, writing papers, participating in class discussions, and doing homework. Teachers don’t have to teach, and students don’t have to learn.
Writing, for example, is a “complicated” task that many people–whether teachers, students, scholars, managers, or pastors–find tedious and difficult, and it is something that AI can effortlessly emulate. But writing cannot be separated from the “complex” task of thinking. Gathering thoughts and information, doing research and making sense of it, takes place in the process of writing. Writers seldom have a body of knowledge in their heads, which they then simply write down. Rather, writing embodies the mental process of reflection and communication. And communication is a relational task, in which one human being connects with other human beings. Other “busy work” that AI can eliminate has similar value: planning, research, answering e-mails, sorting out logistical details, and even meetings.
Hendershott adds,
The greater mistake in Brooks’ “AI Happiness Theory” is the assumption that leisure, rather than work, is the primary engine of human flourishing. The Catholic tradition has always insisted on the opposite: that meaningful work orders the soul toward purpose.
As far back as 1963, Josef Pieper warned in his book, Leisure: The Basis of Culture , that a culture obsessed with escaping work eventually loses the capacity for genuine leisure – the kind of leisure that flows from an interior life that has been shaped by purpose and discipline.
When we treat work as a problem to be solved rather than a practice that forms us, we end up with neither: not the leisure we were promised, and certainly not the dignity we abandoned by allowing machines to do the work we should be doing.
“The task ahead is not to escape work but to reclaim its dignity,” she concludes, “so that we remain capable of realizing the meaning and joy that no technology can create.”
Illustration: Work Related Stress by Ciphr.com – https://www.flickr.com/photos/193749286@N04/51419721263/, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=110072597
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