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LM: #380: In defense of drudgery
Every time we make a thing easier, we lose some crucial element that was wrapped up within it.
I remember many mornings in San Francisco being struck by irony on my way to work. As I passed the open windows of a gym, I heard pumping music and the amplified shouts of a spinning instructor. The students were riding bikes, exercising while going nowhere. I was riding my bike, exercising while going somewhere.
As AI and robotics advance, we will stop having to do some things. At the same time, we’ll stop doing some things that are good for us.
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I’m finding that with these developing powers I now opt for many things I would have once considered drudgery.
I’m growing food, making soap, cooking new recipes, and doing plumbing.
Now that the informational bottlenecks that prevented me from doing these before have been widened, doing more things in the physical world has changed my perspective on other chores, such as laundry, washing dishes, and cleaning.
So when I see a video of a housekeeper android, my immediate reaction is, Damn, I want one of those!
But then I realize that in some version of the future, it’s not the physical drudgery of keeping a household running that we outsource.
The other day, my water distiller broke. The old me would have just spent $125 to buy a new one. Instead I asked Claude to guide me through troubleshooting.
Instead of sitting in an office chair, clicking a one-click-order button, then sitting in an office chair even more to figure out how to make an extra $125, I went into town.
It was a bad capacitor. I didn’t know what that was but I walked around and asked people because you can’t find many businesses on Google Maps. I found an electronics-repair shop, where they soldered in a new one. Parts and labor: $1.25.
My distiller works like new. I got to move around and use my hands and body, and isn’t that what they’re for? I used my mind, but didn’t have to go through the mental drudgery of learning electrical engineering to know it could be a broken capacitor.
Given the trajectory of the past several decades, we’re biased to believe that automation will next lift us out of physical drudgery, but it’s not done lifting us out of mental drudgery. Maybe it’s actually been heretofore pushing us into it.
Maybe we’re made for moving around and doing things in the physical world and shouldn’t be so eager to outsource it to an android.
Aphorism: “There is no habit you will value so much as that of walking far without fatigue.” —Thomas Jefferson
Book: In This Economy (Amazon) is Kyla Scanlon’s fun introduction to money and markets.
Best,
David
