But I couldn’t find anyone writing like that. So, in a fit of insanity, decided to start a blog series like “whose university?” back in 2010. Hence – futurelology.
We are starting to encounter serious bugs with the idea of “work” as what human being should be doing. Humankind is basically engaged in a long price war with machines, and this is a war that it cannot win. It is already unusual (looking globally) to see the work of one human produce enough value to maintain a decent standard of life, and this enroaching trend is not likely to reverse itself any time soon.
We are now living in a global state that has been structured for the benefit of non-human entities with non-human goals.
The first industrial revolution begun when it was established that machines were more efficient at manual labour than people. This led to a new area of work, the generation of energy in forms that machines could use, which dominated much of the 20th century.
The second industrial revolution, which began in the middle years of the 20th century, is occurring as machines are becoming more efficient than people at intellectual labour. This too has led to a new area of work, the generation of knowledge (in the form of data) in forms that machines can use.
The third industrial revolution is beginning to occur as machines become more efficient than people at social labour. It can be imagined that this will lead to a new area of work, the generation of people in forms that machines can use.
We live in an age in which familiar restraints are being kicked away, and foundations snatched from under us.
Work is humanity’s primary means of defining value, so the devaluing of work leads to a devaluing of humanity. Both Marx and Adam Smith, writing at the dawn of the first industrial age, drew a parallel between the “value” of a commodity, and the amount of labour required to to produce it.
But as industrial society has moved in to a second phase, the amount of human labour required to produce the same commodities has fallen, and (with design and energy efficiencies) the amount of machine labour – which, after all, is just an abstraction of the human labour required to design and power the machine – has also fallen.
You might, at first, think this would mean stuff has gotten cheaper. But this is to ignore the corollary to efficiency – the less work that has to be done, the less wages are paid to people.
“The worker becomes all the poorer the more wealth he produces, the more his production increases in power and range. […]With the increasing value of the world of things proceeds in direct proportion to the devaluation of the world of men.” (Marx, on Estranged Labour, 1848)
So the “work singularity” of the title is where the creation of commodities becomes so efficient that no worker is able to buy them. I use the term “singularity” because this represents a single, inescapable end-point to our civilisation, and it is not possible to make any meaningful predication as regards what follows. Either civilisation will be radically, unrecognisably, reorganised – or it will collapse.
In education, is it a co-incidence that costs have risen as institutions are under more pressure to deliver efficiency? Perceived student costs have in fact risen as a deliberate political choice in order to drive efficiency in education. The actual cost of educating a student in the US and UK – if you add public investment and student fees – has remained largely static in real terms for the past 10-20 years.
Efficiency – a word I have used variously throughout this post, could usefully be defined in modern terms as the ability to pay less for the same (or similar) results. In education, by far the most expensive outlay is on the wages of educators, so the efficiency agenda has invented various ways to pay them less:
or to get more labour out of them:
(These moves have been paralleled by similar pressures on the workforce more generally – it is important to be clear that this is not a specific attack on academia, rather the academic experience of a more general malaise.)
But what can post-compulsory education offer a workforce entering employment at a time when labour is valued so poorly? And what can be offered as we approach the work singularlity?
First would be an enhanced support for learning literacy – enabling members of a pre- and post-singularity society to re-skill and to adjust to rapidly changing expectations. This also has the advantage of meeting the needs of our current society with its basis on casual labour, but actually refers to a much more profound ability to adapt to whatever comes after the collapse of waged work.
Second would be a documentation and preservation of the knowledge and insight of the existing experts, in academia and elsewhere. Robust and decentralised forms of knowledge-sharing and social media would appear to be a key activity here, as would the archival and replication of resources from these sources.
Thirdly would be an improved understanding around where humans can perform tasks that machines cannot and will not be able to. Mechanised tasks tend to be those that can be standardised, that do not require deep listening skills, and can be logically mapped. There is much that needs to be done that does not “fit” mechanisation, and one of the most important things we can be doing right now is to ensure that the attempt to mechanise these tasks does not destroy our understanding of them.
In certain moods I would add “learning” to this latter category.
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