The Human Hive

Since May last year, I’ve been spending most of my time building a new home for my family in Noordhoek. I love design and mulling over aspects and intricacies of the building in my mind, but houses don’t build themselves – it really is a matter of 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration. To save costs and frustration I’m doing a lot of the work myself and it’s clear to me that I’m not quite the spring chicken I was when last I built twenty years ago. Not that I won’t or can’t do the hard yards – I’m constantly in the trenches or on the scaffolding – but I often get to mid afternoon and find my energy reserves completely depleted. “Getting old is not for sissies”, my mom would say. In my mind I’m still young, but my body begs to differ.

A while back, my daughter Meg was going on, as is the fashion, about the paternity and how much easier it is for us blokes. As counterpoint, I highlighted a few instances of reality that I think gave her pause for thought. Like my Malawian crew mixing concrete or digging trenches in the wind and rain, or Pitso, my friend and stone mason, now working shifts as a drill operator in the platinum mines. He uses a hydro drill which spews water that saturates him, especially when drilling overhead. So they give the drill operators raincoats to wear, but the water they use for drilling has additives (probably toxic) that make his skin itch. Yes, men disproportionately occupy positions of power, but far more are out there doing the worst and most difficult jobs there are, earning their pay to support their families. The question I posed was: would their wives swap places with them? I think not. The truth is that most blokes I know are out there toiling, in one form or another, to provide for their families.

But of course it’s not just us blokes doing service. A while back, I had a moment of epiphany when it became clear to me that almost everyone is out there in service to humanity, whether they see themselves that way or not. It doesn’t matter whether someone is designing rockets, composing symphonies, or emptying bins – all are engaged in the business of serving others. I’m pretty sure that many or most people in (especially mundane) 9-5 jobs see themselves as wage slaves – only working to earn the next pay-cheque – and many would happily stop if they could. But the reality, whether they see it that way or not, is that their pay-cheque is secondary – it’s simply society’s way of thanking them for the service they provide.

It’s a wonderful thought pattern to cultivate. Seeing people who cross your path as serving you or others engenders, in me at least, a healthy attitude of gratitude and goodwill. I’m only human and still get annoyed when people mess up, but I find myself being more forgiving in my judgment of others and I berate myself when I might have been too harsh.

While we often marvel at the orderliness of ant colonies  or bee hives and how the individuals take on specific roles and work together, this all pales when compared to the complexity and truly magical intricacy of human endeavour. All those people out there providing their services create the tapestry that allows us to buy what we need, drive our cars on beautiful roads, make phone calls, and everything else besides. One of my favourite clips is of Milton Friedman brilliantly explaining just how amazing it all is. The world really does run like a Swiss clock, and even though it sometimes feels broken, that brokenness itself is part of what’s needed for progress and fine tuning.

But in the same way that many people don’t see themselves as living lives of service, even though they are, so too I think most people don’t realise that much of the meaning in their lives actually comes from providing that service, even though it does.  Our lives take on meaning when we serve others. A garbage man might not feel that his work has much meaning, but subconsciously he absolutely knows it does, and his happiness is the better for it.

Today, we’re hurtling headlong towards a future where ultimately everything mechanical and intellectual will be done better and faster by bots and computers than by humans. It seems unstoppable – our redundancy is certain and we have maybe a decade of practical usefulness remaining. This is no exaggeration. But when we stop working we stop serving, and when we stop serving we lose meaning. The impact this change will have on individuals and our societies is a complete mystery.

To add to the coming disruption, I don’t see how our economic models can survive what’s coming either. All economic theory is based on scarcity of supply, and up to now the overarching scarce resource has been human capital. What happens when this limiting factor is removed? What happens when the bots are mining the ore, running the steel mills, factories, ports, ships, and building everything, including more of themselves? With humans completely out of the loop, this has to result in exponential growth and the implications are hard to grasp. It may seem like science fiction, but it’s only a few years away. 

Money is nothing but a useful medium that we in society agree to accept in exchange for the energy we expend. An actuary can charge more than a janitor because actuaries are more scarce than janitors. Throughout history, it’s humans that have, in this way, given money its meaning. But when human capital becomes redundant because bots can do everything better and faster, how do we do anything of commercial (monetary) value? I suspect that a few vocations, like the arts (and politics 🙄), may somehow remain viable, but how will the rest of us survive in a world where money has lost its meaning?

Tragically, we will likely greet our coming redundancy eagerly as a welcome end to wage slavery, especially once governments start handing out universal income, which I have little doubt they will have to do. In all likelihood, the shift to universal income will be sold to us as utopia and an age of abundance, but my fear is that before long it will settle into tyranny as those in power use the resources they control to ensure no dissent ever becomes a threat.

As a parent, my vocational advice hat has been stowed away for good. Short of counsel to pick a profession that has a more secure moat to keep AI out for longer, I really don’t have a clue. My son Sam became a dive instructor after dropping out of The Animation School, and now I think he’s probably better off for it.

This week, I’m back on the building site and will start putting up the rafters for the roof and hopefully the whole project will be completed before summer. Most people think it’s unusual for me to be building a home I’ve no financial interest in and intention of living in, but I’m happy to do it as a service for my family. By the time it’s done, I might have a better idea about how best to prepare for the coming AI disruption. Maybe my next project will be creating a microcosm of self-sufficiently on the farm.  Being able to grow your own food certainly won’t hurt…