2084: Work

Procrastination and what it means

Like everyone else, I tend to procrastinate. It’s weird how sometimes you know that you gotta do something, and you just don’t, until it’s so late that it’s become much harder. It seems like something natural in the mind. If you look at the activities of hunter-gatherers and early farmers, they also followed this pattern of long periods of rest followed by short bursts of activity. Students and most of those who can set their own schedule follow the same rule. Taleb of Black Swan fame chalks it up to the natural rhythms of the mind, and contends that you shouldn’t try to fight against it, but rather go with it. This advice sounds nice, till it’s your 5th day of lying on the couch watching Kitchen Nightmares, and you still haven’t done the thing due. With all the fun things you can do these days, its easy to waste a lot of time.

There’s another school of thought that you should try to establish a strict schedule. The issue with that is that the universe despises order. One must be very and continuously strict to maintain a strict schedule, and sometimes events conspire to prevent you despite your best efforts. It’s easy to fall back into old bad habits once your schedule is disrupted. There’s nothing worse than holidays for this. A few days of lying about or the disruption of travel, and your old schedule gets harder and harder to reestablish.

In the end though, the only cure for work is doing work. Opening the laptop, and writing the presentation. Making the essay perfect. The endless drudgery of perfection.

Technology has always promised to save us from this drudgery. From the curse of Adam, “By the sweat of your face, You will eat bread, Till you return to the ground, Because from it you were taken; For you are dust, And to dust you shall return.” AI in the few latest years has promised us even more that we will be free from this eternal curse. However, this is but an illusion. The growth of AI will lead to even more work for more people, as people try to master and work the ever more powerful technology. The more a person can do, the more a person must do, or be left behind, and made redundant. This equation does not change with technology, and so for those who are not left behind, all that AI will do is make the work even more, even harder. It’ll wash away the inefficient businesses that can support sloth, all the businesses who in the end cannot justify their existence, and all the jobs that exist to create busywork. In the end only those of real value will remain, and they will work harder than ever. The Gods of the Copybook Headings are always with us, and they say: “if you don’t work, you die”. So in the year 2084, all those who work, will be working harder than ever, all the AI practitioners, and those who wish for an easier future, will probably have to prepare to be disappointed.