What We Do
Is it worth automating things? I’m a software developer. My job is to automate things. Automation, over the last couple of hundred years, has made many of us rich (compared to our ancestors). So the answer should be simple, and yet it isn’t.
What’s the point?
It seems to me we’ve stopped asking this fundamental question. But if we don’t know why we even do the things we do, the question of is it worth automating things—or in a broader sense, is it worth making things more efficient—is impossible to answer.
Maybe we stopped asking why we do the things we do because we have simply accepted that more is a good enough reason. More money, more success, more status. Or maybe we think that happiness is the ultimate goal and that more wealth and status will make us happier.
Automation and efficiency definitely lead to more wealth, and more wealth, in our society, leads to more status. And if we’re right that all of this leads to more happiness, then yes, automating as much as we can and striving for a world of maximum efficiency and minimal human labor is definitely the way to go to reach that goal.
But is this right? Does more wealth and status lead to more happiness? And, even more fundamentally, is happiness even a worthy goal to strive for?
The pursuit of happiness
Maybe because of the great success of the US and its founding principle of the pursuit of happiness, we accepted this to be the answer and stopped asking.
But there is an important nuance to be found in this phrase: it’s the pursuit of happiness. In the wording lies the correct assumption—as far as we know from psychology today—that happiness is something we can sometimes attain but cannot sustain; we can only keep pursuing it.
This mechanism is called hedonistic adaptation. For our grandparents, living through the Second World War and its aftermath, just having enough food on the table, for a while, was a source of happiness. For me, it isn’t. Today I make almost double what I made six years ago, yet each individual pay raise was relatively small, so I never really felt a surge of happiness because of it.
I feel happiness is overrated, yet I find Jefferson was onto something.
The struggle is the goal
Are we happier than our ancestors? Maybe. Maybe not. The answer to this question probably depends a lot on how one even defines happiness. But even if it turned out that we are indeed a little bit happier than most of our ancestors throughout history, considering how vastly wealthier we are compared to them, it would hardly be a great feat.
And if we could answer this question, my hunch is that most of the additional happiness would be explained by improvements to food security and our health, such as being able to treat painful or debilitating ailments.
More and more, I realize that what fulfills me isn’t achieving my goals, but instead, it’s three things:
- The self-determined creative act itself.
- Learning and improving.
- The pursuit of reaching a worthy goal.
(This pretty much aligns with the three pillars of motivation Daniel Pink describes in his book Drive: autonomy, mastery, and purpose.)
Looking for meaning and purpose
This article was inspired by me wrestling with the impact of LLMs on my job as a software developer. What will it mean to me if an AI can one day do my job better than I can with minimal human input?
While writing this, ironically, for a brief moment I was tempted to give my notes to an LLM and let it write the article for me. But I came to my senses quickly. Maybe the output would’ve conveyed what I want to say even better than I can, but the article’s existence would be completely pointless to me.
What is quite clear with a creative piece like this article—that the act of writing it is at least as important as the final result itself—is less clear with code.
A lot of people argue that there is no value in the act of writing code and that the faster we can automate it, the better. Only the final piece of software is what counts. I very much disagree and would even turn it on its head. The final piece of software, more often than not, is pretty much meaningless in the grand scheme of things. Just a couple of decades ago, when our parents were already alive, there was zero software on this planet. And believe it or not, they did just fine.
After we learned how to harness gasoline and automate vast amounts of the essential manual labor necessary to build houses and produce food, we found other ways to find meaning and purpose in our lives and, among other things, invented electronics and informatics. Admittedly, some of it helped us to be happier and lift even more people out of poverty, but a lot of it didn’t move the needle in a significant way, and some made at least some of us even worse off. Look at older people without smartphones, for example. Do you think they are unhappier? I would be less surprised to learn if it was the opposite way around.
Do stuff!
Even though I started this article by posing the question of whether more automation and efficiency are worth it, this is not an anti-automation or anti-AI article. I believe we just can’t help it: regardless of whether it improves our lives or not, we will keep automating things. So this is not an argument about whether or not we should stop automation; this is an article about embracing the struggle. If AI reaches a point where it can do most of the things we do today on its own, and even if we distribute the benefits of this in a fair way, just sitting there enjoying our unlimited free time will probably make us miserable.
Self-determined creative work, learning new things, improving our craft, and solving tough problems give us meaning and purpose in life.
Human nature is to be active, so we must (and will) keep struggling and doing stuff!