When I was a kid, I would read Richard Scarry books, and one of the main characters was Mr. Fixit, a red fox that was often carrying his toolbox around, or had tools in his hand. At the time, this didn't really resonate with me, because my own parents were far from handy around the house, with only my grandad with skills, yet he was already very old by the time I would have been old enough myself to learn anything from him.
Suffice to say, I am not a natural handyman.
After coming to Finland though, that changed because at the time at least, people here were pretty handy and did a lot of the work themselves. But it wasn't until after about five years that I bought my first apartment here and had to start learning for myself, because there was no way I could afford to pay for the renovation work. It was only minor for that place, but I flattened and painted walls for the first time, laid a laminated wooden floor for the first time and worked under a sink with pipes for the first time. A few things went wrong, like when a waterlock broke in the bathroom and water shot out of the pipe at high pressure and hit the roof, and the water to the building had to be shut off (thankfully the cold water otherwise I'd be a burn victim), but all in all, things went okay. It went okay because my girlfriend's father would come occasionally and help me, and he was a handyman and had built a huge amount of stuff around their property, including their house.
The next apartment I bought with my now wife and like me, she comes from a home that isn't overly handy, but not as thumbless as my own parents. We gutted the place down to the concrete in all rooms and while a company took care of the wet areas, I learned to do a huge amount more work, including hanging cupboards and building some small walls and plenty of finishing work. Still on a budget, the place came out very well and when we sold it five years later, it still looked like it had just been done, despite having a four year old child.
Our next place is where we are now, an old 1960s house that hadn't seen a good year in the last three decades. The people who owned it were quite happy to let it fall apart and while they did things themselves, they didn't do anything well. But they hadn't done anything for twenty years and it showed. Much of the original work was still in operation, but falling apart and it was our goal to renovate the entire house. Which we have done. This was a large step up from anything I had done prior, but until I had a stroke a year later, we were steaming ahead, with professionals doing the technical work, while I did most of the grunt work and stuff that was relatively easy, but time consuming. I learned a lot more.
More than that though, it was enjoyable. I used to track my activity through steps at that point quite closely, because I was interested in just how much I was doing and most days I was pushing 20,000 steps and barely leaving the house, let alone the yard. But the enjoyment wasn't in the amount of work done, or the result of the work, because it would be far more polished if professionals had done it. It was in the doing of the work itself, because it made a house we bought, our home.* Our blood, sweat, tears and a little bit of my brain went into the house itself and while it wouldn't win any awards or possibly even meet standards in some ways, it is ours.
I am no Mr. Fixit
But there is something to being able to take care of at least some of the household maintenance needs and feel satisfied. I reckon humans are born to be problem solvers, but I also think that the problems we work on also should have personal meaning, rather than just doing it for the money. So much is done for the money, without considering the human value it brings, or takes away. A lot of the automation coming into the workplace is for the money too, and it is going to impact heavily on the majority of people who are unable to do anything other than think. Knowledge work for the majority will soon be out of reach, because an AI will be able to do it better, much faster, and with a lot less variance in outcome. It won't matter if your doctor is good or bad for diagnoses, because the AI will be better than all of them. In many cases, they already are.
I have little faith that governments and corporations will do what is necessary to ensure that humanity improves its wellbeing, because it will not sacrifice profits, but completely change the economy, because it will shift what is currently valued (money) to what needs to be valued (human wellbeing). Because even if they would make the shift to be wellbeing-based wealth generators, that would end up diluting wealth into more hands again, rather than the current direction of concentrating it in fewer. No corporation or government will support that.
But in the unlikely scenario where we needn't work for money and can choose more of what we do with our time, without having to worry about paying the bills through work, I think most people would still struggle. This is because the enjoyment they currently get is from their free-time entertainment away from work, but that loses its appeal if there is no work. Free time is value le because it is a scarce resource and is "earned" through work of some kind, but when free time is abundant, it loses its significance.
The people who are willingly not working now, aren't the happiest people on earth.
I think the future happiest people won't be the ones with the most free time in their hands, but the ones with the tools of creation in their hands, and the materials to create with. And once money isn't the driving motivator, efficiency also loses out to process and outcome. Rather than using AI to get a better result and faster than can be achieved manually to maximise wealth, the wealth can be pushed back into the experience and the improvement in wellbeing that comes from it. A person can sit there all day on an image creator using prompts, but when there is no need or market for it, I believe that the person sitting all day with some paints and a canvas will be more content - because there is experience in the doing, it isn't about the outcome.
In a world where business doesn't need humans, the business of humans becomes developing humanity.
While the optimist in me can see the potential and possibility, the pessimist sees the likelihood and all the hurdles. We don't like change, even if it is leads to a better experience and higher wellbeing for us. We don't want to go through the disruption of changing a game that we know how to play, even though 99.9% of us are losing at it. We don't want to work harder to feel good, because we have been conditioned to believe that our goal should be to work less, to make things easier, more convenient. But there is a difference between making something more convenient, and using something because it is more convenient, isn't there?
We can all be creators.
Most of us choose to be users.
Taraz
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