Work: A Deep History, from the Stone Age to the Age of Robots by James Suzman

A vast, sweeping history of anything and everything work related, from our forager/hunter-gatherer ancestors, to agriculture, to farming, to the industrial revolution, to the present day of automation, this book is not only a summary of where we’ve been, where we are, and where we are going, but it is also a repudiation of some of the wealth and “stuff” we have accumulated along the way. Work, as we know it, is certainly and simply a way of life for most of us, as we need to work to eat, sleep, buy stuff, and also have a sense of purpose and accomplishment at the end of every day. But Suzman makes a pointed argument that even though work is vital for humans, we have become so attuned and accustomed to using work as a means to purchase material goods, our continued craving for more things has created not only a general unhappiness with the nature of work, but also a damaging relationship with the natural world around us. When we work so hard and create so much demand for more stuff — not to mention working so hard that we can, sometimes, literally kill ourselves — what then? How much work is too much work? What happens when a robot comes for my job? How much work do I need to do to acquire all the “stuff” I really need to survive on a day-to-day basis? Suzman goes way back in history to answer the question of how we got here, posits some ideas for the future, and reminds us that the way we work didn’t always used to be this way. Is it too late to change? He isn’t sure, but in 2022 we might be at another transformative point in history, and change is coming whether we like it or not.

• what will happen if a robot takes my job?
• we work to live and live to work and are capable of finding meaning, satisfaction, and pride in almost any job
• Keynes, “economic problem”, “problem of scarcity”: we are rational creatures cursed with insatiable appetites and that because there are simply not enough resources to satisfy everybody’s wants, everything is scarce
• to economists, scarcity is what drives us to work
• begin to bridge the gap between our apparently infinite desires and our limited means
• hunter gatherers were well nourished, lived longer than most in farming societies, rarely worked more than 15 hours a week, bulk of their time at rest and leisure
• presumption of abundance rather than a preoccupation with scarcity
• often the only thing that differentiates work from leisure is context and whether we are being paid to do something or are paying to do it
• beyond the energy we expend to secure our most basic needs, there is very little that is universal about what constitutes a necessity
• work = purposefully expending energy or effort on a task to achieve a goal or end
• at its most fundamental, work is always an energy transaction
• as our ancestors developed the capacity to master many new different skills, our purposefulness was honed to the point that we are now capable of finding meaning, joy, and deep satisfaction in activities like building pyramids, digging holes, and doodling
• when humans mastered fire acquired the gift of more free time from the food quest — 1
• 12K years ago, store food and experiment with cultivation — 2
• when people began to gather in cities and towns (third point of convergence)
• people living in cities increasingly begin to bind their social identity ever more tightly to the work they did
• factories and mills belching smoke = fourth point of convergence
• turbocharging of our collective preoccupation with scarcity and work
• our world is subject to chaotic forces and that humans must work to keep these in check — mythology
• tension between chaos and order is a feature of the world’s mythologies
• Coriolis, 1792, time of French Revolution, “Carolis Effect” = a way of modeling the swirling forms of weather systems or the vagaries of ocean currents
• remembered for introducing the term “work” into the lexicon of modern science
• “work” = force that is needed to be applied to move an object over a particular distance
• not just effort but suffering, evoked the recent tribulations of France’s Third Estate
• technology leading us to the promised land
• “work” is now used to describe all transfers of energy
• what differentiates living things from dead things are the very unusual kinds of work that living things do
• life actively works to survive in spite of what some physicists consider to be the “supreme law of the universe”: the second law of thermodynamics, also known as the law of entropy
• tendency for all energy to distribute itself evenly across the universe
• decay of our buildings and our bodies, example
• Physicist Schrodinger, 1943 — life needed to contribute to this overall entropy in the universe, and concluded that it di this by seeking out and capturing free energy, using it to do work, which generated heat, and thus added to the total entropy in the universe
• ATP is the immediate source of energy used by all cells to do work
• life has been busy harvesting free energy, storing it in ATP molecules, and then putting it to work on our planet for a long time
• purposive behavior is behavior that an external observer may be able to attribute purpose to but that the agent of that behavior neither understands nor could describe
• when a tree grows to maximize its leaves exposure to the sun so that it can harvest solar energy to convert CO2 and water into glucose
• species that form complex, intergenerational social communities, in which individuals work together to secure their energy needs and reproduce, often do different jobs, and occasionally even sacrifice themselves for the good of the team, are described as eusocial rather than merely social
• eu, Greek, meaning good
• rare in the natural world
• 1879, Herbert Spencer, survival of the fittest, organisms that are best adapted by the slow mill of evolution to fit into any particular environment niche will thrive, at the expense of those that are less well adapted
• organisms competed with one another for energy in much the same way that main street retailers competed with one another for customers and cash
• also believed that the characteristics acquired by an organism during its lifetime could be passed on to its offspring, and evolution was an engine for progress that resulted in ever greater complexity and sophistication, a progressive weeding out of the unfit by the fit
• fierce advocated for small government and free markets
• Darwin believed that natural selection was also shaped by co-adaptation
• mutualism = symbiotic relationships where two or more species benefit
• commensalism = symbiotic relationships where one species benefits but at no cost to the other
• parasitism = one species benefits at the expense of the host
• most businesses and businesspeople operate in a manner far more similar to real ecosystems
• many hard to explain animal traits and behaviors may well have been shaped by seasonal over abundance of energy rather than the battle for scarce resources, clue as to why we work so hard
• homo sapiens are by far the most prolific, expert, and versatile makers and users of tools in the history of life
• evolved to be progressively remolded over the course of our lives by the kinds of work we do
• recognizably modern humans have been living in Africa for 300K years
• most widely used stone tool in human history, the Acheulean hand ax
• not only are we products of the different kinds of work our ancestors did and the skills they acquired, but we are also shaped progressively over the course of our lives by the different kinds of work we do
• most important and far reaching physiological legacies of tool use are neurological
• from the perspective of the capacity to acquire skills, what is most interesting is the series of neurological transformations that take place over the course of our childhoods, through adolescence and beyond, which enable our physical interactions with the world around us to physically reconfigure aspects of our neural architecture
• ancestors were skilled at acquiring skills
• our species extraordinary plasticity when young and the extent to which it declines as we get older also accounts for why as we age we become more stubbornly resistant to change
• advantages of plasticity, combined with traits associated with social learning, are amplified many times over, because beneficial learned behaviors can be transmitted across generations with no cost and minimal risk
• organisms that ingest information = informavores
• clear that all living things, from prokaryotes to plants, are informavores
• homo sapiens are the gluttons of the informavore world, we are uniquely skilled at acquiring, processing, and ordering information, and uniquely versatile when it comes to letting that information shape who we are
• lineages evolutionary history, each surge in brain growth signaled a surge in our ancestors appetite for information and the amount of energy they expended in processing it
• hunting was almost certainly among the selective pressures that encouraged the development of our ancestors ability to develop complex language
• hunting in this way may have played an important role in shaping their sociality and social intelligence as well as building up the perseverance, patience, and sheer determination that still characterize our approach to work
• most important and far reaching energy revolution in human history — mastery of fire
• fire summoned into existence leisure’s odious opposite: the concept of “work”
• fire = arguably the greatest energy revolution in history
• our brains only constitute 2% of our total body weight but they consume about 20 percent of our energy resources
• seems likely that cooking spurred the next big period of brain growth
• cooking vastly extends the range of plant foods that we can eat
• predigesting foods through the process of cooking, fire made a significant proportion of this digestive plumbing redundant
• helped redesign our faces, eating softer, cooked foods meant that having big muscled jaws ceases to be a selective advantage
• so as our ancestors brains grew, their jaws shrank
• fire = gift of free time
• great labor saving technology
• brains grew, less physical effort, more time to apply intelligence and energy to activities other than finding, consuming, and digesting food
• where we differ from numerous other species is in the extent to which boredom spurs creativity
• drives our purposiveness and makes it possible for us to find satisfaction, pride, and a sense of achievement in pursuit of hobbies that serve no immediate purpose other than keeping us busy
• lot more time in each other’s company — managing social relations
• Gossip and Grooming hypothesis, Robin Dunbar
• language had origins in affectionate grooming we see among primate groups as they gently scour each other’s hides
• idea of language emerging as an extension of grooming behavior is persuasive
• when our ancestors outsources some of their energy requirements to fire, world where the physically powerful sometimes play second fiddle to the articulate and charismatic
• systematic, well organized non reciprocal sharing outside of a parental context is a uniquely human trait, one that would not be possible without fire
• Stauss, public intellectual in France, “structuralism”
• individual beliefs, norms, and practices that make up a culture are on their own meaningless but are meaningful when viewed as part of a set of relationships
• individual cultural practices could only be made by a sense of looking at their relationship with other practices in the same culture
• our cultures are a reflection of the way our minds work
• our cultures are far more the product of what we do with our bodies than the likes of Levi Strauss ever realized
• not only were the early Homo Sapiens every bit as self aware and purposeful as we are now, but also that they have been around far longer than was ever imagined before
• 95 percent of our species history, work did not occupy anything like the hallowed place in people’s lives that it does now
• likely that several distinctive homo sapiens lineages that shared a common ancestor around half a million years ago evolved in parallel with one another, and appeared near simultaneously around 300K years ago in North Africa, southern Africa, and East African Rift Valley
• all people today are made up of a mosaic of genetic features inherited from all of them
• 1963, Lee, doctoral student at UC, looked at foragers were relaxed about their food quest, typically met nutritional requirements with great ease, and spent most of their time at leisure
• Ju/hoansi were the original affluent society
• Sahlins, modesty of energy requirements
• hunter gatherers had much more free time than others mainly because they were not ridden with a whole host of nagging desires beyond meeting their immediate material needs
• “sharing” economies characteristic of foraging societies were an organic extension of their relationship with nurturing environments
• forager economies were underwritten by the confidence they had in the providence of their environments
• Woodburn, 1957, Ju/hoansi were never inclined to harvest more than they needed to eat that day and never bothered storing food
• short term thinking was the key to understanding how societies like theirs were so egalitarian, stable, and enduring
• immediate return economy, contrasted with delayed return economics of industrial and farming societies
• all immediate return economies spurned hierarchy, did not have chiefs, leaders, or institutional authority figures, and were intolerant of any meaningful material wealth differentials between individuals
• “demand sharing” describe all societies where food and objects are shared on the basis of requests by the receiver rather than offers made by the giver
• no one considered it at all impolite to ask for things from someone else
• “tolerated theft” — national taxation systems are shrouded in institutional anonymity
• socialists demonize the idle rich, while capitalists tend to save their scorn for the idle poor
• particular conflict is of a far more recent provenance
• demand sharing societies — material wealth always ended up being spread pretty evenly, everyone got something to eat regardless of how productive they were, scarce or valuable objects were circulated widely freely available for everyone to use
• no reason for people to waste energy trying to accumulate more material wealth than anyone else, as doing so served no practical purpose
• short term benefits of self interest are almost always outweighed by the longer term social costs
• Smith — people were inherently selfish creatures, intends only his own gain, “invisible hand” to promote the interests of society
• free enterprise unburdened by regulatory interference would inadvertently create wealth for all
• in broad historical terms the transition to agriculture was as transformative as any other that came before or after it
• agricultural revolution not only enabled the rapid growth of the human population but also fundamentally transformed how people engaged with the world around them
• transition from foraging to food production was as revolutionary as anything before or since
• happened in the blink of an evolutionary eye
• gradual transition during which people and a whole series of plant and animals slowly but inexorably bound their destinies ever closer to one another, changed one another forever
• 6K years ago farming was a well established subsistence strategy across many parts of Asia, Arabia, North South Central America
• Garrod, archeologist, 1937 book The Stone Age of Mt. Carmel
• first study of any place to chart a continuous archaeological sequence spanning nearly half a million years of human history
• area around Mt. Carmel was home to a distinctive regional culture around 12K years ago, responsible for the invention of agriculture
• climate change induced scarcity played an important role in pushing some human populations down the path toward being food producers
• periods of climate change induced abundance played an important role in the process too
• 18K years ago, only 3K years later, rapid warming two millenia that followed, Bolling Allerod Interstadial
• warming climate and more oxygen rich atmosphere, local populations became increasingly dependent on far fewer but much more prolific plants
• natufians cheerfully abandoned their ancestors once necessarily mobile existence in favor of a far more sedentary life in small, permanent villages
• form of affluence based on far greater material abundance
• didn’t have to work nearly as hard
• abundance was seasonal
• 13K years ago, temps plunged
• Younger Dryas
• substantial declines in the yields of many of the key plant foods
• Gobekli Tepe in Turkey = oldest evidence of large groups of people anywhere coming together to work on a very big project that had nothing obvious to do with the food quest
• first evidence anywhere of people securing sufficient surplus energy to work over many consecutive generations to achieve a grand vision unrelated to the immediate challenge of securing more energy, and one that was intended to endure long beyond the lives of its builders
• society in which many people had something resembling full time highly specialized jobs
• as farming societies grew more productive and captured more energy from their environments, energy appeared to be scarcer and people had to work hard to meet their basic needs
• gains in productivity gobbled up by populations that quickly grew to numbers that could not be sustained
• prosperity was fleeting
• agricultural revolution did nothing at all to extend the life span of the average person
• great agricultural civilizations through to the Industrial Revolution = nutritional deficiencies, anemia, famines, bone deformations as a result of repetitive, arduous labor
• over longer periods of time farming societies were far more likely to suffer severe, existentially threatening famines than foragers
• much less risky, foragers tended to live well within the natural limits imposed by the environment
• foragers in even the bleakest environments relied on dozens of different food sources
• pests and pathogens, penning their livestock into cramped enclosures at night, inadvertently hastened the evolution and spread of a whole host of new viral bacterial and fungal pathogens
• zoonotic pathogens, 2.7M deaths every year
• depleted soils, diseases, famines, conflicts were recurrent causes of catastrophe in farming societies
• farming was ultimately much more productive than foraging
• in terms of work, most important energy revolution was farming
• adults in the U.S. consume on average around 3600 cal of food per day
• recommended 2–2500
• agriculture now accounts for up to a third of all greenhouse gases emissions
• majority of land under cultivation across the globe is used for the purposes of growing a limited number of high energy yielding crops
• mutualism, form of symbiosis which occurs when the interactions between organisms from different species benefit them both
• Malthus — why did most people still work so hard and yet live in poverty
• insistence that there are clear limits to growth
• historically, his observation that population growth gobbled up any benefits yielded by improvements in productivity was accurate for the period of human history beginning when people started processing food and generating surpluses, through to the Industrial Revolution
• societies that were most economically productive tended to expand at the expense of those that were not
• wherever an improvement in society’s agricultural or economic output is diluted as a result of population growth, it is now convention to describe it as a Malthusian Trap
• for each new laborer they gave birth to was not only an additional mouth to feed, but after a point resulted in a noticeable decline in food yields per person
• farmers had to expand into virgin territory
• agriculture in Europe replaced established hunter gatherer populations rather than assimilating them
• one of the most profound legacies of the transition to farming was to transform the way people experienced and understood time
• foragers focused most of their attention on the present or the immediate future
• almost every task on the farm is focused in achieving a future goal or managing a future risk based on past experience
• where foragers stoically accepted occasional hardships, farmers persuaded themselves that things could always be better if they worked a little harder
• Wealth of Nations, 1776, Smith was convinced that reason could reveal the fundamental laws of human economic behavior
• common instrument of commerce, “primitive currency” — gold, sliver, coinage
• Franklin wrote about the Iroquois Confederacy, held most resources communally in grand longhouses and afforded responsibility for their distribution to councils of women
• money’s origins lie in the credit and debt arrangements that arose between farmers
• little obvious correspondence today between time worked and monetary reward in the world’s largest economies
• value of a bow or anything else amount of work the purchaser was prepared to do in order to acquire it — Smith
• when viewed from the perspective of a deep history of work, our anxieties about artificially intelligent machines turning on their owners are not without precedent
• much of the history of domestication the primary job of most domestic animals was to do work
• people and their domestic animals now comprise 96 percent of all mammalian biomass on the planet
• domestication of cattle was important, enabled greater intensification of grain farming and a mans to transport these surpluses from the country to the city
• roman economy some similar economic challenges to those posed by large scale automation = wealth inequality
• collapse was hastened by the corrosive inequality at its heart
• endured for 500 years, sucking in energy surpluses generated by farmers across the empire
• beginning in 2008, more people lived in cities than in the countryside for the first time in human history
• 250M chinese moving from rural to urban sectors from 1979–2010 = largest migration event in human history
• cities are born, sustained, grown by capturing energy and putting it to work
• cities lived or died on the basis of common rules of behavior and the ability of their citizens to bind themselves together with shared experiences, beliefs, and values, and then to extend these into the countryside that fed them
• in cities people’s individual social identities often merged with the trades they performed
• for much of history people in similar trades usually cooperated, collaborated, supported one another
• not until the emergence of cities that anyone developed any visual representation system as versatile as writing
• literacy changed the way people perceived tools necessary to develop complex abstract models that made most important discoveries in math, science, and engineering possible
• new previously unimaginable desk jobs
• literacy fundamentally transformed the nature and exercise of power
• functioning bureaucracies and formalized legal systems
• currencies, financial and banking institutions, ledgers
• city merchants quickly learned that trade was a possible route to wealth and power
• Keynes — absolute needs, relative needs
• “keep up with the Joneses”
• importance of social context and status in shaping people’s desires
• historians argue that inequality was probably a direct and immediate consequence of our embrace of agriculture
• extreme inequality was not an immediate and organic consequence of our ancestors transition to farming
• proportion of people employed in agriculture in any country is usually a pretty good measure of that country’s wealth
• in the U.S., less than 2 percent of the working population are now in high tech agriculture
• 1776, Watt, steam engine — following century was marked by the appearance and rapid adoption of successive new increasingly efficient, and versatile variants of it
• for those destined to work on the factory floors, actual skills were not on the list of qualities that their employers wanted
• bodies that could be trained to operate their spinning jennys, water frames, power looms
• Arkwright, inventor of “factory system”
• first few decades of the industrial rev cities labored longer hours, ate poorly, breathed air with smog, drank dirty water
• wealth in the 1850’s began to trickle down a bit to those on the factory floor, better wages and better housing
• consumption became more influential in shaping lives
• 17th and 18th centuries, desire of poorer people in the cities across Europe to consume what were once luxuries enjoyed only by the very rich was just as influential in shaping the history of work as the invention of tech to exploit the energy in fossil fuels
• reinvesting wages in the very same products they and their factory workers manufactured
• Durkheim, first sociology lecturer
• simple societies operated like rudimentary machines, complex societies functioned more like living bodies
• Suicide: Study in Sociology — social causes with social solutions
• tried to make sense of how rapid changes brought about by industrialization affected individual well being
• changes associated with urbanization and industrial development that were a major driver of anomie
• malady of infinite aspiration
• being burdened by unattainable expectations was not normal but rather a social aberration that arose only in times of crisis and change, when a society lost its bearings as a result of external factors like industrialization
• anomie looks increasingly like the permanent condition of the modern age
• Taylor, father of efficiency movement, science of work
• scientific method to work
• rigid, target driven, repetitive work regimes where innovation was prohibited
• Ford Motor Company, model T
• all he needed was anyone capable of learning a few simple techniques and diligently following instructions
• robbed workers of the right to find meaning and satisfaction in the work they did
• first to approach the problem as methodically as a scientists might approach a lab experiment
• first to realize that in the modern era most people went to work to make money rather than products, and that it was the factories themselves that made actual things
• Lubbock — Bank Holiday Act of 1871 in Great Britian
• work-life balance
• extra day a few times a year in which they might rest their work worn bodies and do as little as possible
• between 1930–1945 average work week in the U.S. 37–39 hours a week
• last few decades this has crept up, while total hours in industrialized countries slowly declined
• most americans work several hundred more hours over the course of a year than people in Denmark, France, Germany
• Kellogg during the Great Depression switched to a 35 hour week, but then in the 1950’s staff voted to return to 40 hour weeks
• wanted more money to purchase more stuff
• Galbraith, Econ Professor at Harvard — The Affluent Society, 1958
• U.S was not making good use of its wealth
• poor use of affluence
• exalted position of advertising in global commerce was ultimately enabled by industrialization
• stopping advertising to save money is like stopping your watch to save time — Ford
• much of the 20th century, there was a relatively stable relationship between labor productivity and wages in the U.S. and other industrialized countries
• 1980, Great Decoupling, productivity, output, GDP grew, wage growth for all but the highest paid stalled
• personal and household debt, rise in hours worked
• technological expansion was cannibalizing the workforce and concentrating wealth in fewer hands
• deregulations of markets, trickle down economics
• big companies were persuaded by McKinsey and Company to retain “top talent” with exorbitant pay packages
• talent narrative was nonsense, still is
• 2008 2009, talent narrative was so deeply embedded, crash did precipitate a sharp decline in public confidence in economists
• expertise in general was treated with more skepticism
• most laypeople underestimated the pay ratio between bosses and unskilled workers
• karoshi = death by overwork
• karo jisatsu = when an employee takes their own life as a result of the mental stresses arising from overworking
• more than half a million Chinese die from overwork every year
• ambitions refracted through the expectations of their employers
• in western europe and north america, deaths by overwork are usually attributed to individual failings rather than the actions or failings of an employer or their government
• workaholism is a real, diagnosable condition with potentially fatal consequences
• most modern city dwellers still tend to embed themselves into surprisingly small and often diffuse social networks
• for many of us our regular social networks are made up of people we have worked with or encountered at work
• Parkinsons Law = work inevitably expands to fill the time available for its completion
• bureaucracies will always generate enough internal work to appear busy and important enough to ensure their continued existence or growth without any corresponding expansion in output
• academics universally report a considerably higher proportion of their workweek doing admin than was the case two decades ago
• very few people find their work meaningful or interesting
• 2013, Oxford study, 47 percent of all current jobs in the U.S. had “high risk” or being automated out of existence by as early as 2030
• automation is not only likely to entrench further structural inequality between countries
• dramatically exacerbate inequality within many countries as well
• diminishing opportunities for unskilled and semi-skilled people, inflating incomes of a few, increase returns on capital rather than labor
• 1972, Limits to Growth — sudden and uncontrollable decline in both population and industrial capacity within a century
• continued preoccupation with solving the economic problem was the starkest problem facing humanity and that the likeliest outcome if things continued was catastrophe
• needed to abandon our preoccupation with perpetual economic growth
• 2002, initial study was affirmed
• tidal wave of newer studies documenting humans unfolding impact on our environment and the anticipated consequences of it
• never before in human history has there been 7.5B people each capturing and expending roughly 250 X the energy that our individual forager forebears did
• we are a stubborn species, one that is deeply resistance to making profound changes in our behavior and habits, even when it is clear that we need to do so
• we are also versatile when change is forced upon us
• Keynes: we might once more value ends above means and prefer the good to the useful
• reveal how our relationship to work is more fundamental
• relationship between energy, life and work is part of a common bond we have with all other living organisms, and at the same time our purposefulness, our infinite skillfulness, and ability to find satisfaction in even the mundane are part of an evolutionary legacy honed since the very stirrings of life on earth
• loosen the claw like grasp that scarcity economics has held over our working lives, diminish our correspondence and unsustainable preoccupation with economic growth