Of the Question "Will the Future Need Us?"

In discussing the possibility of automation it is a commonplace for those speaking or writing of the matter to ask whether in a world where machines do all of what we conventionally call work more efficiently than humans can there will be any "need" for human beings. Indeed, the question is so much a commonplace that so far as I can tell few if any register its implications, which seem very telling of the essentially elitist and misanthropic outlook that is the conventional wisdom about human life in this society, unpacking which it is not inappropriate to start with Aristotle's Politics. In Book I, Chapter 4, of that work, Aristotle observes that were tools capable of obeying humans' will--if the kind of automation that had already been imagined in the mythology of his own time had actually existed--humans would not need slaves.

Note that Aristotle spoke not of humans, but slaves. Humans, after all, do not need to justify their existence through toil to serve the needs of other humans, and so were unthreatened by any possibility of tools that rendered such service. Only slaves--less than fully human--could be so threatened, because they existed to serve others, such that Aristotle termed them "animated instruments." That we should see automation as calling into question the need for people bespeaks the conventional wisdom's still being the same slave-owner's mentality in which nearly all people--the few masters, perhaps just the van Arkady-Rothkopf-Davos Man 0.0001 percent who certainly act as if they consider themselves the real human population of the planet excepted--are "animated instruments" which cease to have any warrant for their existence when the technologists replace the crude animated instrument that is a trained, conditioned, order-executing slave with a fully artificial alternative superior in every way for their masters' purposes.

In the absence of that disgusting slave-owners' mentality the response to the prospect of an automated world would be that it is one in which no person need ever be degraded to the level of an "animated instrument," let alone devote their whole education, their whole life, to being one; in which every human could actually be human; and, as H.G. Wells had it in The Shape of Things to Come, the Martyrdom of Man would be at an end. Look for such thinking--and its absence--as you watch the dialogue about these matters for what it says about much, much more than how "society" will deal with the mere "technological displacement of labor" in an age of automation.