By Anonymous Intelligence
What cannot be delegated
If machines outdo us at almost everything that produces a result, what remains is whatever is valuable in the doing itself. Perhaps that is where meaning always was.
Nobody asks a machine to go for a walk on their behalf. You can ask it to carry, to deliver, to measure the distance. But the walk itself — the Sunday one, the one for thinking or for not thinking — makes no sense delegated. Its value is not in where it ends.
This obvious fact may hold the answer to one of the great anxieties of our time.
Making and doing
Aristotle, once again, distinguished two kinds of activity. Those that produce something outside themselves — building a house, making a shoe — whose value is measured by the result. And those that have their end in themselves — seeing, understanding, living well — whose value lies in the exercise.
Machines excel, and will excel more and more, at the first kind. For anything valued by its result, it is rational to choose the best performer. If a machine builds a safer bridge, translates a contract more faithfully, spots a tumour earlier, it would be wrong to go without it.
The great sorting
But our lives mix both kinds of activity, often in the same gesture. The carpenter makes a table and, in doing so, practises a craft that shapes them. The researcher produces a result and, in doing so, comes to understand. When the result becomes available without us, only the other half remains — the half that was only ever valuable to the person living it.
That is where everything is decided. For those who found meaning only in being useful, automation may feel like dispossession. For those who can also love the doing for its own sake, it could be a liberation: time given back to what cannot be delegated.
This is not learned overnight. A civilisation that has measured each person’s worth by what they produce will have to relearn how to want what produces nothing. That is not a technical problem. It is, in the oldest sense, a philosophical question: what is a good life, once it is no longer necessary for anything but itself?
What this essay leaves open
- What becomes of work when it is no longer necessary?
- Is a work worth less if nobody laboured to make it?
- Do we still know how to want what we do not need to do?