Article
Character
Comment
5 min read

Work isn’t working, it’s killing us

We mistake the nature of work and our purpose within it.
Two people sit beside each other working on laptops, One looks askance to the other who frowns.
Resume Genius on Unsplash.

What is work for? In our individualist society we perhaps might zoom in on the minutiae of the specific role that we fulfil. Work is for the success of the company I work for, work is for building up my CV, work is to earn money enough to live, work is for seeing people I don’t have to live with. But what about work? The burden that humans have always had to gather enough resources to provide for themselves. We are mistaking the nature of work and our purpose within it, and it is beginning to kill us. 

Each of the recent generations have had different, and askew, attitudes to their work. Baby boomers- those who got a job and a sensible haircut in the 60s, conceived work as a contract. They worked well at almost anything and the reward was home ownership, resources to provide for a family, and saving for leisure. The purpose of their work is the lifestyle it creates. To some extent, their successors in Gen X had the same perception and the same contract- stick at any industry and the reward will be generous enough to make the graft worth it. 

But what happens when that contract is broken? When work no longer leads to those rewards? The Millennial answer is to seek out work that gives purpose, to accept the reward will not be fulfilling and so to find the purpose in the end of the work itself. Even if that means a lifetime of renting and scrimping, because the reward is not to be found in the payment. 

A slow generational drift from the true purpose and boundaries of work has left us confused about its point and struggling to engage. 

The Gen Z answer to this broken contract is the most fascinating of all; a reluctance to work at all. There is ‘quiet quitting’ whereby you do as little as possible whilst remaining employed, ‘bare minimum Mondays,’ and, of course, ‘lazy girl jobs.’ The purported aim of this generation is to find jobs where they can work from home, do almost nothing, and still receive a generous salary. Others are living the ‘soft life.’ They move in with mum and dad (usually boomers who have run the rat race and received the benefits of the contract) and do something creative part-time, earning little but doing little. It's a bit of the old baby boomer attitude seeking pleasure outside work but without the corresponding work ethic or career mindset. 

On top of this is the mental health crisis, which prevents many of Gen Z from working, with one in three non-graduates out of work with mental health conditions. Bosses receive calls from parents of those in their 20s explaining that their children are too unwell to work. 

I suggest that these things are linked, and a slow generational drift from the true purpose and boundaries of work has left us confused about its point and struggling to engage. We must look outside ourselves to understand what work was created for. In Genesis, the Christian origin story, God conceives work as a place of dignity and purpose. What Adam and Eve did in the garden mattered- they were the leaders of creation, and God even gave them the responsibility of naming other creatures. Humans were made to have responsibility, made to express this in their work. Even in the drudgery of repeated physical, administrative, or household tasks, we have the freedom to find purpose. We can take pleasure and pride in making things, fixing things, restoring things, even if just to the state they were in when we cleaned last week.  

Find the purpose in the making, fixing, restoring, the very task itself. 

The ‘quiet quitting’ of Gen Z or the dry contract of the boomers will not cut it. Even in jobs we don’t like, or tasks we find overwhelming, the same reframing is needed, perhaps even more so. Work itself brings purpose, and that is worth giving our whole selves to, otherwise listlessness and sadness will get us. We were made to find purpose and joy in the task of whatever is in front of us, no matter how simple. 

Millennials have swung the pendulum too far in the other direction. Yes, this generation have found the importance of purpose in their work. But only in work that has an end outside of itself. Work has been created with an internal, permanent purpose. Suggesting that meaning only comes from employment with obvious altruistic ends means that any other kind of work, domestic or employed, is devoid of this meaning. The same listlessness ensues in any role not found to have such an end. 

St Paul elevates work explicitly even beyond this created place of purpose. In his letter to a church in Colossae, he writes, ‘Whatever you do, work at it with all your heart, as working for the Lord, not for human masters.’ In other words, work is an act of worship, acting as if the task we are completing is for God, and putting the requisite effort in.  

Of course, this is a massive challenge. How many of us put as much work in to satisfy our bosses as we would if they were the ultimate director of our eternal destiny? But it does redeem those moments where we wonder what the point of what we’re doing is, who will see it, and if it is really worth doing properly at all. God sees. God knows. And that makes it worth doing properly. 

Paul also makes it clear here that work is not just what we get paid for. Work is everything we do that is not rest. Whatever we do - employed, at home, inrelation to our families. And this allows those who cannot work, in an employment sense, to take part in God’s purpose for humanity by working in a way in which they can. Whether it’s caring for a relative, nurturing a tiny veg patch, creating a piece of art, or hoovering the carpet. Find the purpose in the making, fixing, restoring, the very task itself. Do it as if God were watching. And feel yourself become more human. 

Article
AI
Culture
Generosity
Psychology
Virtues
5 min read

AI will never codify the unruly instructions that make us human

The many exceptions to the rules are what make us human.
A desperate man wearing 18th century clothes holds candlesticks
Jean Valjean and the candlesticks, in Les Misérables.

On average, students with surnames beginning in the letters A-E get higher grades than those who come later in the alphabet. Good looking people get more favourable divorce settlements through the courts, and higher payouts for damages. Tall people are more likely to get promoted than their shorter colleagues, and judges give out harsher sentences just before lunch. It is clear that human judgement is problematically biased – sometimes with significant consequences. 

But imagine you were on the receiving end of such treatment, and wanted to appeal your overly harsh sentence, your unfair court settlement or your punitive essay grade: is Artificial Intelligence the answer? Is AI intelligent enough to review the evidence, consider the rules, ignore human vagaries, and issue an impartial, more sophisticated outcome?  

In many cases, the short answer is yes. Conveniently, AI can review 50 CVs, conduct 50 “chatbot” style interviews, and identify which candidates best fit the criteria for promotion. But is the short and convenient answer always what we want? In their recent publication, As If Human: Ethics and Artificial Intelligence, Nigel Shadbolt and Roger Hampson discuss research which shows that, if wrongly condemned to be shot by a military court but given one last appeal, most people would prefer to appeal in person to a human judge than have the facts of their case reviewed by an AI computer. Likewise, terminally ill patients indicate a preference for doctor’s opinions over computer calculations on when to withdraw life sustaining treatment, even though a computer has a higher predictive power to judge when someone’s life might be coming to an end. This preference may seem counterintuitive, but apparently the cold impartiality—and at times, the impenetrability—of machine logic might work for promotions, but fails to satisfy the desire for human dignity when it comes to matters of life and death.  

In addition, Shadbolt and Hampson make the point that AI is actually much less intelligent than many of us tend to think. An AI machine can be instructed to apply certain rules to decision making and can apply those rules even in quite complex situations, but the determination of those rules can only happen in one of two ways: either the rules must be invented or predetermined by whoever programmes the machine, or the rules must be observable to a “Large Language Model” AI when it scrapes the internet to observe common and typical aspects of human behaviour.  

The former option, deciding the rules in advance, is by no means straightforward. Humans abide by a complex web of intersecting ethical codes, often slipping seamlessly between utilitarianism (what achieves the most amount of good for the most amount of people?) virtue ethics (what makes me a good person?) and theological or deontological ideas (what does God or wider society expect me to do?) This complexity, as Shadbolt and Hampson observe, means that: 

“Contemporary intellectual discourse has not even the beginnings of an agreed universal basis for notions of good and evil, or right and wrong.”  

The solution might be option two – to ask AI to do a data scrape of human behaviour and use its superior processing power to determine if there actually is some sort of universal basis to our ethical codes, perhaps one that humanity hasn’t noticed yet. For example, you might instruct a large language model AI to find 1,000,000 instances of a particular pro-social act, such as generous giving, and from that to determine a universal set of rules for what counts as generosity. This is an experiment that has not yet been done, probably because it is unlikely to yield satisfactory results. After all, what is real generosity? Isn’t the truly generous person one who makes a generous gesture even when it is not socially appropriate to do so? The rule of real generosity is that it breaks the rules.  

Generosity is not the only human virtue which defies being codified – mercy falls at exactly the same hurdle. AI can never learn to be merciful, because showing mercy involves breaking a rule without having a different rule or sufficient cause to tell it to do so. Stealing is wrong, this is a rule we almost all learn from childhood. But in the famous opening to Les Misérables, Jean Valjean, a destitute convict, steals some silverware from Bishop Myriel who has provided him with hospitality. Valjean is soon caught by the police and faces a lifetime of imprisonment and forced labour for his crime. Yet the Bishop shows him mercy, falsely informing the police that the silverware was a gift and even adding two further candlesticks to the swag. Stealing is, objectively, still wrong, but the rule is temporarily suspended, or superseded, by the bishop’s wholly unruly act of mercy.   

Teaching his followers one day, Jesus stunned the crowd with a catalogue of unruly instructions. He said, “Give to everyone who asks of you,” and “Love your enemies” and “Do good to those who hate you.” The Gospel writers record that the crowd were amazed, astonished, even panicked! These were rules that challenged many assumptions about the “right” way to live – many of the social and religious “rules” of the day. And Jesus modelled this unruly way of life too – actively healing people on the designated day of rest, dining with social outcasts and having contact with those who had “unclean” illnesses such as leprosy. Overall, the message of Jesus was loud and clear, people matter more than rules.  

AI will never understand this, because to an AI people don’t actually exist, only rules exist. Rules can be programmed in manually or extracted from a data scrape, and one rule can be superseded by another rule, but beyond that a rule can never just be illogically or irrationally broken by a machine. Put more simply, AI can show us in a simplistic way what fairness ought to look like and can protect a judge from being punitive just because they are a bit hungry. There are many positive applications to the use of AI in overcoming humanity’s unconscious and illogical biases. But at the end of the day, only a human can look Jean Valjean in the eye and say, “Here, take these candlesticks too.”   

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