For physicists, work is the movement of mass upon the application of force. For the rest of us, work is the effort made to obtain or accomplish something. Laying bricks to build the wall of a house is work undertaken to make a dwelling. From the standpoint of evolution, work is the effort required to survive. An early human chasing down an animal for dinner was work. Cooking it was the work to make it easily digestible and safe to eat.
Human survival doesn’t just involve muscle work. It also includes mental effort. In the hunting scenario, mental effort was needed to track the animal, plan an attack and maybe even to decide with whom to have dinner with.
Daniel Kahneman wrote at length about effortless thinking performed by System 1 and effortful thinking performed by System 2. Mentally adding single-digit numbers, jumping to a conclusion, riding a bicycle are all examples of System 1 cognition. Adding two three-digit numbers, carefully weighing evidence, and learning to ride a bicycle are examples of System 2 cognition [3]. System 2 uses more mental resource than System 1. In the human brain, mental resource equates to metabolic energy which is why we think of System 2 thinking as being work.
The English word work comes from the old English woerck, meaning to produce or prepare [1]. But other languages have a darker heritage. French travail and Spanish trabajo derive from the Latin tripalium, the exact meaning of which is obscure but involves three sticks and the feeling a slave gets while being beaten for punishment [2]. When many of us think of work, the Latin etymology seems more appropriate.
The word has a negative connotation. So, we try to avoid it. This is equally true of physical work and mental work.
Effort undertaken to obtain something directly is the simplest kind of work. I’m going to call this Level 1 Work. We also do work that doesn’t directly get us to our end goal but is about reducing the work required to obtain that goal. I’m going to call this second kind of work, … wait for it… Level 2 Work.
Level 2 is meta-work, work is done to make work easier, faster, more reliable, more productive. Tool making is one kind of Level 2 work. When you make a tool, you don’t directly achieve an end goal, you create something that makes it easier to achieve end goals.
We humans have a long history of meta-work. Our earliest known tools were shaped stones used to make it easier to kill game or cut meat. We have been making tools like this for more than 2 million years. But tool making goes back much further. There were certainly older tools made out of wood and other perishable materials. Furthermore, toolmaking isn’t unique to humans or our recent ancestors. Chimpanzees alter small sticks to make a device for extracting yummy termites from trees. Even some birds, such as crows, can construct tools to retrieve food [4].
We usually think of toolmaking as modifying material in some way or another but there are other kinds of meta-work that don’t involve constructing physical tools. Planning is mental meta-work. In and of itself planning doesn’t get you anything. A plan that isn’t executed, is simply wasted effort. But with successful follow through, planning can reduce the total amount of work.
Some work is less attractive than other work. So, we often work to get the right kind of work. When I was small, my parents told me that if I didn’t work hard at school, I would end up digging ditches. Although I didn’t see many ditch diggers, I took them at their word. I went to school for more than 20 years to make sure that I didn’t have to work quite so hard for the next 40 years. Becoming educated is mental meta-work.
Jigs and templates also reduce future work. When a skilled carpenter wants to cut multiple boards of the same length, he doesn’t use a tape measure to measure and mark each board. Instead he makes a thing to hold boards in a measured position so that each cut is made in exactly the same place. The measurement is made only once. Making the jig is work that reduces subsequent work in measurement and exerting special attention and motor control when making cuts [5, 6].
Sometimes meta-work like this isn’t worth the effort. Archeologists differentiate between expedient tools and formal tools [7]. A tool can be roughly made if it is going to be used only once and then discarded. But if it is going to get a lot of use, it is more carefully crafted. This is the same kind of thing we do when we decide it is too much effort to go out the garage and get a screwdriver to tighten a loose screw. We grab whatever is handy, a coin, a butter knife or we use a fingernail. Many fingernails have been sacrificed like this.
People often choose whether to stick with just-plain work or do some meta-work. Meta-work is an investment. Spend a little time and effort in meta-work and you may reduce the total amount of work.
The choice is not necessarily obvious (see figure 1). Certain work situations are temporary or infrequent. I may realize that if I will perform the task repeatedly, I could save a lot of effort if I first built a tool. This happens with spreadsheets. I could build a fancy spreadsheet with lots of formulas, conditional formatting and macros. It would summarize my data very efficiently. But it might take significant meta-work to build it. Still, it should be worth it. Unfortunately, I often guess wrong about the amount of meta-work required. Sometimes, I work too hard to avoid work.
So far, I’ve been only discussing personal work — work we do ourselves to obtain an immediate, personal goal. Before we had barter and money, most work was personal. But with the invention of systems of exchange, it became possible to decouple work from specific goals. We can work for money that we in turn use to get whatever we want — just as long as we have enough of it.
Employment is a financial transaction over work to be done. Employers have money and want to have work done to achieve their goals. Employees have their own goals and need money to achieve them. So, employees trade their work for the employer’s money.
It makes sense for employers to invest in meta-work. Meta-work performed by employees means that they will get more done for the same amount of money. They become more productive. Of course, workers don’t want to work any harder than they need to so, this sounds like a good deal for all.
In a modern technological society, the work to increase productivity is usually done by different people than the ones whose productivity is being enhanced. The level-2 worker constructs tools that amplify the effectiveness of the level-1 worker. These tools can create more output for a given worker input or they can take over the execution of mundane tasks through automation.
The value to employers of level-2 work is reflected in the greater compensation that technology workers receive when compared to that of those engaged in more mundane service jobs, such as janitors, nursing assistants and the like [8].
Automation is the final solution to problem of work. It eliminates not only physical labor but increasingly replaces cognitive work. Lest we forget, the automation of human mental work is not new. After all, “computer” once was a job description rather than just a tool [9].
Opinions are divided about whether automation, and especially, artificially intelligent automation, is a good or bad thing. Optimists dream about the ultimate triumph of human ingenuity over drudgery, AI discoveries of cancer cures, and immortal human personalities uploaded to the cloud. Pessimists fear a future in which SkyNet becomes self-aware and decides that we can be dispensed with.
I don’t think either is likely. We won’t get digital immortality, nor will we be rendered extinct by killer robots. Over time there will be less and less work. Maybe the notion of a basic income will take hold and we will continue to have food and shelter. We will have more time for pastimes. In this dystopian future, there will be coloring books for adults.
[1] Rosa, Paulo & Guimarães Pereira, Ângela & Ferretti, Federico. (2018). Futures of Work: Perspectives from the Maker Movement. 10.2760/96812.
[2] To Work, Latin Language Blog 17/12/2012. https://blogs.transparent.com/latin/to-work/ collected 11/3/2019.
[3} Daniel Kahneman. Thinking Fast and Slow. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York, 2011.
[4] von Bayern, A. M. P., Danel, S., Auersperg, A. M. I., Mioduszewska, B. and Kacelnick, N. Compound tool construction by New Caledonian crows. Scientific Reports volume 8, Article number: 15676 (2018) https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-018-33458-z
[5] Crawford, Mathew D. The world beyond your head. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York, 2015.
[6] Kirsh, David. The Intelligent Use of Space, June 1993. http://adrenaline.ucsd.edu/Kirsh/Articles/Space/AIJ1.html collected 11/3/2019.
[7] Tomkca, Steve. Stone Tool Recycling: A Key to Survival in Prehistoric South Texas,
https://www.texasbeyondhistory.net/st-plains/prehistory/images/recycling.html Collected 3/12/2019.
[8] Eduardo Porter, Tech is splitting the U.S. Work Force in Two. The New York Times, February 4, 2019.
[9] Sarah McLennan, Human Computers, https://crgis.ndc.nasa.gov/historic/Human_Computers. Collected March 18, 2019.
