My Thoughts (Collection)

Artificial Omniscience and Self-Enforced Labor

Inspired by: Time and the Machine (Aldous Huxley)

Genre: Argumentative

 No information can travel faster than light, but mankind has come so drastically closer to that limit in just a century. The ongoing revolution in information technology has made it so that online meetings of a room full of people across the globe take a few seconds to load, whereas in the early to mid 1900s long distance communication was limited with people that had a landline that was connected by cable. In addition, we now can store hundreds of people's information onto a small USB, whereas thick phone books were still in use until the turn of the millennium.

To see the real effects of this revolution, we first need to define information technology. Information technology will be defined, for the purposes of this essay, as any technology intended for the storage or communication of information. The Information Revolution is the rapid development in this field of technology and how information has become a valuable commodity, starting in the 20th century and carrying on until the present. This revolution has changed the way we perceive time and humanity's relationship to it.

Time is naturally an invaluable asset for humans, after all, we need it to exist but we only have a limited amount of it, and it is never clear when your time runs out. Even still, comparing the contemporary relationship with time we have with the 19th or 20th century is astonishing. Sending a letter and waiting a few days would be such an inconvenience to the modern person that they might just travel a few hours on the road instead. People also feel a sort of nostalgia for the 1950s or 1920s or maybe even 1800s, envying their perceived decadence and their slow paced environments.

Now that we have the ability to work at lightning fast speeds, we are being forced to, both by some vague greedy corporate system but also by our general modern worldwide culture of efficiency and pouncing fast on opportunities and challenges alike. People can sometimes be blinded by their want for power, money, or whatever their motivation is and neglect their welfare and instead use the new information technology we have to work at unhealthy paces.

In addition, all this information has generated the demand for more work, in the form of information related jobs, whether it is in the form of an IT technician, espionage agent, or a simple franchise manager. All this work follows in the general trends of the deprioritization of the human soul, with our primary motivation increasingly being focused on achievement, money, and status in the quickest time possible. Humans simply do not want to do nothing and instead squeeze out the value of every day down to the millisecond.

To give a substantiating example, overtime violations are a fairly common white collar crime where a person is uncompensated, or compensated too little for overtime work. In an article by Ye and Gindling (2015), they found that 28.6% of workers who worked overtime did not receive any extra pay. The fact that overtime even exists is enough evidence of our unhealthy relationship with time, but not even being compensated for this work shows how little people value just an hour or two if these hours are not spent working.

Our working hours as well is a great example of our unique relationship with time, like how emails are schedule-sent during rigid working hours that ignore the spontaneity of nature and humans and some are sent well after working hours for just that small bit of work that can be accomplished in that time just before sleep.

In the time of month-long ships across the Atlantic, we were lucky enough to not even have the opportunity to work at the pace we do today. Our natural humanity was unimpeded and people worked when they could. Of course in the case of lower classes they were forced to work harder than us today, but for more middle and upper class people, work was at their discretion, and this is what humans evolved for.

Our biology could never have predicted the '40 hour work week' and yet humans did it anyway. Our psychological well being decreases and we see that depression and other mental health problems are much more prevalent in more industrialized and informationized areas (Xu et al., 2023). In addition to this, information jobs, like managerial positions, force people to sit at desks with fluorescent lights for a big portion of their day, further damaging their physical health.

We often forget that our norms of taking every second as an opportunity and working as quickly as possible are not natural. This is a great disappointment of human history that we have become accustomed to time ruling over us, rather than us controlling our own time. Humans view time as an empty space they need to fill with activity.

In the future, we should expect further advancements to further stuff up our schedule as the value and availability of information keeps increasing. The internet and artificial intelligence let us know anything, and an AI that will soon create almost anything and everything for us will paradoxically make us work even harder in even more information related jobs.

The artificial omnipotence that we call the internet has the power to smooth out our day to day jobs and let us work less, or work on ourselves, but instead we want to work even more with this newfound power we have. We need to work to our capabilities, not burn out for profit. When we feel no pressure to work, like a bad economic situation or a deadline to meet, we shouldn't feel guilty for resting for just a day or so, but we should revel in the great joy of nothing.

References:

Ye, L., Gindling, T. & Li, S. Compliance with legal minimum wages and overtime pay regulations in China. IZA J Labor Develop 4, 16 (2015).

Xu, J., Liu, N., Polemiti, E. et al. Effects of urban living environments on mental health in adults. Nat Med 29, 1456–1467 (2023).