The Future of Work: Finding personal fulfillment in a world where human labor is obsolete

In part 1 I ended by questioning the assumption in society that people are lazy in the absence of social norms and authority. Over the past 18 months, I’ve begun to see something even more profound: social norms and authority can both organize our collective agency, and actively discourage us from acting on our own better judgment.

The question isn't just, “Will people work if they don't need money?” It's also, “What kinds of work are we preventing people from doing because they need money?”

What I discovered about agency and motivation

In that time, I have had reason to be involved in my school district’s finances. As a parent, I see my daughter have to fight to enroll in the classes she needs to thrive and prepare for college, because there are simply not enough class offerings to accommodate a full load for all the students. Free blocks and TA positions are encouraged, which the kids love, but are a waste of their education hours.

And as a teacher, I feel the constant squeeze of unresponsive administrators applying constraints but no fixes to my classroom needs. I spend my own money to get the supplies I needed for science experiments in a timely way. At the beginning of the semester I am given 3 boxes of kleenex, one for each of my class periods, as if that is somehow adequate for the semester.

At board meetings, I witnessed unreasonable conversations and processes. For instance, the Union claimed the district was spending too much money on contractors, and the School Board, constrained by Roberts’ Rules of Order and the Brown Act, never responded directly, only suggesting confusion about restricted and unrestricted funds. Meanwhile, the district solemnly alerted us that we must make $7 million in budget cuts and make hard choices, while presenting a slide showing special education costs increasing from $30 million to $90 million in four years, without explanation.

These are the kinds of questions physicists ask routinely: why is the system behaving this way? What patterns can we identify to model the dynamics? Around this time, two guest student teachers from UC Berkeley’s physics program were teaching in my classroom. One possible lesson was “Fermi problems,” named after Enrico Fermi, who broke immensely complicated problems involving large numbers into a series of simple estimations. With this approach, one can estimate the properties of atoms in metallic conductors, the span of time it took a species to evolve, or the number of galaxies in the sky. I was inspired to apply this physics approach to the numbers I was seeing at board meetings.

Knowing our own style and shortcomings

I’m aware that finding novel issues is rare, especially in a field we aren’t an expert at. In the process of learning about the budget I sometimes caught myself thinking, “Whoa, somebody really screwed this up!” only to realize later that I just didn’t know what I was doing. That is why I was genuinely shocked and slow to respond when I saw our spending patterns for externally contracted staff. Now, a year later, we’ve met with many agencies and legislators. All have been surprised by the data, and none have questioned its validity.

And yet, we are at a loss for any formal action or even ownership of the issue. It has been a true wake up call for me to see information so obvious to so many stakeholders illicit so little motivation.

I had encountered this before. As a musician, I found that talent alone wasn't enough to gain recognition. But music is subjective, I thought, and hoped that fundamental physics would be different. Yet there, too, I found that asking unconventional questions often failed to generate curiosity or engagement. The nature of physics, in my view, is not just finding the right answers, but asking the right questions. So when I discovered a systemic accounting issue in California's school finances, verified by person after person, I expected a different response. Surely, if music and physics were too subjective, finance would be different. Yet even here, compelling evidence didn't necessarily lead to meaningful action.

An unfortunate constraint on behavior

Our first big win was with a non-profit organization who advised legislators and districts on school funding policies. They were impressed with our data presentation, acknowledged it was new information for them, and were encouraging. Yet our alignment didn’t last long; my best guess is that our data pointed away from their own diagnosis for the deficits: declining enrollment due to demographic changes in California.

I knew many people in the teachers’ union, so I was hopeful that we could get some traction there. But after a positive response from the statewide office, saying the data was indeed really valuable, we received no further communication in response to our many calls and emails.

Our local county supervisor was very welcoming and gave us a personal meeting. But it truly wasn’t his arena, as he had no jurisdiction over schools, and he told us this.

A local university researcher was very interested in the data, but their demanding teaching schedule made them unavailable to engage beyond the first meeting.

A weekly cross-department phone call for policy makers seemed like a good fit for our information, but without speaking with us directly, they pointed us elsewhere, suggesting that we were more along the lines of advocacy than straight research. To the contrary, we have only sought to interpret the data at the request of other groups who have requested it in order to engage with us. Our main point is that the data being circulated is wrong, but we didn’t get a chance to say that before we were dismissed.

Even though nearly everybody supported our efforts, we witnessed many ways in which our information could be blocked. For instance, one legislative staffer questioned an aspect of the data but wouldn’t respond further when we followed up with the information they requested. Then, the County Supervisor offered to connect us to someone who could help, but never followed up and was impossible to reach. A number of agencies suggested that this issue seemed important, but their three-year strategic plan was already in place and they couldn’t take up this issue. This seemed reasonable, except that in this situation there were hundreds of millions of dollars at stake and thousands of students and families affected. It seemed like any organization devoted to education would set aside existing priorities long enough to reassess where this new information landed for their mission.

I had left teaching in the middle of this investigation, because everything lined up for me to do so, and I saw my future in teaching outside the high school classroom. It was this very issue that gave me an anchor to focus on, something I knew was important enough to enough people that I could both do good in my community and, one way or another, be able to support myself. I live within a family and a wider community where the privilege to leave my job open-ended is available to me, albeit not easy to arrange.

What strikes me is that, for me, it was the only thing I could do. I knew I wouldn’t be happy with myself continuing to teach. While I myself was unhappy with the classroom environment, I saw that my school was the most privileged in the district, and others were experiencing the effects of poverty directly. To me, it felt privileged to stay in my job, because I would be tuning out the needs around me for the sake of a false sense of security with a teacher’s paycheck. Luckily my family situation allowed me to afford stepping down from my position, and the time I regained allowed me to support those in my family who supported me, and to pursue this thread of hidden resource extraction that nobody else was going to pursue.

In my case, it was generational privilege which allowed me the freedom to choose my focus and method of contribution. What if the freedom I experienced as a privilege became available to far more people—not because they inherited financial security, but because technology reduced the labor required to sustain society?

In that environment, I think it is important to recognize if we have been shaped into obedience and ignorance by the current system. How often does employment dictate how we allocate our attention and understand our responsibilities? How much have we been rewarded for fulfilling assigned obligations, at the expense of recognizing needs that emerge in real time?

How we learn to remain in our lanes

Is there something about school that creates this very culture? Could the rigidity with which people seemed to perceive their roles be an unfortunate consequence of the very scientific reasoning that had been so powerful for me in analyzing the financial data? For me, the logic felt freeing because the numbers painted a clear picture of what was really going on. But that was only true because I was free to pursue it. It was ironic that others who may have had more expertise to apply to the analysis were constrained by their assigned roles in that field.

In the Western worldview, we are very keen on cause and effect, but maybe our definition of these relationships can get too narrow. By following different chains of reasoning, we may decide to stay in our assigned role or step out of it. Both can be justified as logical.

Were the organizations and leaders I encountered too busy “filling out worksheets” to look up and question the “purposefulness of the curriculum”? I had unique data with a window into a pressing issue, but their periscope was on a different setting.

In Western culture, there is a push against awe and wonder. We are encouraged to lead an unenchanted life. Progress usually comes from hard work and success is mainly rewarded with money or renown. Being accepted by our peers is often more important than being true to our principles. The loudest voice is often heard best, and the most confident or intense person is often considered the best leader.

I have found that the some of the more intimate songs I have written, or my most honest and seemingly silly ideas in physics, or the discovery of hidden contractor spending in public schools, makes me feel very uncertain. It is the vulnerable uncertainty of my views, and the views of many young people and older renegades alike, that is worth hearing. I am not the perfect model of this, just another once-young person who can maybe put some useful words to a common human experience.

If we are confident because the system has rewarded us extrinsically, then we will likely keep acting within that system. I still dwell on the moment in my life a decade ago when I was desperate to find a way to continue pursuing writing, and pursued a funding source which came with obligations that weren’t right for me. It was the decision I had to make at the time, but in the process I learned how to wait out the uncertainty and discomfort so that the next time I could create the professional opportunity I really wanted.

If I faced that dilemma in my forties, imagine what it’s like for a high school graduate today. I’m not saying young people have the solutions just because they aren’t jaded by life yet. I’m not saying that every outside-the-box idea is correct or has value. I am saying the people have value, whether or not they have proven themselves according to the standards we are using to measure them. Most of the students I have the privilege of teaching are trying to make their way within rigid external expectations; some are well-adapted to that particular struggle and some are not. But I have never met a student that was incapable of passion or creativity. For many it is buried under circumstances and beliefs about their capacities that are formed by comparing themselves to the instruction manual we give them. They trust us to give them meaningful roles, and they dutifully try to shape themselves into the people we want them to be. That is why it is so distressing to me to find a whole segment of society profiting off the needs of our students with disabilities, at the expense of young workers who get stuck in contracts they didn’t understand, by organizations that know exactly what they are doing and can justify it to themselves, and are sheltered from accountability by the lane-keeping of those in authority!

Our children trust us to shape them, and we don’t even notice when they bloom. We walk right past the flowers in pursuit of what we have learned to seek, even then to realize that we have ourselves been mislead.

We are consumers of information and voters in a democratic and capitalist society; we have a responsibility to know ourselves. If we stop paying attention once we think we know what is going on, or we stop listening once we think we know what someone is going to say, or we dismiss someone because we think we already know what they are capable of, it may be our own overconfidence that is the limiting factor.

A new way to organize human activity

There is a paradox that whenever we work together toward a common goal, the tendency grows for “group think” and it can be harder to see clearly. This is a real challenge that I don't have an answer for. We can’t all work independently, we need each other to balance our tendencies, but when we do work together we need to be able to adjust to new information that may change our perspective.

I wonder if the emergence of artificial intelligence tools will help us accomplish a new way of self-organizing. Maybe we don’t need corporations anymore in the same sense as before. A corporation provides an identity to rally around. But collective corporation develops it’s own needs over time, which often preclude the needs of the people involved. Maybe AI provides us the tools for a new form of organizing, where people work together organically in affinity groups, spend money within those groups in ways that are not necessarily even among members, and contribute to those groups in asymmetric ways. A form of family, but maybe more like college housing than your childhood home.

Money is different things to different people. I viscerally recall the feeling of rationing food, except when I went home to see my parents, because every dollar mattered. But now my situation is different, and a hundred dollars for a casual trip to the grocery store is not a concern like it used to be. A dollar can be a lot, and a million dollars can be way to little, depending on context. In an age of AI, I see an opportunity. Right now we often focus on trying to level the playing field, but we keep the barriers to entry in society really high. I would like to see us diminish the impact that earning less has on people in society.

If you love your work and you are doing fine financially (which will continue to be the case for many of us whose chosen career continues to be paid in an AI economy), you may naturally find benefits from working around and living around others who contribute in other ways. The mutual support of these networks doesn’t have to be formal. But such an arrangement becomes possible to imagine if we simply didn’t feel desperate for money. The desperation we are trained to feel for resources locks us into a cycle of staying in our lane and doing only our job description, and nothing beyond. It keeps us imagining most of the problems we observe as somebody else’s problem. It keeps us from creatively engaging with the world we live in.

I wonder if this is the bigger picture I am witnessing as I try to address what seems like an obvious flaw in the school budgeting system. I don’t expect it to be easy to change an industry. But when people whose general job description is to address these kinds of issues, their specific job description should not get in the way of doing what is needed. But it seems to be the one-size-fits-all approach to income and social uplift, along with the lane-tending and gate-keeping that we have inherited from our resource-constrained histories, that may be keeping us from solving real problems and welcoming in a new generation of contributors into society.

What would you devote yourself to if you didn't have to justify your time to an employer, an institution, or a paycheck?