One of the most remarkable things about us is also one of the easiest to overlook: each time we collide with the real, we deepen our understanding of the world and become more fully a part of it. While we’re wrestling with a challenge, we may be motivated by an anticipation of the ends of our labor, but, as Frost saw, it’s the work—the means—that makes us who we are. Automation severs ends from means. It makes getting what we want easier, but it distances us from the work of knowing. As we transform ourselves into creatures of the screen, we face the same existential question that the Shushwap confronted: Does our essence still lie in what we know, or are we now content to be defined by what we want? That sounds very serious. But the aim is joy. The active soul is a light soul. By reclaiming our tools as parts of ourselves, as instruments of experience rather than just means of production, we can enjoy the freedom that congenial technology provides when it opens the world more fully to us. It’s the freedom I imagine Lawrence Sperry and Emil Cachin must have felt on that bright spring day in Paris a hundred years ago when they climbed out onto the wings of their gyroscope-balanced Curtiss C-2 biplane and, filled with terror and delight, passed over the reviewing stands and saw below them the faces of the crowd turned skyward in awe.
Final passage from this book. The key question is whether automation free us up to do things that really give us meaning, or that losing the element of “work” and “challenge” of knowing and doing things makes us feel lost instead.
Humans can be paradoxical in what we want. When we are busy and being challenged, we might yearn for leisure time and to just do nothing. Yet, when we are fully relaxed and not doing anything, there remains an emptiness or a search for meaning. Now, most modern jobs might not be the answer to our search for meaning, so automating such jobs away might not necessarily be the worst thing (probably not from an economic point of view). It remains to be seen how this modern disruption will continue to impact our perspectives and our sense of purpose.
