Essentiality of work
These are testing times. Prolonged isolation and self-quarantine. However with sufficient food supply and a lot of time on hand, the mind wavers towards existential questions. One such is the “essentiality” of work.
Earlier today my wife was recollecting one of her old favourite bangle store which was a 2-storied store selling all kinds of accessories for women. She remarked that in the context of what is happening today, it feels so unnecessary now that such a lot of time, money and resources are typically spent (in normal times) on such frivolous things. I differed with her. My point was that such embellishments and art (when not exaggerated to the point of vanity) add colour to life, which otherwise would become as bland as a black-and-white movie. In a similar vein we both acknowledged that her own craft of classical Indian dance has a huge role to play in making human life much more endurable and flavourful!
Yet the situation we are in today overwhelmingly ignites in us a reflection. With so many people out there putting themselves at risk doing the work essential to keep humanity going, I wonder. I wonder about the work I do and about how meaningful it is. I realize that everyone’s work is essential in one or other way and that it is not binary (essential vs non-essential). Rather it is the degree of essential which I decided to term “essentiality”. It is necessity, purpose and meaning all rolled into one.
So take the work that I do. Me and my team, we create automation. That may by itself seems less essential and therefore of low importance in today’s quarantined world. What place in this world exists for work that helps reduce human effort? Does it have meaning in this quasi-apocalyptic situation?
Our automation work is towards helping software get developed and delivered faster into the hands of users. It seems unessential at first. Even low in meaning. And it is hard to see how it impacts the world at large or even the lives of people in some meaningful way.
But let me take a pause and see if there is something more to it. As the prescient Marc Andreessen predicted, software has eaten the world. Most human pursuits and industry is powered by software or at least made better by software. In fact software today makes possible certain things that would otherwise be impossible. The simplest example being the ability to get news from all over the world within minutes. Or the ability for the WHO or governments to communicate simultaneously with millions of people in need. Or even entertainment becoming possible on-click! And of course once normality returns, the oft-cited example is that of pressing a button and getting a cab within minutes to come and pick you up from wherever you are and take you to anywhere else in the city. Even this simple example would seem like magic and inconceivable to any human mind 50 years ago!
So ok, software is a huge enabler and is important for human existence. But how important or essential is automation for it? Just as many drops make an ocean, automation offering even a 20% speed-up per software version released would quickly add up. Additionally many different pieces of automation coming together might bring compounding effects that are hard to measure.
The medical industry and research is enabled by a lot of software. I imagine software had a role to play in the unprecedented speed with which corona vaccines have been brought to human trial stage! Of course it would be the cumulative effect of many years of software releases & improvements that made such enabling software possible. Making more releases possible per year with fewer bugs and errors has this kind of effect over time. But it is this long tail effect that really makes it seem distant in terms of meaning and essentiality.
Automation has another important role to play. I believe that anything that can be automated yet done manually is a form of human labour. It is repetitive, monotonous and the least good use of human faculty. Human beings can do amazing things. It is the continuous elevation of human effort to higher order things, constantly raising ourselves above repetitive, routine and sometimes menial tasks that has made possible such a drastic change in human living conditions within just over a century! Hard to imagine. Even two centuries ago, vast majorities of people thought that automating away human work was a threat but time and again this has been proven wrong. I’ve written about this before. I think humans can achieve a lot more meaningful progress once simpler and repetitive things are removed from the equation.
So what does all this mean? Does automation have a role to play in improving the human condition? It is hard to measure and sometimes the effects are felt over long periods of time. Also the compounding effect is attained by the involvement of multiple industries (that each use software). So while it seems un-meaningful and low on essentiality, it just might be that removing software automation & acceleration would mean we were still several years behind in our abilities to fight today’s COVID19 threat. It might also mean our lives weren’t as enriched. But also think about it this way: this work might just be accelerating the possibility of people getting their hands on amazing things and having much better in this lifetime! Still difficult to see the connection, but could it be true? What is the essentiality of automation?
All opinions expressed here are my own and do not necessarily reflect the views of my employer.