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Automation and Utopia: Human Flourishing in a World without Work
Automating technologies threaten to usher in a workless future, but John Danaher argues that this can be a good thing. A world without work may be a kind of utopia, free of the misery of the job and full of opportunities for creativity and exploration. If we play our cards right, automation could be the path to idealized forms of human flourishing.
323 pages, Kindle Edition
First published September 24, 2019
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Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews
January 20, 2020
I quite liked the first half of the book, which gave arguments for why work is bad and why it would be better for us to get rid of it. This kind of an argument is open to the objection that anything that people do may be considered work, but Danaher addresses this by choosing a narrower definition for work:
Thus, when Danaher argues that work should be eliminated, he notes that he explicitly does not mean that "all forms of activity, be they pleasant or unpleasant, can and should be automated" - only that people should be freed from the need to do work in exchange for an economic reward.
In the third chapter, "Why You Should Hate Your Job", Danaher offers five features of work that make it bad for most workers:
I found his discussion of these issues excellent and persuasive.
What I found less compelling was the second part of the book, where Danaher discusses what he calls the "cyborg" and the "virtual" utopias. In the first one we merge with machines in order to preserve the ability to work, and in the second one we create a society centered around playing games. Danaher finds the first one uncompelling and the second one promising. While I generally agreed with his conclusions, the discussion about the utopias felt to me rather abstract and technical, such as when spending several pages on a discussion of how a concept such as "utopia" should be defined.
Another example is when the chapter on virtual utopias considers the objection that experiences in a virtual game are not real, and then has a lengthy discussion of what something being "real" means and how socially constructed phenomena such as jobs, legal obligations, and relationships are also in a sense virtual but no less real because of that. While I cannot fault this argument, it feels rather abstract in nature, and I wonder to what extent it would really persuade someone who objects to a world based on games because of the feeling that games are not real. At the same time, there exists a rich literature in game scholarship with various concrete examples of how games are already real, affect people's lives today, or may even satisfy various basic human needs better than reality does. I would have expected to see some of this literature in the chapter, but it goes largely uncited.
Rating: 4 stars for the first half of the book, 2 stars for the second, for an overall rating of 3 stars.
(Full disclosure: the first chapter of the book is named after a poem that I wrote, and includes it as an epigraph. I received a free copy of the book from the author.)
Work: Any activity (physical, cognitive, emotional etc.) performed in exchange for an economic reward, or in the ultimate hope of receiving an economic reward.
Thus, when Danaher argues that work should be eliminated, he notes that he explicitly does not mean that "all forms of activity, be they pleasant or unpleasant, can and should be automated" - only that people should be freed from the need to do work in exchange for an economic reward.
In the third chapter, "Why You Should Hate Your Job", Danaher offers five features of work that make it bad for most workers:
* The Problem of Dominating Influence: Employment contracts, and, more generally, the state of being employed, typically give employers an unjust dominating power over the lives of workers. This significantly undermines the freedom of workers.
* The Problem of Fissuring and Precarity: The working environment is becoming increasingly fissured, and working conditions are becoming increasingly precarious for many workers. This makes working life more unpleasant and stressful.
* The Problem of Distributive Injustice: Work is distributively unjust. Technology is resulting in an increasingly polarized workforce in which a small number of highly paid individuals reap most of the economic rewards, and these rewards are not, in any obvious way, proportional to effort or merit.
* The Problem of Temporal Colonization: Work colonizes our lives. Most of our mental and physical effort is taken up with preparing for, performing, or recovering from work. What's more, this colonization is getting worse as a result of technology.
* The Problem of Unhappiness and Dissatisfaction: Most people are dissatisfied with their work and think they could do better, and this makes it difficult to justify the other bad-making features of work.
I found his discussion of these issues excellent and persuasive.
What I found less compelling was the second part of the book, where Danaher discusses what he calls the "cyborg" and the "virtual" utopias. In the first one we merge with machines in order to preserve the ability to work, and in the second one we create a society centered around playing games. Danaher finds the first one uncompelling and the second one promising. While I generally agreed with his conclusions, the discussion about the utopias felt to me rather abstract and technical, such as when spending several pages on a discussion of how a concept such as "utopia" should be defined.
Another example is when the chapter on virtual utopias considers the objection that experiences in a virtual game are not real, and then has a lengthy discussion of what something being "real" means and how socially constructed phenomena such as jobs, legal obligations, and relationships are also in a sense virtual but no less real because of that. While I cannot fault this argument, it feels rather abstract in nature, and I wonder to what extent it would really persuade someone who objects to a world based on games because of the feeling that games are not real. At the same time, there exists a rich literature in game scholarship with various concrete examples of how games are already real, affect people's lives today, or may even satisfy various basic human needs better than reality does. I would have expected to see some of this literature in the chapter, but it goes largely uncited.
Rating: 4 stars for the first half of the book, 2 stars for the second, for an overall rating of 3 stars.
(Full disclosure: the first chapter of the book is named after a poem that I wrote, and includes it as an epigraph. I received a free copy of the book from the author.)
August 26, 2022
I’m on board with most of Part One of this book, in which Danaher explains “Why you should hate your job” (Chapter 3) and defends the proposition that “The automation of work is both possible and desirable: work is bad for most people most of the time, in ways they don’t always appreciate. We should do what we can to hasten the obsolescence of humans in the arena of work.” (p. 2)
This seems absolutely correct to me; the obsession with the idea of work is a clear example of making a virtue of necessity - we value hard work simply because most people have needed to work in order to survive for all of human history. People who worked hardest were often (but not always) the most successful. That need not be the case in modern society. People should be inherently valuable, not valued in proportion to what they are physically or mentally able to contribute to the world. After all, people don’t get to choose their abilities; even if they work hard, it takes luck to be good at something that happens to be valued by society. And if automation technology continues as it should, there will sooner or later be more people than there is work to do. So we should absolutely welcome the automated future.
I’m a bit torn about the remainder of the book. Danaher describes a world in which machines do most of the work that needs to be done, better than humans could do it, freeing everyone from the need to work. But then he spends a lot of time making assertions about the difficulties people will face when confronted with this world, including the problems of severance, attention, opacity, autonomy, and agency. (p. 126) While there’s a grain of truth in all of these - I’m particularly concerned about the attention economy - and his arguments are philosophically rigorous, I feel these concerns are mostly overblown.
Danaher allows that any solution to these problems depends on solving a more basic problem first: the deprivation problem (“any world in which the need for paid work has been eliminated would be a world in which a large percentage of the population would risk losing the ability to pay for the basic goods and services they need to survive.”) (p. 100). But he explicitly states that he’s not interested in proposing a solution to that problem here; rather, he wants to skip ahead to consider what happens if we do solve that problem. Okay, but let’s hope the solutions to that problem are indeed forthcoming (universal basic income seems the most obvious) or else the rest of this book becomes pointless.
His solutions to the problems involve invoking one of two utopian scenarios: The Cyborg Utopia (Chapter 6) and the Virtual Utopia (Chapter 7). He does point out in the beginning that his is a “particular utopian vision” and that his intention isn’t to convince the reader of these particular conclusions, only to “demonstrate and develop a way of thinking about the automated future”. (p. 3). So I give him credit for doing that, but I suppose I didn’t require as much demonstration as his target reader, and his particular choices for utopian worlds seem excessively limited.
After laying out the idea of the Cyborg Utopia as the future in which humans merge with machines to some extent in order to avoid ceding the cognitive niche to them, he (rightly, I believe) concludes that it it might not be as desirable as it first appears, for various reasons. It might not actually eliminate work, it might adversely affect our values, and it might not be practical any time soon, among other concerns.
Danaher then turns to the idea of the Virtual Utopia, in which humans inevitably cede the cognitive niche to AI and retreat into a virtual world. He concludes that this is more likely, more desirable, and more feasible. Although he mentions that technology is not strictly necessary, allowing that “Game-like environments in the physical world … can also count as part of the Virtual Utopia.” (p. 230), much of this section is spent defending the existence of purpose and meaning in a truly virtual environment that has no consequences in the physical world. I think this goes too far.
Strangely, to me, Danaher neglects the obvious utopian world in which people, freed from work, can do literally anything they want - exactly the same leisure activities they choose today when not working, but more, and all the time. Can’t we simply read books, listen to music, watch movies, and enjoy other types of art? Or write, play, and create art of our own? He seems overly concerned that this will somehow be less enjoyable with the knowledge that AI could do it much better (given that we have ceded the cognitive niche). But I fail to see how this reduces the enjoyment. In fact it seems it would just increase the variety of art available for us to consume. And then are games and sports, which Danaher takes great pains to explain are already “virtual” in some sense, in that they only work because we all agree to play by arbitrary rules, so why should we fear being immersed in virtual games? Indeed, but in fact why introduce the concept of “virtual” at all? We can simply continue playing all the physical games and sports we do today. With endless resources available and no need to work, we could all spend lifetimes learning and playing games or engaging in various athletic events with other humans. Again, so what if machines exist that could exceed us at every one of these activities - why exactly should this concern us? It’s still fun to participate, sometimes win, and sometimes lose, at any level - after all, that’s why sports and games have the concept of ratings and levels of expertise: to allow people with similar levels of skill to engage with each other in competition.
In the end, I found this book to be impeccably written and full of well-stated arguments. In particular, the promise of a world without work is clearly described, and I encourage anyone skeptical of the idea to read this book. The elaboration of the further implications of such a world I found less valuable, but still absolutely worth thinking about.
This seems absolutely correct to me; the obsession with the idea of work is a clear example of making a virtue of necessity - we value hard work simply because most people have needed to work in order to survive for all of human history. People who worked hardest were often (but not always) the most successful. That need not be the case in modern society. People should be inherently valuable, not valued in proportion to what they are physically or mentally able to contribute to the world. After all, people don’t get to choose their abilities; even if they work hard, it takes luck to be good at something that happens to be valued by society. And if automation technology continues as it should, there will sooner or later be more people than there is work to do. So we should absolutely welcome the automated future.
I’m a bit torn about the remainder of the book. Danaher describes a world in which machines do most of the work that needs to be done, better than humans could do it, freeing everyone from the need to work. But then he spends a lot of time making assertions about the difficulties people will face when confronted with this world, including the problems of severance, attention, opacity, autonomy, and agency. (p. 126) While there’s a grain of truth in all of these - I’m particularly concerned about the attention economy - and his arguments are philosophically rigorous, I feel these concerns are mostly overblown.
Danaher allows that any solution to these problems depends on solving a more basic problem first: the deprivation problem (“any world in which the need for paid work has been eliminated would be a world in which a large percentage of the population would risk losing the ability to pay for the basic goods and services they need to survive.”) (p. 100). But he explicitly states that he’s not interested in proposing a solution to that problem here; rather, he wants to skip ahead to consider what happens if we do solve that problem. Okay, but let’s hope the solutions to that problem are indeed forthcoming (universal basic income seems the most obvious) or else the rest of this book becomes pointless.
His solutions to the problems involve invoking one of two utopian scenarios: The Cyborg Utopia (Chapter 6) and the Virtual Utopia (Chapter 7). He does point out in the beginning that his is a “particular utopian vision” and that his intention isn’t to convince the reader of these particular conclusions, only to “demonstrate and develop a way of thinking about the automated future”. (p. 3). So I give him credit for doing that, but I suppose I didn’t require as much demonstration as his target reader, and his particular choices for utopian worlds seem excessively limited.
After laying out the idea of the Cyborg Utopia as the future in which humans merge with machines to some extent in order to avoid ceding the cognitive niche to them, he (rightly, I believe) concludes that it it might not be as desirable as it first appears, for various reasons. It might not actually eliminate work, it might adversely affect our values, and it might not be practical any time soon, among other concerns.
Danaher then turns to the idea of the Virtual Utopia, in which humans inevitably cede the cognitive niche to AI and retreat into a virtual world. He concludes that this is more likely, more desirable, and more feasible. Although he mentions that technology is not strictly necessary, allowing that “Game-like environments in the physical world … can also count as part of the Virtual Utopia.” (p. 230), much of this section is spent defending the existence of purpose and meaning in a truly virtual environment that has no consequences in the physical world. I think this goes too far.
Strangely, to me, Danaher neglects the obvious utopian world in which people, freed from work, can do literally anything they want - exactly the same leisure activities they choose today when not working, but more, and all the time. Can’t we simply read books, listen to music, watch movies, and enjoy other types of art? Or write, play, and create art of our own? He seems overly concerned that this will somehow be less enjoyable with the knowledge that AI could do it much better (given that we have ceded the cognitive niche). But I fail to see how this reduces the enjoyment. In fact it seems it would just increase the variety of art available for us to consume. And then are games and sports, which Danaher takes great pains to explain are already “virtual” in some sense, in that they only work because we all agree to play by arbitrary rules, so why should we fear being immersed in virtual games? Indeed, but in fact why introduce the concept of “virtual” at all? We can simply continue playing all the physical games and sports we do today. With endless resources available and no need to work, we could all spend lifetimes learning and playing games or engaging in various athletic events with other humans. Again, so what if machines exist that could exceed us at every one of these activities - why exactly should this concern us? It’s still fun to participate, sometimes win, and sometimes lose, at any level - after all, that’s why sports and games have the concept of ratings and levels of expertise: to allow people with similar levels of skill to engage with each other in competition.
In the end, I found this book to be impeccably written and full of well-stated arguments. In particular, the promise of a world without work is clearly described, and I encourage anyone skeptical of the idea to read this book. The elaboration of the further implications of such a world I found less valuable, but still absolutely worth thinking about.
October 15, 2020
The speculative second half is quite good when it finally gets to the bit about "Virtual Utopias" ...the entire first half about the "structural badness of work" arrives at some Gramscian conclusions but takes the longest possible route getting there and fails to mention Gramsci lol. Pretty fun to read though, even if the cyborgian stuff is a little tawdry and thin-boned.
August 5, 2020
Interesting ideas, very clear structure.
Very academic style and the book could be 50% thinner. I’d benefit from more simple examples.
Very academic style and the book could be 50% thinner. I’d benefit from more simple examples.
March 16, 2022
Its interesting subject, John Danaher provides a philosophical insight into an extremely realistic problem i.e. how automation is causing the loss of economic work. He talks about human obsolescence in certain industry caused or due to be caused by automation. Also, mentions the Luddite fallacy where it is argued that automation might create more jobs than loss of it. He argues why the current work situation is not the most desirable form of work due the Dominance, Unjust distribution problems. Then paints a picture of post work utopian view in basically two forms - the cyborg utopia and the virtual utopia.
While the problems described in the book are very true and on the horizon, I still believe there can be many other possibilities ( or at least I like to think so), nevertheless, thought provoking and an interesting read.
While the problems described in the book are very true and on the horizon, I still believe there can be many other possibilities ( or at least I like to think so), nevertheless, thought provoking and an interesting read.
June 16, 2023
I thought that the “why you should hate your job” section was quite interesting however the cyborg utopia 🥲 cringe
The Game as Utopia part was really compelling to me mostly because I do agree that games play a significant and vital part of our lives and they promote curiosity and virtue
The book was a but too vague and abstract at times
The Game as Utopia part was really compelling to me mostly because I do agree that games play a significant and vital part of our lives and they promote curiosity and virtue
The book was a but too vague and abstract at times
November 25, 2022
Incredibly clear. I disagree with plenty of it (e.g. his attitude towards work - that it is always an evil, regardless of the subjective value for the worker or beneficiary), but he's never unreasonable.
December 15, 2024
That this book is poorly argued again and again is no surprise given this genre and its low standards is one thing, but the fact that Harvard University Press published it is astonishing. Read the footnotes though -- there are lots of good references in there.
August 17, 2025
Giving it 3 stars because it is well-written and well-organized, although Danaher's "utopia" felt rather dystopian to me (A "Sim City"-esque world is hardly something inspiring...).
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