Work: A Deep History, from the Stone Age to the Age of Robots

by James Suzman

Fully automated production lines do not work for free. Their basic energy needs are often even greater than those of people. They also require periodic upgrades and running repairs. But unlike employees, they don’t strike, and when they are no longer fit for purpose they don’t demand severance packages or expect to be supported by pension plans. More than this, replacing or recycling them incurs no moral costs, with the result that no CEO is going to lose sleep before having them uninstalled and dispatched for recycling or scrap.

The results of this ambitious exercise were first presented to the Club of Rome in private and then published, in 1972, in a book, The Limits to Growth.

But more importantly, it was a place where meeting the energy-expensive “relative needs” that animate our urge to consume had diminished to the point that people were no longer inclined to periodically upgrade and replace everything they owned simply to keep the wheels of commerce turning.

Where foragers, with their immediate-return economies, invested their labor effort to meet their spontaneous needs, and farmers, with their delayed-return systems, invested theirs to support themselves for the following year, we are now obliged to consider the potential consequences of our work over a much longer time span. One that recognizes that most of us can expect to live longer than at any time in the past and that is cognizant of the legacy we leave our descendants. This in turn imposes complex new trade-offs to be made between short-term gains and longer-term consequences that may transform those gains into losses.

If the ultimate measure of sustainability is endurance over time, then hunting and gathering is by far the most sustainable economic approach developed in all of human history, and the Khoisan are the most accomplished exponents of this approach.

Beyond channeling the spirits of the thousands of generations of makers and doers, who as faithful servants of that trickster god entropy have found satisfaction through giving their idle hands and restless minds work to do, the purpose of this book is somewhat less prescriptive. One aim is to reveal how our relationship to work—in the broadest sense—is more fundamental than that imagined by the likes of Keynes. The relationship between energy, life, and work is part of a common bond we have with all other living organisms, and at the same time our purposefulness, our infinite skillfulness, and ability to find satisfaction in even the mundane are part of an evolutionary legacy honed since the very first stirrings of life on earth. The principal purpose, however, has been to loosen the claw-like grasp that scarcity economics has held over our working lives, and to diminish our corresponding and unsustainable preoccupation with economic growth. For by recognizing that many of the core assumptions that underwrite our economic institutions are an artifact of the agricultural revolution, amplified by our migration into cities, frees us to imagine a whole range of new, more sustainable possible futures for ourselves, and rise to the challenge of harnessing our restless energy, purposefulness, and creativity to shaping our destiny.