We Bring Meaning Into The World

Ted Chiang | Work, Meaning, AI

Bringing Meaning? | Kelly Sikkema

We are all products of what has come before us, but it’s by living our lives in interaction with others that we bring meaning into the world.

| Ted Chiang, Why AI Isn't Going To Make Art

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Work, Meaning, AI

or Can work be a place to find meaning and purpose, when that's not what it is organized to do?

One of the slipknots of modern discourse about the role of work in our lives and culture is hinted at by Ted Chiang’s quote above. If it is true that ‘living our lives in interaction with others’ is the source of human meaning, then work — a practice that brings us into contact with others for so many hours each week — must be a major contributor to our sense of self and a wellspring for our search for meaning, right?

Many side questions arise, however, when we approach that premise critically.

After all, we are compelled to work by the exigencies of the marketplace: it is not a choice freely made. Many would rather pursue other ends — art, philosophy, helping others — if those pursuits would support them, or if all were provided a basic universal income.

The adversarial dimension of work — the inherent struggle of the employed (who would like more money, security, and equity for their labor) against the employer (who seeks to commodify work to the greatest extent possible) — polarizes the workplace and the relations between the managerial elite, on one side, and the various classes of workers: the white-collar professionals and blue-collar hourly laborers, on the other. These tensions — unresolved power relations — create a context where ‘bringing meaning into the world’ seems riven with cross purposes and rife with political and societal strain.

Work is not a cathedral for spiritual contemplation of life’s consummation or a Platonic academy in which we interact with other seekers to uncover or co-create meaning. It’s more like a battlefield.

To the extent that the expanses of time we spend at work can be employed toward building meaning for ourselves and others, it comes by side effects, or through outright subterfuge. We can think of this as stealing meaning, like prisoners in a massive jail who scheme and conceal furtively, digging the cement out from between the stones in the walls, seeking to escape.

Perhaps we can bring meaning into the world through working with others to find new ways of work, to sidestep the political authoritarianism of work, to subvert Elizabeth Anderson’s ‘private governments’. Perhaps there might be a different stance to take, where the greatest accomplishment will no longer be escaping from the prison of work in order to find ourselves blinking in the sunlight outside the walls, wondering ‘what now?’.

Ted Chiang’s assertion about meaning occurred in the final paragraph of an essay on how AI will not be able to make art, because they lack the human dimension of making meaning in collaboration with others.

Chiang’s analysis rests on the nature of people as ‘creators and apprehenders of meaning’, which is not something generally found in a job description. And adding AI to the volatile mix that is the modern condition of work will not create new meaning. As he puts it, AI ‘reduces the amount of intention in the world’, which is what people provide.

AI will not increase the degree of meaning people find through work, and neither will it solve the possibly unsolvable tensions of work in a largely unregulated market economy. But AI may disrupt or destroy the fragile détente between the owners and the workers in the workplace, especially if it is introduced at anything like the pace that its promoters seem to be encouraging.

Remember that the original Luddites were highly-skilled weavers that smashed the new automatic looms that commodified their work, and led to their loss of pay, stability, and meaning.

To a jaundiced reader, who might respond to this with something like ‘Who said work was supposed to be a path to human meaning? Suck it up, find a reason to get up every day in the hours outside of work if work isn’t enough, and push ahead’, I hear you.

But there could be a different way forward. It doesn’t have to be like this.

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Links to other resources relevant to these ideas, after the paywall.