Episode: 4118
Title: HPR4118: Toil versus Livelihood
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr4118/hpr4118.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-25 19:51:19

---

This is Hacker Public Radio, episode 4118 for Wednesday, the 15th of May 2024.
Today's show is entitled, Toil v. Livelihood.
It is hosted by DNT, and is about 24 minutes long.
It carries a clean flag.
The summary is, a contribution to the discussions about I as a threat to our livelihoods.
Welcome to another exciting episode of Hacker Public Radio.
I am your host for today.
My name is DNT, and this is a response to the earlier show by Dodd Dummy.
I told Will, they take our jobs, question mark, of course they will, and I'm also somewhat
responding to the show, the comments made during the community news show by Dave Morris and
Ken Fallon on that show by Dodd Dummy, which were very interesting as well.
So thanks to all that, I will just continue the conversation, I guess, and I would like
to make some points about this, I've been really interested in the subject and been
reading a lot about it.
So first of all, I think we tend to confuse livelihood with toil, right?
What are we trying to protect?
Are we trying to protect our livelihood or our toil?
Because those are two different things.
And in our history, we have actually protected our toil.
We value the toil, not just the livelihood.
There is a moral thing that was constructed over a very long time, where the toil itself
is sometimes seen as the end in itself, not just the livelihood, right?
And this is like some writers have described this as something that really comes from the
ruling classes, let's say, in this case.
So I'm referring to an article by a Bertrand Russell that came out in 1930 on Harper.
I think it was, it's called in praise of idleness.
So for example, he says that it's regarding the virtue of hard work as an end in itself,
rather than a means to a state of affairs in which the hard work is no longer needed
is what he says among many other things.
So yeah, here, so I want to give an example.
It's like, I think the things that are threatened by generative AI both in writing and also
in image generation, this is work that nobody actually wants to do.
It's work that is not any good, right?
The work that can actually be replaced by this.
And this is basically all the work that's produced in a commercial context.
You know, nobody wants to write these articles on blogs and stuff that come out by the
thousands, right?
Or draw these images that are commissioned for advertising or things like that.
I would say that none of this work is interesting.
Nobody actually wants to do it.
They just do it because they get paid for it.
And then they get to do in their paid work something that has a little bit to do with
their actual vocation in life, right?
But it is never really fulfilling to their vocation, right?
So I would cite here, there's a friend of mine who he is a video editor, right?
And I used to be a videographer and video editor as well.
I worked as a freelancer in that field.
And I started working in that field during a time when there was some stuff going on in
Rio where I'm from and I really wanted to document it and I just really wanted to tell
those stories, right?
So that was the context in which I started doing that.
Once that ran out, then there was nothing but this meaningless work to do.
And then I found that I was actually not interested in it.
So then this friend of mine who is a video editor, he said to me a little while ago, so he
also was volunteering at this church, doing a running, helping to set up their live stream
station and all that stuff, all the technology around that.
And then we were talking about why do that, right?
Why would you do that?
And he said, well, I'd like to be able to use my skills to do something other than sell
a can opener from time to time.
So this is because this is literally what he does.
He specializes in what's called direct response video, which are basically those commercials
you see on TV where they're directly selling something and it shows the phone number on
the screen and you call the number to order the product.
So there would literally be a lot of can opener there.
So yeah, so that's the thing he doesn't actually like to do, the stuff he does using his
vocation, which is video editing, he doesn't actually enjoy the work he does for pay, right?
He just does it because it's what pays.
So what do you want?
Do you want to do what you want to do with your vocation and get it done?
And then separately from that, you want the livelihood or is it what you want to actually
make this meaningless work that pays you?
We need to draw that distinction better.
So also, we've seen some of these recently, there was a lot of talk about these applications
that people created to kind of poison images that you would post online like artwork.
It would put in some kind of veil on it that then causes the generative models, the things
like stable diffusion or whatever.
It kind of breaks them, you know?
And then it makes it so they, I guess they will try to avoid your artwork.
So I think, I mean, it's the experience shows that people will resolve those things, right?
The people that make those AI things, they will work around that stuff.
It'll just be an arms race and as we know that arms race only make losers at the end of
the day.
Nobody wins an arms race and there's no such thing.
So what is the point of that?
Why are we trying to do that?
And do we want, is it really our vision for our lives, for our world, is to be producing
these images that are so worthless in the real world that people want to entrust it to
a machine, to AI?
Is that really all we want, all we can see for ourselves?
I don't think so.
So this is why I think we need the people who are threatened by these new AI things, which
I would consider myself to be one because I'm a technical writer at work.
So it's certain that the generative AI will enable companies to have smaller technical
writing departments, right?
So there will be fewer people that will be able to make a living as technical writers.
So yet I know that we can't just forbid things, right?
And also I don't actually like the work I do for eight hours a day.
I like the fact that it pays me and then I get to have a house and all that stuff.
You know, I would much rather be writing other stuff than what I write at work, right?
And I would be very happy working a lot less hours a day.
So we should really, these technologies, as they have always been, they can actually free
us from toil, but apparently a lot of people want toil in their lives, right?
Or at least they can't imagine a different world in which we wouldn't need that toil,
right?
So what I'm saying is what we need to do is what is happening with this AI stuff is just
exactly the same thing that has always been happening.
And it is technological progress happens.
And then the promise of technological progress would always be that the people would be freed
from toil, right?
And technology would automate things and then you would not have to do so many things.
You wouldn't have to work so hard.
But then what tends to happen is that those productivity gains instead of converting into
free time for workers, it converts into more profit for the people who own the stuff,
right?
So this is what we need to oppose.
We should not oppose AI because we don't actually want to do the work that AI can do today
and in the near future.
But what we want is the livelihood we get, not the toil, but we can have the livelihood
without the toil, that's the thing.
So then the problem, the other side of that that we run into is the problem of knowing
what to do with your free time.
So there was an article from 1930 by John Maynard Keynes, one of those early theorists that
wrote about capitalism.
So back in 1930, they were already discussing this kind of thing, like with automation technological
progress, there will be less of a need for people to work and then what's going to happen.
Are people going to know what to do with all their free time?
And they were worried that they wouldn't.
So little did they know that we would not have to deal with this problem for about 100
years at least, right?
So Keynes mentions something about singing.
You're going to have all this free time and then you're going to get to sing.
You're going to spend a lot of time singing or something like that.
And then it says, well, but how few he says, so for those who have to do with the singing
life will be tolerable and how few of us can sing exclamation point, he says.
So that's when he kind of introduces that problem, right?
And then I would bring in this, yeah, he wrote for the first time since his creation, man
will be faced with his real, his permanent problem, how to use his freedom from pressing
economic cares, how to occupy the leisure which science and compound interest will have
one for him to live wisely and agreeably and well.
And answer to that is in is in Bertrand Russell's article from 1935 in praise of idleness where
he wrote, it will be said that while a little leisure is pleasant, men would not know how
to fill their days if they had only four hours work out of the 24.
And so far as this is true in the modern world, it is a condemnation of our civilization.
It would not have been true at any earlier period.
There was formerly a capacity for lightheartedness and play which has been to some extent inhibited
by the cult of efficiency.
The modern man thinks that everything ought to be done for the sake of something else and
never for its own sake.
There it is.
So another thing, another point that comes from this from Russell's article that I think
is really interesting is that he says that this means also that we put all the value on
the production side of our activities and none of it on the consumption side, let's say.
So for example, he says a bunch of examples like the butcher working to cut the meat,
to butcher the meat and then sell it is very noble, they are doing work, they are producing.
And then when you buy the meat, you're spending money which is seen as bad and then you're
eating meat and you're enjoying it and that is seen as bad as well, that is not noble.
So it's very interesting and then he puts it in this way that I think is hilarious which
is here we go, quote, broadly speaking, it is held that getting money is good and spending
money is bad.
Seeing that they are two sides of one transaction, this is absurd.
One might as well maintain that keys are good but keyholes are bad.
So what I would say about this in the case of singing, like Kane says.
So the problem is to do with what it is to make meaning, right?
So let's say writing, if you're a writer, you are writing a book let's say and then the
act of writing the book involves meaning making and then you put out the book, the book
becomes just this object, right?
And then or maybe a file on your computer and then when somebody reads it, they make meaning
out of it, right?
And the purpose of the whole operation is the meaning making, it is not the production
of the digital file or of the object that was the book.
So we need to kind of start seeing those two, we need to start seeing that meaning making
as the purpose of what we're doing.
And that means that the person that is reading the book is creating the same value as the
person that wrote the book.
If you forget about the transaction of buying the book and all that stuff, right?
If you think only about why we do things at all as human beings, right?
So the problem is another point that Bertrand Russell makes in this article is that then
there's this problem that most of the cultural works that we know today, they're very passive,
right?
They are consumed passively.
So you know, think of, it's like cultural works that are not considered difficult, right?
A movie that is not very complex, you know, a book that's not very complex, music, whatever.
So the kind of commercial cultural works, they are completely designed to be very, very
easy to consume, right?
And that means that you just can't make as much meaning out of it, because it doesn't,
it doesn't allow, there is no space for very much work on the part of the person consuming
the thing.
This is seen as part of the problem and then people will say that, you know, the working people
are not educated enough to understand that stuff or to be able to enjoy that stuff, but
a lot of that is it actually originates from the fact that the working public is simply
too exhausted from work to be able to consume anything that requires any kind of mental work
on their part, right?
And if it's a problem that kind of creates itself in reality, you're pointing to a symptom
of the problem as if it were the cause of the problem, right?
So that's why, you know, a lot of the cultural works nowadays are just dominated by stuff
that people are into binge watching on TV for hours at a time or just all the kind of
continuous scrolling or swiping or whatever and these apps that people use.
So it's all like kind of mindless work, passive stuff that people consume.
So that's a thing, this type of thing will not do in this future world in which people
have more free time and that's perfectly okay because there will be people with enough
free time to make the stuff that that allows for more space for proper meaning making.
Am I making sense?
So anyway, moving on.
So this other writer, his Italian guy called Domenico de Mazi, he died a few years ago,
just a couple years ago.
So he wrote a lot about this stuff to kind of continue on the work or these earlier
ones.
And so he talked about this idea of creative idleness which refers exactly to this kind
of work that you do.
And so what's interesting about that is that he so a lot of the what people would call
knowledge work nowadays would fall.
This is what this guy is talking about, Domenico is talking about creative idleness refers
to that kind of work, right?
So and I think it's like this is work that it doesn't really make sense to track it for
eight hours a day because it's it's mental work that requires a good deal of variety of
stimulus and and you can't and that that variety of stimulus that you need can't really necessarily
be justified as billable hours let's say at least not in the same way that the hours
in between punching in and punching out would be very plainly justified.
So you know what I mean with that is that you need to pause, you need to go for a walk,
you need to read some other stuff and a lot of times the the mental work, the creative
work that you actually do for a living.
It really advances during these this what you might call down time, right?
So this is part of the mental work, right?
It's work that happens in the background yet it's impossible to draw this distinction
between work while you're on the clock and work while you're off the clock, it's just
not how that kind of work works.
So then Demazi says that yeah, this it's not that this this is that everybody's going to
work in this type of thing in the future, but more and more people will and in this line
of work puts even more pressure on this whole idea of working eight hours a day of the
work loads, the work schedules that are that are still expected of workers nowadays.
So and you know it leads to a lot of problems like I think the point is that this kind of
work it just it just cannot be productive for eight hours a day.
So you you just end up just spending a lot of time just being at your desk performing
what you would call work like motions, right?
This especially common when you're at the office you because you you know you you're not
at home you can't do other things that advance yourself in your life.
So you end up just kind of sitting there for a long long time for a good chunk of your
life, you know, and or maybe maybe you're just staring into space or you're just doing
stuff that doesn't really advance anything, but you just have to do it because you have
to be there, right?
You have to to be at work, you have to look like you're working.
So you're trying to squeeze more and more productivity out of where there is just none
to extract and that just hurts you, it hurts your mind and it harms you, you know.
So as this becomes more and more common it's it's going to be I think it's like the idea
is that workers will be more and more interested in changing the meaning of work, right?
So there's a really cool statement in the last two paragraphs of Bertrand Russell's article
he kind of outlines his vision for the world as it should be and it's really worth the
read even if you don't read anything else I urge you to open that article and at least
read the last two paragraphs because it's it's just a really wonderful vision for how
the world could be in the future if we resolve these problems.
So then yeah, what is the point here?
I think yeah, the whole advent of AI since it is threatening this portion of the population
that are tech workers and stuff, certainly programmers I think and in my case technical
writers it's it's bound to reduce head counts at departments, it's bound to reduce the
number of people that get to have this as their profession.
So it is an opportunity it isn't it is another opportunity to to redefine this stuff to
renegotiate these deals, you know, and we should make sure to to talk about that this is
what this is about it's not about AI whether there will be like a chatbot that will be
good enough whether people are going to generate these these images for their their little
blog, you know, whether people will not need to hire someone to design their logo, you
know, it's not about any of that I think that's first of all it's it's just a given it's
going to happen if we fight to prevent the technology from being used to replace this
toil all we're doing is defending the toil we're not defending our livelihood because
our livelihood is a different thing than the toil.
So I think something that I'm really interested in exploring and I think I would like to write
some kind of work about this is how the experiences of the free software movement the you know
the early networks the early computer networks and the earliest computers those those
beginnings and their their continuation today which is you know free software in general all
the stuff that we talk about here on on hacker public radio I think these cultures they have
experiences they have they have experience that will be I think really important to imagining
this future world I think someone who is has been using free software someone who has experienced
free software and understands what that freedom means has a much easier time understanding the
freedom that we're talking about here when we're talking we're talking about putting in into
that toil and and getting in that free time so that we can pursue our actual vocations freely.
So if you have any thoughts to add to all of that please record a response show let's continue
this conversation if you have any references you know about something you've read that
that has some type of a link to this please record a show or leave a comment sharing that because
I would really appreciate it because I wanted to learn more about this and maybe be able to
contribute more all right well thank you for tuning in and come back tomorrow for another
exciting episode of hacker public radio. You have been listening to hacker public radio at hacker
public radio does work today's show was contributed by a HBR listener like yourself if you ever thought
of recording podcast and click on our contribute link to find out how easy it really is hosting
for HBR has been kindly provided by and onsthos.com the internet archive and our sings.net
on the satellite status today's show is released under Creative Commons
Attribution 4.0 International License