Locally Meaningful, Globally Meaningless - a Call to Action for the Future of Work

The world needs more self-sustaining, meaningless cycles which produce nothing.

No, that was not sarcasm.

Although perhaps it wasn't entirely precise. These cycles should be meaningless in terms of what they produce. But, locally, they should feel meaningful.

A big issue today is a mismatch between what society needs, and what individual people need.

• People need motivation, people are ambitious. They need a feeling that what they're doing has meaning.
• Society needs people to be willing to do less, be less ambitious.
  • We have the means to produce the food, water, and shelter that people need, with only a fraction of the available labor.
  • The bigger issues now are how to get these resources distributed more evenly, and how to sustain an economy with little or no growth.
  • And how to make it so that ambitious people with nothing good to do, do as little harm as possible.

Therefore, although a solution that would work for society would be to have people digging holes and refill them, that wouldn't work for people as it's too obvious that this is meaningless. What we need is to create a bigger cycle which locally looks indistinguishable from meaningful work, but globally produces nothing.

To illustrate, let's consider a few examples of partial solutions which have arisen naturally.

The Financial "Carbon Cycle"

The cycle: Traders make money off of retail flow (think Robinhood) and large, predictable movement of money by big financial companies. They then use this money to buy happiness: expensive vacations, fancy meals, entertainment. This feeds into two paths:

• The service workers who take their money and "respire" by playing on Robinhood, thus feeding money back into trading companies.
• The big corporations who then process the money into the "fossil fuels" of illegible, inscrutable financial contracts, deals, structures, which the heavy machinery of the investment banks to "combust", liquify, and bring the money into the markets.

Like in the real carbon cycle, the financial cycle has been overpowered by "respiration" and "fossil fuel combustion" with the trickle down effects of photosynthesis failing to keep up.

• Lesson: weakness of money as a motivator
  • You always want more... it never feels like enough. The traders and bankers aren't the happiest people in the world.
  • And its utility as a status symbol causes issues of accumulation, leading to unsustainability.

The Academic "Water Cycle"

The cycle: parents pay tuition (to university) and taxes (to the government) so that students can go to university and get a degree. Some of these students then go into academia, where the government and these universities pay them to, often, do work with no applications (though unfortunately sometimes there is some leakage, where positive utility does come out of the research). These academics then marry each other, and have kids who will work hard to go to college.

• Lessons:
  • The utility of siloed communities: one method in which academia attains the "locally meaningful" criterion is via silos. These are communities of researchers who all work on the same topic, and attain fulfillment through having their work published and read.
    • This achieves local meaningfulness, because having ones work published and read, in an actually productive, functioning academic pipeline is a good proxy for the meaningful work.
    • But here, it is able to achieve global meaninglessness as the people reading and writing in this area are the same people, and therefore, it is leakage free: it's able to sustain itself with nothing actually coming out of it.

What's Next?

Think of all the greats of history: Benjamin Franklin, Ada Lovelace, Adam Smith, Aristotle, Emmy Noether.
The next person to be added to this list will be the one who can design with a new cycle which fixes the issues of the past:

• No harm:
  • It's easy for ambitious people to do harm when not checked correctly.
  • For instance, right now there's an argument that the finance cycle is still doing harm. It's undermined economic sanctions, been responsible for recessions, and funded questionable presidential candidates.
  • Can we design a cycle which can satisfy people's ambitions while having no negative externalities?
• No benefit: the ideal cycle will produce nothing.
  • Another issue with the cycles that we've seen is that they actually have positive externalities: academia occasionally does produce new technology. But we don't want this, there is only so much production that a society can take. So we'd like to remove people as completely from the production process as possible.
• Efficient: the ideal cycle will leak as little as possible.
  • Academia right now is a very inefficient cycle, as much of the money that is paid in tuition leaks away into bureaucracy, building, housing, etc...
• Scalable: we want to account for as many people as possible.
  • Academia and finance can only sustain so many people. At this point, they seem to be saturated.
  • Can we design a self contained cycle which is scalable enough to account for everyone, not just the few and the privileged?
  • That is, can we provide truly equal opportunity meaningless work?

If you're reading @Nobel Committee, it's about time you introduced a "Nobel Prize for The Work of the Future" focused on rewarding those who produce the best locally meaningful, globally meaningless systems.