What is left for us to do
When machines can make anything, the meaning of work moves from making to choosing. Taste and judgment are the job that remains.
John Maynard Keynes wrote an essay about his grandchildren in 1930, while the world economy collapsed around him. Within a hundred years, he predicted, living standards in the advanced countries would be four to eight times higher, and three-hour shifts or a fifteen-hour week would do. He got the hours wrong and the next part right: once the economic problem was solved, man would face "his real, his permanent problem", which is what to do with the freedom.
The debate about AI and work has not caught up with him. It is stuck on jobs and income: who loses a salary and who pays for it. These are real problems, but they are problems of distribution, and a state that can run a pension system can solve them. The harder question is the meaning of work when production costs almost nothing. My answer is that meaning moves from making to choosing, and that taste becomes the last scarce skill.
Making was never it
I am a designer by training and have made products for Sony, LG, Panasonic, Samsung, Canon and Nespresso. People assume the job is drawing. Drawing is the part a student picks up in a year and a machine now does in seconds. The job is deciding which sketch goes forward and which feature is refused.
Refusing is the harder half. Every refusal is a judgment that something should not exist, made by a person who then has to defend the empty space where it would have been. The finished object shows none of this, which is why the work is so easily mistaken for drawing. A coffee machine with two buttons is the record of an argument somebody won.
Now the making is on tap. A model will produce a logo, a contract, a film score or a page of working code on request, and then a thousand variants of each before lunch. When anything can be had by asking, ability stops being the bottleneck. What matters is whether the thing should exist at all, and which of the thousand is right. A thousand is a worse position than three, as anyone who has stood in front of a wall of paint samples knows.
The meaning of work
This is where the income debate, for all its urgency, stops short. It is the comfortable half of the subject, because income can be modelled and purpose cannot. Pay people to do nothing and you have solved the rent. You have not told them what they are for. Keynes expected trouble: no country, he wrote, could look forward to the age of leisure and abundance "without a dread".
Work made people necessary. Being necessary for output is ending, one trade after another, and no transfer payment replaces it. What remains is being necessary for judgment. Someone has to say this one and put a name to it. A model can draw fifty floor plans for a hospital ward, but it cannot be the person the nurses hold to account.
That is a heavier job than the one it replaces. Labour could be measured in hours and excused by effort. A choice is right or wrong, and it belongs to whoever made it. The designer’s old burden, saying no and answering for it, now falls on everyone else.
Taste on trial
The charge against taste is that it is either snobbery or statistics. If it is snobbery, the preference of people who went to the right schools, it deserves to lose. If it is statistics, a machine can learn it, and one already has. The first public versions of Stable Diffusion were trained in part on images picked by an aesthetic score, and the score came from a predictor taught on people’s ratings of pictures from one to ten.
Both halves mistake what taste is. A score like that is the average of what people have liked so far, and it is as useful as a market survey. It tells you what will please. It says nothing about what should exist next, because the next thing has no ratings yet.
Ask a model which version is best and it will answer. Ask again and it may pick another, and it loses nothing either way. Taste is a choice with a cost attached: a name on the product and money in the tooling.
Nor is it a privilege of class. The baker who will not sell yesterday’s bread has it, and so does the carpenter who sends back warped timber. They learned it by deciding often and living with the results. Free production opens this to more people than ever, since until now you needed a factory to find out whether your judgment was any good.
Watchmaking went through all of this more than half a century ago. In December 1969 Seiko put the first quartz wristwatch on sale in Tokyo, and from that day a mechanical movement was the worse way to tell the time. The mechanical watch survived as an act of pure choice. I helped to found a house in Geneva, Collectif Noir, that makes them in small series with a movement of its own. Quartz is still more accurate, and we are still building the other kind.
The pictures in this essay were made with AI.