The Character Gap

How do we keep people in the game?

Robots are not taking jobs from humans. Humans are being taken away from jobs. The distinction matters, because it points at where the pressure is actually coming from.

Someone who can originate ideas and execute on them is unlikely to find themselves redundant. Creative work — new technologies, new ventures, new schools of thought, new cultural movements — carries enormous leverage, and that leverage is rising rather than falling. We all benefit from it, and we all seek it out: when you are ill you want the best doctor; when you are in trouble you want the best advocate. Excellence is not a dirty word, and competition is a decent mechanism for surfacing it.

But the ability to work at that pitch is not distributed the way opportunity ought to be, and I do not think the binding constraint is what we usually claim. The gap between employee and founder is materially smaller than it has ever been. The remaining hurdle is psychological. The primary shortfall in the creation of new creators is not access to education, nor social capital, nor money — it is something closer to character: the settled sense that one is entitled to attempt things.

This is not the fault of the people who lack it. It is very difficult to undo the opportunity cost of twelve years of schooling built to produce compliance, and to flatten anyone who develops ideas above their station.

I’ve concluded that genius is as common as dirt. We suppress genius because we haven’t yet figured out how to manage a population of educated men and women. The solution, I think, is simple and glorious. Let them manage themselves.

— John Taylor Gatto, Weapons of Mass Instruction

So the question is not how we manufacture jobs for people. It is how we help far more people arrive at the point of being able to shape their circumstances rather than be shaped by them — how we increase the stock of courage and initiative in a society, and undo some of the damage done to young characters inside the machinery of schooling.

Perhaps machines will help guide us towards the top of our own potential. A true companion should be a safe harbour to shield the tender heart, a torch to scintillate the perceptions of the mind, a protector of the body and nourisher of its needs, and a gravity well to ground the wandering soul’s ascent. If even part of that stack can be automated well, it would be rich in meaning and value to humanity.

Intelligence amplification and talent augmentation may be another route: not replacing people, but raising the ceiling of what an ordinary person can attempt. As software and hardware absorb a growing share of the work that used to be available, finding ways to bring more people up to that level looks less like an economic nicety and more like a central task.

The best way to protect the interests of ordinary people is not to insulate them from the change, nor to write them off as surplus to it, but to give them the means to meet it — and to stop running an education system that spends a childhood teaching them they cannot.