The Evolution of Roles in Humanity

Understanding Human Meaning and Work in an Evolving World with Intelligent Machines

In the not-so-distant future, a majority of jobs currently done by humans may be done by computers, robots, and artificial intelligence (AI). Philosophers commonly debate whether this future would be desirable because it would allow people to spend their time more meaningfully, or undesirable because work is a source of meaning and value. To examine these arguments, I will divide this essay into three parts; firstly, realizing evolution and humanity to understand how we arrived at modern work; secondly, exploring the different types of work based on creativity, technicality, and ownership, and their relationship to subjective meaning; and thirdly, envisioning probable futures and understanding the possible human implications of increased automation. Ultimately, I will argue that meaning is just stories that humans tell themselves based on biological desires and purposes to make sense of the sentient experience. A future with AI doing most traditional work is overall beneficial for humans.

Part I: A Trip Down Memory Lane (Evolution and the Rise of Roles and Tools)

It is necessary to prelude this essay by stating that I will strictly follow the scientific position of materialism, meaning that all living and nonliving things are composed of matter and all phenomena are the result of material interactions. For living things, specifically animals and humans, this takes shape by billions of cells and neurons, forming complex organisms that perceive and feel the environment to effectively survive. Evolution and natural selection are key to understanding life, sentience, and humanity as we know it.

Evolution is not a process of gaining superhuman abilities. Life does not strive to break records. Living organisms do not transcend—they adapt. Evolution boils down to adaptation in response to changes in the environment through the trial-and-error process of natural selection for random mutations. Other than survival, there is no magic Holy Grail at the end of the dark and murky cavern of biology. Sentience itself is a random adaptation that accidentally prevailed over any number of other adaptive mechanisms for coping with the outside world. Life has no need for sentience or self-awareness as we understand them, and it survives perfectly well without them (e.g. plants, sponges). In fact, the energy requirements of human sentience are so high that our lives are dominated by serving their biological needs. These biological needs of eating and reproducing are served by working to hunt prey, evade predators, and find mates.

It is incredibly important to fully appreciate the vast history of life’s development to effectively understand modern humans and work. Mammals and especially hominids have always been social organisms, with complex social structures and basic roles appearing between males and females before the ancestors of apes (this is the start of roles, and the modern workforce as we know it). Through millions of years and several species of humans, Homo sapiens evolved to develop more complex language. This led to effectively communicating and cooperating in larger and larger groups. Eventually, this steered the way towards basic civilization, which led to the domestication of agriculture.

It is here where humans start prioritizing different roles to a larger degree. Previously, there was a small shared community, and although males and females had different roles to play, the roles were more fluid and everyone knew one another. But when civilization occurs, there is an agricultural surplus and a rapidly increasing population (now hundreds of families) as a result of these newfound resources. This leads to slightly more free time away from food production, resulting in more tools and crafts, which leads to an ever-growing amount of roles. In fact, humans are almost exactly the same as honey bee colonies, which consist of a single queen, hundreds of male drones, and 20,000 to 80,000 female worker bees. This complex web is better for everyone’s survival, and it is the most efficient way to survive in the current environment. Humans have just kept adding layers to this, with over 10,000 different roles (jobs) now.

Over millions of years of human evolution, tools were coming into play. The definition of a tool is anything, usually an object, that carries out a function. Originally, hominids started with simple rocks for smashing the occasional savanna animal skeleton to eat the bone marrow inside. These tools are valuable because they have potential intelligence—basically, they give an animal powers that they never possessed biologically. Suddenly they can do so much, even though they didn’t wait hundreds of millions of years for these tools to develop on their bodies. Humans specifically are good at learning to use tools and using said tools to further their goals—there is constant input and output coupled with learning. Over thousands of years, because of human curiosity, social influence, and a need for survival, humans go from inventing pottery and spears to nuclear weapons and supercomputers.

One key point is that you must learn how to use tools, and as tools get more and more complex, education is needed more and more. In early human civilization, there was no general education as we know it today. This is precisely why we see the emergence of families that specialized in particular roles, seen now through many family names like “Schumacher'' (shoemaker role). Humans taught their offspring to use tools and complex tools, giving them a role to survive in society. Nowadays, almost all humans have the opportunity to do many roles because they have access to large-scale education.

Now we must focus on roles within society with tools. Tools get more and more complex to solve more problems and inefficiencies in society (ultimately these make it easier and easier to survive and reproduce). As a result, more and more roles emerge. Each tool solves more problems that humans create for themselves. For example, ancient humans used to drink water simply by sipping straight out of a river. When humans invented drinking horns and clay vessels later on, they made it easier for people to store water (critical for human survival) and later, other liquids. But it also created more minor problems—people now have to get the material to make these things, physically construct them, transport them to other people, and fix them if they break. This creates not only more roles, but increasingly complex roles in society. Furthermore, roles are generally becoming more difficult because the tools we use are becoming more complex, and thus more education is needed. Today, even YouTubers who skip college need to learn how to use Adobe Premiere Pro to edit their video, learn how to use a camera, and learn how to use YouTube and social media effectively. Roles and tools are intricately linked, and this information is relevant as the tools we use become increasingly complex and intelligent.

All in all, humans are just a bunch of cells and neurons that are sentient by chance, who are now absurdly working a role in a human-constructed society in order to survive (in a comfortable way now) and pass on their genes effectively with the highest likelihood of survival. Humans are blindly driven by an uncontrollable desire to survive and mate, and as a result, develop to care about socialization and to understand their world better (perception and curiosity).  As humans observe and understand their world more and more, they start to become self-aware and question why they are working mundane roles. They now question the “meaning of life” and their meaning in it—this complex web that humans live in, created by thousands of generations of humans driven by blind desires.

Part II: They Don’t Make Work Like They Used To (Modern Work and Meaning)

In the present day, people have a vast variety of roles working with complex tools in a society that has now grown to humans all over the Earth. The wealthiest humans have a large number of tools at their disposal which are used to greatly increase the probability of their personal and reproductive survival. One can always increase the likelihood of your survival, and this is driven naturally through competition. If there is a natural disaster or a major environmental change, humans at the top of the hierarchy will be the first to survive. Even if there is no climate shift, they will be the first to eat and they will be the first to reproduce. Most humans work in a wide variety of roles with complex tools to survive well and reproduce so that their offspring can do the exact same thing.

It’s important to note that there is no objective meaning whatsoever in this (which is quite evident because so many humans continuously ask the question of objective meaning). The only point of life is survival, but if you ask, “What is the point of survival?”, the answer is to reproduce. If you ask, “What is the point of reproducing?”, the answer is to survive. There is absolutely no objective point or “greater picture” to this whole cycle. But even if there is no objective meaning in the universe, there are still certain biological and social rules that are ingrained in humans’ DNA (e.g. humans naturally desire to have sex, and this is an uncontrollable desire). These desires are byproducts of the core desires to survive and reproduce. This means that they can find chemical satisfaction from doing well in school, winning a race, spending time with humans they like, creating art, or even discovering a new element.

Of course, there is no inherent “meaning” to any of these things, but one can literally “feel” positive chemicals by doing these things. Doing well in school and winning a race are both good for a human’s gene survival because outcompeting other humans shows that your genes are the “fittest”. Spending time with friends is also good for gene survival because you are more likely to stay alive with a group of humans you like and trust rather than either being alone or being with humans you don’t like and trust. Creating art is a tricky one because at first glance it doesn’t make any sense to gene survival. But the answer to why someone makes art is down to courtship displays, impressing other humans in society, and curiosity. Creating or discovering a useful tool makes sense to survival because it helps one efficiently get food and avoid predators—this explains a lot about why creativity and ingenuity are valued. For making art, the ultimate reason is so that someone else can see it and hopefully like it. It is theorized that these trinkets and crafts are exactly the same as mating calls seen in countless animals, and humans are no different. Discovering a new chemical element may result in satisfaction because it is firstly, tied to creating tools for survival; secondly, subject to probable social praise; and thirdly, related to human curiosity, which is needed to learn how to use tools and understand the environment. Over time, many of these survival mechanisms have become inherently rooted as social elements.

These “survival drives” that I describe do not necessarily entail meaning as understood in philosophy. Subjective meaning most likely comes from humans telling themselves stories of their experiences to rationalize their sentient and knowledgeable life, and feel satisfied that they have done something in their life. In terms of modern work, some jobs can make one feel these survival drives that I describe, usually in roles that have a high degree of creativity, ownership, responsibility, impact, and something you are curious about. Here, a human is more in control of themselves (as opposed to being a dispensable sweatshop worker) and can work on a particular interest while thinking about things and making tools and crafts that others aren’t. Work can also provide much-needed social interaction and obviously pays money which is key to survival (which is why one can feel satisfied by any money-paying job).

But in terms of the work inherently, there are also jobs that don’t really call upon these survival drives. If a human works in an assembly line putting screws into iPhones, one after the other, this does not use the human’s creativity or curiosity. There is not much social grouping because the work is not social, and maybe the human can outcompete fellow humans in screwing parts to feel something, but the work clearly isn’t original enough to the human itself—there’s little free will. If one is being controlled to have a certain role in society that requires little problem solving and little creativity, one will probably feel less satisfaction in one’s quest to effectively survive and reproduce. One feels less in control of the situation, and screwing a part for years under a demanding boss is a very different life than scanning the environment, hunting and evading animals, making creative tools, and socializing with other humans.

In the majority of work today, humans do not feel much chemical satisfaction in the survival drives from the work itself because most of the work does not stimulate curiosity and ingenuity enough—much of it is still monotonous labor. Being at work can provide competition, it can provide social interaction, and it can provide money which is important to survival, but the work itself seems to be in most cases, a means to an end. Even some of the highest paying jobs in consulting, software development, and finance (especially) can be too boring, unfree, and not stimulating enough to these trigger these natural hormones. I argue there are definitely better ways to get these survival drives, by being more independent (not being a slave to work), being more creative, being more social, and doing things that better satisfy our curiosity.

Part III: A Passport to the Future (Humanity and Work with AI)

When we talk about AI, we must remember that it is essentially a very complex tool created and controlled by humans that ultimately allows them to survive more comfortably. In all of human history, humans have increasingly created more tools in quantity and complexity, which has led to a higher standard of living and easier survival. It has also created more roles (jobs) in quantity and complexity, with many old roles fading away (just like humans no longer use spears). In the near-term future (50-100 years), it is very hard to imagine a change to this trend. Right now, AI applications are extremely narrow, rely on a vast amount of data, and are designed and built by human programmers.

For the future of roles, certain jobs that are inherently social will have difficulty being replaced by AI. These roles may be augmented by further using computing tools, but to remove these jobs is to remove human socialization, which is something embedded deeply in human society. For example, we can look at the chess match between Deep Blue and world champion Garry Kasparov in 1997. IBM’s Deep Blue was a supercomputer programmed to play chess, which is ultimately an algorithmic game. It beat Kasparov, which was a groundbreaking achievement for computing, but today, humans don’t watch computers play chess against each other. We crave the human touch, the social element of emotions and empathy. Today, a robot could be made to play tennis better than any human player, but people would still be chanting for Roger Federer and Rafael Nadal. Humans desire to deal with humans.

One general concern about AI and the future of work is that the roles will change due to the increased complexity in tools. This is true, and AI will further exacerbate this problem because the skill level to learn and work on these tools is much higher. For technical matters in computer science (CS), the bar will be raised and more education will be needed. There will also be significantly more roles in and around CS and AI to develop the tools more and more. I predict many humans will turn to entertainment and social roles because there is a low technical skill level for entry. For actors and models, their attractiveness is easily the most important issue, which is not competing at all with AI. This industry will also be dramatically increasing because of the increase in comfort and free time due to the rise in automated tools, and this is already happening today on a large scale, with humans sharing entertaining videos on TikTok as proof.

The long-term future is difficult to predict, but perhaps there will be many humans who do not hold traditional jobs. Most work as we know it may become incredibly automated to the point where everyone’s standard of living could be extremely high. But at the same time as consuming entertainment and enjoying comfortable survival, they will still be motivated by core survival traits. Humans will still be mostly driven by the need for social status (based on survival and reproduction), as well as observation and curiosity. It’s hard to imagine that humans will become completely stagnant.

Humans will never stop working generally. There will always be a deep drive to do things to trigger their underlying neurotransmitters. Remember, working was originally hunting and evading animals to survive. Now, working means effectively use tools to create value for society to survive. Animals are not only competing with other animals, but within their own species for limited resources. This has been biologically drilled into our DNA since the beginning of life 3.7 billion years ago, and trillions of animals have survived or died through natural selection to pass this survival trait forward. However luxurious the future is, humans will always compare themselves to each other, want more to ensure the best chance of survival, and work hard to get to the top of the human food chain. If there is a significant lack of roles in the future because of AI (which I think somewhat unlikely), then humans will create their own work somehow, seen today by people casually selling on Etsy or streaming games on Twitch. Based on biological desires, we will always feel a sense to do something because life has always had to work very hard to survive. 

The story of life and humanity is an extremely complex one, with so many different tools, roles, and phenomena. Evolution and natural selection have led humanity to become a big success, and by humans telling stories to themselves based on the experience of uncontrollable biological desires, they can be more satisfied in their sentient experience. Even with everything automated and humans living as comfortably as ever, not needing to do any work, they will certainly do so anyway because of embedded survival drives to compete. And with AI doing much of the heavy lifting, humans could have greater creative freedom, greater socialization, and greater experiences in the future.