The meaning of life in a world without work

Yuval Noah Harari
The Guardian
Originally posted May 8, 2017

Most jobs that exist today might disappear within decades. As artificial intelligence outperforms humans in more and more tasks, it will replace humans in more and more jobs. Many new professions are likely to appear: virtual-world designers, for example. But such professions will probably require more creativity and flexibility, and it is unclear whether 40-year-old unemployed taxi drivers or insurance agents will be able to reinvent themselves as virtual-world designers (try to imagine a virtual world created by an insurance agent!). And even if the ex-insurance agent somehow makes the transition into a virtual-world designer, the pace of progress is such that within another decade he might have to reinvent himself yet again.

The crucial problem isn’t creating new jobs. The crucial problem is creating new jobs that humans perform better than algorithms. Consequently, by 2050 a new class of people might emerge – the useless class. People who are not just unemployed, but unemployable.

The article is here.

Yuval Harari on why humans won’t dominate Earth in 300 years

Interview by Ezra Klein
Vox.com
Originally posted March 27, 2017

Here are two excerpts:

I totally agree that for success, cooperation is usually more important than just raw intelligence. But the thing is that AI will be far more cooperative, at least potentially, than humans. To take a famous example, everybody is now talking about self-driving cars. The huge advantage of a self-driving car over a human driver is not just that, as an individual vehicle, the self-driving car is likely to be safer, cheaper, and more efficient than a human-driven car. The really big advantage is that self-driving cars can all be connected to one another to form a single network in a way you cannot do with human drivers.

It's the same with many other fields. If you think about medicine, today you have millions of human doctors and very often you have miscommunication between different doctors, but if you switch to AI doctors, you don't really have millions of different doctors. You have a single medical network that monitors the health of everybody in the world.

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I think the other problem with AI taking over is not the economic problem, but really the problem of meaning — if you don't have a job anymore and, say, the government provides you with universal basic income or something, the big problem is how do you find meaning in life? What do you do all day?

Here, the best answers so far we've got is drugs and computer games. People will regulate more and more their moods with all kinds of biochemicals, and they will engage more and more with three-dimensional virtual realities.

The entire interview is here.

Association Between Physician Burnout and Identification With Medicine as a Calling

Andrew J. Jager, MA, Michael A. Tutty, PhD, Audiey C. Kao, PhD Audiey C. Kao
Mayo Clinic Proceedings
DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.mayocp.2016.11.012

Objective

To evaluate the association between degree of professional burnout and physicians' sense of calling.

Participants and Methods

US physicians across all specialties were surveyed between October 24, 2014, and May 29, 2015. Professional burnout was assessed using a validated single-item measure. Sense of calling, defined as committing one's life to personally meaningful work that serves a prosocial purpose, was assessed using 6 validated true-false items. Associations between burnout and identification with calling items were assessed using multivariable logistic regressions.

Results

A total of 2263 physicians completed surveys (63.1% response rate). Among respondents, 28.5% (n=639) reported experiencing some degree of burnout. Compared with physicians who reported no burnout symptoms, those who were completely burned out had lower odds of finding their work rewarding (odds ratio [OR], 0.05; 95% CI, 0.02-0.10; P<.001), seeing their work as one of the most important things in their lives (OR, 0.38; 95% CI, 0.21-0.69; P<.001), or thinking their work makes the world a better place (OR, 0.38; 95% CI, 0.17-0.85; P=.02). Burnout was also associated with lower odds of enjoying talking about their work to others (OR, 0.23; 95% CI, 0.13-0.41; P<.001), choosing their work life again (OR, 0.11; 95% CI, 0.06-0.20; P<.001), or continuing with their current work even if they were no longer paid if they were financially stable (OR, 0.30; 95% CI, 0.15-0.59; P<.001).

Conclusion

Physicians who experience more burnout are less likely to identify with medicine as a calling. Erosion of the sense that medicine is a calling may have adverse consequences for physicians as well as those for whom they care.

AI will make life meaningless, Elon Musk warns

Zoe Nauman
The Sun
Originally published February 17, 2017

Here is an excerpt:

“I think some kind of universal income will be necessary.”

“The harder challenge is how do people then have meaning – because a lot of people derive their meaning from their employment.”

“If you are not needed, if there is not a need for your labor. What’s the meaning?”

“Do you have meaning, are you useless? That is a much harder problem to deal with.”

The article is here.

Culture: The Grand Web of Meaning

Chao, Melody Manchi and Kesebir, Pelin,
Found in The Experience of Meaning in Life: Perspective from the Psychological Sciences
(September 16, 2011).  J. Hicks, C. Routledge, eds., Springer Press, 2011.

Abstract:    

Meaning and culture mutually constitute each other. Culture rests on meaning, whereas meaning exists and is propagated in culture. The uniquely human quest for meaning transpires against the background of culture and is simultaneously recreating culture. The current chapter aims to explore different aspects of this dynamic relationship between meaning and culture. We begin by defining meaning and culture, and elaborating the nature of their intricate relationship. Then, we analyze the universal and relative aspects of meaning systems across cultures. Finally, we examine meaning in the backdrop of multiculturalism to illuminate how individuals navigate through different cultural webs of meaning and its implications to cultural competence.

The book chapter is here.

Excerpt from Stanley Kubrick's Playboy Interview 1968

Playboy, 1968

Playboy: If life is so purposeless, do you feel it’s worth living?

Kubrick: Yes, for those who manage somehow to cope with our mortality. The very meaninglessness of life forces a man to create his own meaning. Children, of course, begin life with an untarnished sense of wonder, a capacity to experience total joy at something as simple as the greenness of a leaf; but as they grow older, the awareness of death and decay begins to impinge on their consciousness and subtly erode their joie de vivre (a keen enjoyment of living), their idealism - and their assumption of immortality.

As a child matures, he sees death and pain everywhere about him, and begins to lose faith in the ultimate goodness of man. But if he’s reasonably strong - and lucky - he can emerge from this twilight of the soul into a rebirth of life’s élan (enthusiastic and assured vigour and liveliness).

Both because of and in spite of his awareness of the meaninglessness of life, he can forge a fresh sense of purpose and affirmation. He may not recapture the same pure sense of wonder he was born with, but he can shape something far more enduring and sustaining.

The most terrifying fact about the universe is not that it is hostile but that it is indifferent; but if we can come to terms with this indifference and accept the challenges of life within the boundaries of death - however mutable man may be able to make them - our existence as a species can have genuine meaning and fulfilment. However vast the darkness, we must supply our own light.

The entire interview is here.

Forget ideology, liberal democracy’s newest threats come from technology and bioscience

John Naughton
The Guardian
Originally posted August 28, 2016

Here is an excerpt:

Here Harari ventures into the kind of dystopian territory that Aldous Huxley would recognise. He sees three broad directions.

1. Humans will lose their economic and military usefulness, and the economic system will stop attaching much value to them.

2. The system will still find value in humans collectively but not in unique individuals.

3. The system will, however, find value in some unique individuals, “but these will be a new race of upgraded superhumans rather than the mass of the population”. By “system”, he means the new kind of society that will evolve as bioscience and information technology progress at their current breakneck pace. As before, this society will be based on a deal between religion and science but this time humanism will be displaced by what Harari calls “dataism” – a belief that the universe consists of data flows, and the value of any entity or phenomenon is determined by its contribution to data processing.

The article is here.

Empathy is a moral force

Jamil Zaki
FORTHCOMING in Gray, K. & Graham, J. (Eds.), The Atlas of Moral Psychology

Here is an excerpt:

More recently, however, a growing countercurrent has questioned the utility of empathy in driving moral action. This argument builds on the broader idea that emotions provide powerful but noisy inputs to people’s moral calculus (Haidt, 2001). Affective reactions often tempt people to make judgments that are logically and morally indefensible. Such emotional static famously includes moral dumbfounding, under which people’s experience of disgust causes them to judge others’ actions as wrong when they have no rational basis for doing so (Cushman, Young, & Hauser, 2006). Emotion drives other irrational moral judgments, such as people’s tendency to privilege physical force (a “hot” factor) over more important dimensions such as harm when judging the moral status of an action (Greene, 2014; Greene et al., 2009). Even incidental, morally irrelevant feelings alter moral judgment, further damaging the credibility of emotion in guiding a sense of right and wrong. (Wheatley & Haidt, 2005).

In sum, although emotions play a powerful role in moral judgment, they need not play a useful role. Instead, capricious emotion-driven intuitions often attract people towards internally inconsistent and wrong-headed judgments. From a utilitarian perspective aimed at maximizing well being, these biases render emotion a fundamentally mistaken moral engine (cf. Greene, 2014).

Does this criticism apply to empathy? In many ways, it does. Like other affective states, empathy arises in response to evocative experiences, often in noisy ways that hamper objectivity. For instance, people experience more empathy, and thus moral obligation to help, in response to the visible suffering of others, as in the case of Baby Jessica described above. This empathy leads people to donate huge sums of money to help individuals whose stories they read about or see on television, while ignoring widespread misery that they could more efficaciously relieve (Genevsky, Västfjäll,
Slovic, & Knutson, 2013; Slovic, 2007; Small & Loewenstein, 2003). Empathy also collapses reliably when sufferers and would-be empathizers differ along dimensions of race, politics, age, or even meaningless de novo group assignments (Cikara, Bruneau, & Saxe, 2011; Zaki & Cikara, in press).

The chapter is here.

Why are we humans so prone to believing spooky nonsense?

Stephen Law
Aeon - Opinions
Originally published December 15, 2015

Scientists working in the cognitive science of religion have offered other explanations, including the hyperactive agency-detecting device (HADD). This tendency explains why a rustle in the bushes in the dark prompts the instinctive thought: ‘There’s someone there!’ We seem to have evolved to be extremely quick to ascribe agency – the capacity for intention and action – even to inanimate objects. In our ancestral environment, this tendency is not particularly costly in terms of survival and reproduction, but a failure to detect agents that are there can be very costly. Fail to detect a sabre-toothed cat, and it’ll likely take you out of the gene pool. The evolution of a HADD can account for the human tendency to believe in the presence of agents even when none can actually be observed. Hence the human belief in invisible person-like beings, such as spirits or gods. There are also forms of supernatural belief that don’t fit the ‘invisible person-like being’ mould, but merely posit occult forces – eg, feng shui, supernaturally understood – but the HADD doesn’t account for such beliefs.

The article is here.

How Evolution Illuminates the Human Condition

The Wright Show - Meaning TV
Robert Wright and David Sloan Wilson
Originally posted July 19, 2015

Robert Wright and David Sloan Wilson discuss evolution, biology, psychology, religion, culture, science, values, beliefs, meaning, altruism, motivation, groupishness, and group strength.

Welcoming the Concept of Alief to Medical Ethics

By J.S. Blumenthal-Barby
bioethics.net
Originally published June 15, 2015

Philosopher Tamar Gendler has introduced (circa 2008) a new concept in the philosophical literature that could be of interest to medical ethicists. The concept is that of ‘alief’ and it is meant to contrast with the concept of ‘belief.’ An example Gendler discusses to tease out the difference between the two concepts is the example of a woman who believes African American and Caucasian people to be of equal intelligence, yet in her behavioral responses it seems as if she believes differently (e.g., she is more surprised when an African American student of hers makes an intelligent comment than she is when a Caucasian student does, she more quickly associates intelligence with her Caucasian students, when grading exams she might grade the same quality exam differently if written by an African American student than a Caucasian student, etc.). In other words, if you ask her explicitly, she says she believes P (in this case, P is “all races are of equal intelligence”), and she says it sincerely. But, you might think from the outside that she believes ~P (in this case, “all races are not of equal intelligence”). You might be tempted to say that she does not really believe P. What Gendler wants to say is that this woman does believe P, but that she has an ‘alief’ that is in tension with her belief of P (she has a “belief discordant alief”). The content of this alief is a set of associations that get activated (usually from habit) and show themselves in behavioral responses. Another example Gendler discusses is a glass walkway over the Grand Canyon. When walking across, a person may believe that the walkway is completely safe, but alieve something very different. The content of the alief is: ““Really high up, long long way down. Not a safe place to be! Get off!!”” While beliefs change in response to evidence, aliefs might not (they change in response to habits or affective associations).

The entire blog post is here.

Jean-Paul Sartre and Existential Choice

The existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre thought that human beings live in anguish. Not because life is terrible. But rather because, we’re ‘condemned to be free’. We're ‘thrown’ into existence, become aware of ourselves, and have to make choices. Even deciding not to choose is a choice. According to Sartre, every choice reveals what we think a human being should be.

Narrated by Stephen Fry. Scripted by Nigel Warburton.

Release date: 13 Apr 2015

Believing that life is fair might make you a terrible person

By Oliver Burkeman
The Guardian
Originally posted on February 3, 2015

Here is an excerpt:

What’s truly unsettling about the just-world bias is that while it can have truly unpleasant effects, these follow from what seems like the entirely understandable urge to believe that things happen for a reason. After all, if we didn’t all believe that to some degree, life would be an intolerably chaotic and terrifying nightmare in, which effort and payback were utterly unrelated, and there was no point planning for the future, saving money for retirement or doing anything else in hope of eventual reward. We’d go mad. Surely wanting the world to make a bit more sense than that is eminently forgivable?

Yet, ironically, this desire to believe that things happen for a reason leads to the kinds of positions that help entrench injustice instead of reducing it.

The entire article is here.

Editor's Note: My suspicion is that this has a direct application to therapist's views of patients.  Self-reflection and understanding biases help to reduce negative influences in our lives.

The Virtue of Scientific Thinking

By Steven Shapin
The Boston Review
Originally published January 20, 2015

Here is an excerpt:

So natural science without the capacity of moral uplift, and grown-up scientists, so to speak, without moral authority, are—in historical terms—recent creations. Both the disenchantment of the world and the supposed invalidity of inferring ought from is derive from the historical development of a conception of nature stripped of the moral powers it once possessed. That development reached its culmination in the science and metaphysics of Darwin and the scientific naturalists of the late nineteenth century. Their modern conception of nature could not make those who studied it more moral than anyone else because no sermons in stones were to be discerned. Nature, said the great nineteenth-century biologist T. H. Huxley, “is no school of virtue.”

The insistence that science cannot make you good, or make the scientist into a moral authority, flowed from a natural philosophical position: there are no spiritual forces operating in nature and there is no divine meaning to be discerned in nature. That is to say, Weber was making a sociological statement about what belongs to certain social roles, but he was doing so by way of historical changes in science and metaphysics.

The entire article is here.

How secular family values stack up

By Phil Zuckerman
The LA Times Op Ed
Originally posted January 15, 2015

More children are “growing up godless” than at any other time in our nation's history. They are the offspring of an expanding secular population that includes a relatively new and burgeoning category of Americans called the “Nones,” so nicknamed because they identified themselves as believing in “nothing in particular” in a 2012 study by the Pew Research Center.

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He was surprised by what he found: High levels of family solidarity and emotional closeness between parents and nonreligious youth, and strong ethical standards and moral values that had been clearly articulated as they were imparted to the next generation.

“Many nonreligious parents were more coherent and passionate about their ethical principles than some of the ‘religious' parents in our study,” Bengston told me. “The vast majority appeared to live goal-filled lives characterized by moral direction and sense of life having a purpose.”

The entire piece is here.

(Un)just Deserts: The Dark Side of Moral Responsibility

By Gregg D. Caruso

What would be the consequence of embracing skepticism about free will and/or desert-based moral responsibility? What if we came to disbelieve in moral responsibility? What would this mean for our interpersonal relationships, society, morality, meaning, and the law? What would it do to our standing as human beings? Would it cause nihilism and despair as some maintain? Or perhaps increase anti-social behavior as some recent studies have suggested (Vohs and Schooler 2008; Baumeister, Masicampo,and DeWall 2009)? Or would it rather have a humanizing effect on our practices and policies, freeing us from the negative effects of what Bruce Waller calls the “moral responsibility system” (2014, p. 4)? These questions are of profound pragmatic importance and should be of interest
independent of the metaphysical debate over free will. As public proclamations of skepticism continue to rise, and as the mass media continues to run headlines announcing free will and moral responsibility are illusions, we need to ask what effects this will have on the general public and what
the responsibility is of professionals.

In recent years a small industry has actually grown up around precisely these questions. In the skeptical community, for example, a number of different positions have been developed and advanced—including Saul Smilansky’s illusionism (2000), Thomas Nadelhoffer’s disillusionism
(2011), Shaun Nichols’ anti-revolution (2007), and the optimistic skepticism of Derk Pereboom (2001, 2013a, 2013b), Bruce Waller (2011), TamlerSommers (2005, 2007), and others.

The entire article is here.

Does Everything Happen for a Reason?

By Konika Banerjee and Paul Bloom
The New York Times Sunday Review
Originally posted on October 17, 2014

Here is an excerpt:

This tendency to see meaning in life events seems to reflect a more general aspect of human nature: our powerful drive to reason in psychological terms, to make sense of events and situations by appealing to goals, desires and intentions. This drive serves us well when we think about the actions of other people, who actually possess these psychological states, because it helps us figure out why people behave as they do and to respond appropriately. But it can lead us into error when we overextend it, causing us to infer psychological states even when none exist. This fosters the illusion that the world itself is full of purpose and design.

The entire article is here.

When Hearing Voices Is a Good Thing

A new study suggests that schizophrenic people in more collectivist societies sometimes think their auditory hallucinations are helpful.

By Olga Khazan
The Atlantic
Originally posted July 23, 2014

Here are two excerpts:

But a new study suggests that the way schizophrenia sufferers experience those voices depends on their cultural context. Surprisingly, schizophrenic people from certain other countries don't hear the same vicious, dark voices that Holt and other Americans do. Some of them, in fact, think their hallucinations are good—and sometimes even magical.

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The Americans tended to described their voices as violent—"like torturing people, to take their eye out with a fork, or cut someone's head and drink their blood, really nasty stuff," according to the study.

The entire article is here.

Are We Hardwired to Believe We Are Immortal?

by Barbara Moran-Boston University
Futurity: Science and Technology
Originally posted on January 29, 2014

Most people, regardless of race, religion, or culture, believe they are immortal. That is, people believe that part of themselves—some indelible core, soul, or essence—will live forever.

Why is this belief so unshakable?

A new study published in the journal Child Development sheds light on these profound questions by examining children’s ideas about “prelife,” the time before conception.

The entire article is here.

The original study is here.

The Importance of the Afterlife. Seriously.

By SAMUEL SCHEFFLER
The New York Times - Opinionator
Originally published September 21, 2013

I believe in life after death.

No, I don’t think that I will live on as a conscious being after my earthly demise. I’m firmly convinced that death marks the unqualified and irreversible end of our lives.

My belief in life after death is more mundane. What I believe is that other people will continue to live after I myself have died. You probably make the same assumption in your own case. Although we know that humanity won’t exist forever, most of us take it for granted that the human race will survive, at least for a while, after we ourselves are gone.

Because we take this belief for granted, we don’t think much about its significance. Yet I think that this belief plays an extremely important role in our lives, quietly but critically shaping our values, commitments and sense of what is worth doing. Astonishing though it may seem, there are ways in which the continuing existence of other people after our deaths — even that of complete strangers — matters more to us than does our own survival and that of our loved ones.

The entire story is here.