Industry 4.0: Murderous boredom

[abomvubuso]

If you had to choose between a job where your adrenaline often skyrockets because of sudden tasks and deadlines that expired yesterday, and one where an automatic system has not only eliminated all the organisational chaos but it has taken the bulk of your everyday functions - which one would you choose? Let's not forget that things weren't always what they seemed.

Experts in psychology and social sciences are already pondering the implications of the the advent of a new era, the so called Fourth Industrial Revolution that's about to transform the workplace. Last year a new batch of researches and reports have warmed the global public some more about the coming of the age of automation as a result of the accelerated development of robotics, AI and self-teaching machines.

Apart from all the upsides that the boom of technology brings to mankind, there's also an intense discussion about how to mitigate and overcome the possible negative consequences on people, particularly the most immediate among them, job loss. The idea of a unconditional minimum income has received a new bush, and Bill Gates has proposed that companies should be paying a "robot tax" that would fund new types of activity, mostly in the social and humanitarian area.

Not so long ago, McKinsey Global Institute published a research that forecast that robotics and AI would erase between 400-800 million jobs from the work market worldwide by 2030. And though most estimates point to just about 5% of the professions potentially being completely automatised in the near future, more than half of all human activities will inevitably undergo changes that will see them being taken over by machines to a various extent.

When it comes to industrial revolution, obviously it won't be just the economy and the market that will be affected. Changes in the workforce will affect people just as much. For instance, our modern age has brought stress and its consequences to the fore. We've seen the emergence of the so called yuppie syndrome: chronic fatigue that's typical for young urban people of higher income who work fast, without much time rest where they could recharge their immune system. In recent times, we've been talking of work burnout, now a mass phenomenon if we could judge from the frequency of its occurrence. It's no longer mentioned just in the specialised journals, it's a thing now. The general culprit is again stress and over-burderning, leading to depression and anxiety disorders.

A roboticised future might be looking very attractive if we imagine it as an almost permanent vacation. But there are other factors on the horizon, and the risks are pretty serious. The thing is, by taking much of the burden off of people at their workplace, the machines could bring them into the other extreme, a lethal state of boredom, so to speak.

Boredom is what a new PsyArxiv.com research defines as the "paradox of effort: it's as costly as it is valuable". The Canadian authors have concluded that in the era of automatisation there's a risk of double underestimation: on one side, the positive effect of effort that an individual invests in their work, and on the other, the subtle harms of boredom that increase exponentially with its increase.

These conclusions present a challenge to the established canon of cognitive psychology, neuroscience and economics, where stress and burden, both physical and psychological, is an expense and a liability: if people (or any other creatures, to that matter) had a choice, they'd rather avoid it. Here the authors provide evidence of just the opposite: every effort does bring added value instead.

Of course, some roles will be obsolete in the automatised future, while others will be partially substituted by machines, which will be relied upon for making work less stressful and freeing up opportunities for focusing on more creative activities and solving abstract, complex problems - all skills that are key for the Fourth Industrial Revolution. Technologies that would make deeper analysis and decision-making easier would hardly bring more high-pay jobs that require erudition and creativity.

Much of the low-pay jobs will continue to rely on human labour, in the sense that it'd take more time to significantly automatise these activities. So the biggest risk is for humans in positions of medium pay whose tasks are clearly formulated and largely repetitive. Their functions will be more of supervision rather than active participation, and they'll be dispersed along the chain of activities, and will have a scattered active worktime. It's their job that will require less effort, hence the dangerously high levels of boredom (and boredom fatigue).

James Hewitt, head of the science and innovation department at the Hintsa Performance explores these unanticipated transformations in an article for the electronic edition of the World Economic Forum. His Finland-based consultant company advises and trains workers how to achieve a better quality of life that would guarantee them a better professional performance. Its regular clients come from various fields: from F1 to top CEOs as well as employees of 1000+ organisations from around the world.

Hewitt believes that at a time when more and more human activities are getting automatised, we should think hard about the value of what we're removing. Healthy amounts of work stress and effort are key for human performance and development, he argues, and directly relates this to well-being because it's associated to a goal-driven behavour: we perform better when we're trying to achieve a goal, rather than postponing or forgetting our goals due to getting distracted by something unimportant.

So what would happen if we lose the positive experience that comes with effort? Automatisation could make boredom, both on and off the workplace, a big issue. And that's not a recent observation: at the dawn of the industrial revolution, Nietzsche warned of a similar effect of the "machine culture" on the workforce. There are various definitions of boredom, the most recent ones defining it as a subjective state of low-level anxiety and discontent caused by the lack of interest, coupled with insufficient stimulae. A 1980 research describes the bored person as someone who's "half-unhappy, half-asleep".

Boredom is already wide-spread in high-quality work environments, and it's been recognised as an important field of research. Guys like Hewitt acknowledge there are many legitimate and logical reasons to embrace automatisation, including enhanced safety, better precision and lower costs. But they insist we should also explore its effect on well-being and human efficiency. Not only because automatisation could replace human work but because the consequences of ever increasing levels of boredom among the employed could be dire. A more efficient and less stressful life might not necessarily translate into a better life - especially if we're bored to death. So the technological automatised paradise of the brave new world is not entirely flawless. Automatising everything just for the sake of it could bring unpredictable results in the long run.

At the end of the day, if we've made up our minds as a civilisation that AI does human work better than us, we could assign it the task of calculating the amounts of stress and work burden that would be healthy enough for us, too - so that we would neither have to burn out at work, nor get into a state of half-coma.