What are you going to do with your life when the machines are better at your job than you are?

World Go champion Ke Jie of China has already found out. He just played a best-of-three tournament against an artificial intelligence program called AlphaGo and he lost 3-0.

To watch the video of him playing and losing is to be reminded that current debates over automation and the future of work go a lot deeper than the single issue of whether or not robots will take our jobs. The real issue is more likely to be whether or not robots will take our souls.

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Reflecting on his loss, Ke Jie noted what he considered to be his human failings. “I was very excited. I could feel my heart bumping,” he said. “Maybe because I was too excited, I made some stupid moves. Maybe that’s the weakest part of human beings.”

Maybe. Or maybe the “weakest part of human beings” is that we have separated our emotional capabilities from the work that we do, and we therefore judge our worth on criteria better suited to machines, on inputs and outputs, productivity and growth, on mere calculation, rather than on intrinsic human values.

In other words, maybe what we can learn from AlphaGo’s victory is to better understand our place in the grand scheme of things. After Copernicus, we had to accept that the Earth wasn’t the centre of universe. After AlphaGo, we have to accept that we are no longer the smartest creatures on the planet, and maybe this will help us understand what the future of work really is.

This is the second time AlphaGo has beaten a highly ranked human opponent, having accounted for the South Korean master Lee Sedol 4-1 in 2016. That was an amazing result but Ke Jie is widely considered to be the best human player in the world and was even thought to have played “perfectly” for a significant portion of all three games: and yet he was still unable to best the computer. The result was enough for most experts to accept AlphaGo had improved enough to be considered unbeatable.

It’s also important to note that a computer winning at Go is a much more impressive feat than one winning at chess. In chess, a computer can memorise millions of moves and reliably calculate a path to victory. It is essentially a number-crunching exercise.

Beating a Go master is a different order of intelligence.

In Go, there are more possible moves than there are atoms in the universe, so number-crunching is not enough: a computer simply cannot memorise every possible Go move, or even a significant fraction of them. The program therefore needs to be able to “think”, to understand the state of play and develop a strategy in order to win. Until recently we could kid ourselves that there was something uniquely human about this type of intelligence, but no more.

Is it possible that the rise of ever-smarter machines, those exemplified by AlphaGo, may offer us a way out?

This has enormous implications for the future of work.

Work, broadly defined, is likely to always be at the centre of human self-worth. We are embodied creatures and we understand ourselves by interacting with our environment physically and mentally. It’s this embodiment that makes us different from machines and why machines will never actually think like us, no matter how smart they get. For humans, it is meaningful to do work of many different kinds and we will always find work to do that we find satisfying and fulfilling.



The problem is that work has come to mean “a paid job” and, for most us, that means working for someone else. Under these circumstances, we value “work” less for the improvement to our self-worth it brings us as embodied human beings than for the fact that we have to sell our labour to earn a wage in order to survive.

So when economists tell us that we don’t need to worry about robots taking our jobs because technology will create new jobs, they are basically arguing for perpetuation of this status quo, where the few employ the many and where “work” is a paid job. In fact, more than that, they are defining us as mere units of production, inputs into the economy, rather than as embodied beings seeking meaning by interacting with the world around us.



But in a world of incredibly smart machines, is this really the best future we can imagine for ourselves? After all, there is nothing intrinsic to human self-worth about selling your labour to the owners of capital. In fact, in many ways it represents the worst of us, an exercise in exploitation, where the few wield power and control over the many.

Is it possible that the rise of ever-smarter machines, those exemplified by AlphaGo, may offer us a way out? If we actually let them take over more of the jobs that humans do, might we not be able to find better ways than wages to distribute wealth and free up people to live more meaningful lives? Rather than disrupting our place in the universe, might artificial intelligence help us secure it?

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Look at it this way. Most civilisations are ultimately predicated on slavery because releasing a segment of the population from the constraints of work-to-live is a prerequisite for human progress. The citizens of ancient Greece, for instance, pretty much invented western civilisation, from art to philosophy to democracy, but they were only able to do it because they had slaves to take care of their day-to-day survival.

No one is recommending slavery but machine automation may be its functional equivalent. If we could get over our ridiculous work ethic – of equating human worth with selling our labour – and instead see ourselves as something more than employees, as something more than labour inputs into an economy built on consumption and growth, it is entirely possible that artificial intelligence and similar technologies could usher in a new age of human flourishing.

This doesn’t mean that our future would necessarily exclude anything we would recognise as a job but it might mean that the terms on which we perform such work is radically altered.

Perhaps Go master Ke Jie has already given us a hint as to how we should be thinking. Having lost 3-0 to the machine, he has decided to leave it to its own devices, declaring: “After this time, AlphaGo to me is 100% perfection, to me AlphaGo is the god of the Go game.” He has announced he is going back to playing against people.

It’s a very human response but a wise one as well. He isn’t giving up, just recognising there are more important things than trying to compete with a machine; that human worth isn’t determined by measuring our success against a disembodied technology but in our ability to derive satisfaction on our own terms. We all know this in our hearts but maybe the reality of ever-smarter machines will help us realise it in the lives we live too.