This morning, as Zoe was headed for another week of 9th grade, she said she still liked school, but what she didn’t like was being in school for eight hours to get two hours of learning.
I knew just what she meant. By her age, I’d been feeling that way for a couple of years already. Eighth grade was as far as I got in any kind of conventional schooling. I couldn’t stand the idea that I was being trained in the indispensable skill of being bored. It feels like a deliberate crushing of your spirit. It makes you employable.
We’ve been saying “post-industrial” since the 1970s, even before the Reagan-era watchwords “automation,” “offshoring,” and “rustbelt.” Fifty years on–and with my retirement from engineering to focus on writing–I’m getting visions of what post-industrial life it might really be like.
One day in 1985, in my senior year studying civil engineering, I took the subway downtown to a job interview. The firm was in a converted loft building, in the garment district. The sewing machines had been supplanted by carrel desks, in melamine rows, where white-shirted men sat, many of them with copies of the American Institute of Steel Construction manual. I recognized the red leatherette cover, the way each man had hedgehogged his copy with paper clips marking pages with the key tables, so he could look up the entries to his calculations. They were sizing girders and beams and braces for bridges and skyscrapers, writing the calculations on paper sheets, formatting the calculations to allow ready checking and review.
The first IBM PCs had already arrived in that office. Those men’s jobs were about to evaporate, in favor of better calculation methods (finite element analysis) that can analyze structural designs more beautiful and elegant than what came before.
At its best, engineering education instills a mental closeness to material properties. This closeness is akin to what is required for, say, baking or leatherwork, but at the higher, more abstract level made possible when the material properties are made consistent by quality control in manufacturing. The engineer’s confidence in a design–confidence that the bridge or building will stand up and not fall down–is derived from confidence in the mathematical representation of how the steel compresses or stretches or bends, rather than direct observation. But it is still, in some sense, still felt, and as such, it is still craft.
As the post-industrial future comes into focus, I’m feeling that the transition in the daily experience of work–its phenomenology–is away from the rote and regimented, away from looking things up, away from rule-based judgements. Those are all things computers, and artificial “intelligence,” can do faster, better, cheaper than human beings. No one needs to sit in rows, in carrels, doing a job.
We do need to practice craft, though, and more of it. We are swamped in commodities but have a deficit of value–and value comes from the application of human skill to material substance. Being able to practice craft requires discipline, grit, and the capacity to tolerate discomfort. But it doesn’t require–I don’t think–practice at boredom.
I envision a world, not within my own lifetime but possibly within Zoe’s, where work as we now know it is mostly replaced, not by leisure but by craft. Where human engagement in production of things, of commodities, is bit by bit replaced by the everyday application of feeling, creativity, and mastery to unique problems. And the output of that engagement is beauty, or service, or caring, or glory. But not money.
