company news about Embracing habit in an automated world

Illustrations by Miriam Martincic

Of all the attempts to pinpoint the origin of modernity—an exercise of which modernity never tires—my favorite begins with medieval monks. According to this account, it was the Benedictines who came up with the idea that it was possible to do the same thing, at the same time, every day. Although time was still widely regarded as fluid and coterminous with eternity, the monastery was governed by the rhythms of that most modern instrument: the clock. The monks rose together, ate together, and prayed together, starting and stopping each task at the appointed canonical hour. In time, their obsession with order seeped into the world at large. The tradesmen and merchants in town heard the monastery bells ring out eight times a day and began to synchronize their daily tasks to their rhythm. The butcher picked up his cleaver at Prime and set it down for lunch at None. Clerks hustled to finish their work by Vespers. Time became currency, something that could be spent or saved, and people increasingly turned to machines to make life more efficient. By the dawn of the Industrial Revolution, the religious impulse behind these regimens had been long forgotten. The monastery gave way to the factory. Ritual dissolved into routine.

There is, to be sure, a certain logic in describing habits as machinelike. The actions that are most familiar to us—walking, riding a bicycle, driving a car—are those that can be performed without conscious deliberation, as though we were “on autopilot.” Habit, it’s often said, is nature’s version of outsourcing, a way to off-load cognitive overhead to the rote movements of muscle memory and free up the mind to think about other things. At their most extreme, habits can slide into addictions and compulsions, patterns that resist our conscious efforts to break them. As the philosopher Clare Carlisle observes, it is this tendency to slip in and out of consciousness, transgressing the neat binaries of modern thought—activity and passivity, freedom and necessity, mind and body—that has made habit so troublesome for philosophers, raising uneasy questions about freedom and individual autonomy. Kant excluded habitual actions from moral philosophy, maintaining that the “thoughtless repetition of the same action” cannot be ethical because those actions are not freely chosen.
Nothing is habitual but indecision, and for whom the lighting of every cigar, the drinking of every cup, the time of rising and going to bed every day, and the beginning of every bit of work, are subjects of express volitional deliberation.

For contemporary critics of habit, this understanding of freedom—the ability to consistently choose the good, or to act routinely in accordance with one’s highest nature—would be largely unrecognizable. According to the most zealous advocates of automation, true freedom requires gradually eliminating necessity from our daily lives by rendering work and labor superfluous, leaving our schedules open for limitless choice and novelty. This is the scenario that Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, proposed in his well-publicized 2021 article “Moore’s Law for Everything.” In the next decade, Altman speculates, AI, which is already making inroads into nonroutine work, will read legal documents, offer medical advice, do assembly-line work, and perhaps serve as “companions.” In the years after that, it will make scientific discoveries and do essentially all of the work that currently constitutes human employment. AI companies will become so astronomically wealthy they’ll be able to bankroll a universal basic income for all citizens, a system that will create “a virtuous circle of societal wealth.” Everything from food to video games will be so cheap that people will be able to buy whatever they want, without having to labor for long hours. If we get bored from not working, we can always make up new jobs, and “we will have incredible freedom to be creative about what they are,” he writes. “The future can be almost unimaginably great.”

One is thus presented with the strange spectacle of machines in which the method has become so perfectly crystallized in metal that it seems as though it is they which do the thinking, and it is the men who serve them who are reduced to the condition of automata.