Meaningfulness and the Future of Work

Many people want to live meaningful lives. But our lives are changing as new technology increasingly influences how we work, live, and socialise. Algorithms calculate routes for delivery drivers. Artificial intelligence systems sift through legal records to compile reports for lawyers. Chatbots draft emails for office workers, and lesson plans for teachers. How do these changes affect the meaningfulness of our working lives? And why should we care about such impacts on meaningfulness? My project aims to address these questions. It does so by pursuing three objectives. The first objective is to explore the connection between meaningful work and meaningful lives, asking whether meaningful work (where this includes unpaid productive activities such as volunteering or care work) is necessary for living a meaningful life overall. Answering this question will shed light on whether the meaningfulness of our lives can be sustained despite the increasing automation of work. The second objective is to explain the role of attachments for meaningfulness. When we are attached to people, activities, or things, they take on special meaning for us. I argue that our attachments determine the extent to which activities are meaningful. But others can influence what we get attached to. For example, chatbots might nudge us to take up new tasks, or persuade us to think more favourably of our work. These influences can be problematic, when they amount to manipulation or deception. Such cases raise important questions about the ethics of influencing attachments, which the project addresses. The third objective is to investigate whether we can harm others by making their lives less meaningful. Intuitively, people suffer harm when their lives lose meaning, for example, when they get assigned trivial and pointless tasks instead of challenging and worthwhile tasks. But standard philosophical theories of harm cannot explain this intuition. I propose to expand standard theories of harm to include cases of meaningfulness. In doing so, I also explore the connection between instances of losing or gaining meaningfulness and living a meaningful life overall. Overall, the project develops a novel framework for understanding impacts of automation on meaningfulness, and in particular, meaningful work. The resulting framework has wide-ranging applications. Importantly, understanding the meaningfulness of work has implications for policy and business practice related to developing and implementing new technologies at work. For example, if meaningful work is central to meaning in life, then the primary aim of technological innovation should not be to replace human workers; rather, technology should be used to enhance work that is meaningful and reduce work that is not meaningful. The proposed project also sheds light on ways in which technology might affect the meaningfulness of work in more subtle ways, for example through technology which changes what is meaningful for workers by influencing their attachments. The results of the project will be disseminated, among others, through a policy brief and an event on policy implications. The project brings benefits to a variety of national and international stakeholders interested in the future of work, including, but not limited to, workers, businesses, policy makers, and researchers across disciplines interested in the good life and meaningful work.