Outsourcing Happiness

Camily Carvalho 29' is an international student from Brazil, currently in her sophomore year studying Computer Science and History. She is especially interested in exploring how humans and technology have mutually evolved throughout the eras.

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Eudaemonia is a philosophical interpretation of happiness defined by Aristotle over 2,300 years ago. It has acquired an important significance in today's world, where AI has been deeply reshaping the meanings we project onto work, identity, and human excellence. The Greek expression does not accurately translate to happiness, at least not in the modern sense of the term, but I strongly believe that it can contribute greatly to the understanding of human fulfillment and personal joy. 

For Aristotle, the intentional pursuit and commitment to personal talents and abilities, or arete, was directly linked to a sense of happiness, which, for him, was not a fleeting state, but a condition of a life well spent. Eudaemonia is self-sufficient, continuous, and long-lasting. It makes life desirable and lacking in nothing. It is composed of activities that are ends in themselves and of the state of fulfillment that comes from doing them.

Think about the activities that make you feel the happiest. Are they related to activities you perform excellently? If you answered yes, like I did, they might also be related to your work identity. That is because, unlike in the recent past, work is now seen as not only something you do to support yourself economically but, most importantly, as an enjoyable task to which you dedicate yourself. In a high-skilled-worker economy in which professionals spend decades pursuing excellence in a field, a tool that can easily perform your arete can erode your fulfillment ruthlessly.

By now, you have understood that the tool I am referring to is a specific branch of artificial intelligence, generative AI, which is being incorporated into the workplace to perform tasks that once relied on you, the very work from which you derived eudaemonia.

As a Computer Science student who plans to work as a software engineer, at this moment, my biggest hesitation with using artificial intelligence is facing the fact that I will be required to outsource activities that bring me joy, in this case, programming, which AI has the capabilities to do much faster and better than me. Despite feeling conflicted, I have decided to slowly find ways to be creative and re-invent myself to re-encounter eudaemonia.

Additionally, as a History major, my internal struggles with these recent technological advancements remind me of the Luddite movement. The Luddites were part of a secret oath society in the early nineteenth century who, amid financial and political instability caused by the Napoleonic Wars, protested against the emerging technological breakthroughs in textile machinery that threatened their livelihoods. Mass layoffs, wage reductions, lack of autonomy over the means of production, and the use of unskilled labor to substitute for proficient workers were some of the issues these workers opposed through the movement. The historical context of the movement and its antecedents matches our reality very closely. As Mark Twain cleverly put it, "History does not repeat itself, but it often rhymes."  I believe that the Luddites, similarly to us, were not against technological progress, but rather against the replacement of human values imbued in work, and its consequences for the working class and power to disenfranchise employees.

Every time a new technological innovation comes into place, we have to deal with the uncertainty of how it might impact our modus operandi. From my personal perspective, we must also re-evaluate how much various parts of our identity shape our sense of worth, since that sense of worth contributes massively to continuous happiness. In the case of the Luddites, technological advancement did cause a tremendous deterioration in living and working conditions for artisans, causing disenfranchisement from the means of work and burnout. 

Eventually, the working class accepted that technological advancement was out of its control and that re-shaping one’s identity to survive in a modern economy was no longer a toil caused by a singular occurrence but a skill that all modern workers should have to survive. The difference between previous technological breakthroughs and AI is the scale at which artificial intelligence can perform human work without much human assistance. 

If we follow Aristotle's claim that our sense of happiness comes from performing activities with excellence, and, analogous to Marx, believe that work should be "free, fulfilling, and creative," we deny work alienation and believe in agency over the work we produce. What is left for us at the moment is to take a closer look at how our skills feed our sense of fulfillment in our daily lives and what aspect of that we will allow AI to take over. Presently, we consider the prevalence of AI inevitable owing to hegemonic values of efficiency over subjective human fulfillment, but as humans who have agency over their history, we need to wake up to the fact that in the daily choices we deem passive, therein lies our power.