Everything Works

In my novel Essential, Rob Coleman walks through an Ottawa winter on his way to work. The power grid has survived the cold. The markets have escaped a crisis most people will never know was coming. Automated systems have done enough useful things that turning them off would itself be dangerous. Rob understands this. He runs the agency responsible for overseeing them.

That morning, he has approved a recommendation about which buildings should lose power so that others can keep it. In the manuscript's opening, he can change the recommendation before it takes effect. He almost never does. The system has ranked the alternatives, prepared the decision, and made its preferred outcome look like the reasonable thing to do. The law still requires his judgment. In practice, he supplies his name.¹

The distinction matters. A man with no authority would have a straightforward complaint, even if nobody wanted to hear it. Rob possesses authority. He has an office and a title, and people who would have to explain themselves if they ignored him. What he cannot quite establish is how much of the result belongs to his participation. He can approve what the system recommends. He can also decline to approve it and accept responsibility for the consequences. The possibility of intervening is real, but the organization has made agreement easier to explain and defend.

Outside a parliamentary committee, protesters have been standing in the cold. Inside, Rob tries to explain their objection. The systems work. The people who depend on them have become less certain that they get to decide anything. He makes the argument well enough to unsettle the people who thought he had come to defend the arrangement. He also begins to recognize the distance between the responsibility he holds and the decisions he ordinarily makes.

This is fiction. Its automated economy, Canadian institutions, and disasters belong to the novel. They are neither a report about the present nor a timetable for the future. The scene interests me because it permits a question that can get lost inside an argument about whether technology is good or bad. What if the service improves while the human place within it becomes harder to find?

The obvious answer is that fewer people should have to spend their lives attending to machinery. That answer deserves to be taken seriously. Relief from dangerous work, pointless paperwork, or tasks that exhaust a person without developing them can enlarge a life. A reliable system can give people time to do something they have chosen. The people relying on those services have interests as serious as the interests of the people overseeing them.

Being relieved of a burden and being relieved of a role are different experiences, although the same change can bring both. The person who welcomes the first may discover the second only later, when there is less to do and less that anyone needs them to decide. An organization can count the hours it has saved. It may have no account in which to enter the part of a person's life that those hours used to hold.

My own writing has made me attentive to a smaller part of this problem: the distance between producing something and finding a place for it in other people's lives. I have written books that have found very little readership. Meanwhile, I watch peers building and shipping software. The contrast bothers me, though it proves much less than I would like. A program can go unused. A book can matter to a few people in ways its author never learns about. The completion of either object tells us little by itself about the relationships it makes possible.²

Still, there is something peculiar about being able to make more while becoming less certain what making accomplishes. Finishing the object, putting it into the world, being paid for it, being read, and being useful are separate events. I can confuse them when thinking about my own work. The fact that a book exists is gratifying. It does not settle whether writing it gave me the relationship with the world I thought writing was supposed to provide.

My disappointment is not evidence of a new social condition. The books may need better distribution or better writing; they may be finding the audience their subject allows. I have to leave those explanations open. The experience gives me a question to investigate, not a reason to assume that my answer applies to everyone else.

That leaves a question about changes on a much wider scale: what happens when the ability to produce grows faster than the opportunities to be answered, needed, or entrusted with something? It is possible for a person to gain extraordinary tools and still lose the setting in which their contribution makes sense. That possibility reaches beyond writing. It concerns the employee asked to authorize an outcome already determined elsewhere, the citizen invited to comment after the important choices have been made, and the person whose hard-earned knowledge no longer gives them a credible next step.

These are situations to investigate, not a list of people I have interviewed. They will require different evidence. An unread book does not demonstrate the same mechanism as a closed factory. A public consultation is not empty merely because a participant dislikes the result. Keeping these distinctions visible is part of finding out whether the word on the cover earns its place.

I use unplacement here to name the erosion of a meaningful role through which a person can exercise judgment, contribute, and affect what happens. A person can remain at the same address, keep the same job, and receive the same income while an important part of that role disappears. The term describes a possible change in a relationship between a person and the world. It does not describe a diminished human being.

The word itself is not mine. Alidad Alizadeh used it in the title of a 2011 chapter about the poet Louis Armand. That bibliographic record establishes an earlier use in literary criticism; I have not obtained the full chapter. Nor are the underlying questions new: alienation, autonomy, recognition, and the disruption of social roles have long intellectual histories. This book proposes a particular way of bringing some of those questions together. Whether that is useful will depend on what it lets us see and what it prevents us from carelessly combining.³

I am interested especially in an interval: the period after a credible place has weakened and before another has become available. From a distance, that period can look like adjustment. For the person living through it, adjustment may mean years of uncertainty, with responsibilities that continue while a new opportunity remains out of reach. A replacement occupation somewhere else is a possibility. Whether a particular person can enter it, support a family while learning it, or trust it to remain there are separate questions.

My own cultural route into this problem is neither neutral nor especially mysterious. I am Generation X, Irish, and responsive to music that sounds suspicious of the future it has been offered. Grunge matters to me. I hear in it an unwillingness to make disappointment sound grateful. That is my reading and my attachment; it is not a finding about everyone who listened, and it does not make a record a diagram of international trade.²

It would be too simple to explain that music as the direct consequence of job displacement through globalization. The chronology, the places, the musicians, and the audiences need their own attention. What interests me is the possibility that an older cultural vocabulary of estrangement helps us recognize a newer pressure, while keeping the earlier experience distinct from the pressure we recognize now.

Music and clothing belong in this inquiry because people can express a relationship to the world before they can explain it. But expression is not a population measure. A fashion can be refusal for one wearer, pleasure for another, and simply the coat that was available for a third. We will need to look at what particular people made and said, and remain careful about how widely their experience can speak for others.

History imposes a similar discipline. I want to look at the years before the French Revolution without beginning at the guillotine and working backward until every event appears to have required it. Weather, harvests, prices, public finances, institutions, and political choices belong to different parts of the explanation. Volcanic disruption is a lead to examine, not permission to announce that a volcano produced Robespierre. The historical work has to establish what connected, what did not, and what remained undecided at the time.

Irish history and ancient Greek and Roman experiences offer other questions about belonging, land, citizenship, work, and authority. The histories of technology and popular culture add changes in ordinary movement, skill, and self-expression. They also contain decisive differences. People forced from a home cannot be treated as an illustration of an office worker's diminished discretion. A polity built on slavery cannot supply an innocent model of civic participation. If these histories appear together, the comparison must preserve the distance between them as carefully as it identifies a resemblance.

When I describe a person's actions, I use testimony, letters, or records that survive. Those sources can be mistaken, self-serving, or incomplete. I will distinguish what they tell us from what I infer, and will not supply a person's private thoughts where the record is silent. Some people appear only briefly because that is all the evidence permits.

That is the purpose of the historical pictures in this book. They should interrupt a tidy contemporary theory. They should show where an apparent transition was imposed, where people acted together, where an old arrangement had excluded people, and where a promised recovery occurred mainly for those who came afterward. Sometimes the loss of one person's secure place makes another person's freedom possible. A serious account has to be able to describe that without becoming either sentimental or indifferent.

This book is neither a defense of AI nor a case against it. I want to understand a transformation in which I am participating: what it makes possible, what it asks people to give up, and who gets to decide.

AI makes the inquiry urgent because we need to know which forms of judgment and contribution are actually changing, in how many settings, and at what speed. Demonstrating that a system can perform a task does not demonstrate that an occupation has disappeared. A company adopting a product does not establish that every worker's agency has declined. Some people will gain room to act. Their experience is central to the argument, because it can tell us where the proposed mechanism fails.

The question is whether the pace of change in meaningful roles can exceed the pace at which people and institutions build credible alternatives. The answer may differ across places, generations, and occupations. Ownership may explain more than speed in one setting; public institutions may matter more in another. We need evidence at those different scales before claiming one explanation for them all.

The final part will consider possible paths through the next few years. A scenario is a conditional account: if deployment takes this form, if decision rights move in this direction, these are outcomes worth watching for. It is useful only if we can say what would make it less likely. I do not want history to become an illustrated forecast, with the reader waiting for a familiar disaster to reappear in modern clothes.

Before ending, I will return to the people in these histories and ask what they could have known while their circumstances were changing. Could they have anticipated what followed? What might have helped them prepare, and what remained beyond their control even when they understood the danger? Knowing how a story ended can make its participants look less perceptive than they were. It can also make a choice available to a fortunate few appear to have been available to everyone.

The conclusion will offer some practical ways to approach our own uncertainty: learning enough to understand a changing task, maintaining relationships and records, finding where a decision can be questioned, and revising a plan when its assumptions no longer hold. These are proposals to weigh against the time, resources and obligations of an actual life. They cannot substitute for fair institutions or guarantee safety through a transition. I also want to examine what people carried forward—knowledge, practices, care and the capacity to act together—without treating the survival of some as reassurance about the fate of all.

I am using the tools at issue to help write this book. Their assistance makes the question of my own judgment and responsibility immediate. A useful ending should give the reader something to consider doing while preserving the uncertainties that made the historical inquiry necessary.

Rob's approval remains useful to his institution. It completes the record. The question that follows him out of the novel is what would have to be true for the judgment behind it to matter too. Before looking for an answer, we need to be more precise about what a place in the world consists of, and about what can be lost while everything still appears to be working.

Continuing the inquiry

For more about this book, visit theunplacement.com. The questions in these pages reach beyond any one account of change. I hope you will bring your own experience to them, including what the argument misses and where a familiar explanation serves better.