Work summary

Introduction

Work by James Suzman. What's in it for me? A deep historical dive into how work has affected the evolution of our species. We're in the midst of an industrial revolution, much like the ones that birthed steam engines and microprocessors.

This time, we're facing the union of digital, biological, and physical technologies. And it's a cause for concern, plaguing the global market as artificial intelligence threatens our core existence. We're a species born to work. This summary looks at the complex relationships between human beings, their circumstances, and work.

Going back billions of years to when life on Earth first developed, they trace how natural, technological, and intellectual advancements caused our idea of work to evolve over time even before our human history began.

Life on earth increases entropy by capturing and expending energy.

Life on Earth increases entropy by capturing and expending energy. If you've ever felt that your life is chaotic, you're both right and wrong. From a physics perspective, life is orderly, but it was born from the chaos of entropy in the universe.

Everything from the trees outside to your finger tracking on a screen is a hugely unlikely physical alignment of atoms that formed by chance. The energy or work your body expends by just existing contributes to the universe's chaos. Quantum physicist Erwin Schrödinger of Schrödinger's cat fame looked to the second law of thermodynamics to explain this. Entropy was the universe's normal state, and the particular order that is life was very abnormal.

But life couldn't exist in violation of the second law of thermodynamics, so it must be contributing to the overall entropy of the universe. It captures energy, uses it, and then chaotically releases it. Around 3. 5 billion years ago, single-celled bacteria were the first living organisms on Earth.

They did work by transmuting energy from water and rock into chemical bonds, which were then broken down to release energy. They worked largely in the dark. Around 2. 7 billion years ago, some species evolved to photosynthesize, deriving energy from sunlight and producing oxygen.

These cyanobacteria provided fuel for oxygen-breathing organisms to do work. The first creatures with tissue and nervous systems evolved in the oceans around 700 million years ago. The most successful of these aquatic organisms transformed work by harvesting energy from other living things. When creatures began to live on land, the nature of work continued to transform and eventually became what we see today.

But early life forms weren't just preoccupied with capturing energy. They also needed to expend it. A good example of this basic need can be seen in the male black-masked weaver bird of southern Africa. He'll spend weeks painstakingly building a nest in hopes of impressing a female, only to start over a few days later when she doesn't come along.

He'll do this incessantly. One bird in Zimbabwe was recorded destroying 158 of 160 nests. Scientists now believe males engage in this seemingly arbitrary behavior to expend surplus energy. It's not just black-masked weaver birds who exhibit hard-to-explain behaviors.

Have you ever wondered why anyone would run an ultramarathon or why the city was tearing down a perfectly good skyscraper to build a bigger one? An overabundance of energy may be a clue to these behaviors, too.