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I am not against automation, and I want to say that plainly before I say anything else, because what follows will be mistaken for technophobia if I do not. I work with these systems and I believe they can do real good. But I have watched the way we talk about automation, and it is dishonest, because it counts the savings and excludes the costs. I want to give an honest accounting, from Port Harcourt, of what we actually lose when machines take over human work.
The Dishonest Calculation
The way we talk about automation is built on a calculation, and the calculation is dishonest. It goes like this. A machine can do this work faster, cheaper, and more reliably than a person, so replacing the person is simply rational, an obvious efficiency gain. The savings are counted carefully, in money and time and output. And the costs, the human ones, are left out entirely, as though they did not exist.
I want to be clear before I go further, because this argument is easy to misread. I am not against automation. I work with these systems, I believe they can do real good, and I am not romanticising drudgery or calling for machines to be unplugged. What I am against is the dishonesty of the accounting, the way we tally what automation saves while refusing to name what it costs. Those costs are real, they are human, and a society that will not count them does not thereby avoid them. It simply pays them without admitting it. Let me give the honest accounting, from Port Harcourt, of what we actually lose when machines take over.
Work Is Not Only Tasks
The whole confusion begins with a false picture of what work is. The efficiency calculation treats work as nothing but a set of tasks, functions to be performed, outputs to be produced. If a machine can perform the tasks, then replacing the human is pure gain, because the tasks still get done, more cheaply. But work is not only tasks, and this is the error at the root of everything.
Work is also a source of meaning. For most people, their work is one of the main ways they contribute something to the world, feel useful, and have a reason to rise in the morning. Work is a source of identity, so much so that we introduce ourselves by what we do, and a person's sense of who they are is often deeply bound up with their work. Work is a source of dignity, the self-respect that comes from being needed, from producing something of value, from earning your place. And work is a source of community, of the relationships and belonging that form around shared labour, the colleagues, the trade, the common enterprise.
None of these show up in the efficiency calculation, because none of them are tasks. They are the human goods that work provides alongside the tasks, and they are precisely what the calculation is blind to. When you automate a role, the tasks get done by the machine, but the meaning, identity, dignity, and community that the role provided to a person do not transfer to the machine. They simply vanish. The machine does the work and gets none of the human goods, and the person loses the human goods and keeps none of the work. That loss is real, and it is nowhere in the ledger.
What People Actually Lose
Let me make the loss concrete, because abstraction lets us keep not-seeing it. When a person's role is automated away, they lose their income, and that is the loss we acknowledge. But they also lose things we refuse to count.
They lose meaning, the sense that their days contribute something, and many people who lose meaningful work describe a hollowness that money does not fill. They lose identity, the answer to who they are, and the disorientation of that loss is severe, because a person who was a maker of something, a driver, a clerk, a craftsman, must now discover who they are without the role that defined them. They lose dignity, the self-respect of being needed and useful, and in its place can come the quiet shame of feeling surplus, discarded, no longer required by the world. And they lose community, the web of relationships and belonging that formed around their work, which does not survive the work's disappearance.
These are not minor or sentimental losses. They strike at the core of what makes a human life feel worth living, and they are experienced as genuine grief by people whose work has been taken by machines. A society that counts only the lost paycheck and ignores these deeper losses is not accounting honestly. It is looking at a fraction of the cost and calling it the whole.
Why Leisure Is Not the Answer
A common response to all of this is that automation will free people from work, and that freedom, more leisure, is a gift. If machines do the labour, people can be released to enjoy their lives. This sounds humane, and it rests on the same error as everything else. It assumes that work was only a burden, so that removing it is pure liberation.
But if work provides meaning, identity, dignity, and community, then removing it does not simply free people. It strips them of the things work was providing, and leisure does not replace those things. A person does not derive identity from leisure the way they derived it from work. Leisure does not provide the dignity of being needed or the meaning of contributing. Endless free time, without a source of purpose and place, is not the paradise the leisure argument imagines. For many people it is closer to a slow erosion, a loss of the structure and significance that work gave their lives.
This is why the vision of a future where machines work and humans simply enjoy the results is naive about human beings. We are not built to be merely comfortable and idle. We need to contribute, to be useful, to have a place and a purpose, and work has been the main way most people meet those needs. Take the work and offer leisure in its place, and you have not solved the problem. You have replaced a source of meaning with an absence, and called the absence freedom.
Communities and Identities Built on Work
The loss is not only individual. Entire communities and identities are built around kinds of work, and when those kinds of work disappear, the communities and identities go with them, which is a social loss on a scale the individual calculation misses entirely.
Whole towns have been organised around a single industry, their culture, relationships, and sense of themselves woven around a shared kind of labour. When that labour is automated or made obsolete, it is not only individuals who lose their jobs. The community loses the thing it was built around, and what follows is not just unemployment but a deeper disintegration, a loss of the shared identity and common life that the work sustained. The social fabric that formed around a type of work unravels when the work is gone.
This has happened repeatedly through waves of technological change, and it is happening again now, faster and more broadly. Each time, the efficiency calculation records the gains and ignores the hollowed-out communities, the lost ways of life, the identities that no longer have a place in the world. These are real costs, borne by real people and real communities, and their exclusion from the reckoning does not make them any less real. It only makes our accounting a lie.
What We Owe
So what follows from all of this? Not opposition to automation, which I have said and will say again is not my argument. What follows is honesty, and from honesty, obligation.
We owe, first, an honest accounting, a willingness to count the full costs of automation and not only its savings, to look directly at what is lost rather than hiding behind the efficiency numbers. A society that cannot even name the human costs of what it is doing has no hope of addressing them. We owe, second, real responsibility to the people whose work is automated away, and this responsibility goes beyond financial compensation, because what they lose is more than money. It includes genuine pathways to new forms of dignified work and contribution, ways for displaced people to find meaning, identity, and a place again, not merely a redistributed income to keep them fed while their deeper needs go unmet.
The specific solutions are genuinely hard, and I will not pretend to have them all worked out. But the obligation is not hard to see. A society that captures the enormous benefits of automation while abandoning the people it displaces has taken the gain and refused the cost, which is a moral failure however impressive the efficiency. From Port Harcourt, watching automation accelerate across every kind of work, I hold to this. Automation is not the enemy, and progress is not the problem. Dishonesty is the problem, the refusal to count the human price. Count it honestly, own what we owe the people who pay it, and we can pursue the real benefits of these machines without pretending they are free. That is not being anti-progress. It is being honest enough to deserve the progress.
