What is the main message of Work?

Work challenges our understanding of productivity and offers a more holistic view of human existence.

How long does it take to read Work?

The reading time for Work varies depending on the reader's speed, but it typically takes several hours. However, the Blinkist summary can be read in just 15 minutes.

Is Work a good book? Is it worth reading?

Work is a thought-provoking book that sheds light on the history and future of work. It's definitely worth a read!

Who is the author of Work?

James Suzman is the author of Work.

Work Summary of Key Ideas and Review | James Suzman

Name: Work
Rating: 4.1 (88 reviews)
Author: James Suzman

Introduction

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.

These blinks look 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.

In these blinks, you’ll learn

what humans have in common with male black-masked weaver birds;
what the most important tool in human history is; and
why Adam Smith was wrong about the origin of money.

Key idea 1 of 8

Life on earth increases entropy by capturing and expending energy, often in confounding ways.

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.

The key message here is: Life on earth increases entropy by capturing and expending energy, often in confounding ways.

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 ultra-marathon? 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.

Key idea 2 of 8

The use of tools influenced our physical and neurological evolution.

Our primate predecessors have been living in Africa for over two million years. Over time, their bodies evolved to make tools, eventually giving us humans opposable thumbs to grip and palpate objects, and a head with front-facing eyes to see what we’re doing.

The most widely used stone tool in human history, the teardrop-shaped and sharp-edged Acheulean hand-axe, is a bit of a mystery. The mystery is that no one knows how human ancestor Homo erectus wielded this heavy stone tool without injuring himself. But so many have been found that it’s obvious they were a popular gadget. It seems that Homo erectus all over the world – except, mysteriously, East Asia – diligently banged out hand axe after hand axe.

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Key idea 3 of 8

When Homo sapiens stepped out of Africa, their perception of work changed.

Around 300,000 years ago, early Homo sapiens and Neanderthals retired their hand axes in favor of more specialized tools. And over the millennia, they even started using tools for things other than the strictly necessary. The first evidence of jewellery, snail beads with drilled holes, dates back to about 75,000 years ago – roughly when engraved ochre stones appeared, the first evidence of representational art.

We believe that early people had incredibly hard lives, surviving on whatever they could scrounge. But if they were making art, wouldn’t that mean they had a degree of spare time many of us only dream of?

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Key idea 4 of 8

Early farmers had to work a lot more than hunter-gatherers.

Just like any industrial revolution, our ancestors’ transition from hunting and gathering to farming was truly life-changing. It enabled rapid growth of the human population while redefining how people engaged with their world.

Beginning about 10,000 years ago, populations across Asia, Africa, Oceania, and the Americas began independently cultivating crops and rearing animals. We don’t know exactly why this happened, but it was probably a combination of climactic, demographic, environmental, cultural, and even evolutionary factors.

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Key idea 5 of 8

The first ideas of monetary value arose from farming.

One of the most profound legacies of transitioning into farming was how people understood time. Foragers focused all their attention on the immediate, but if farmers did that, they wouldn’t last the winter. Farmers had to reckon with seasonal abundance and scarcity. Not doing something in a timely fashion might mean the difference between life and death. The ever-present specter of death by starvation was probably a pretty good motivator for early farmers as they got up at the crack of dawn to till fields.

Farmers also had a more transactional relationship with the land than foragers did. Whereas foragers frequently thought of the land in terms of its generous gifts, farmers exchanged their labor for the promise of future reward. This transaction gave rise to the idea of debt – and, eventually, money.

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Key idea 6 of 8

Thriving on animal domestication opened the way for human enslavement.

Domestic animals, including dogs, played a huge role in the amount of energy our species was able to harness and use in developing our societies.

The first animals to be domesticated after the dog were sheep and goats, around 15,000 years ago. They were farmed mostly for their meat, as well as milk, and, sometimes, wool. But when humans got around to domesticating cattle, another industrial revolution broke out. Cattle could do the work of five men plowing fields, plus they did the work of transporting the fruits of their labor to market. Another revolution soon followed – horse domestication. Not only could horses do twice the work of cattle in less time, they could also carry people long distances.

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Key idea 7 of 8

Cities forced people to reimagine how, and with whom, they worked.

By the beginning of 2008, more people lived in cities than rural areas for the first time in human history. This shift happened in the evolutionary blink of an eye. In the twentieth century, 250 million of China’s rural population migrated into cities seeking jobs in an emerging manufacturing industry. This marked the single biggest migration in human history.

But let’s go back to the beginning. To support themselves, early cities needed easy access to high-yield crops, as well as favorable climate and topography. The first cities, in the Middle East, Southeast Asia, and the Indian subcontinent, were in fertile areas with access to water via river floodplains.

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Key idea 8 of 8

The industrial revolution ushered in an era of inequality unparalleled in human history.

In 1750, Great Britain’s population was 5.7 million. One hundred years later, it had more than tripled to 16.6 million. This surge came in concert with a revolutionary new technology: the steam engine. It powered hundreds of textile mills and factories, increasing the production of cotton, sugar, and coal.

These factories redefined work yet again, making obsolete a raft of other trades. Labour hours in factories were long and dismal, but people needed the work. The quality of life in teeming cities was not much better: many people experienced scarcity and squalor like never before. From 1800 to 1850, the average height of Britons declined, along with their life expectancy. And while factory workers struggled, factories created vast wealth for an elite few from the Oxbridge-educated upper classes.

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