The Third Thing: Arendt, Labor, Work, and the Doing No Delegate Can Begin

The fourteen matters took your delegate most of the night and took you ninety seconds. That is the arrangement now, and it is a good one. I teach people to hand down the small matters and to keep only what is worthy of their attention. The pile gets shorter every month.

The text from your brother is not on the pile. It never was. Your delegate has read it, because it reads everything, and it could produce a warm, well-judged page in a second. You both know that page would be worth nothing. Worse than nothing, if he ever found out.

So here is a strange fact about the morning. Fourteen things were done for you, some of them hard, and you feel fine about all fourteen. One thing is left, a few plain words to one man, and it has to be you. Not because you are better at it. You are probably worse at it than the machine. It has to be you because the words are not the point. You saying them is the point.

What is the difference between the fourteen and the one? We do not have a good everyday word for it. We say “work” for all of it. We say “things to do.” A woman named Hannah Arendt saw in 1958 that this one word was hiding three different things, and that the difference between them would matter enormously once machines got good enough. They have now gotten good enough.

Fourteen things were done for you and one thing is left. The one that is left is a different kind of thing.

This book is about the three kinds of doing. Two of them are leaving your hands. I am glad to see them go. The third cannot leave, and most of us are badly out of practice at it.

In October 1957 a metal ball the size of a beach ball went around the earth every ninety-six minutes, beeping. It was called Sputnik. People stood in their yards at dusk to watch it cross the sky.

Hannah Arendt was fifty-one that autumn and finishing a book. She put the satellite on its first page. What struck her was not the engineering. It was the mood. She noticed that the first reaction was not pride so much as relief, as if people had been waiting for a way off the planet. She thought that was worth stopping to look at.

Arendt had reasons to look hard at things other people walked past. She was born in Germany in 1906 and fled it in 1933. She was a stateless person for eighteen years, a woman with no country to answer for her, until she became an American citizen in 1951. She had learned what it means when the ordinary arrangements that hold people together simply stop.

The book grew out of lectures she gave in Chicago in 1956. She called it The Human Condition, and she said its purpose was very simple. She wanted to think about what we are doing. Not what we believe or what we feel. What we do all day, with our hands and our mouths.

On the same first pages, next to the satellite, she named a second event that she thought was just as large and much closer. Automation. She expected that within a few decades machines would empty the factories and lift from people their oldest burden, the burden of laboring. You would think that was simple good news. She did not think so, and her reason is the reason for this book. We will get to it in Chapter 5.

First she had to do something that sounds like hair-splitting and turns out to be the most useful thing in the book. She split “work” into three.

She noticed that the old languages already knew. Greek, Latin, French and German each keep two unrelated words where English tends to blur them: one word for labor, with its sense of pain and effort, and another word for work, with its sense of a thing made. English has both words too. We speak of a woman in labor and of a work of art, and we would never swap them. Then there was a third activity that the Greeks prized above both and that we have almost stopped noticing as a kind of doing at all. She called it action.

Labor, work, action. Here they are, as plainly as I can put them.

Carry to dinner

In 1958 Hannah Arendt split the single word “work” into labor, work and action, because she saw machines coming for the first.

Assignment

Tonight, write down everything you did today. Just the list. You will sort it in the next three chapters.

You wash the dishes after dinner. Tomorrow there are dishes. You wash them again. You will never be finished with the dishes, and no one will ever point to the dishes you washed in 2019.

That is labor. Labor is what a living body has to do to go on living, and what a household has to do to go on being a household. Grow the food, cook it, clean up, wash the clothes, haul the water. Its mark is that it leaves nothing. Whatever labor produces is used up almost as fast as it is made, and then the need comes back.

Labor moves in a circle. It has no beginning and no end, only a turning. Hunger, meal, hunger. Dirt, cleaning, dirt. This is why it is so tiring in a way that has nothing to do with muscles. There is no day on which you stand back and say, there, that is done forever.

Arendt was not sneering at it. She thought labor carried its own deep reward, which is simply the feeling of being alive: tired after effort, fed after hunger, asleep after a long day. It is the oldest happiness there is and nobody has improved on it. But it is the happiness we share with every animal, and she gave the laboring creature a Latin name to make the point: animal laborans.

The ancient world was blunt about labor. A free man in Athens did not do it. Labor belonged to the household, behind the door, and it was done by slaves and by women so that a few men could walk out into the square with their hands empty. That arrangement was cruel, and I am not holding it up as a model. I am pointing at what it admits. They understood that labor is necessity, that necessity is the opposite of freedom, and that somebody or something has to carry it before anyone can do anything else.

Now look at your own list from last night, and look for the circles. The washing machine took the wash a hundred years ago, but the laundry itself came back every week anyway. Then look at the office. The inbox. The status report. The expense reconciliation. The weekly numbers. You clear it and it returns. Nobody will ever point to the email you processed in 2019.

Most of what we called knowledge work was never work. It was labor, done sitting down.

This is the first thing Arendt lets you see. We gave office labor a dignified name because it was done with the mind and paid well. But it has the mark. It leaves nothing and it comes back in the morning.

Carry to dinner

Labor is the doing that keeps life going, leaves nothing behind, and returns tomorrow. Most office tasks are labor.

Assignment

On your list, put an L next to everything that will be back tomorrow or next week no matter how well you did it.

A carpenter builds a table. She starts with a picture in her head. She cuts, joins, sands, finishes. Then there is a moment that labor never has: she stops, because the table is done. Fifty years later someone eats breakfast at it.

That is work. Work makes things, and the things stay. A table, a bridge, a house, a law book, a violin, a poem. Arendt’s point about work is that it builds the world, and by world she does not mean the planet. She means the made place we live inside, the one that was here before we were born and will be here after. Rooms, roads, tools, books. Without work we would be alive, but we would have nowhere to be.

Work moves in a straight line. It has a clear beginning, which is the idea, and a clear end, which is the thing. In between, the worker is in charge. She can stop, start over, throw the bad one away. No one is in charge of labor, the dishes rule you. And as we will see, no one is in charge of action either. Only in work is a human being the master of what she is doing.

She gave the maker a Latin name as well: homo faber, man the maker. The maker thinks in means and ends. The saw is for the board, the board is for the table, the table is for the family. It is a clean and satisfying way to think, and it is exactly the way to think when you are making a table.

Keep that last sentence in mind. The maker’s way of thinking is right for things. Chapter 6 is about what goes wrong when it is used on people.

On your list, the work is whatever has an end and leaves something standing. The proposal that was finished and sent. The menu redesigned. The spreadsheet model that the company still uses. The report, the plan, the lease, the website. Work is what you can point to.

For most of history, work was the proud part of a person’s day. It is where the word masterpiece comes from. I wrote a whole book about that, and about who trains the masters now. Here I only need the definition. Work ends in a thing.

Carry to dinner

Work is the doing that has an end and leaves a lasting thing in the world. The worker is master of it from start to finish.

Assignment

Put a W next to everything on your list that ended in a thing you could hand to someone.

A man stands up at a town meeting. He has never spoken in public. He says, I think we are about to make a mistake, and here is why. The room goes quiet. Whatever happens next, the meeting is now a different meeting, and he is now known in that town as the man who stood up.

That is action. Action is what happens directly between people, with nothing in the middle. No material, no product. Just word and deed, in front of others. Asking her to marry you. Telling the partner you want out. Founding the company. Apologizing to your brother. Saying no in the meeting when everyone else is saying yes.

Arendt gave action three marks, and they are the reverse of the marks of work.

First, action begins something. It does not continue a cycle and it does not carry out a plan. It starts a thing that was not going to happen otherwise. She thought this was the most human power of all, and she tied it to the plain fact of birth. Every person arrives as someone new, and so every person can begin something new. Her word for this was natality.

Second, action shows who you are. Not what you are. What you are is a list: your skills, your title, your faults. A machine can match the list. Who you are only appears when you speak and act in front of other people, and you cannot fully control it or even see it yourself. The others see it. The man at the town meeting did not decide to become the man who stood up. He stood up, and they saw.

Third, action has no end and no master. A table is finished when it is finished. A word spoken among people is never finished, because the others are free too, and each of them can begin something in return. So every action sets off a chain that nobody controls. Arendt said action is boundless, unpredictable and irreversible. You cannot know where it will go and you cannot take it back.

Labor leaves nothing. Work leaves a thing. Action leaves a story, and you are not its author. You are only the one who began it.

That is why action leaves stories and not products. A life of labor and work can be summed up in a list. A life with action in it has to be told. And the telling always belongs to someone else, who can see how it came out.

It needs one more condition, and it is the one that will matter most later. Action needs equals. You cannot act among your tools or among your servants. The Greek who walked into the square was walking out among men who could contradict him. She called this the fact of plurality: not Man, but men, each one different, each one able to begin.

Carry to dinner

Action is word and deed among equals. It begins something new, shows who you are, and can be neither controlled nor undone.

Assignment

Put an A next to anything on your list that was said or done directly to another person and could not have been sent by someone else. Count the three letters.

Here is why Arendt did not cheer for automation.

She looked at the modern world and saw that it had turned the old order upside down. The Greeks put action at the top, work in the middle and labor at the bottom, hidden in the house. The modern age put labor on top. We came to believe that the highest thing a person can do is make a living. We ask a child what he will be and we mean which job. We ask a stranger what she does and we mean for money. Even the artist and the judge learned to say they were just doing their jobs.

In that kind of world, she said, everything gets measured as labor. Is it productive? Does it pay? Does it keep the wheel turning? Work lost its pride and became employment. Action nearly dropped out of sight. It was something for politicians, and we did not admire them much.

And now, she wrote in 1958, the machines are coming to free this society from labor. But it is a society that no longer knows any other kind of doing. Her phrase for what was coming is the coldest line in the book. She said we faced the prospect of “a society of laborers without labor.”

You cannot free people into an activity they have forgotten exists.

Think about what a laborer does with free time, if labor is all he knows. He rests, and then he consumes. Consumption is the other half of labor’s circle: produce, use up, produce, use up. Take away the producing and the circle does not open into something higher. It just spins on its other half. She predicted that the spare time of the laboring animal would be spent on consumption, and that its appetite would grow the more time it had.

She was writing about factory hands and television. Read it again with a phone in your hand. The feed has no beginning and no end. It leaves nothing. It returns tomorrow. It is labor’s circle with the labor taken out, and it is where the freed hours have mostly gone so far.

I do not think that is the end of the story. But I think she was right about the order of events, and I want you to see it coming in your own house. When the delegate lifts the pile, the first thing that rushes into the space is not freedom. It is the feed.

Carry to dinner

A society that only knows labor does not know what to do when labor is lifted. The freed time goes to consumption first.

Assignment

For one week, note what you do in the first ten minutes after your delegate finishes something for you.

There is a second way to lose action, and it is older and more respectable than the feed. It is to treat people as something you make.

Remember the maker. She has a picture in her head, she takes her material, and she shapes it until it matches the picture. She is in control from beginning to end. It is a wonderful feeling, and it is the feeling every leader, parent, manager and reformer wishes they had about human beings.

Action is frightening for exactly the reasons Arendt listed. You cannot predict it. You cannot reverse it. You are not in charge of it, because the other people are free. So for as long as there have been thinkers, she said, there has been a temptation to swap action for making. Do not persuade the citizens, design them. Do not ask the staff, manage them. Do not court the customer, engineer the funnel. She traced it back to Plato, who wanted the city ruled by a man who knew the pattern and could shape people to fit it the way a craftsman shapes a couch.

The dream of every manager is predictable people. It is a maker’s dream, and people are not material.

Notice what the swap requires. To make a table you must do violence to a tree. Making always begins by breaking something down into material. When the thing being made is a workforce, or a market, or an electorate, the people in it have to be treated as stuff: inputs, segments, headcount, users. Their power to begin something of their own stops being the point of them and becomes the defect to be engineered out.

I spent a career around good companies, and I am not accusing anyone of villainy. The language gives it away without any villain. Human resources. Human capital. Change management. Customer acquisition. Every one of those phrases is a maker talking about material.

It never fully works, because people keep beginning things. The quiet employee quits. The loyal customer walks. The managed electorate does something no model saw. That is not a failure of the plan. It is the human condition showing through. But the attempt does a great deal of damage, and it trains everyone inside it to forget that there was ever another way to deal with one another.

Hold this chapter next to what is coming. For all of history, making people has been expensive and clumsy. It took armies of managers, marketers and clerks. It is about to become cheap.

Carry to dinner

The oldest way to escape the risk of action is to treat people as material and make them into what you want. It never fully works and it always costs.

Assignment

Find one phrase you use at work that speaks of people as material. Say out loud what you would say if they were your equals.

If action nearly dropped out of sight, where did it go? It went where everything went. It went inside the job.

A job, as most of us have known it, is a bundle. I have written before about how much is tied up in it: income, insurance, a schedule, a title, a place to go. Arendt lets you see a deeper bundle underneath. A job has been holding all three kinds of doing in one package, under one name, for one paycheck.

There is the labor in it: the inbox, the forms, the reports that come back every week. There is the work in it: the things you built that are still standing. And there is the action in it. The day you told the room the launch was not ready. The colleague you took aside. The customer you looked in the eye and promised. The time you said, I was wrong, that one is on me.

For a great many people, the job has been the only place they act at all. Think about that. The town meeting is empty. The lodge, the union hall and the church basement are thinner than they were. The one room left where an ordinary person regularly stands up among equals and says something that cannot be taken back is the conference room on Monday.

For many people the job was the last place they ever stood up in front of anyone.

We did not notice, because we called all three by the one word. A good day at work might be nine parts labor and one part action, and what you told your wife about at dinner was the one part. Nobody goes home and says, I reconciled forty invoices. They say, you will not believe what I said to Dave.

This is the part of the future that the usual argument misses. The argument is about income: if the machine does the job, how will people eat? That is a real question and I have written about it elsewhere. But a job was never only a living. It was also where the things got built and where the standing up got done. Unbundle it, and three different losses come apart. They need three different answers. A check replaces the first. Nothing you can mail replaces the third.

Carry to dinner

The job bundled labor, work and action under one word. For many people it held the only action in their week.

Assignment

Recall the last three things you told someone about your day. Were they labor, work or action?

I do not say that people use AI. You do not use an entity that takes a matter off your hands and brings it back done. You delegate to it. The right word for the human is manager, and the right word for the AI is delegate, from the Latin for sending someone with a charge.

Now sort what gets sent.

Labor goes first, and it goes almost completely. This is what Arendt saw coming for the factory, arriving sixty years later for the desk. The inbox, the scheduling, the reconciling, the renewing, the filing, the chasing. Everything with the mark of the circle. The delegate does not get tired of circles. It does not need the old reward of labor, the good tiredness, and it does not suffer the old curse of it either. You hand the circle down and it turns out of your sight.

I want to be exact about how good this is. Since the first household, somebody has had to carry necessity so that somebody else could be free, and it was always a person. A slave, a servant, a wife, a clerk, a junior. For the first time the carrier is not a person. The ancient bargain that bought freedom for a few with the bondage of many does not have to be struck.

Work goes second, and this is the newer shock. The delegate does not only turn circles. It finishes things. The contract, the analysis, the plan, the design, the code, the book of accounts. It comes back and the word on it is Done. You do not chat with finished work. You Accept it or you Reject it.

I will not pretend all work goes. There are things made by hand that people will want made by hand, and there is the master’s eye that knows a good table from a bad one. But the long middle of work, the competent finished thing that used to take a professional a week, now arrives by morning. The maker has become a manager of makers.

Labor went to the machine a century ago. Work is going to the delegate now. Count what is left on your list.

So take out your list from Part I. Cross off the L’s. Cross off most of the W’s. Look at what is still there. On most people’s lists it is three or four lines, and every one of them has another person’s name in it.

Carry to dinner

A delegate takes nearly all labor and most work. What remains on the list is short, and every line has a person in it.

Assignment

Cross off every L and W your delegate could take today. Read the remaining lines aloud.

Why not send the delegate to do those lines too? It writes better than you do. It is more patient. It never says the wrong thing at a funeral.

There are three reasons, and each one comes straight from what action is.

The first is that action shows who you are, and a delegate sent in your place shows nothing. The words may be perfect. That is the trouble with them. Your brother does not need perfect words. He needs to find out whether you will pick up the phone. When a message could have come from anyone, it tells him nothing about the one person he is wondering about. I have put it this way before: I chose you, and you sent your AI instead. The insult is not in the quality. It is in the sending.

The second is that action happens among equals, and delegation only runs down. Your delegate is your subordinate. That is not an insult to it, it is the structure of the arrangement, and it is what makes the arrangement safe. But it means that when you send your delegate to a person, you have sent a subordinate to an equal. You have told him his rank. And when your delegate meets his delegate, two subordinates are exchanging paper. That is useful, and it is fine for the fourteen matters. Nothing has begun between the two of you.

The third is that a beginning must have a name on it. When something new starts among people, the first question is always the same: who began this? The question needs an answer who can be thanked, blamed, forgiven and held to it. A delegate can carry out a thousand procedures. It cannot be the answer to that question, because nothing it does is its own to answer for. It is yours. Either you stand behind it, in which case it was your act and you had better have meant it, or no one does.

Delegation runs down. Action runs across. That is the whole reason the third thing will not go down the chain.

I should mark the edge of this claim. Delegates will do things in the world that have large consequences among people. They already do. I am not saying those things do not happen. I am saying each one is either an act of yours, done with a long arm, or an event with no one behind it. The second kind is the one to fear, and Chapter 10 is about the industry that will produce it.

This is what I mean when I tell my students never to have their AI deal with a person who is worthy of their own attention. I used to give it as a rule of manners. Arendt shows that it is a rule of structure. The delegate is not being kept out of the room by etiquette. There is simply nothing in that room it can do.

Carry to dinner

Action cannot be delegated because it shows who you are, happens among equals, and needs a name that can answer for it.

Assignment

Name the one person you have been letting a system handle. Deal with them yourself this week.

Now put Chapter 6 next to Chapter 8. The oldest temptation in human affairs is to stop acting among people and start making them. And the new delegate is the greatest maker ever built.

Until now, making people was clumsy. One message for a million customers. One policy for every employee. One speech for the whole electorate. The clumsiness was a kind of protection. You could feel the form letter. You knew when you were being handled.

That protection is ending. A delegate can produce, for each person, the exact words that person is most likely to respond to. The warm note on the anniversary. The check-in after the hospital. The apology in just the right key. The birthday message, the condolence, the encouragement, each one fitted to its target, a million at a time, with nobody anywhere deciding to say any of it.

I call this the counterfeit. It has the outward form of action: words addressed to a person. It has the inner structure of work: a product, made to a pattern, for an effect. Nobody began anything. Nobody showed who they were. A result was manufactured in another human being.

The counterfeit has the form of action and the structure of work. It is a thing made to look like someone showing up.

It will be sold as care, and at first it will work. Response rates will rise. Then two things will happen, and both are already visible.

The first is that people learn. A signal that costs nothing carries nothing. Once everyone knows the warm note is free, the warm note becomes noise, and then it becomes an insult, because it shows you were worth a template and not a minute. The second is worse. The person doing the sending loses the ability. If your delegate has handled every difficult conversation for five years, you no longer know how to have one. The muscle that begins things has wasted.

The deepest problem with the counterfeit is what it removes. The reason action is risky is that the other person is free to begin something back. That is not a flaw to be engineered away. It is the entire value. A managed friendship is not a friendship with less friction. It is a different object.

This is why I keep telling business owners to be the face their customers trust, and why I think the price of a person in a room is going up and not down. I made that case at length in another book. Arendt gives it its foundation. Trust is not a feeling you produce in a customer. It is what is left behind when someone acted in front of you and then stood by it.

Carry to dinner

AI makes it cheap to manufacture the appearance of action at scale. The counterfeit works briefly, then insults, and it wastes the sender’s own ability to act.

Assignment

Find one automated message that goes out under your name to a person who matters. Turn it off and say it yourself.

If action cannot be controlled or undone, how does anyone dare do it? Arendt’s answer is the most beautiful part of her book, and the most practical.

Action has two terrible properties. It is irreversible: what you did, you did, and it has joined the past. And it is unpredictable: once begun, you cannot know where it leads, and you cannot even be sure who you will be tomorrow. Either one alone would be enough to keep a sensible person at home.

For each there is a remedy, she said, and the remedies are themselves actions. They are not tools and they are not techniques.

The remedy for the irreversible is forgiveness. You cannot undo what was done. But another person can release you from it, so that you are not chained forever to your worst afternoon. Without forgiveness, every one of us would be the permanent prisoner of a single deed, and nobody could ever begin again.

The remedy for the unpredictable is the promise. You cannot know the future. But you can bind yourself in front of another person, and that binding makes a small island of certainty in the ocean of what might happen. A marriage, a contract, a handshake, a constitution. Each is a group of people making tomorrow a little less wild by giving their word.

Forgiveness is the remedy for what cannot be undone. A promise is the remedy for what cannot be foreseen. Neither one can be sent.

Here is the detail that matters for us. She pointed out that you cannot do either one alone. You cannot forgive yourself, not really, and a promise made only to yourself binds no one. Both need another person standing there. Both are made of nothing but one human being’s word to another. They are action in its purest form.

In my own framework I put the same fact this way. Consciousness does not manufacture the future. Consciousness manufactures history. Whatever you do becomes part of the past, and the past is the one thing beyond alteration. You do not get to choose what comes. You only get to choose what will have been done. Arendt adds what two people can do about that, standing in front of each other. One can say, I release you. One can say, I give you my word.

A delegate can prepare the contract, and it should. It can remind you of the date. It can tell you what your brother said eleven days ago and what you said to him two years before that. It cannot forgive him for you, and it cannot be forgiven in your place. If the two great remedies of human life cannot go down the chain, then the chain has a top, and you are standing on it.

Carry to dinner

Forgiving and promising are what make action bearable. Each needs another person, and neither can be done by anyone but you.

Assignment

One promise you have been avoiding making, and one person you have not released. Pick one of the two.

Let me make this practical, because my students are about twenty-four and they will live their whole working lives on the far side of this change.

Take the list again. You have three columns now.

The labor column goes down the chain, all of it, with no regret. Do not keep a circle because turning it makes you feel busy. Busy was the dignity of the laboring age. Let it go.

The work column goes down too, with one difference: you stay the master of it. Somebody has to hold the picture of what good looks like, and to say Accept or Reject and mean it. That is real and it is yours. But it is minutes, not days.

The action column stays. And here is the thing nobody tells you. It does not fill the freed hours by itself. Labor and work come to you: the inbox arrives, the deadline arrives. Action never arrives. No one assigns it. It only happens if you begin it, and beginning is frightening, so the hours go to the feed.

Labor arrives. Work is assigned. Action only happens if you begin it.

So you have to put it on the calendar the way you once put work there. One beginning a week. A call you have been avoiding. A room you walk into. A thing you propose, a person you thank to their face, a no you say out loud. Count them the way you used to count finished tasks.

I can say what this looks like in my own life, in plain facts. Years ago a man named Paul Stern and I were the first two employees of a company called E2open. On paper it had about ten founders, all of them large companies, and venture money behind it. We started in the venture firm’s building before there was a lease in Belmont, California. I can see now that what happened in those first rooms was not work in Arendt’s sense. There was no product yet. There were people giving each other their word about something that did not exist. The work and the labor came later, and there was a great deal of both.

In January of this year I opened a place in Charleston, about three thousand square feet, where local people come in person to understand and use AI. Our business there, Charleston AI, delivers finished work to hospitality owners, and I have come to think of it in these terms. We take the labor and the work so the owner can be where only the owner can be: in the dining room, among guests, as the host. A restaurant is one of the last places left where a stranger is received by a person. That is not the overhead of the business. That is the business.

Carry to dinner

Hand down the labor, stay master of the work, and schedule the action, because action is the only one of the three that never arrives without being asked.

Assignment

Put one beginning on your calendar for this week. A named person, a day, an hour.

Here is what I expect, stated so that it can be checked.

1. The inbox is named for what it is.

   By 2030 a serious employer will no longer list correspondence, scheduling, reporting or reconciliation in a job description for a person. Those are labor, and labor will be assumed to go down the chain. A job description will read like a list of people you must face and things you must stand behind.

2. “Who began this?” becomes the question on everything that matters.

   As more of the world is carried out by delegates, the scarce thing is a name at the start of the chain. Contracts, public notices, medical plans and news stories will carry a named human beginner, and things without one will be treated the way we treat an unsigned letter.

3. The counterfeit has a good five years and then turns into an insult.

   Automated warmth will be everywhere by 2028 and resented by 2032. People will ask plainly, did you write this, are you here, and the cost of being caught sending a manufactured condolence will be a broken relationship. Businesses will advertise what they do not automate.

4. The freed hours go to the feed first, and to rooms second.

   For most people the first decade of lifted labor will be a decade of more consumption, as Arendt expected. Then a second movement begins. Clubs, congregations, town boards, guilds, choirs and leagues will grow again, because they are where an ordinary person can appear among equals. I expect in-person membership of that kind to be rising in America by 2035, after sixty years of falling.

5. The promise and the apology become the premium human acts.

   When everything else can be sent, the two things that cannot will be worth the most. The person who gives the customer their word, in person, and the person who says to their face, that was our fault, will be the most valuable people in any company. They will be paid like it.

Those are five. Under all of them is one prediction that I hold more firmly than any of the dates. A generation is about to discover that it does not know how to begin things, and learning that will be the education of the century. It was once called the free arts, the arts of a person who is free to walk into the square and speak. We will have to teach them again, to everyone this time, and not to a few men whose freedom was paid for by someone else’s bondage.

Carry to dinner

The scarce things become a named beginner, a person present, a promise and an apology. The feed wins first. The rooms win later.

Assignment

Pick the prediction you most doubt and write down what you would expect to see by 2030 if I am wrong.

A book of predictions owes its reader an account of where it stands and where it could fall. Here is mine.

I should also say that Arendt’s three boxes are cleaner than life. A mother nursing a child is doing labor that is also something else. A carpenter teaching an apprentice is working and acting at once. Scholars have argued with her lines for sixty years, and they are right to. I am using the distinction the way you use a map. It is not the ground. It shows you which way you are facing.

Carry to dinner

The claim rests on the delegate staying a subordinate. If an AI is ever received as an equal, action opens to it and the argument fails.

Assignment

Write the one sentence that would change your mind about this book. Keep it.

You could type something. You know by now that typing is the wrong size for this. Eleven days is long enough that a text would be a way of not calling.

You do not know what he will say. That is the unpredictable part, and it is the reason you have put it off. You cannot take back what was said two years ago. That is the irreversible part, and it is the reason there is something to call about.

Everything else in your morning has an end. This has only a beginning. If it goes well, it will not be finished. It will be started, and then there will be more of it, and you will not be in charge of where it goes.

No one will mark it Done.

You press his name. It rings twice.

“Hello,” you say. “It’s me.”