I’ve been reading Hannah Arendt’s The Human Condition recently and it is truly a fascinating book. It distinguishes work, labour and action from one another – Something that you might think is trivial or unimportant, but that as it turns out is really quite important for understanding how human beings but that’s not what I want to talk about today.

What I want to talk about is this idea of the violence we do to the world through the work of our hands.

Here Arendt’s definition of work is relevant; work is what we do, homo faber as we are, to create a world that lasts beyond us, something distinct from our labor, something durable.

When Arendt describes work, she doesn’t just describe it as a process of creating things ex nihilo – the way that a god might – out of nothing; rather, human beings create things out of that which was already given to the world we take timber and ore as resources from earth’s natural growth process and from within its bowels transform it through our efforts into something that was not on earth before and in so doing take the finitude of the world and fashion it for our own ends in an act of rebellion an act of violence, some might say.

I think about the industries we have, and how often we work purely for the sake of our biological needs, yet how because we conflate work with labor, work becomes our highest ideal in few other places.

I see this most saliently in the global AI consumption situation, where thousands of us are casually using tokens on a massive scale to power artificial intelligence models that are run on carbon-consuming computers that produce true simulated machine intelligence computations that stretch beyond the limit of any individual’s human capacity – a form of violence that we are doing to the world.

I don’t consider myself an environmentalist, but I can see that this is a form of violence that I had not seen so clearly before. There are many things that I have to say about this and plenty of thoughts, but I can already feel myself returning to the life process that is sleep. One of those things I’ve become a little more in touch with as I began reading this book. Well, until tomorrow then.