Opinion
Two thousand years ago Seneca warned us about AI. The ancient Roman philosopher wrote about a wealthy and lazy man who desired to appear worldly and educated, without wanting to do the hard work of studying required to get there.
Instead, he bought and trained slaves to recite lines of poetry and spit out the answers to any questions that he desired. Summoning knowledge from these slaves, he told his friends, was no different to summoning it from his own mind.
The obvious absurdity of this belief was mocked by Seneca, and today you can draw the same dotted line to our relationship with technology.
This story was recounted to me by Ryan Holiday, the author most responsible in recent times for a resurgence in applying historical philosophies to modern problems. His 15 books, like The Daily Stoic and The Obstacle Is The Way, have sold over 10 million copies.
We speak from a recording studio that he’s built next door to The Painted Porch, a charming bookstore he owns in a small town in Texas. Ryan writes extensively about Stoicism, or the philosophy of focusing on what you can control, and is touring around Australia next month.
Although we like to think that our problems are unique and new, we’ve been struggling with similar questions for thousands of years.
“When Stoicism burst onto the scene in the fourth century BC, there was something about it that was both basic and also radical and mind-blowing,” he says of its perennial popularity. “Anytime a book or a series of ideas lasts for 23 or 24 centuries, there’s clearly something about it that’s timeless – and there are elements of it that feel very timely when the world is on fire.”
One of the driving themes of Stoicism is that we are in charge of ourselves, which came into full view in many workplaces as they adapted to working from home. “When you don’t have a boss looking over your shoulder and you don’t have an office you have to commute to, you now have to make some decisions about your day in a way that a lot of people really struggled with,” says Ryan.
You can apply Stoic thinking to work in many ways, like how to deal with difficult colleagues. When obstacles are placed in our way, it helps to reframe them. “You can think, ‘does losing my temper or being disappointed help this situation?’” says Ryan, explaining that gaining perspective can help with any problem. “How are we going to learn a lesson from this? Are we going to put in better processes because of this? That to me is the day-to-dayness of what the Stoic philosophy is.”
The biggest lesson for workplaces, however, is that the difficult and messy parts of doing your job is often more important than the outcome itself. In other words, the process of work is just as important as the work itself. Take writing an essay, says Ryan. “You could have ChatGPT write your essay for you, but is the point to have the essay? Or is the point to write the essay yourself so that you are the person who wrote the essay? Not just to learn how to do it, but to learn about yourself as you do it and to develop the capacity to be able to do it?”
These big questions are something every worker is grappling with right now as our robotic slaves can summon impressive-sounding results without the usual cognitive thinking required. Although we like to think that our problems are unique and new, we’ve been struggling with similar questions for thousands of years. And if history is anything to go by, we’ll still be wrestling with them for a long time to come.
Tim Duggan’s new book, Clear in Tension: How to get better at conflict, is available for pre-order now from www.clearintension.com.au.
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Tim Duggan is an author, founder and optimist. He co-founded Junkee Media, is the Chair of the Digital Publishers Alliance and writes the monthly newsletter, OUTLET (One Useful Thing Literally Every Time).From our partners
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