Work, dignity, and technological determinism with Andrew Kortina

Executive overview

As automation expands, the cultural link between work and human dignity becomes a liability — it was built for scarcity, not abundance. Kortina argues that dignity tied to productivity may exclude people when work disappears, yet he finds himself unable to escape that conditioning personally.

His company Fin attacks the gap between today's limited AI and the ideal of a full personal assistant — using distributed human workers enabled by software, not pure automation.

The cultural value of work was a useful scarcity mechanism; it may become harmful as abundance grows.

Work, dignity, and cultural conditioning

• Dignity linked to work is a cultural inheritance, not a personal choice — hard to override even when you recognise it as constructed
• Protestant work ethic logic: incentivise productivity to build surplus against natural catastrophe
• The mechanism becomes dangerous when abundance replaces scarcity — not everyone may need to be productive
• Risk: people without the opportunity to work are locked out of dignity by an outdated framework
• Power law applies to the attention economy — most "creative" futures for displaced workers will still concentrate value at the top

The failure mode of bullshit jobs

• Already possible we're in a failure mode: assigning dignity to unnecessary work while under-allocating labour to education, healthcare, and food
• The toothbrush-aisle problem: entire production, marketing, and distribution chains exist to waste five minutes of someone's time
• Money is the algorithm already running humans — the singularity may have already happened
• Silicon Valley sells meaning and impact the way Wall Street sells money — but the Wall Street pitch is at least honest

Technological determinism

• Useful things will be invented out of necessity regardless of any individual's contribution
• Corollary: if everything useful will be built by someone, individual work feels less unique — but opting out breaks the system
• JFK's moral argument for the space race: good actors must build powerful technology first, before bad actors do
• Same logic drives OpenAI and most frontier AI labs today

Craft, automaticity, and Charlie Kaufman

• Craft (coding, cooking, drawing) provides meditative escape from verbal-analytical thinking — the source of existential despair
• Risk: craft identity becomes a way to critique others without producing anything yourself
• Charlie Kaufman's runner analogy: repeating the same automatic phrase regardless of context — the default mode of work and relationships
• The tragedy is not doing conventional things; it is doing them without ever choosing to

Fin: human-backed AI assistance

• Fin provides personal assistant services via distributed human workers enabled by software — not pure NLP automation
• Target use case: people who need 3–5 hours of assistant help per week but cannot hire a full-time person
• Core differentiator vs. raw VA marketplaces: institutional memory, training, and shielding clients from staff turnover
• Hardest problem: measurement — heterogeneous workers, tasks, and customers make it nearly impossible to isolate whether any change improved the system
• Demand forecasting is critical: under-supply means waiting; over-supply burns money
• When Fin can handle all work autonomously, no human needs to work — so Fin's goal is to be the best system for human work for as long as humans still do it