Value Added Life - Part II of "Journey of Tao" Trilogy

 

This passage was originally published in Heaven On Earth in July 2013 and republished as Part II of "Journey of Tao" trilogy in Journeys of Other Kinds in July 2026.

In preparation for my trip to India in September, I was applying for a tourist visa. Even though there is a consulate office in Vancouver, regular tourist visa applications were outsourced to private companies two years ago. After filling out an application form on line, I took the hard copy to the recommended private company for processing. Two visits to the visa office later, my visa application was still not processed. I had a similar experience applying for a Russian visa two years ago. The complex requirements for the Russian visa seemed more palatable since Russia was formerly a communist country where people's movements were restricted and closely monitored.

I simply could not understand why an Indian visa application could not be processed because the size of the photo was not exactly 51 mm x 51 mm and the background of the photo was not completely white. These visa service companies appeared to be paid for picking bones from eggs. No wonder it was outsourced. What is the practical purpose of making the applications so uniform? From the economics standpoint, the standardization of visa photos is a way of providing business opportunity and employment. It certainly does not appear to improve national security.

Many years ago when I worked as an engineering technician at the City of Toronto, I used to input data for the water distribution system in hope of implementing a mathematical model to the system and identifying problematic areas for infrastructure planning. The work was monotonous but I was determined to complete the project because I believed that my work was worthwhile. However, after running the program a couple of times, I realized that the software the City purchased did not have the capacity to handle large networks and my data would probably be shelved like those ancient blueprints in no time. I became very disinterested in my work even though the pay was above average. Surprisingly, my bosses still wanted to keep me there despite the issue.

Many cultures place a great deal of importance on occupations. Many people derive their identity from their work. When they lose their jobs or retire, they also seem to lose the purpose of their lives. The answer to the question, "Do you work to live or live to work?" is not always apparent to them. What exacerbates the problem is that their work has not been adding much value to society.

Postscript, 2026:

Looking back at this now, in 2026, I find the question has only gotten sharper. AI has begun doing, faster and more cheaply, exactly the kind of work I was describing back then — the visa office clerks measuring photos against a 51mm standard, the data entry I did for a model nobody would ever use. These were never jobs that required human judgment so much as human patience for repetitive, rule-bound tasks. 

If anything, the years since have made the original question more urgent rather than answering it. The jobs most exposed to AI displacement are disproportionately the value-subtracted ones I was complaining about then: not because AI is making a moral judgment about which work matters, but because mechanical, rule-following tasks were always the easiest to formalize. The harder question, for individuals and for whatever comes after this wave of automation, isn't whether your job survives, but whether the value you were adding could be described clearly enough for a machine to take over. For too many of the people I felt little empathy for in 2013, the honest answer is probably yes.