Are some tasks undignified?

In an Uber ride a few weeks back I told my driver it felt uneasy to be chauffeured somewhere because of an implied power dynamic. He agreed vehemently and called it “disguised slavery".

It isn't slavery and it isn't even unequal: in capitalism’s eyes we’re trading partners on equal footing, and I paid a fair price for the fair service he procured me. After all he’s about to go home and do the same to his cashier; I’m about to go home and do the same for my boss.

Still: in a better world, Waymo would've already expanded their coverage to include Berkeley, and Raoul and I would be sitting side by side as friends in the back instead of in our awkward diagonal arrangement.

Better yet, I would never meet Raoul: the both of us would be in different Waymos, sitting side by side as friends with people we're respectively more happy to be around.¹

I wonder if this, then, is evidence that driving, or at least the kind of driving Raoul is doing, is an undignified task, in some sense that means “we'd be better off automating it”. (People tend play racecar simulators, not taxicab simulators.)

Raoul might find great meaning in his work and have achieved whatever mastery of driving implies, but this might also be true of the humans who spent their days doing laundry or mathematical operations by hand.

Because indeed, one can find dignity in any task. There is probably a latent Jiro Dreams of Sushi documentary to anything a human can do. Yet it seems clear that, when given the choice, well-off people tend to spend their time perfecting their art of cooking rather than their art of doing laundry by hand, even as both jobs can more or less be easily delegated.

The point is not that cleaning toilets for a living is undignified; it doesn’t have to be. It’s that if we had self-cleaning automated toilets, this would be a net improvement over our current situation, including for the dignity of the people who currently clean them. I do not think we will return to cleaning toilets, in utopia when we must decide what to fill our days with.

(This is isomorphic to: “the point isn’t that you should treat 2026 as a living hell, because you’d be unhappy. The point is that from the perspective of a much better civilization we can get to, it is living hell, and pretending that everything’s all right is also bad.”)

I’m sort of baffled I notice a lot of people without an intuitive sense or emotional valence for tasks which are undignified under conditions of automation. I’ve been called lazy for using the drier instead of the clothesline! For getting Claude Opus 4.5 to do some boring tasks like docs formatting instead of doing it myself!

In my civilization, there’s a moral element attached to doing it yourself. But my gut screams that certain things are both effortlessly automated and don’t seem like the kind of things I want to be treating as dignified. Yes, I’m going to do things: but it’s going to be because I chose todo them instead of doing them because they’re necessary, and it’s better that way.

This post serves as a reference / PSA that some things just genuinely aren’t worth doing, and in the future will only be done by the most ardent of Renaissance Faire LARPers. You can let the machines do those things. It’s OK. Everything is going under the automation waterline eventually anyway. With time the sensation that you’re doing something just because you want to will intensify, not go away. True Necessity Besides Fun is slipping through our fingers and never coming back.