What exactly does the distinction between goods and services amount to? The distinction goes back at least to Adam Smith and is enshrined in most national accounts. However, mainstream economic theory pays it little heed. From its point of view, goods and services are both commodities subject to the general laws of supply and demand. The differences between them are purely cosmetic.
I think there is an important distinction to be drawn here, though it doesn’t quite correspond to the conventional distinction between goods and services. The distinction that interests me is between two forms of human action, which we can designate using the
names first given to them by Aristotle: poesis and praxis.4 Poesis
is standardly illustrated by the production of a vase, shoe or some other artefact, but it is not limited to this sort of thing. Cleaning a house or creating political turmoil in Iraq also count as poesis, though what they aim at is not a material object but a state of affairs. In general terms, an action is poesis if it is a means to an end external to itself, so that it could be replaced, in theory if not in fact, with some other action. If one could clean a house by reciting a magic formula, one would presumably do so. The important thing is that the house gets cleaned.
If poesis has an external end, the end of praxis is simply good praxis itself. Games and the performing arts are the clearest examples. Whatever else he aims at, a chess player must at least aim to play chess well, otherwise he doesn’t count as playing it at all. Cooking for friends, giving advice and giving a gift are also praxis, for they aim, in the first instance, at success in the specific kinds of activity they are. Praxis is an expression of particular skills and dispositions on the part of the agent. In Dante’s happy phrase, it is the disclosure of the agent’s own image.5 Hence it cannot be
delegated. You cannot farm out to some third party the choosing and giving of a gift, or if you do, the gift is no longer a personal token of affection but something more like a bribe. And that is a case of poesis, not praxis.
It should be clear from this why poesis but not praxis can in principle be automated. Poesis permits any number of
means to a given end. Once the end is attained, the means drops out of view, like scaffolding taken down after the job. A clean house is what it is, regardless of whether it was done with a broom, a vacuum cleaner or a robot. You would not feel cheated knowing that it was done one way rather than another. But where action is its own end,
mechanisation spells loss. A dinner at a friend’s house, however delicious, is diminished in one’s estimation by the knowledge that it was bought from Waitrose. The meal remains the same, but the gesture is altered.
Part 4. Robots and Justice
The poesis/praxis distinction is the interesting core of the manufacturing/service distinction. It explains why most manufactures can be mechanised without loss whereas most services cannot. Cost and quality being equal, no one cares whether a chest of drawers was made by robot or by hand. But imagine discovering that a favourite Horowitz recording was in fact generated on a computer after his death. Something would surely be lost, even if the deception was perfect. Appreciation of piano music rests, writes philosopher Denis Dutton, upon “an unstated assumption: that it is one person’s ten unaided fingers that produce the sound. The excitement a virtuoso pianist generates with a glittering shower of notes is intrinsically connected with this fact.”6
Unlike most pop music, a classical CD is essentially the record of a human act. It is a product of praxis, not poesis, though it is classed as a good, not a service, in the national accounts.
The services of the teacher, doctor and nurse also fall under the heading of praxis. However, there is an ambiguity here, which creates an opening for the mechanisers. Because education aims at a state of knowledge, it can be thought of as a ‘mere means’ to this state, pursuable in a multitude of different ways. That is a mistake, though. A surgeon might cause you to understand calculus by fiddling with your brain, but he could not be said to have taught you calculus. Teaching aims not just to foster a certain state but to foster it in a certain way. It is essentially rational instruction; it proceeds by means of explanations, examples, descriptions and stories. Mechanised teaching, with its apparatus of multiple–choice tests, MOOCs and so forth, is inherently second–rate, though it may be unavoidable in certain circumstances. In the same way, doctoring and nursing are not just means to the end of health but forms of care. They can be mechanised up to a point, but only at the expense of quality.
Not all services are praxis. Cleaning, as has been said, is a form of poesis, as are most routine clerical jobs. Many of these services have already been mechanised, without any great loss. Others resist mechanisation for purely technical reasons. It is hard to build a robot that will sweep in corners or under the bed. But it will happen sooner or later, and when it does, only the redundant cleaners will bemoan it.