This post has spoilers for the movie No Other Choice (2025)
A few weeks ago I watched No Other Choice (2025) a black comedy directed by Park Chan-wook. In the film, Man-su is a veteran (and award winning) employee of a papermaking company. The film begins with him happilly inspecting the factory. He goes around happily greeting his coworkers as he inspects the reams of paper, hitting each one with a club to inspect it for quality. But then he is laid off, after months of searching for work he develops a sinister plan to get a job - by eliminating the competition.
One of the running themes of the movie is how our identities are shaped by our work. Park Chan-wook brings uses this to comical absurdity by showcasing how much of the laid off worker’s identity are based on working at a papermaking company. The audience laughs as Man-su reads “Pulp Men” the industry magazine of the Korean paper making industry. There is an interpretation of this film which is radical – a critique of how capitalism intertwines identity with ones job, no matter how banal. That when jobs are scarce, available positions becomes status symbols, laid off workers becomes crabs in a bucket, brutalizing others who they share the most with. They become fully atomized against each other, fighting for the last position to preserve their status.
But there is also a softer interpretation. For people who enjoy their profession, no matter how banal, being made redundant removes a part of their identity. Man-su is made redundant due to automation. A factory of workers reduced to one who simply monitors the factory. In the end, Man-su gets the job. The final scene is him, in a fully automated factory. He still has his club to inspect the reams, but it is redundant - there are automated robots hitting the reams to check for the quality. They are much faster and more accurate, rapidly tapping against the tremendous reams. But Man-su still persists, hitting the reams with his own club. Just like he did in the beginning of the film.
The weekend I watched the movie, I also started experimenting with Claude Code. There are many tutorials, examples, and posts about what Claude Code is. In brief, Claude Code is an agentic command line tool. It is an LLM that lives on your computer which can write code. It is extremely impressive. With a single prompt it writes better code than I have ever written. I am not a programmer, my code was never very good by their standards – but I am pretty okay for a run of the mill social science. It is striking how good it is for most relatively quantitative social science projects. If you use Claude Code fully, your job shifts from writing code, exploring datasets, figuring out little puzzles, to writing a command, waiting, reviewing, and repeat. Running code on your own can feel like Man-su hitting his club against the reams of paper. You don’t need to do it but you want to.
In the film the choice of a paper mill worker is deliberate decision to illustrate the absurdity of putting so much status into a job which many may find boring. It is hard to understand from the outside. But most people who take pride in their work have similar jobs. In my experience, outside of academia, or even outside of your own specific subdiscipline, most people struggle to understand why X paper is impressive, or Y accomplishment, or why people spend thousands of hours to produces tables of regression coefficients.
This raised the question of what I enjoy with my work. What would be lost if it was automated away? Watching Claude Code spin out line after line of code that is generally a higher quality than I can write, I can’t help but feel some sense of sadness. The boring, tedious part of cleaning data, writing code for a plot, and trudging through errors is one of the practical parts of research. It feels like small, applied problem solving. It is a relaxing break from higher level thinking.
What can be automated away without losing something integral? Visual media, great written works, and music all derive their importance to humans because they reflect something human, something that is supposed to make you feel emotions, to invite introspection. GenAI music, art, and visual media feels soulless and wrong to me. But the code that I write by hand is not art. It does not invite others to feel emotions besides anger when it doesn’t work. There are other parts of my job I enjoy much more than writing code. Reading research, mapping out the literature, finding interesting questions, writing and teaching all feel like something where I would lose something integral by automating this away. But then again, that is essentially the rest of the tasks of my work. While these tools can help augment these processes, I don’t think they truly are close to replacing them in the same way that my code has been replaced. But there is a risk, that even if something is lost, it may be smaller than the benefits of these tools at scale. Everything is faster, but slightly worse in some immeasurable dimension.