The future is emotional
aeon.co
aeon.co
People used to gather in salons to hear live music. Today we put earphones on a train to listen to music instead of socializing.
If we socialize, we do it with other consumers, not producers.
Compare photos of the 50s and now. Everyone was socializing outside. Today they are on fb with the phones mediating.
The milkman doesn't come around anymore. The gas station attendant doesn't fill up your car in many states. The Uber driver drops food off and leaves right away. Amazon delivers.
We want it globally accessible, accurate, and now.
Already you prefer to ask Google than your parents or teachers, and so do they.
In the future as AI gets better how do you know people will still want that smiling McDonalds cashier instead of a kiosk? Or the personal touch of a chef instead of a machine that gets the same result every time?
People socialize with producers all of the time. Twitch streamers, Instagram influencers, YouTube stars- there is hot demand from fans to interact with their internet celebrities. Traditional creators get huge attention from Reddit AMA's.
It is true that smartphones have become a massive attention drainer. And automation has created a culture of seeking convenience and availability from machines instead of people whom you know. But your post conflates two different types of human activity- creative, intellectual, entertaining pursuit and logistics-heavy, service work. People will always prefer real people doing the former, until Holodecks really are a thing.
When it's a one-way conversation, that's consuming.
Concerts today do take place, of course, but they are not the same as 20 people getting together in a salon for interaction and a musical soiree.
http://www.billboard.com/articles/columns/music-festivals/77...
Furthermore, art, fiction and music are things that can do a lot for people emotionally and psychologically, both the makers of such and the consumers. Yet no one ever seems to include those in these ridiculous articles about so-called emotional labor which perhaps should more accurately be termed traditional women's work.
Perhaps most importantly, it frames it like this is about the laborer having emotional discipline or something. The reality is that feelings come from somewhere and we routinely mix up "love" the noun that describes a feeling and "love" the verb that describes care-taking that meets a high standard. That feeling in one person typically grows out of the hard labor done by another. The person that inspires the feelings is very often treated pretty abusively. They exist to make other people feel good and to hell with their needs or wants, kind of like the recent story titled "My Family's Slave."
I don't see anything either overly demeaning or glamorous about that descriptive term, it seems to describe exactly the value proposition that is on the table with that sort of work.
For men and women, paid and unpaid, waking at 3am to care for a crying baby or bathing a distressed Alzheimer’s patient can be gruelling and transcendentally life-affirming all at once.
Lots of people take satisfaction in a job well done. This is pretty universally true, regardless of what kind of work you do. The above framing describes cleaning up other people's literal shit in near religious ecstasy type terms. If that isn't overblown, I don't know what is.
I did the full time mom thing for a lot of years. I raised and homeschooled two special needs kids and was a military wife. Finding good solutions that supposedly did not exist is something that I feel very proud of. But cleaning up literal shit never felt like some sort of joyous nigh religious thing. It was grueling, yes. Transcendental, big fat nope.
I am appalled by this article. You should go look up the recent article called "My Family's Slave."
I thought "emotional" had more to do with the person being helped? They may be going through some kind of crisis (having one of the worst days of their lives). Helping them isn't just an obstacle to doing the job; in medical or teaching professions, it often is the job. That's why it's different from another job that might be equally or more physically demanding, but it's just hard work.
Maybe we could distinguish this from jobs serving the public where ordinary, able-bodied adult customers are being demanding for no good reason. But then again, they are probably serving the young, old, sick, etc. some of the time too. That's what serving the public means; you get all kinds.
The first one, while requiring skill and being a relatively low-paid job that a lot of people might not want to take, technically doesn't require customer interaction. (And perhaps not even much in the way of English skills, which makes it a more practical job for some immigrants.)
For the home visit, the actual cooking and cleaning, though important, might not actually be the most important reason they're there?
How should we talk about the difference?
This is anecdotal, but my mother in law spent a decade paying home visits to disabled vets. This is not senior care, but you see similar situations of people with special needs and an inability to care for themselves fully. Two things that she emphasized were how she was hugely underpaid for the work she actually did (as opposed to the work she was minimally required to do) and how she needed frequent, long spans filling paperwork to recover from the physical and mental duties. I may be wrong, but you don't often see that with jobs that require exertion on a single front unless it's extremely stressful and salaried accordingly (e.g. surgeon).
Specially in case of elderly or those suffering from terminal diseases, it is much more tough because inherent you are helpless, you want to do so much but inspite of your best efforts, you can't do anything.
that's emotional labour!
But despite calling it a "disease," this doesn't necessarily seem like a bad thing. Often they're difficult jobs (high emotional labor), so they maybe they should pay more?
To give an example: medical doctors aren't a low-skill/low-wage profession, but their productivity in crude terms of patients examined per hour appears stagnant — medicine is inherently labour-intensive (although the outcomes of care provided can improve over time as new and better treatments become available). If wages rise in other professionalized sectors that require huge amounts of training due to productivity gains (e.g. among engineers), wages will consequently rise for doctors because doctors and engineers are loosely coupled at source through the training/labour market.
TLDR: cost disease isn't about low-wage occupations, it's about pay in occupations that are refractory to performance improvement being coupled to pay in sectors where performance gains are possible via the labour market.
The other element is that wages represent the provisioning costs of labour, or as Adam Smith puts it, "A man must always live by his work, and his wages must at least be sufficient to maintain him." (Further qualified upwards in subsequent text.) WoN, Book 1, Ch. 8.
http://www.gutenberg.org/files/3300/3300-h/3300-h.htm#link2H...
Which is to say: wages are not defined by productivity, but by the general wage level. What is defined by productivity is instead the quantity demanded of a good.
If some quantity of a high-labour good is demanded, then that quantity will pay wages based on the minimum prevailing wage (and if that's a sustainable level: the minimum living wage), plus additional premia for various other factors elevating wages above that floor, as described by Smith in chapter 10 of book 1.
https://www.quora.com/What-is-more-beneficial-in-life-a-high...
It's worth noting that emotional intelligence doesn't mean someone is kind and good. Emotional intelligence can also allow people to be manipulative too. That can be perhaps even more harmful to employees than an emotionally unintelligent manager, but usually such a manager can be very successful and effective for their organization.
Firstly the gender ratio of engineers in e.g. Russia is more even, so let's just shoot that one down before continuing. There's a lot of gender imbalance in Western culture as a whole and to imply that most of it is the "fault" of unemotional males is pretty insulting.
Often this also accompanied by some implicit value judgement assumption, that they attempt to force onto the programmer. "My values are better than yours". Er, no sorry. If you think a programmer is being unemotional, perhaps you should take a step back and examine whether it is you who are being unempathetic, brushing away someone else's engineering concerns as being less important than your own personal feelings about a topic that you don't have a good knowledge of?
[1] https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/10/121030161416.h...
To me it was saying something pragmatic like "Now that advances in technology are taking care of more and more of our material needs while requiring less labor, there is a relative need/opportunity for workers in roles requiring especially-high emotional skills and endurance". Would you disagree with that?
The rest of it instead talks about the benefits of being more emotional (nobody would disagree) and complaining about why people don't seem to think it's as important as the author thinks, but without balancing it out with everything else happening in the world that people have to also think about.
This is done after framing the first paragraph in terms of Obama supporting computer science education, so it's clear that the author wants to imply a contrast or opposition to this, in the rest of the article.
There's also a fair amount of implicit bias and weasel wording dotted around the place, like:
- "But the truth is, only a tiny percentage of people will ever end up working in software engineering [..]" - "It’s also not hard to see that highly educated, mostly male [..]" - "the information revolution frees us to complement, rather than compete with, the technical competence of computers"
The first and third ones basically "beg the question" of the whole article's thesis - it's stated as an implicit assumption, it's never actually justified.
In fact, technology is also automating away a lot of human service jobs, and there's even ongoing research to replace them with robots that can "act" more emotionally. I think the development of this sort of technology shows that plenty of programmers are emotional and empathetic, and the article makes no mention of these.
So it's not infeasible that we'll see a trend (in the long run) of there being less "care workers" of the sort that the article mentions. I'm not in the business of making predictions though, I don't think I know enough - unlike this article which is too falsely confident of itself.
Nobody disputes that it would be good, if all jobs were done by people that were more emotionally sensitive; however you could say the same thing about technical topics, like knowing how your new laptop or phone actually works.
Finally, my own experience of this topic has been that, without exception, complaints about the supposed lack of emotion in programmers or in industry or whatever, has been from people with personal grudges to hold against particular programmers or particular aspects of more analytical behaviour, and who also implicitly think they are "superior" emotionally.
The reason that programming was mentioned was to illustrate how our culture is currently very focused on knowledge work (programming for everyone!), so they could make the counter-point that another type of work is currently undervalued. You may agree or disagree with that, but it is a huge stretch to take the whole thing as a slight against analytic/less emotional types.
I don't think it's an over-reaction to understand that they are implying that the water is unimportant, and also implying that the water won't help to fulfill the same needs that the land might fulfill.
And here, I think your analogy is biased in favour of the article; there's no reason why analytical skills can't help us improve services that require a lot of emotional empathy; they are not as separate as "land" vs "water.
And if you're talking about irony, what I find ironic is an article that places such importance on emotional empathy is happy to use a divisive title like "The future is not X but Y". Obviously the people that personally hold greater weight for X are going to be annoyed. And they didn't even do a good job of explaining why they think it!
While I agree with that to a certain extent (example, the work Microsoft is doing in collaboration with Dr. Eckman's work on microexpressions to read emotional cues from facial expressions), there is a certain part in mindful, loving-kindness that I doubt could be replicated by automation. (Or rather, if there were a way, it would involve a kind of self-serve ... where the user is lead through an experience that generates self-compassion).
I say this as someone who has spent much of my 20s and early 30s heavily analytical, then went through some extreme, transformative experiences. These transformative experiences got me in awareness of emotions in a way that was difficult for my intellect to fool me into thinking otherwise. There was a world of experience that made much more sense.
You're mistaken in thinking that emotional empathy means that such people will not be divisive. The most compassionate can stay centered even in face of extreme divisiveness -- being centered in midst of extreme emotions is why they _can_ be compassionate -- and as such, can often be the voice of uncomfortable, deep, soul-shaking truths. Or better, to bear silent witness for the uncomfortable truths as it works its way out into the open.
The kind of "emotional labor" this article talks about involves bearing a lot of pain and suffering, above and beyond the physical labor. These pain are often pain that, others are not witnessing or mindful themselves. The traditional archetype of heroism is exactly the wrong archetype that bears these pain: the traditional hero who bears pain fools himself into thinking he still retains control over when and how that pain expresses itself. Life, though, brings pain all on its own. No one can control it. Absorbing, deflecting, and armoring against pain does not develop empathy. There is no fooling yourself that you can control when and how it happens, and that unpredictability and lack of control makes it much more difficult to experience. A traditional hero eventually breaks under these conditions. Our society currently materially rewards these heroes, even though they are not suited for dealing with pain and suffering.
When we cross a threshold with automation, I think we will no longer have much left to keep the existential anguish at bay. And that's when people who have been quietly working with these difficult emotions will help keep things from flying apart.
No, it isn't.
> I don't think it's an over-reaction to understand that they are implying that the water is unimportant,
Not only do they not say that, I seriously doubt they think that.
> and also implying that the water won't help to fulfill the same needs that the land might fulfill.
Well, that's a matter of opinion and you're welcome to disagree with the article, but I think that there are many important jobs that software can't do well. I certainly don't think that it's obvious that software will do all those things well any time soon.
> there's no reason why analytical skills can't help us improve services that require a lot of emotional empathy
Maybe, but the article says no such thing.
> they are not as separate as "land" vs "water.
At this point they are.
> what I find ironic is an article that places such importance on emotional empathy is happy to use a divisive title like "The future is not X but Y
What I find ironic is that this is not the title at all.
> Obviously the people that personally hold greater weight for X are going to be annoyed.
Why? That's not the title nor explicitly or implicitly said in the article at any point. What annoys me is that not only are you now in the position having far more power, but are annoyed at the claim that others may have some power as well, insisting that your power dominates theirs and balking at the idea that it may not.
Of course, it always helps. But being able to accommodate people with different levels of social and/or emotional awareness is a good thing.
If you are, I'm wondering if you ever feel limited by English as a language. Do you feel like you have bigger, better ideas in Russian?
English is a more rational language, and my "native" (I don't use it much) language is a bit restrictive when expressing anything, whether logical or emotional.
Till the age of eleven, I was essentially speaking only Russian. They did teach us some pretty rudimentary English at school, just enough to ask for directions in a foreign country.
Then, my family moved to Canada, and I had to learn French. It took about 2 years to attain a native-level proficiency. Then, I learned English as a "second language" (actually third, of course) here in Canada.
French is the language I use most. Thus, my largest and most precise vocabulary is in French, and this is obviously the easiest language to express myself.
However, I don't feel constrained by a language while talking/writing in English or Russian. Worst case scenario, I have to turn to Google to translate some precise French word when the English equivalent does not come fast enough.
In general, I think in whatever language I am using at the moment, and the best ideas can come in any of those three languages.
(Not advocating for violence here in any way. Just disputing your "while thinking rationally" point. There's actually a longrunning dispute among leftist theorists and philosophers whether violence is an acceptable means of bringing about political change. But the dispute is only about whether it's morally acceptable.)