The low unemployment rate is proof that this techno optimism isn’t true.
Here are some more optimistic ideas. If we reconsidered vehicles, everyone could have access to them when desired. If we reconsidered city layouts, everyone could have a home with desired proximity to others without needing to sacrifice either nature or privacy. If we reconsidered education, medical care and communications infrastructure, they would be universally available and effectively free (indeed, in many places these are already the case). If we reconsidered politics, we could encourage global industry toward environmentally sustainable outcomes without irreversible disaster.
> everyone could have access to [vehicles] when desired
Uber is trying to do this, but has a lot of problems, from unpredictable pricing, surge pricing, long wait times, shitty drivers, chatty drivers (?), seats with puke all over them, ... self-driving cars could solve some, but not all of these problems.
> everyone could have a home with desired proximity to others
No, the reason real estate in e.g. NYC is so expensive is that everybody wants to live there! The only way to fix this is to fundamentally decentralize our economy and education systems, but that's a whole lot more complicated than "city layouts".
> [education, medical care and communications infrastructure] would be universally available and effectively free
Maybe education and communications, but with medical care almost certainly not... The main issue is that medicine doesn't save people's lives, it just prolongs them, and that can always be done better... So fundamentally, the demand for medicine is unlimited, whereas the supply (doctors) is limited, so whatever system of "free and universally available" system you design, there's going to be tradeoffs. Tradeoffs like, "do I fix my teeth or my eyes" and someone is going to have to make that choice. Personally, I'd prefer that to be me (with my money) rather than my government.
You raise a particularly good point about the overall properties of systems for mass medical care, but people don't live forever. Cancer is one answer. Solutions that reduce or delay post-facto treatment with holistic and pre-emptive approaches (better regulation, better education, better diets/life choices) may be another.
(Please don't tell me this needs a sarcasm tag. If you can't tell in this case, then I think it's utterly hopeless.)
https://twitter.com/Noahpinion/status/1205596833692565504
"The economists find that by the standards of LBJ's time, the U.S. poverty rate has dropped from 19.5 % in 1963 to just 2.3% in 2017!!"
If that's not winning, I don't know what is.
One might say a simpler explanation is that employee output is still interesting, and that what's interesting isn't just technological output, and that the bulk of interesting technological work isn't about advancement but delivery to the world.
Humans aren't rational.
It’s the same sort of juvenile thinking that causes someone to look at a vast legacy codebase and decide “oh we could easily rewrite that.” The reality is that automation is progressing as fast as technology allows, but technology just doesn’t work that well. In fast food, for example, self-order touch screens are vastly inferior to a trained order taker. There are no machines to roll a burrito. There’s no machines to wipe tables, clean bathrooms, clean the kitchen, or even take drive through orders. We don’t, get, have automated ubers, taxis, freight trucks, etc. Grocery checkout automation is atrocious, which is why higher end chains like Whole Foods don’t have them, even though they’re better able to afford automation.
There’s not a single job I can think of that qualifies as a “bullshit job.”
Seen it happen many times and it made me cynical about the whole "there are no bullshit jobs" meme. IMO there are BS jobs, quite a few of them too.
But I doubt the distribution can be so high as people are always insinuating in these bullshit jobs subthreads.
Given the desire to always cut the useless non-profit parts of a business there will always be some pressure to find and eliminate bullshit, even as there may be some countervailing pressures to create bullshit. I think though that the feedback loops of capitalism are such that if you end up with too much bullshit at a company over time there would have to be a correction, leading either to the elimination of most of the bullshit or the downfall of the company.
If one believes most jobs or a great proportion of them are bullshit then that person should refrain from complaining about MBAs and their cost cutting measures getting rid of jobs - because probably those jobs were the bullshit ones.
(on edit - assuming bullshit jobs are a disease of the employment place I think for the sake of analogy the percentage should be the same as the flu, so 5 to 20 percent in a company, if a company has 20% or more bullshit jobs that company has an epidemic on its hands and needs to do something. If it's 5% ah, that you can live with.)
It's a process that is going at a glacial pace pretty much everywhere, sadly.
This thread is about low wage workers.
> I’m actually referring to mostly white collar ones, a lot of administration jobs, finance, government, etc
Why, because you don’t understand what they do? Imagine explaining to those people that Google has “engineers” who just maintain the source repository. I bet they’d think it was a “bullshit job.”
It's no secret that the top-5 tech firms hire large numbers of lobbyists and corporate lawyers [1].
And I don't think it is a stretch to say that some well-paid engineering positions include work such as maintaining built-in-house duplicates of open source software, or enforcing arbitrary coding standards, that could be considered "box ticking". Present company excluded, of course.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/05/us/politics/amazon-apple-...
I was a business analyst at my previous job. My core function was to gain a deep understanding of what the various people in an organization did, where the input for their work came from and where the output went, and why.
Here's an example that actually embodies an extremely common scenario:
I worked with a customer whose clients filled out and submitted online forms at the customer's website. They had a clerk who would, once per hour, print all the forms that had been submitted, then take that stack of paper and place it on an unoccupied desk in a room on the other side of the building. She would then walk back to her own desk and twiddle her thumbs for the remainder of the hour.
After a lot of interviews and digging, I found out the reason for this bizarre process: the unoccupied desk on the other side of the building used to be occupied by another clerk, whose job was to sort the forms based on their destination department, then walk to them to those departments. She would then come back to her desk and twiddle her thumbs for the remainder of the hour.
Here's the thing though: she had retired 5 years ago. The stacks of paper that were being piled on her now unoccupied desk were simply shredded regularly by a third clerk about once a week, and it took that clerk four hours to shred everything because she was required to keep an Excel spreadsheet of how many of each form was being shredded. That Excel spreadsheet was then saved to a network drive, where it wasn't accessed by any user, ever.
You might be thinking, "wow, that's pretty crazy, but stuff like that is probably pretty rare." You would be very wrong. I charted out insane processes like this for ten years. Every company has boatloads of them. Bullshit jobs are not only invented, but they are also retained long after they are made redundant and completely unnecessary.
A.k.a. management & coordination is a hard problem.
What were the people receiving the forms from the retired person were doing with them ?
> When it comes to garbage collectors, though, it’s different. Any way you look at it, they do a job we can’t do without. And the harsh truth is that an increasing number of people do jobs that we can do just fine without. Were they to suddenly stop working the world wouldn’t get any poorer, uglier, or in any way worse. Take the slick Wall Street traders who line their pockets at the expense of another retirement fund. Take the shrewd lawyers who can draw a corporate lawsuit out until the end of days. Or take the brilliant ad writer who pens the slogan of the year and puts the competition right out of business.
> Instead of creating wealth, these jobs mostly just shift it around.
(the article itself[0] tells about how banks in Ireland went on strike for 6 months, but the strike was shrugged off as there was no impact)
[0]: https://evonomics.com/why-garbage-men-should-earn-more-than-...
In my experience, once you get used to the interface, it's actually faster to just use the touchscreen to place the order.
> There’s not a single job I can think of that qualifies as a “bullshit job.”
Any job that involves taking a handwritten form which then is processed or oral instructions could be eliminated by providing an interface for the person to input the data directly without having to go through the middle person.
I love it if it isn't during "rush hour," but some people take a long time to make up their minds when given a plethora of options. And then I seek out a counter person as they will just help the next person if someone hasn't made up their mind yet.
Right, but in general, people don't. Sure, there are some people who will go to the same fast food place every day, and after a week will be able to input their order blindfolded, but that's not the norm.
The people who get used to the interface and end up incredibly efficient are the paid cashiers who input hundreds of orders for 8 hours each day.
No, Costco for example I expect to not have automation because I'm bulk buying and don't want to deal with trying to fit all that on their weight scale for self checkout.
Also, Whole Foods doesn't SKU on all their produce products which makes this a pain for anyone trying to use self checkout.
Stores here in Canada like Loblaws, Metro, IGA, etc are rolling out self checkout. Thank goodness, I don't want to talk to people, asked if I'll donate $1 to something, etc.
Today, I went through Walmart cash checkout because I was buying 7 storage bins for a move. The entire thought process why I didn't go through self checkout:
- Don't have handheld bar scanner
- Someone probably going to stop me because they'll think I've put something inside of bins.
- There's almost no space on the self checkout to actually do large purchases.
People want convenient experiences. I saw older generations +65 starting to use self checkouts at grocery chains.
Spend time watching behavior. Same repeat that happened when McDonald's kiosks rolled out. Now, people get pissed when other people go to use the cash because it pulls someone off the line to deal with someone not using mobile order or the kiosk.
Yes, at least in a sense. Coordination failures are a thing. (See e.g. https://equilibriabook.com/toc/ for a readable introduction to the issue.)
Unfortunately the processes they are squeezing often involve budgets and salaries, like those of factory workers, teachers and nurses. Its a bit hard to sympathise with this kind of 'value' sometimes.
> In fast food, for example, self-order touch screens are vastly inferior to a trained order taker > Grocery checkout automation is atrocious
I don't kniw about elsewhere but in NZ and Japan I'll pick self check out every time it's there. Its a bit sad on the human side of things but it is easier
The logical extreme in the opposite direction -- that our technology gets to the point where everything is automated and no one needs to do any kind of work -- suggests that we should be moving toward some form of universal basic income that provides for everyone's survival needs. People who want more than that can become skilled enough to do worthwhile jobs that provide meaningful income.
Obviously this won't be a panacea, and human nature will cause some people to be exploited while others are enriched, but this idea that life's purpose and meaning is just work work work work work is sad and nonsensical.
An observation that was already obvious in the 19th century:
"The extraordinary productiveness of modern industry… allows of the unproductive employment of a larger and larger part of the working-class, and the consequent reproduction, on a constantly extending scale, of the ancient domestic slaves under the name of a servant class, including men-servants, women-servants, lackeys, etc. [footnote: Between 1861 and 1870 the number of male servants nearly doubled itself. It increased to 267,671. In the year 1847 there were 2,694 gamekeepers (for the landlords' preserves), in 1869 there were 4,921.]"
Chapter 15 of volume 1 of Marx's Capital. Today the servants are delivery people, Uber drivers, personal chefs and assistants, maid services, etc.