What the fuck are we doing as a society, that this lady, with a machine that could compute the above in a fraction of a second, has to spend a decent chunk of her work time doing this?
To put it bluntly: do you want her to be unemployed instead?
To put it bluntly: do you want her to be unemployed instead?
* productivity for goods is high and availability is high (we can discuss inequality and distribution)
* we just don't need everybody to work 40hrs a week to obtain collectively good standard of living
* but as a society we are uncomfortable with universal basic income
* so instead we basically do UBI through inefficient, unnecessary jobs
That's my current perspective at least. As I continue to grow older and slide into cynicism though, I'm likely to switch to "everybody is idiots and everything is screwed up" theory more and more :-D
There are mega-efficient factory farms in Nebraska that are immensely productive per-human involved, but that doesn't mean what hobby farmers in Connecticut or subsistence farmers in Africa are doing is bullshit.
I think "bullshit jobs" are less of a thing than people believe. It's just that people devalue assembly-line or cog-in-machine work, even when they're the ones doing it - especially in the US where we grow up wanting to be a unique success story like an entertainment celebrity or rich entrepreneur and so that kind of work is antithetical to our idea of a successful person. Fact of the matter is, machines needs cogs, and we don't have an infinite capacity to replace human cogs with automated ones.
And if bet money on it NOT being enjoyable and fulfilling. Humans almost universally hate being cogs doing the same repetitive trivial action over and over.
There's a real sense of accomplishment in it, and it's nice that people can immediately see and enjoy the results of your hard work. There's also something about doing manual labor that is satisfying.
And I enjoyed being "invisible" around people who used the spaces I cleaned. You usually don't exist, so people tend to continue to speak to each other as if nobody else is listening. I learned a lot about people that way.
Your first 3 bullet points make sense, but this last one is where I think the normal theory behind "bullshit jobs" really falls apart. Every individual business has a large, strong economic incentive to not hire these bullshit jobs if they don't need to, so why should we think they would be so generous to engage in this "bullshit jobs charity"?
I think what is really happening is that as society advances, lots of rules, regulations and processes just build up and up over time, and this complexity eventually becomes self-sustaining, even if it greatly diverges from the original intent of the original rules.
Case in point (which is a common case I know) is the complete, total insanity of the US healthcare system, specifically how healthcare is paid for. Literally every single person I know that has ever gotten into some aspect of healthcare payments (potentially with an idea to improve the madness) eventually comes to the conclusion "The whole system is completely fucked, it should all just be torn down and greatly simplified." The problem, though, is now there are a ton of entrenched interests who depend on that complexity for their livelihood (I heard it referred to as "an abusive relationship" - Company A exists to "simplify some aspects of healthcare payments", which means they depend on the underlying complexity in the first place to exist), so there are no real incentives from the people that control the levers to simplify. So a lot of those bullshit jobs come about to manage that complexity, but it's not like some company thought "let's hire people to do busywork so they'll have employment."
I’d just like to proactively coin the term “Ego Engineer” for the post-AGI world.
Practicality of having someone able to adapt to novel situations aside, there's something to be said for just having a human interaction.
I don't think UBI would change that, but UBI might have a chance to change the perception of one's job as a bullshit job (they say that's 40% of the workforce).
Excellent point and phrasing! And it suggests what needs to be done to move things along: (a) make them not losers & (b) decrease the ability to entrench lobbying.
To (a), I don't think we do enough of directly buying out stakeholders. E.g. if we know moving to single-payer insurance would be beneficial to the system as a whole (we probably don't, but just an example), why not explicitly pay off private insurance companies, phased out over 10 years? Everyone would still win!
To (b), the key is the corruption of should-be-objective decisions. To me, regulatory-industry revolving doors are the most important, because they're the greatest source of invisible-at-the-time corruption (e.g. you sway a decision... 15 years later you get a cushy "retirement job" in industry). Fundamentally, I don't think there's a way you get around that, absent banning it (above a certain level of regulatory authority) and substituting equivalent economic compensation. Continuously finding selfless, competent people to staff regulatory services is not a sustainable model. So pay them so the "selfless" isn't a requirement (even if you have to tax industry more heavily to do so).
This is one theory, I think a slightly different explanation could be that most corporations are too large for the people making decisions regarding things like layoffs to be able to have a clear picture of what each employee is doing
Also like a sibling comment said, there are also conflicting incentives like middle management engaging in empire building. Because of this, there isn't any vertical enforcement or clarity
Really interesting how much better complexity scales in software than it does in business
Fine. Then write her a script and continue to pay her a salary. Hell, let her keep coming into work if she wants to. Functionally, what’s the difference to the business?
Presumably she’s still going to want to maintain social relationships in her life, which means she’s got an intrinsic incentive to do things to benefit someone else even absent financial incentive.
But now we’ve effectively got an atomic form of UBI, which scares people. Yet 1 person’s worth of work is being done for the cost of 1 salary.
In fact, if she starts doing something else productive to society with her time, you’ve got 2 people’s worth of work being done for the cost of 1 salary.
And if someone automates that and she switches to something else, it increases to a 3:1 ratio.
Where is her employment status a problem, except to the sensibilities of people who believe that everyone needs to be “employed”?
If no one ever automated what she was doing for fear of her losing her livelihood, then the maximum productivity we’d ever expect to see is 1:1.
Seems like not having UBI or a stronger safety net is creating a perverse incentive for economic inefficiency.
Why would any company do that?
If she turns up to work reliably, and stays on-task, there are no end of other things she could be doing that increase general welfare more than this.
And the whole thread was about how computers should work for everyone, including this lady whose job could be automated.
Which begs the question: do most people actually want general purpose computing? Or does the average human prefer "apps"?
An interior decorator, or a gardener, or a nurse aide, or a yoga instructor, or a nail technician: they all add more to human welfare than this task.
If she wants to become an architect, or a water system engineer, more power to her!
Not everyone can become an architect or water systems engineer at 50, after having worked a "general assistant" type office job for many years.
I think that (and its consequences) might be the biggest short term societal risk of automation in an aging society.
How would you solve this problem?
Whether or not you want to is an entirely different question, of course.
Our youth is when the majority of what we do is try things out to see what fits and what doesn't. In our older years, most of that experimentation is behind us and we have a pretty solid idea of what fits us and what doesn't.
The trick is that the amount of experimentation should never be reduced to zero.
By X, in a single career, you've generally got a pretty good handle on things (and life).
In contrast to 20/30, when everything is constantly new and you are constantly uncomfortable.
Thus, big difference in how well the uncomfortable muscle is exercised. 20/30 -> novel situation you suck at -> business as usual. Over X -> " -> WTF.
And, as you say, the key to retaining that capability is... make sure you continue exercising that muscle!
Something something about age and responsibilities and tiredness and not having trained for that, but... it's worth it to think about it, anyway — at least as risk-mitigation for yourself, going forward.
Maybe we'll all end up as plumbers?
The older one is, the more time one spent in one line of work before being forced to find something else to do, the harder it hits. So sure, maybe you can switch to landscaping in your 50s, but that also means you and your family suddenly being kicked down one or two economic classes.
Usually, switching industries past a certain point of tenure wipes out (2), as so much of the expert knowledge is specific.
In this case, she obviously wasn't only a spreadsheet-reconciler: this lady knows thousands of things about banking that I don't. And probably that new, entry-level people at her company have no idea about.
Ergo, the company would get the most benefit from assigning her new responsibilities where that information is valuable. Specifically, something in middle management where her intuition of "... that doesn't sound quite right, tell me more about..." would help prevent bad decisions.
Which is the other side of the coin of the ubiquity of this problem -- modern businesses are so optimized on the people side that roles are collapsed down to 1-2 people, and therefore those people inevitably catch "oh, and also do this" could-be-automated work.
Advertise a job, with midling-but-not-exceptional pay, and try the following with a few hundred people.
- They report at exactly 9:00 am
- They bring nothing with them
- They enter a featureless room
- They sit at a featureless desk
- They sit there for 8 hours
- They have 30 minutes for lunch
- They have access to a featureless bathroom
- They leave at the end of the day
- They get paid weekly
My hypothesis is that it's a bimodal distribution. Some set of people would be perfectly fine with it, indefinitely. Some people would go batshit insane and quit quickly.
Furthermore, a society where there is massive unemployment but society's economic engines are humming along, mostly automated, for the benefit of a select private few, is a society where such engines are ripe for nationalization, whether that be through public ownership or public seizure of the majority of the profits via taxation, either one of which could support basic income. So again, not necessarily a bad thing in the end.
And if you think people blowing their basic income checks on panem et circenses represents some kind of civic death, I would point to the current alternative, people working bullshit jobs of questionable value, and ask if that really represents the civic virtue you're trying to uphold.
Only if those people have asked for the push. If they haven't, then it's not at all an act of compassion.
Some of us are not well adjusted. Some of us are barely hanging on, barely able to manage the demands of our lives and our society.
Being laid off at this point for me would be worse than disruptive it would be an outright disaster.
They have a family and are the primary means of support.
They're laid off. Parent post's "act of compassion"
What happens?
In the US, they have unemployment benefits. They have SNAP.
That's probably it as far as immediate. They hypothetically have access to Section 8 housing, but that's contingent on finding availability (current wait-lists are long and conditions of properties variable).
There are some academic / training programs (merit and need-based), but I believe those are all state-administered?
IOW, in the US, not great. I don't have high confidence that housing and initial retraining would be financially/practically attainable to allow them to take advantage of their abilities.
Honestly, in the US, most reliable option for that person would be to join the military.
And, indeed, that old job called "computer".
These sorts of labor shifts can't avoid harming those who get the short end of the stick.
Saying this is not to say that such changes shouldn't happen. It's inevitable and necessary in order for society to adapt to changing conditions. But I very often see a disregard for the reality that people really do get hurt badly in these shifts.
By the time you mint a professional in medical something, they've put a decade+ into training for it. And in the US model, incurred substantial debt doing so.
One reason I'm more sympathetic to the artificial medical supply/demand management shenanigans.
Yes.
Compassion and reason both repel me, as a humanist and computer scientist, from the thought of another human being pointlessly wasting her life for the mere "necessity" of money to live because broken software has become an excuse for this.
It is an inhuman spectacle, and the notion of "employment" here is so weak as to have no force in the argument. An unemployed person at least has the opportunity to redefine their life, whereas one who is tricked daily into believing their bullshit job is "valuable" is being robbed, no matter the remuneration.
Further, as a technical person, it disgusts me to see the tools we created so comprehensively misused by idiots who are unable to intelligently deploy them - or rather deploy them as instruments of abuse rather than for human development and progress.
Redefine their life? Good luck doing that when you suddenly don't have an income because you were automated out of employment. People who are able to recover from these events and reinvent themselves are the exception.
Any job is better than no job and it's not your place to judge the value of someone's life. If said person is making an income, can tolerate their job, and enjoys their time outside of work that's all anyone can really ask for.