He looks like a young turk.
The Future of Employment.
There is probably a more depressing development in labor relations than the technological rationalization of economically marginal piecework labor; but I’m still working on thinking of it.
Future? This is today.
Any work that can be done by a machine for less money than a human will be automated. The cost of automation is coming down, the number of tasks that can be automated is going up.
It makes no sense to pay more for a human to do a task if a machine can do the same thing for less money. Let humans do work that takes creativity or special abilities and leave the rest to robots.
Good thing they got rid of those pesky labor unions, they were really holding workers back.
Just wait till the robots start demanding benefits.
Let humans do work that takes creativity or special abilities and leave the rest to robots.
I like the plan, but to get there we need to actually value work that takes creativity and special abilities - and we are not an economy set up to support a class of artists and social commentators.
I tried doing some Mechanical Turk work a little while ago just to see what it was all about. I mostly did transcribing of old (1970’s - 1980’s) newspaper clippings and some other much older historical documents. It was kind of interesting, I kind of liked it. Only did enough to earn about $10, though (which I of course used to buy stuff from Amazon).
Artists and social commentators? It’s actually a pretty damned good time to be an artist. Most of the barriers between you as a creator and me as a customer are very low.
In a way, you have a point. When labor is cheap (like on MTurk), it takes away some of the incentive to develop better text and image recognition programs. If turkers were unionized and their work was more expensive, it would provide an economic reason to improve the technology and perhaps would increase the speed of automation.
Of course it does, there are more humans then ever, and the population is projected to go up.
It makes no sense to understand this and not have a way for them to earn a living.
Its going to make sense for robots to do menial labor once humans don’t have to survive off of doing said menial labor.
How much time for that $10?
I think the only way I wouldn’t find this horrifying would be if it happened in a society where food and shelter were already guaranteed to all people independent of employment.
Earning a living has always impressed me as a rather impractical idea. It’s based upon finding busy-work for people and milking tasks rather than finding necessary tasks and achieving them.
This has been the case since the industrial revolution, and even more so since the advent of automation. The only real obstacle seems to be a vast minority of special interests who prefer to use automation and resource scarcity to control people instead. But there isn’t any compelling reason to concede this to them. It hardly seems as if it would be worthwhile for the average person.
I am a professor at the University of Pennsylvania. I teach a course on Crowdsourcing and Human Computation (http://crowdsourcing-class.org). I have been developing a tool to help Turkers find higher paying work by calculating their effective hourly rate and sharing it with other workers. You can check it out at http://crowd-workers.com/landing
Its going to make sense for robots to do menial labor once humans don’t have to survive off of doing said menial labor.
This will likely be completely misunderstood due to impenetrable layers of Orwellian indoctrination, but I’ll say it anyway.
I’d like to remind everyone that our true purpose - the ultimate objective of the human race - is the Pursuit of Happiness. Capitalism has not and will not deliver that. But we will find a way, one day.
Can’t believe I’m first to say: I love his tactic, to pay the turkers to provide the interview. Unfortunate that there will be unaccountable bias in the responses.
Don’t we also run the risk of creating two tiers of labor, which could create another class system - those with creative talent, and everyone else? At least as we imagine creative work now. If we think of it as a skill, like anything else, it could work.
Sounds like you live in a bit of a bubble.
There are a lot of people out there for whom the job of Walmart greeter would be a stretch, let alone doing something “creative”…
In your vision of the world, these people… all go on the dole?
