Oh, I did it so sporadically, it was over a year ago… I want to say I probably got 5 -10 cents for a task that took about maybe 15 to 20 minutes to do. Monotonous, for sure. A bunch of it was transcribing the captions, which were 2 - 4 sentences from photographs from a Kansas newspaper form the 60-70’s. It was kind of an interesting, odd, little slice of history.
Maybe it’s the after-effects of reading Nancy Kress during my formative years, but I kind of assume that at some point technological change is going to put most people on the dole.
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In your vision of the world, these people… all go on the dole?
Maybe. It could very well be that it’s a better use of limited resources to let machines do things and use the generated wealth to pay people to do nothing. Any other scheme seems to be an instance of the broken window fallacy.
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Podcast around these issues of piecemeal work and AI managing workers:
http://c-realm.com/podcasts/crealm/457-techno-extortion/
Your work sounds like an interesting area for looking into optimising pay rate. I would be interested in algorithms which could help me to decide how much I should be paid, rather than assuming the game that my pay should be as much (or “high”) as possible.
Labor unions were not going to save anyone. Labor unions would probably have had the opposite effect that you wanted. Drive the cost up, and people look for an alternative. People who want renewable energy to take off want to tax gas and end subsidies to gas because they want to drive the cost of gas up. If the cost of gas is high, it makes it more worthwhile to invest in solar. The same is true for labor. When you are competing against automation, driving up the cost of labor just means more money is pumped into automation.
More than that, a labor union for something like a mechanical turk only works if you have the entire world, without exception. Guess what? Acceptable living wages in the US and Indian are different. That is a fight that you are never going to win.
You can’t fight the tide of automation. A few people, like the folks doing mechanical work, can chase it to the bottom, but it is a short lived chase. Even China, the factory of the world with its cheap labor, is starting to struggle to chase automation into the ground. The best you can do in the face of automation that is going to very shortly make huge swaths of our population unemployed is to figure out how to deal with people who are literally unemployable for economically worthwhile work. You need to find a way to keep those people happy and if not productive (economically), at least not destructive, while at the same time you want to keep people that can work still working.
It is a pretty extreme paradigm shift that places like the US are thoroughly unprepared for. Personally, I would put my money on the Scandinavians as the folks who have it closest to figuring it out.
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I agree, if at some point all labor can be more efficiently performed by machines, what is the point of labor?
This is what I was getting at.
What are your thoughts on paying unemployment benefits on a permanent basis?
If you’re okay with it, then there’s not much of a problem, except that to ensure there is money for those benefits you have to tax the companies that are replacing workers so much, that it’s not economically viable to replace them anymore. Which, I guess, mostly minimizes any problems. (EDIT: later posts by you indicate that you may be okay with this, and that’s perfectly fine. I’m not simply trying to be critical here.)
If you don’t like permanent benefits, then what are the now-unemployed supposed to do? There is not exactly a booming market for creative people, and already a surplus of workers, compared to job openings, in almost all job fields.
Incorrect. The “ultimate objective” of any species is simply continuation of the species; whether that means reproducing, or helping to ensure that the offspring of other members of the species survive to maturity. The Pursuit of Happiness is nothing more than a fringe benefit for those individuals, or even those societies as a whole, who have achieved an adequate, and persistent, degree of safety (safety that comes from physical security, as well as sufficient food resources).
You are correct that Capitalism will never deliver that on a societal level.
I thought the video was very good. I looked into and felt that it was just not even worth the effort for me, but after watching the video, I could think of a couple of people who would get a lot out of it. The woman who was disabled and who used it to fill her time reminded me of a friend of mine who has agoraphobia and a lot of mental illnesses; I could see this kind of busy work as being a way for her to distract herself, as well as make a little money which currently she struggles to do. I know she couldn’t support herself with it, but she has not really figured out supporting herself for a long time, so having something would be better than nothing. I also thought my dad, who has some similar problems, and primarily lives on social security, might benefit from the extra pocket change and sense of purpose, while not having to leave his apartment.
While it is a little sad to see young people who can’t get jobs doing this kind of digital piecework, I can see that unskilled work that can be done from home is something that some people could benefit from.
Presumably that doesn’t include the time spent finding the job and communicating with the client, but even if so… 20-40 cents as an hourly wage, presuming maximum efficiency?
& with only artists & other creatives for my entire market, what shall you pay me with?
It’s not about the barriers anymore, it’s about how much time you can spend on indulgences.
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The realization that in order to do this kind of work you would have been considered skilled not too long ago, suddenly jumped at me. You know, because computers.
True dat. Remember when secretaries used to transcribe letters?
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When oh WHEN will bbs get a down-vote button? “Dislike” would work too…
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Wow I’m glad I’m not you. It would be hard to have a more depressingly empty view of mankind.
To the contrary, it’s not “depressing”, it’s realist. Kind of along the lines where psychological studies show that people who put on a false happy-face in order to avoid negativity, much more frequently suffer from depression than those who are grumpy/cynical.
My accepting the realities of life do not restrict my happiness, because I am not trying to deceive myself. EVERYTHING about life past the point of base survival makes life a joy.
I see - in which case I think we’re talking at cross purposes. I mean the “pursuit of happiness” in the US constitutional sense, which is in turn taken from moral philosophy. It’s not referring to whether individuals feel happy in the emotional sense, but whether mankind as a whole is morally in a good place. It’s about the meaning of human life - an ideal to aim for, not a statement about biology or psychology or how individuals live their lives.
Apologies for not being clear.
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