Social Skills Are Last Line of Defense for Humans Seeking Work
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
I can't help feeling that in an increasingly automated world a few steps further on from what the article discusses, the importance of social skills will actually decrease rather than be a differentiator for humans any more.
Imagine how poor the social skills of a generation of kids could be that are surrounded by robots doing nearly everything for them. Once people grow up spending more time interacting with robots than other people, social expectations and norms will change.
Caring about that stuff could end up being something that only old people worry about. Like handwriting or sending letters or buggy whips etc.
Social skills will always be important because they are entrenched status markers. Better mousetraps aren't going to supplant that.
Social skills are contingent on so many things, environment, status, how you feel that day, how well you know people youre socializing with, etc.
And psychologists have been trying to get to the root of the human psyche and language and identity for decades with little progress.
It's weird that people use this as some sort of semi-concrete-quantitative value.
If your job can be made better by just doing it cheaper you probably don't want that job anyway.
Nobody wants them now.
But people needed those jobs at the time, and other jobs didn't just appear to save them. It took more than a century until the situation cleared out.
That said, did they actually need those jobs? Or was it that they wanted to do the same thing? It might just seem like semantics but when comparing it to our current future, believing that certain jobs are needed vs. wanted is the core of whether or not we should fight or embrace additional A.I.
People were starving, with no job available to them. The jobs that existed suddenly become extremely demanding (to the point that lots of people died executing them), and salaries went to the floor all over around.
They didn't need those same jobs they lost, any other would do. But there weren't many others.
That said, I expect the next cycle of joblessness, powered by AI, to be much worse. Not only will things get bad, but they won't ever get good again (a century is peanuts). That's because machines can improve at least as fast as humans. I think it's very important that we act differently on the next cycle, once it really starts.
I fully think IA will allow us to out-compete AI in time. We might not be fully human anymore, but not completely synthetic either.
But similar to our 1799 analogy, those who try to just "keep things the way they are" will suffer. Not that I want them to or anything, it's just the way it will probably go.
There were many people who were made quite rich in the industrial revolution, but as in all things where humans are involved it's generally the few rather than the majority (sadly).
I, for example, want very much to to be an individual contributor who also does architecture and systems work on smaller projects. The more obscure and the greater the risk from defects, the better. Oh, and it has to make money as well.
If you want to climb the greasy pole and be a prime player on a high profile system then it's harder.
Which, in the end, is all of them. All this crap about "jobs, jobs, jobs" just papers over the fact that people don't like working and never did like working, but treat working "full-time" as a hazing ritual for who gets to acquire certain levels of lifestyle.
Now, I'm sure someone somewhere is about to protest that they work very hard for their salary, and why should people who work less hard deserve as much, or even, if we count by the hour, more. But here's the facts: by the standards of the Industrial Revolution, a 12-16 hour workday, six days a week, is full time, so in fact you "hard workers" with your mere 50-60 hour weeks are only really working part-time -- such layabouts! Of course, pre-agricultural hunter-gatherers usually worked something like 3-4 hours per day, seven days per week, so indeed you remain a very hard worker compared to them.
In the real world's real history, there have been wide variations in the quantity of work people do to earn their share of the available technological bounty, so arguing that the growth of technological gives us a moral obligation to intensify the economically-compelled workload of the average person... doesn't make much historical sense.
Notice, an engineer working 35 hour weeks is conceivably a hell of a lot more valuable than a factory worker from the industrial revolution. This explains the disparity in wages.
Robots have already replaced human jobs. They started with factory labour, but today they're trading our stocks, diagnosing diseases, driving our cars... it'll be a very long time before automation can completely replace the human animal (today, our ability to improvise in a highly unpredictable world gives us a strong edge, which is why those self-driving cars won't be seen on wintry roads any time soon), but I have no doubt that humans will get automated out of work in the fullness of time.
The trend I see emerging in offices is emotional and social commitment becoming the primary form of labor. This may be one of the forms of work that persists in a highly automated society.
I personally think the chattering classes bent that "Emotional Quotient" thing into common usage after the Bell Curve and this article is just more of that. Don't get me wrong; the EQ stuff is important but it's not likely to be what some writers think it is.
Perhaps, but if we look at things like organically produced goods, fair-trade etc it shows that in post-scarcity societies emotion and ecology play a large part in purchasing decisions. Even ethical investing aka socially responsible investing is a big thing.
With that in mind, does the cheaper, wholly automated firm beat out the warm-fuzzy partially-human-crafted yet more expensive equivalent? I think it will depend on scarcity.
The important thing to remember is signaling shapes behavior, but culture is always in flux. Young men in the 60's suddenly decided it was ok to have long hair, and suddenly lot's of barber shops went out of business. A short fad in 2070 decides that vat grown meat is better for the environment, and boom so much for the organic cattle farmers.
I get what you're saying, but do you define the ecological age as a fad or something that becomes a persistent and growing part of the social consciousness?
Going back to scarcity, you could quite reasonably say a poor farmer in Africa would sooner go for what is affordable but if the cheaper product ultimately destroys his own capacity to produce, by way of pollution or key resource availability, then economic factors can change in order of importance. As more people buy eco-friendly products, whether real or bullshit, they're making a similar decision even though their connection to the environment is more abstract.
A short fad in 2070 decides that vat grown meat is better for the environment, and boom so much for the organic cattle farmers.
But the same effect is in play - first a transition is made from standard farming practices to more ecologically friendly meat production, and then to the obvious conclusion that we eventually stop killing animals for food (or abate the practice dramatically). I see it as an ongoing narrative, not one fad to the next.
That's interesting - I hadn't considered the dialogue aspect of it before. That's a good way to look at it.
I suspect the guys in the poorer regions will be teaching us sustainability w.r.t farming. There were no small purple potatoes when I was a kid; I am glad they are there now. That's clearly a craft product. Since I don't have to eat potatoes like an 1820s person from Ireland, it's win-win.
I wouldn't bet on scarcity.
Unfortunately current vision systems don't cope well with obscured roads, or even precipitation.
My guess is that'll take changes to infrastructure. With snow packed roads you simply can't see lines on the road and so need some other type of telemetry.
I work in an area that is at the forefront of automation and algorithms - marketing and I actually make those automation and algorithms happen. They will never ever replace humans. All of it is simple input-output program. There is no "artificial intelligence". There is only automating tasks. And before you start protesting that the employers will simply dispose of the people who used to perform those tasks let me tell you that nothing of the sorts will happen. The humans will simply start performing other tasks. Using those algorithms and automations in their decision making. There is just a shift of the paradigm in what constitutes marketing or sales work, not obliteration of employment. In fact, employment ins skyrocketing. Required skills are shifting, but that is to be expected.
Now if you talk about clerks at the fast food chains and big box retailers - some of those will be gone, yes. But not nearly as many as you might think.
My analogy is very carefully chosen. Think about it for a second. Or more than a second.
There is literally nothing a computer/robot can't do if you're willing to invest enough time and money into. For some things, like giving a nuanced acting performance or making a person feel pampered at a high-priced spa, where the cost to develop the technology far exceeds the profit currently available.
Other areas, like taxi drivers and fast food workers it's quickly tipping into becoming cost effective to replace human labor with robotic labor. In such industries you see humans increasingly competing to be cheaper than a machine. The recent debate over minimum-wage for fast-food workers is a great example of it, including the fact that more fast-food companies are investing in machine kiosks to automate more and more of your fast-food experience.