(2013-07-11) Rao Not An Artisan Sexy Vs Future Work

Venkatesh Rao on why you're not an Artisan (Artisanal). Thinking through the implications of the whole artisan-crafts-guilds meme in the future-of-work (Economic Transition) debates led me to an odd conclusion: the future is significantly brighter (or less bleak) than people realize. So long as you stop thinking in terms of crafts and aim to practice a trade instead, there is more work for humans than people realize.

Neologism Of The Day: Conspicuous Production: *We look for prestigious brands to work for. We look for “fulfillment” at work. Sometimes we even accept pay cuts to be associated with famous names. This is work as fashion accessory and conversation fodder... First World artisan tendencies take this to a logical extreme... People who seek sexy work are often members of what I called the Jeffersonian Middle Class in an earlier post — motivated by creative self-expression and a sense of personal dignity rather than economic survival.

Sexy/schleppy is to my mind, the most natural way to break down human preferences for work... Unfortunately, the entire current conversation around work is confused because we prefer a less meaningful distinction, Creative vs. uncreative.

So when people talk about saving work or jobs, they mostly talk about saving sexy, income-generating conspicuous production packaged as creative work, in a debt-fueled de facto leisure society. Since few people actively aspire to do the Schlep Work anyway, we don’t poke much at the consensus view that it can be automated away. I think this conclusion is premature and in fact mistaken. Just because sexy work is the kind we want to save doesn’t mean it is the kind that is easier to save. In fact it is harder to automate schlep work, which we grievously misunderstand.

The world according to computers (and by extension, robots and soon all machines) offers two kinds of work: algorithmically scalable and algorithmically unscalable. We make the mistake of thinking that just because computers do bounded-variety, repetitive information work very well, that they can do anything that seems repetitive (boring) to humans very well. But when we’re talking complex systems-level schlepping, like the refining of crude data from disparate information systems, there are rarely any elegant algorithms... The human share of the work pie isn’t the gap between machine creativity and human creativity. The real human share of the work pie is the gap between machine repeatability and human boredom.

Aspiring artisans seek sexy work at small-and-local scales (LocalWorld). They reject mass celebrity and status in a global culture, but still crave local celebrity and status (they call it “being respected in the community”). They still look to engage in conspicuous production. They are as prone to deluding themselves that sexy is creative as wannabe actors. How do they do this? They do this by confusing economically essential variety (such as handling all the potential variety and ongoing evolution in an online payment system) with economically optional variety (such as uniqueness in hand-crafted coffee mugs). This is the artisan delusion... The artisan delusion is important because almost everything artisans want to do — all the local-and-sexy work — is actually algorithmically scalable once you filter out the noise. There just isn’t much requisite variety there. Which means it is more vulnerable to being taken over by post-industrial modes of automated production, not less. Because software makes assembly lines more capable, not less.

The easiest way to appreciate the emerging human condition to adopt a couple of new metaphors for machines: machines as children and humans as intestinal fauna.

In every sexy-work market, automation takes away the most profitable irreducible-variety segment and leaves behind a pure Attention Economy segment subject to the highly random celebrity and fashion dynamics of the Internet age... The role of technology in sexy work is to take away the algorithmically scalable, high-requisite-variety market segments that actually generate profits, leaving behind a casino economy for a class that is destitute in the median case. It is democratization in the sense of turning an unfair Lottery that you can at least game with some cleverness (such as pitching a gullible movie producer with more money than taste) into a true lottery that you cannot.

The early example of information-age chimney sweep work are just emerging: data cleaning, image interpretation, human customer service as a differentiator from voice-prompt hell, various kinds of machine repair. Some of these categories will go away, but I suspect new kinds of schlep work will emerge faster than old kinds vanish... What unites all these trades is that they accept roles based on kinds of schlepping that machines are bad at rather than insisting on work that humans like to do. I think of them as forming an emerging Hamiltonian middle class — a class that accepts and adapts to large-scale technological systems as a part of life (the kind that Alexander Hamilton promoted in early America). Unlike the Jeffersonian middle class, the Hamiltonian middle class is willing and able to redefine its identity and evolve with machines rather than remaining attached to a static, romanticized notion of what it means to be human. *