Technological Unemployment: Yes, It's Our Problem Too
We are as vulnerable as anyone else.
- Labor Market Inelasticity
workers are the supply, rather than demand, side; a dual phenomenon occurs and job markets exhibit inelasticity. One might expect a 5% increase in available labor to cut wages by 5%, but it’s often more than that. It wouldn’t surprise me if it cut wages in half.
In many under-developed countries, no one gets rich by working. There are too many workers and too few jobs. […] Wage collapse is not an out-of-context dystopian threat; it’s the norm in the world, and we’re at risk of that becoming the case now.
- Triumph of Mediocrity
What do executives care most about? Remaining executives. One might expect “shareholders” to push back, but the shareholders are mostly rich people who got rich by being executives, and so (a) they’re likely to give a pass on executive self-protection that isn’t egregious, and (b) even when they fire executives, they replace them with other people drawn from the same set, so it’s just shuffle.
Executives, by and large, don’t want top talent. It threatens them; they might be outshined by underlings. The fact that nothing but legacy backs their authority might be exposed. Top talent is unpredictable. It’s witchy. It’s also too rare to be a business on, and hard to replace if lost.
Top talent is not expensive. In fact, it’s cheap; for example, a company will pay less for one excellent software engineer than three mediocre ones. However, corporate executives do not mind the expensiveness of mediocrity, because it’s reliable, and because it is so normal to run a business on mediocrity that it will not get them fired. Most business operations can be run on “commodity” talent […].
Does society need the most intelligent people? In the long run, yes. Chain gangs of “Agile Scrum” mediocrities do not invent. If we want human society to advance, or for our particular nations to remain relevant through the 21st century, highly intelligent people and how we treat them are crucial. But no single corporation really needs high talent, and individual executives have well-studied reasons to be afraid of it.
- Technological Surveillance
It is unlikely that people intelligent enough to program computers will face a future of no jobs. It is more plausible, in my view, that we will face one of humiliating, highly monitored jobs where our bosses get daily reports on our keystrokes-per-hour and web activity.
Be Afraid
It’s nearly impossible for an individual to “push back” against the creeping inhumanity– open-plan offices, unnecessary layoffs presented as “low performer initiatives” that devolve into witch hints, aggressive surveillance of the worker, long hours that achieve nothing, and a culture that values putting workers in their place (so they don’t threaten executives) as opposed to increasing their value to the world– and not be steamrolled. I’ve tried; I know. I’ve stood up for what was right, and been flattened for it, and I still don’t know if there was ever a point to such efforts.
Silicon Valley– after it ceased to be a genuinely productive place, around 2002– became a sandbox for new ways to mistreat employees: open-plan offices, daily status meetings, back-channel reference calls, disposable companies, unreasonable deadlines driven using psychological warfare, and so on. This should be a source of great moral shame to us. It is for me.
We are not safe. The monsters we are building will not treat us well, and we should be worried.