Gillian Tett

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“It Is Far From Clear Whether These Anecdotes Are Typical”

December 23, 2016 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech | Permalink

Gillian Tett of the Financial Times wonders whether the perplexing elevation of an unqualified orange supremacist to the Oval Office could accelerate the loss of jobs to machines in our technological age, a mass outsourcing not beyond borders but beyond species. A fair concern, though not my main one.

First there’s the possible end of 240 years of American democracy to fascism, not an impossible outcome. Also there’s potential for nuclear war, worsening climate change, shredding of the Constitution, establishment of Muslim registries, harassment of undocumented workers, and an assault on women’s health from a seeming sociopath whose early moves suggest he wants to leave them bleeding from the wherever.

But Tett makes good points in the area she investigates, suggesting that perhaps automation will lead to a freestyle-chess-tandem arrangement between humans and computers, creating more and better jobs–unless policy disturbs that process. Certainly that was the result of the Industrial Age, though I’m not convinced past is prologue in this case. The cooperation between carbon and silicon workers may be provisional, with computers ultimately relieving us of too many of our duties in too brief a period of time.

Then again, I just spent 15 frustrating minutes navigating an automated customer-service phone system which was dumb as a rock. Maybe there’s hope for us yet?

An excerpt:

Consider the findings of Benjamin Shestakofsky, an anthropologist who spent 19 months inside a California company that uses digital technologies to connect buyers and sellers of domestic services. Mr Shestakovsky initially assumed that his research would show how machines were replacing human workers. When he did grassroots analysis he realised that the company was growing so fast, with such big and complex computing systems, that it was constantly drafting more humans — not robots — to monitor, manage and interpret the data. “Software automation can substitute for labour but it also creates new human-machine complementaries,” he told an American Anthropological Association meeting recently, noting that companies “are creating new types of jobs”.

Shreeharsh Kelkar, another anthropologist, saw the same pattern in the education world. Until recently it was presumed that the rise of digital teaching tools would make human teachers less important. But watching educators in action, Mr Kelkar found that human teachers are working with these digital tools to be more efficient. The issue is not that computers are automating jobs away, he says, but that “assemblages of humans and computers are emerging”.

An obvious response is that it is far from clear whether these anecdotes are typical, nor does anyone know whether these new “assemblages” of human and machine will create enough jobs to offset those lost to automation. In addition, new digitised jobs may seem less attractive than the old roles since they are often structured as “contingent work”, with self-employed workers who provide services on demand.

Still, the findings of the anthropologists should not be ignored.•

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“Information Technology Has Reduced The Need For Work”

August 11, 2015 in Books, Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech | Permalink

According to Paul Mason, author of PostCapitalism, technology has reduced the economic system to obsolescence or soon will. While I don’t agree that capitalism is going away, I do believe the modern version of it is headed for a serious revision.

The extent to which technology disrupts capitalism–the biggest disruption of them all–depends to some degree on how quickly the new normal arrives. If driverless cars are perfected in the next few years, tens of millions of positions will vanish in America alone. Even if the future makes itself known more slowly, employment will probably grow more scarce as automation and robotics insinuate themselves. 

The very idea of work is currently undergoing a reinvention. In exchange for the utility of communicating with others, Facebook users don’t pay a small monthly fee but instead do “volunteer” labor for the company, producing mountains of content each day. That would make Mark Zuckerberg’s company something like the biggest sweatshop in history, except even those dodgy outfits pay some minimal fee. It’s a quiet transition.

Gillian Tett of the Financial Times reviews Mason’s new book, which argues that work will become largely voluntary in the manner of Wikipedia and Facebook, and that governments will provide basic income and services. That’s his Utopian vision at least. Tett finds it an imperfect but important volume. An excerpt:

His starting point is an assertion that the current technological revolution has at least three big implications for modern economies. First, “information technology has reduced the need for work” — or, more accurately, for all humans to be workers. For automation is now replacing jobs at a startling speed; indeed, a 2013 report by the Oxford Martin school estimated that half the jobs in the US are at high risk of vanishing within a decade or two.

The second key point about the IT revolution, Mason argues, is that “information goods are corroding the market’s ability to form prices correctly.” For the key point about cyber-information is that it can be replicated endlessly, for free; there is no constraint on how many times we can copy and paste a Wikipedia page. “Until we had shareable information goods, the basic law of economics was that everything is scarce. Supply and demand assumes scarcity. Now certain goods are not scarce, they are abundant.”

But third, “goods, services and organisations are appearing that no longer respond to the dictates of the market and the managerial hierarchy.” More specifically, people are collaborating in a manner that does not always make sense to traditional economists, who are used to assuming that humans act in self-interest and price things according to supply and demand.•

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“More And More Consumers Appear To Be Living Hand-To-Mouth”

May 5, 2013 in Excerpts, Politics, Science/Tech, Urban Studies | Permalink

Gerrymandering has allowed an out-of-favor political party to control Congress, to stem the flow of economic revival for all but a few in an extremely top-heavy American economic recovery. From Gillian Tett is the Financial Times:

“A few weeks ago, when I was chatting with the head of one of America’s largest food and drink companies, he made a revealing comment about data flows. Like most consumer groups, this particular company is currently spending a lot of money to monitor its customers with big data.

But it is not simply watching what they do or do not buy. These days it is increasingly scrutinizing the micro-level details of pay and benefit cycles in every district in America. The reason? Before 2007, this executive said, consumer spending on food and drink was fairly stable during the month in most US cities. But since 2007, spending patterns have become extremely volatile. More and more consumers appear to be living hand-to-mouth, buying goods only when their pay checks, food stamps or benefit money arrive. And this change has not simply occurred in the poorest areas: even middle-class districts are prone to these swings. Hence the need to study local pay and benefit cycles.

‘We see a pronounced difference between how people are shopping today and before the recession,’ the executive explained. ‘Consumers are living pay check by pay check, and they tend to spend accordingly. Then you have 50 million people on food stamps and that has cycles too. So for our business it has become critical to understand the cycle – when pay [and benefit] checks are arriving.'”

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