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The future is emotional

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Re: The future is emotional

#21

Post by pron »

infinity0 wrote: post #19
symstym wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did you read the whole article? I don't think it was implying anything negative about tech workers or making value judgements. I am frustrated by some of the same things you are, but I don't think they were present in the article. To me it was saying something pragmatic like "Now that advances in technology are taking care of more and more of our material needs while requiring less labor, there is a relative need/opp…

The article is certainly more negative than you're giving it credit for. Its title makes a prediction about the future, but it spends about 3/25 paragraphs explaining why it is making that prediction (where it quotes statistics about the changing landscape of jobs). The rest of it instead talks about the benefits of being more emotional (nobody would disagree) and complaining about why people don't seem to think it's…

I find it ironic that your reaction to the article proves the point you imagine it makes, but that it doesn't actually make. The way I understood the sentences you point out (and I am pretty certain that my reading matches the author's intention) is that certain things are put in opposition to technical subjects merely because this is where power is currently overwhelmingly concentrated. When you write about the importance of dry land in islands in the Pacific ocean, it is not to imply that the water is bad in any way, but to contrast it with the obvious overwhelming predominance of water in the ocean.

Re: The future is emotional

#22

Post by wsinks »

infinity0 wrote: post #9

I'm a bit annoyed at the constant background snide and subtle implication of these vague literary articles, that programmers are bad empathetically or emotionally. They use facts such as western programming culture being very male-dominated, and then twist this to imply that males are bad at being empathetic. Firstly the gender ratio of engineers in e.g. Russia is more even, so let's just shoot that one down before c…

Totally side question - are you Russian by nature and language?

If you are, I'm wondering if you ever feel limited by English as a language. Do you feel like you have bigger, better ideas in Russian?

Re: The future is emotional

#23

Post by cstross »

skybrian wrote: post #18

I wonder how this relates to what economists call "cost disease?" As the cost goes down in some industries (through automation or other efficiency improvements), this increases wages in those industries, which spills over into other, traditionally lower-wage industries due to competition for workers, not through efficiency improvements. But despite calling it a "disease," this doesn't necessarily seem like a bad thin…

That's not exactly correct; the real issue with Baumol's Cost Disease isn't that it leads to wages in "traditionally lower-wage industries" — it's that wage competition leads to wage increases in sectors that don't undergo productivity gains.

To give an example: medical doctors aren't a low-skill/low-wage profession, but their productivity in crude terms of patients examined per hour appears stagnant — medicine is inherently labour-intensive (although the outcomes of care provided can improve over time as new and better treatments become available). If wages rise in other professionalized sectors that require huge amounts of training due to productivity gains (e.g. among engineers), wages will consequently rise for doctors because doctors and engineers are loosely coupled at source through the training/labour market.

TLDR: cost disease isn't about low-wage occupations, it's about pay in occupations that are refractory to performance improvement being coupled to pay in sectors where performance gains are possible via the labour market.

Re: The future is emotional

#24

Post by infinity0 »

pron wrote: post #21
infinity0 wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The article is certainly more negative than you're giving it credit for. Its title makes a prediction about the future, but it spends about 3/25 paragraphs explaining why it is making that prediction (where it quotes statistics about the changing landscape of jobs). The rest of it instead talks about the benefits of being more emotional (nobody would disagree) and complaining about why people don't seem to think it's…

I find it ironic that your reaction to the article proves the point you imagine it makes, but that it doesn't actually make. The way I understood the sentences you point out (and I am pretty certain that my reading matches the author's intention) is that certain things are put in opposition to technical subjects merely because this is where power is currently overwhelmingly concentrated. When you write about the impo…

To use your analogy, the article's title is "The key to jobs in the future is not water but land." It spends very little time arguing this. Instead, it assumes it, and rather argues why land is useful, with some random remarks throw in about how the land is green and the water is blue.

I don't think it's an over-reaction to understand that they are implying that the water is unimportant, and also implying that the water won't help to fulfill the same needs that the land might fulfill.

And here, I think your analogy is biased in favour of the article; there's no reason why analytical skills can't help us improve services that require a lot of emotional empathy; they are not as separate as "land" vs "water.

And if you're talking about irony, what I find ironic is an article that places such importance on emotional empathy is happy to use a divisive title like "The future is not X but Y". Obviously the people that personally hold greater weight for X are going to be annoyed. And they didn't even do a good job of explaining why they think it!

Re: The future is emotional

#25

Post by Apocryphon »

EGreg wrote: post #10

If anything, we will see people preferring a lot less human interaction. People used to gather in salons to hear live music. Today we put earphones on a train to listen to music instead of socializing. If we socialize, we do it with other consumers, not producers. Compare photos of the 50s and now. Everyone was socializing outside. Today they are on fb with the phones mediating. The milkman doesn't come around anymor…

The use of earphones and iPods is for personal mobile convenience. Live music is still in hot demand as an activity, and in fact one way artists have adapted to loss of revenue from the end of album sales, has been to focus on touring and other events.

People socialize with producers all of the time. Twitch streamers, Instagram influencers, YouTube stars- there is hot demand from fans to interact with their internet celebrities. Traditional creators get huge attention from Reddit AMA's.

It is true that smartphones have become a massive attention drainer. And automation has created a culture of seeking convenience and availability from machines instead of people whom you know. But your post conflates two different types of human activity- creative, intellectual, entertaining pursuit and logistics-heavy, service work. People will always prefer real people doing the former, until Holodecks really are a thing.

Re: The future is emotional

#26

Post by prodmerc »

wsinks wrote: post #22
infinity0 wrote: post #9

I'm a bit annoyed at the constant background snide and subtle implication of these vague literary articles, that programmers are bad empathetically or emotionally. They use facts such as western programming culture being very male-dominated, and then twist this to imply that males are bad at being empathetic. Firstly the gender ratio of engineers in e.g. Russia is more even, so let's just shoot that one down before c…

Totally side question - are you Russian by nature and language? If you are, I'm wondering if you ever feel limited by English as a language. Do you feel like you have bigger, better ideas in Russian?

I'm not Russian, but it feels like emotional responses are more... emotional in Russian. Like thinking about something or swearing.

English is a more rational language, and my "native" (I don't use it much) language is a bit restrictive when expressing anything, whether logical or emotional.

Re: The future is emotional

#28

Post by Mz »

I really, really, really hate it when they refer to things like taking physical care of the elderly as "emotional labor." Caretaking can have a huge emotional component, but this framing has serious inherent problems.

Furthermore, art, fiction and music are things that can do a lot for people emotionally and psychologically, both the makers of such and the consumers. Yet no one ever seems to include those in these ridiculous articles about so-called emotional labor which perhaps should more accurately be termed traditional women's work.

Re: The future is emotional

#29

Post by monksy »

Apocryphon wrote: post #25
EGreg wrote: post #10

If anything, we will see people preferring a lot less human interaction. People used to gather in salons to hear live music. Today we put earphones on a train to listen to music instead of socializing. If we socialize, we do it with other consumers, not producers. Compare photos of the 50s and now. Everyone was socializing outside. Today they are on fb with the phones mediating. The milkman doesn't come around anymor…

The use of earphones and iPods is for personal mobile convenience. Live music is still in hot demand as an activity, and in fact one way artists have adapted to loss of revenue from the end of album sales, has been to focus on touring and other events. People socialize with producers all of the time. Twitch streamers, Instagram influencers, YouTube stars- there is hot demand from fans to interact with their internet…

> People socialize with producers all of the time

When it's a one-way conversation, that's consuming.

Re: The future is emotional

#30

Post by dredmorbius »

cstross wrote: post #23
skybrian wrote: post #18

I wonder how this relates to what economists call "cost disease?" As the cost goes down in some industries (through automation or other efficiency improvements), this increases wages in those industries, which spills over into other, traditionally lower-wage industries due to competition for workers, not through efficiency improvements. But despite calling it a "disease," this doesn't necessarily seem like a bad thin…

That's not exactly correct; the real issue with Baumol's Cost Disease isn't that it leads to wages in "traditionally lower-wage industries" — it's that wage competition leads to wage increases in sectors that don't undergo productivity gains. To give an example: medical doctors aren't a low-skill/low-wage profession, but their productivity in crude terms of patients examined per hour appears stagnant — medicine is in…

Charlie: the concept is highly analogous to Amdahl's Law, in some regards. The limit to performance increases in parallelisation is limited by the non-parallelisible portion of a process. The limits to productivity increases are limited by the irreducible labour component of a productive process.

The other element is that wages represent the provisioning costs of labour, or as Adam Smith puts it, "A man must always live by his work, and his wages must at least be sufficient to maintain him." (Further qualified upwards in subsequent text.) WoN, Book 1, Ch. 8.

http://www.gutenberg.org/files/3300/3300-h/3300-h.htm#link2H...

Which is to say: wages are not defined by productivity, but by the general wage level. What is defined by productivity is instead the quantity demanded of a good.

If some quantity of a high-labour good is demanded, then that quantity will pay wages based on the minimum prevailing wage (and if that's a sustainable level: the minimum living wage), plus additional premia for various other factors elevating wages above that floor, as described by Smith in chapter 10 of book 1.

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