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NY Times Sunday Book Review, May 17 2015
‘Rise of the Robots’ and ‘Shadow Work’
By BARBARA EHRENREICH
RISE OF THE ROBOTS
Technology and the Threat of a Jobless Future
By Martin Ford
334 pp. Basic Books. $28.99.
SHADOW WORK
The Unpaid, Unseen Jobs That Fill Your Day
By Craig Lambert
277 pp. Counterpoint. $26.
In the late 20th century, while the blue-collar working class gave way
to the forces of globalization and automation, the educated elite looked
on with benign condescension. Too bad for those people whose jobs were
mindless enough to be taken over by third world teenagers or, more
humiliatingly, machines. The solution, pretty much agreed upon across
the political spectrum, was education. Americans had to become
intellectually nimble enough to keep ahead of the job-destroying trends
unleashed by technology, both robotization and the telecommunication
systems that make outsourcing possible. Anyone who wanted a spot in the
middle class would have to possess a college degree — as well as
flexibility, creativity and a continually upgraded skill set.
But, as Martin Ford documents in “Rise of the Robots,” the job-eating
maw of technology now threatens even the nimblest and most expensively
educated. Lawyers, radiologists and software designers, among others,
have seen their work evaporate to India or China. Tasks that would seem
to require a distinctively human capacity for nuance are increasingly
assigned to algorithms, like the ones currently being introduced to
grade essays on college exams. Particularly terrifying to me, computer
programs can now write clear, publishable articles, and, as Ford
reports, Wired magazine quotes an expert’s prediction that within about
a decade 90 percent of news articles will be computer-generated.
It’s impossible to read “Rise of the Robots” — for review anyway —
without thinking about how the business of book reviewing could itself
be automated and possibly improved by computers. First, the job of
“close reading,” now commonly undertaken with Post-its and a felt-tip
red pen, will be handed off to a scanner that will instantly note all
recurring words, phrases and themes. Next, where a human reviewer racks
her brain for social and historical context, the review-bot will send
algorithms out into the ether to scan every other book by the author as
well as every other book or article on the subject. Finally, all this
information will be synthesized with more fairness and erudition than
any wet, carbon-based thinking apparatus could muster. Most of this
could be achieved today, though, as Ford notes, if you want more
creativity and self-reflexivity from your review-bot, you may have to
wait until 2050.
This is both a humbling book and, in the best sense, a humble one. Ford,
a software entrepreneur who both understands the technology and has made
a thorough study of its economic consequences, never succumbs to the
obvious temptation to overdramatize or exaggerate. In fact, he has
little to say about one of the most ominous arenas for automation — the
military, where not only are pilots being replaced by drones, but robots
like the ones that now defuse bombs are being readied for deployment as
infantry. Nor does Ford venture much into the spectacular possibilities
being opened up by wearable medical devices, which can already monitor
just about any kind of biometric data that can be collected in an I.C.U.
Human health workers may eventually be cut out of the loop, as tiny
devices to sense blood glucose levels, for example, learn how to signal
other tiny implanted devices to release insulin.
But “Rise of the Robots” doesn’t need any more examples; the human
consequences of robotization are already upon us, and skillfully
chronicled here. Although the unemployment rate has fallen to officially
acceptable levels, long-term unemployment persists, and underemployment
— part-time jobs when full-time jobs are needed, or jobs that do not
reflect a worker’s education — is on the rise. College-educated people
often flounder for years after graduation, finding temp jobs and
permanent roommates. Adults of both sexes are drifting out of the work
force in despair. All of this has happened by choice, though not the
choice of the average citizen and worker. In the wake of the recession,
Ford writes, many companies decided that “ever-advancing information
technology” allows them to operate successfully without rehiring the
people they had laid off. And there should be no doubt that technology
is advancing in the direction of full unemployment. Ford quotes the
co-founder of a start-up dedicated to the automation of gourmet
hamburger production: “Our device isn’t meant to make employees more
efficient. It’s meant to completely obviate them.”
Ford offers little hope that emerging technologies will eventually
generate new forms of employment, in the way that blacksmiths yielded to
autoworkers in the early 20th century. He predicts that new industries
will “rarely, if ever, be highly labor-intensive,” pointing to companies
like YouTube and Instagram, which are characterized by “tiny workforces
and huge valuations and revenues.” On another front, 3-D printing is
poised to make a mockery of manufacturing as we knew it. Truck driving
may survive for a while — at least until self-driving vehicles start
rolling out of Detroit or, perhaps, San Jose.
The disappearance of jobs has not ushered in a new age of leisure, as
social theorists predicted uneasily in the 1950s. Would the masses
utilize their freedom from labor in productive ways, such as civic
participation and the arts, or would they die of boredom in their ranch
houses? Somehow, it was usually assumed, they would still manage to eat.
Come to find out, there’s still plenty of work to do, even if no one is
willing to pay for it. This is the “shadow work” that Craig Lambert
appealingly brings to light in his new book on “the unpaid, unseen jobs
that fill your day.” We take it for granted that we’ll have to pump our
own gas and bus our own dishes at Panera Bread. Booking travel
reservations is now a D.I.Y. task; the travel agents have disappeared.
As corporations cut their workforces, managers have to take on the work
of support staff (remember secretaries?), and customers can expect to
spend many hours of their lives working their way through menus and
recorded advertisements in search of “customer service.” At the same
time, our underfunded and understaffed schools seem to demand ever more
parental participation. Ambitious parents are often expected not only to
drive their children to and from school, but to spend hours carrying out
science projects and poring over fifth-grade math — although, as Lambert
points out, parental involvement in homework has not been shown to
improve children’s grades or test scores.
“Shadow Work” is generally a smooth ride, but there are bumps along the
way. The definition of the subject sometimes seems to embrace every kind
of unpaid work — from the exploitative, as in the use of unpaid interns,
to the kind that is freely undertaken, like caring for one’s own family.
At times the book gets weighed down by an unwarranted nostalgia for the
old days, when most transactions involved human interactions. For
example, Lambert grants that home pregnancy tests offer women “more
privacy and more control,” while also lamenting — as no woman ever has —
that they cut out the doctor and thus transform “what can be a memorable
shared event into a solitary encounter with a plastic stick.”
Lambert, formerly an editor at Harvard Magazine, is on firmer ground
when he explores all the ways corporations and new technologies
fiendishly generate new tasks for us — each of them seemingly
insignificant but amounting to many hours of annoyance. Examples include
deleting spam from our inboxes, installing software upgrades, creating
passwords for every website we seek to enter, and periodically updating
those passwords. If nothing else, he gives new meaning to the word
“distraction” as an explanation for civic inaction. As the seas rise and
the air condenses into toxic smog, many of us will be bent over our
laptops, filling out forms and attempting to wade through the “terms and
conditions.”
Lambert falls short of calling for the shadow workers of the world to go
out on strike. But that’s what it might take to give us the time and the
mental bandwidth to confront the dystopian possibilities being unleashed
by technology. If middle-class jobs keep disappearing as wealth piles up
at the top, Martin Ford predicts, economic mobility will “become
nonexistent”: “The plutocracy would shut itself away in gated
communities or in elite cities, perhaps guarded by autonomous military
robots and drones.” We have seen this movie; in fact, in one form or
another — from “Elysium” to “The Hunger Games” — we’ve been seeing it
again and again.
In “Rise of the Robots,” Ford argues that a society based on luxury
consumption by a tiny elite is not economically viable. More to the
point, it is not biologically viable. Humans, unlike robots, need food,
health care and the sense of usefulness often supplied by jobs or other
forms of work. His solution is blindingly obvious: As both conservatives
and liberals have proposed over the years, we need to institute a
guaranteed annual minimum income, which he suggests should be set at
$10,000 a year. This is probably not enough, and of course no amount of
money can compensate for the loss of meaningful engagement. But as a
first step toward a solution, Ford’s may be the best that the feeble
human mind can come up with at the moment.
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