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talkpolitics2018-01-21 10:34 am
abomvubuso) wrote in talkpolitics2018-01-21 10:34 am
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Industry 4.0: Murderous boredom
If you had to choose between a job where your adrenaline often skyrockets because of sudden tasks and deadlines that expired yesterday, and one where an automatic system has not only eliminated all the organisational chaos but it has taken the bulk of your everyday functions - which one would you choose? Let's not forget that things weren't always what they seemed.
Experts in psychology and social sciences are already pondering the implications of the the advent of a new era, the so called Fourth Industrial Revolution that's about to transform the workplace. Last year a new batch of researches and reports have warmed the global public some more about the coming of the age of automation as a result of the accelerated development of robotics, AI and self-teaching machines.
Apart from all the upsides that the boom of technology brings to mankind, there's also an intense discussion about how to mitigate and overcome the possible negative consequences on people, particularly the most immediate among them, job loss. The idea of a unconditional minimum income has received a new bush, and Bill Gates has proposed that companies should be paying a "robot tax" that would fund new types of activity, mostly in the social and humanitarian area.
Not so long ago, McKinsey Global Institute published a research that forecast that robotics and AI would erase between 400-800 million jobs from the work market worldwide by 2030. And though most estimates point to just about 5% of the professions potentially being completely automatised in the near future, more than half of all human activities will inevitably undergo changes that will see them being taken over by machines to a various extent.
When it comes to industrial revolution, obviously it won't be just the economy and the market that will be affected. Changes in the workforce will affect people just as much. For instance, our modern age has brought stress and its consequences to the fore. We've seen the emergence of the so called yuppie syndrome: chronic fatigue that's typical for young urban people of higher income who work fast, without much time rest where they could recharge their immune system. In recent times, we've been talking of work burnout, now a mass phenomenon if we could judge from the frequency of its occurrence. It's no longer mentioned just in the specialised journals, it's a thing now. The general culprit is again stress and over-burderning, leading to depression and anxiety disorders.
A roboticised future might be looking very attractive if we imagine it as an almost permanent vacation. But there are other factors on the horizon, and the risks are pretty serious. The thing is, by taking much of the burden off of people at their workplace, the machines could bring them into the other extreme, a lethal state of boredom, so to speak.
Boredom is what a new PsyArxiv.com research defines as the "paradox of effort: it's as costly as it is valuable". The Canadian authors have concluded that in the era of automatisation there's a risk of double underestimation: on one side, the positive effect of effort that an individual invests in their work, and on the other, the subtle harms of boredom that increase exponentially with its increase.
These conclusions present a challenge to the established canon of cognitive psychology, neuroscience and economics, where stress and burden, both physical and psychological, is an expense and a liability: if people (or any other creatures, to that matter) had a choice, they'd rather avoid it. Here the authors provide evidence of just the opposite: every effort does bring added value instead.
Of course, some roles will be obsolete in the automatised future, while others will be partially substituted by machines, which will be relied upon for making work less stressful and freeing up opportunities for focusing on more creative activities and solving abstract, complex problems - all skills that are key for the Fourth Industrial Revolution. Technologies that would make deeper analysis and decision-making easier would hardly bring more high-pay jobs that require erudition and creativity.
Much of the low-pay jobs will continue to rely on human labour, in the sense that it'd take more time to significantly automatise these activities. So the biggest risk is for humans in positions of medium pay whose tasks are clearly formulated and largely repetitive. Their functions will be more of supervision rather than active participation, and they'll be dispersed along the chain of activities, and will have a scattered active worktime. It's their job that will require less effort, hence the dangerously high levels of boredom (and boredom fatigue).
James Hewitt, head of the science and innovation department at the Hintsa Performance explores these unanticipated transformations in an article for the electronic edition of the World Economic Forum. His Finland-based consultant company advises and trains workers how to achieve a better quality of life that would guarantee them a better professional performance. Its regular clients come from various fields: from F1 to top CEOs as well as employees of 1000+ organisations from around the world.
Hewitt believes that at a time when more and more human activities are getting automatised, we should think hard about the value of what we're removing. Healthy amounts of work stress and effort are key for human performance and development, he argues, and directly relates this to well-being because it's associated to a goal-driven behavour: we perform better when we're trying to achieve a goal, rather than postponing or forgetting our goals due to getting distracted by something unimportant.
So what would happen if we lose the positive experience that comes with effort? Automatisation could make boredom, both on and off the workplace, a big issue. And that's not a recent observation: at the dawn of the industrial revolution, Nietzsche warned of a similar effect of the "machine culture" on the workforce. There are various definitions of boredom, the most recent ones defining it as a subjective state of low-level anxiety and discontent caused by the lack of interest, coupled with insufficient stimulae. A 1980 research describes the bored person as someone who's "half-unhappy, half-asleep".
Boredom is already wide-spread in high-quality work environments, and it's been recognised as an important field of research. Guys like Hewitt acknowledge there are many legitimate and logical reasons to embrace automatisation, including enhanced safety, better precision and lower costs. But they insist we should also explore its effect on well-being and human efficiency. Not only because automatisation could replace human work but because the consequences of ever increasing levels of boredom among the employed could be dire. A more efficient and less stressful life might not necessarily translate into a better life - especially if we're bored to death. So the technological automatised paradise of the brave new world is not entirely flawless. Automatising everything just for the sake of it could bring unpredictable results in the long run.
At the end of the day, if we've made up our minds as a civilisation that AI does human work better than us, we could assign it the task of calculating the amounts of stress and work burden that would be healthy enough for us, too - so that we would neither have to burn out at work, nor get into a state of half-coma.
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It may be that AI enables us to better fulfill our potential. But maybe not as we are arseholes as a species when it comes to profit and selfishness. I wonder if the inequalities between capital and labour will reach crisis point when AIs become commonplace and work is either drudgery or managing your investments. A scenario perfect for revolution.
Personally, I would like to avoid a year zero. This situation needs managing. Hahaha. Like that’s going to happen.
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You know what this means... We're ALL going to be middle-managers in the future.
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Also, you really should look at John Maynard Keynes' 1930 essay "Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren". I strongly disagree with his assessment of why the Great Depression set in, but his extrapolations to the future were dead on:
And who instilled that dread? The wealthy, who have been a terrible, terrible example:
The wealthy are the problem, but the solution lies in overcoming their obsessions and replacing them with new priorities:
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O, that we could all live life like the young daughters of filthy rich movie stars... A half hour with the yoga instructor to welcome the day, followed by a gourmet breakfast, not too heavy, probably Mediterranean... Then a quick poetry reading and Q&A session with a well-known author, a chauffeured ride to the stables for some dressage (since it's Tuesday), then a swim in the pool and a shower, and a high-protein lunch while chatting with friends (hopefully in person, but video may suffice).
Then an hour of singing lessons mixed with guitar, an hour of one-on-one tutoring in math, then an amateur acting workshop (not aviation class - that's Wednesday.) Today we're doing the last act of a Midsummer Night's Dream. (That Pyramus fellow is a real hoot.) A chauffeured ride back to the house for an hour of "unstructured time", a dinner with a parent (if schedule allows), then it's out to the club for some daaaanciiiing! Whoo blow off steam! But get home by 12:30 or Dad will take your T-Bird away.
Personally, I would love it.
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(A “trust fund” slightly under average minimum income enables one to lead at least the cultural side of your comment’s narrative.)
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I wonder if a calculation of the "adequate" amount of stress is even possible.
I do see some very interesting developments ten years from now, though, when some company - probably Google - debuts an online service where you chat with their robot, and it is not only capable of fully passing a Turing test, but actually offers you psychological advice, chats about your day, gossips about your neighbors... And of course, recommends products, in a helpful, by-the-way tone.
Whither humanity?
On the human front, I think the world of servitors may arrive in the far, far distant future, but until then, we will only approach it in half-steps, and all the while we will invent new kinds of labor in the mad competition to determine who occupies the top story of the gold-plated skyscraper, and who has to settle for the humiliating second-from-the-top apartment that is otherwise exactly the same. (Dammit, I KNOW he's up there, I can hear him stomping around just to remind me that he's on top. Some day I'm gonna kick that bastard off his balcony...)
Humans didn't get where we are by goal-oriented thinking, e.g. let's hurry up and invent the mouldboard plough and then thank The Lord our food troubles will be over. We got here by being engineered by natural selection to always, always, eventually become discontent with the status quo, no matter how dumbfoundingly powerful and posh it may seem to our great great grandparents if they were alive to see it.
And dammit, the discontent among us often rise to the top. Discontentment is a two-edged sword; it can make you miserable and it can make you ambitious -- and when you're ambitious, what comes in really handy? A nice sharp sword. I currently can't think of any situation - however posh or boring or confusing - where the discontent won't be able to find a survival advantage over those who have been placated by technology (or anything else.)
I agree, the modern wrestling match of work-life balance is getting more and more Wrestlemania each year. I recently had a mini-epiphany: Burnout is common in my field (computer science) for one simple reason: The Red Queen effect. You run as fast as you possibly can on the treadmill of new techniques, and sooner or later you start to pine for the lifestyle others seem to lead, where they jog along, and the scenery actually changes for them, all the time. And no matter how cleverly you reposition yourself in the industry (i.e. haul the treadmill to slightly different spots) to keep things novel, you start to dream, every day, of getting the hell off the treadmill, and never, ever stepping onto it again. NEVER. NEVER!!!
(Maybe take up goat farming instead, or just spend all day with the kids.)
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A bit too much of the ends justifying the means for holier-than-thou types. I almost fall into that bracket, inasmuch as I cannot see any justification for keeping people discontented when we don't need to. May I emphasise that we don't need to keep people discontented; ergo it becomes a moral or ethical decision as much as a practical one.
Alpacas rather than goats, I'd suggest. Nicer animals and better returns on their wool etc.
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Also, ones children can often make one discontent for big hunks of time, just by being rebellious, ungrateful, or disappointing. Is the solution to outsource parenting to robots?
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