Haves and Have-nots

…for all its success in drawing and nurturing firms on the technological frontier, Phoenix cannot escape the uncomfortable pattern taking shape across the American economy: Despite all its shiny new high-tech businesses, the vast majority of new jobs are in workaday service industries, like health care, hospitality, retail and building services, where pay is mediocre.

Eduardo Porter –
Tech Is Splitting the U.S. Work Force in Two , NYT 2/8/19

In my previous post I expressed my discomfort at many of the constructions in this article. The quote above entails the most concerning aspect.

Here’s the problem: Society as a whole has determined that work best done by humans is not valuable. Caring for the sick, taking orders and delivering nourishment, creating a welcoming atmosphere to world-weary travelers, and helping people buy and maintain their homes and businesses is not worth a lot of money.

When Capital needed human-as-machine labor, it created manufacturing and clerical jobs to execute all those tasks. Those jobs had the most value, because without them, nothing could happen. Everything else was “just” service.

In the big, bad “shiny new high-tech” world, however, automation is taking those human-as-machine jobs away from humans and giving it to machines.

Humans should fight back!

But no. Everyone in the AI, machine learning and robotics world knows that the jobs they are “taking away” from humans are jobs that should never have been done by humans in the first place.

The human toll of human-as-machine labor is terrible. That’s what the Luddites were opposed to–not just their loss of work, but also their loss of humanity.

We are social animals. Everyone is lamenting the loss of connectedness, yet many people want to increase human-as-machine productivity, rather than off-load it onto automated processes that would execute it easily, quickly, and with no alienation, eye or back strain.

The lowly “service” job is a by-product of harmful human-as-machine Capitalism. If you have ever watched a nurse lovingly support a sick relative, you know the rage you feel realizing that this person is overworked and underpaid. Nurses, teachers, servers are humans who care for us, educate us and feed us. What more important work could there possibly be?