I frequently find myself undergoing the experience that I can't help but describe in any other way but "shouting through an electric tube at a robot". I implore you not to laugh -- or if you must, let it be out of a place of relation. I'm absolutely certain we've all suffered through the ordeal numerous times over the course of the last year alone. As more of the businesses we each depend on for our everyday living standard find themselves turning to automation to a higher degree, humanity as a whole is beginning to witness how broad its impact really is. From banking, to healthcare, to higher education, to restaurant operations. No business is immune to it -- least of all, those knee-deep in cryptocurrency.
Throughout the pandemic, we collectively found ourselves facing the frustration of reduced bandwidth of effective communication, with the exceptions being those few people we allowed inside our personal bubbles. For all those who weren't already in regular contact with us from the start, communications were often compromised. On a good day, the best one could get would be speaking clearly to another person on the other side of an open field with plenty of ventilation. Of course, since most people don't have open quiet fields at their disposal for all routine social interactions, additional compromises are made. In my workplace, I'm often encountered with the difficulty of communicating to a customer through at least two masks -- one per person -- and a plexiglass screen that divides our faces from one another. I'd find it hard to believe that I'm the only person who's found himself repeating "What?" multiple times in a vocal exchange. Similarly, I'd find it hard to believe that I'm the only person who's struggled to remain expressive with half of my visible face masked off from sight. I've found myself overcompensating with expression through eyebrow movement. Or, I might overcompensate in how I express myself through fashion.
(On the bright side, nobody can tell me that's not an effective mask.)
All of this is a disheartening inconvenience, sure. But as much as I dislike shouting at people through a mask, it's still better than trying to understand people through the internet or a phone line. A quick trip to a youtube comment section quickly reveals how a lack of understanding for nuance, subtext or sarcasm can cause unintentional flame wars faster than it takes your average politician to drop a campaign promise, post-election.
We’ve undoubtedly found ourselves suffering from the bandwidth restrictions of information processing at the hands of digital media. Too many times, I’ve found myself feeling incapable of properly expressing human emotion over the phone? —? what happens if the signal cuts out and I need to repeat myself? Do I just fake what I was feeling and parrot my response to the listener? It feels like I'm not so much establishing human connection as much as I'm emulating human connection.
Now all of this sucks, sure. But as much as shouting through masks or electric tubes sucks, nothing sucks worse than shouting at a robot through an electric tube.
Maybe it's just me, and I'm in an unfortunate position in life. Maybe I'm a fluke. But I start to worry when I suddenly notice that struggles with automation are a reoccurring problem for literally every single member of my inner circle -- across the nation -- all at the same time. I'll stop to ask how a friend's doing, and they'll start talking about the bureaucratic hoops they're presently required to jump through in order to switch healthcare providers. I'll part ways, and ask a family member how they're holding up -- each and every family member I converse with is struggling to navigate convoluted webpages, email exchanges, and forms in order to file taxes, renew identification, or apply for jobs. And I think it goes without saying that the process of scheduling a vaccine appointment is a harrowing nightmare that leaves nobody unaffected.
Unfortunately, as much as we've hated shitty hold music and shitty voice recognition while waiting to talk to a representative for our internet service over the phone since.... well, basically since shitty hold music and shitty voice recognition even started being a thing to begin with, I'm convinced that we won't see a change in this phenomena any time soon.
(Credit: The Oatmeal)
Allow me to illustrate with an example:
Suppose Grubhub decides that it won't be hiring an intelligent human being to figure out the logistics of a delivery. Instead, they'll be utilizing an algorithm. It's not a particularly intelligent algorithm. It doesn't have to be. It could consistently make mistakes. It might redirect drivers to incorrect destinations, or misplace the orders to prepare the appropriate food ahead of time. Or it might make multiple notification for an identical food order. It might even send delivery drivers to an establishment with a similar name but in a different city altogether.
This algorithm would still turn a profit for an organization like Grubhub. Even if it had an abysmal success rate of 10%, this would still be cost effective. It would almost always be more cost effective for the company to pay a robot to work on pennies of electricity a year than it would to pay a warm-blooded American a minimum wage.
As technology becomes more accessible to businesses both large and small, more positions of employment face the threat of become obsolete. It need not even be total for the economic ramifications to be felt far and wide. Unemployment during the height of the great depression capped off at about 20% -- as CGP Grey determined in his aptly named documentary "Humans Need Not Apply," that number could easily be beaten by a handy 40% through rigorous employment of automation. Sooner than we think, we may very well be playing witness to whole generations of college graduates who are unemployable through no fault of their own -- for no reason more complicated than that the job they'd been training for their entire lives had recently been optimized by an algorithm somebody wrote up in python.
I kid. In all likelihood, it was written up in python by another robot. As "machine learning" becomes a part of everyday vocabulary, not even computer programmers are safe from unemployment.
So where do we go from here?
I've discovered a practice I've tried to make a point of engaging in, whenever I'm faced with an overwhelming scenarios of doom and gloom. I try to ask myself what I can personally do to remedy or prepare for a given scenario. There are no shortage of potential catastrophes about, after all, and I refuse to turn a blind eye to them. I pride myself in being a pessimist, in a manner of speaking -- when one sets their expectations low or moderated, they're almost always met or exceeded.
Two major points of consideration have come to mind for me:
1: Consider the fields of work where we will always prefer a human worker.
Some jobs are a little ambiguous. In post-agricultural nations, disproportionate work has historically gone to the industrial sectors. In post-industrial economies, large swaths of service jobs have emerged. Some storefronts will doubtless be replaced by complicated vending mechanisms, sure, but I'm convinced that a large part of what you're paying for when you go to a restaurant winds up being the human element. I might even go as far as to categorize restaurant dining as "entertainment" in my personal accounting.
This goes for other fields, too -- with less ambiguity sometimes. Few people are enthusiastic about a robotic babysitter looking over their kids. Few find anything satisfying about a robotic minister or pastor. While there are some robot-fetishists, a large part of prostitution boils down to having an interpersonal interaction with another human being. Ask any sex worker, and he or she will no doubt have a small collection of instances when a client just wanted to snuggle or talk.
2: Consider how you vote with your wallet in the democracy that is capitalism.
I think that cryptocurrency makes a fine example of this phenomena. Even since the earlier days of cryptocurrency, I've found myself feeling apprehensive about centralized exchanges that had an impersonal or automated element to them. I don't think anybody would be satisfied with being registered for a bank where speaking to a representative was an impossibility -- and I think that if we held centralized exchanges to a similar standard, we'd find ourselves facing much greater service in our transactions.
As somebody with a history of writing, publishing and managing expenses, I've found it worthwhile to constantly ask myself "where is the money I'm spending going to?" If I want to purchase an album, I could easily send Apple or Amazon a twenty. Or, I could be patient and ensure that a little part of that ends up going towards somebody I know who runs the record shop downtown. Yes, I could easily save myself the inconvenience of leaving my house by tapping a few buttons on the surface of a glowing screen. Or, I could save a fast-food employee from that much pressure, all while enjoying a nice conversation, by simply placing a phone order and arriving for pickup.
As for cryptocurrency, yes, I could absolutely buy or sell on a distribution. Or, I could turn to a local P2P decentralized exchange. Or better yet, I could try reaching out to friends my age who've jumped on the same bandwagon I have. After all, cryptocurrency is designed to be a distributed LEDGER system for payments -- why not use that very same ledger system with the peers closest to me in real life?
After all, by doing this, you ensure that they money's going to somebody you know personally.
That somebody might remember you when you need them more than ever. You can't say the same for any non-human entity.
