deskilling

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Hacking Capitalism by Söderberg, Johan; Söderberg, Johan;

Abraham Maslow, air gap, Alvin Toffler, AOL-Time Warner, barriers to entry, Charles Babbage, collective bargaining, commoditize, computer age, corporate governance, creative destruction, Debian, deindustrialization, delayed gratification, Dennis Ritchie, deskilling, digital capitalism, digital divide, Donald Davies, Eben Moglen, Erik Brynjolfsson, Firefox, Free Software Foundation, frictionless, full employment, Garrett Hardin, Hacker Conference 1984, Hacker Ethic, Herbert Marcuse, Howard Rheingold, IBM and the Holocaust, informal economy, interchangeable parts, invention of radio, invention of the telephone, Jacquard loom, James Watt: steam engine, jimmy wales, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, Ken Thompson, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, labour market flexibility, late capitalism, Lewis Mumford, liberal capitalism, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, Mitch Kapor, mutually assured destruction, new economy, Norbert Wiener, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, packet switching, patent troll, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer model, planned obsolescence, post scarcity, post-Fordism, post-industrial society, price mechanism, Productivity paradox, profit motive, RFID, Richard Florida, Richard Stallman, Ronald Coase, safety bicycle, Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence, SETI@home, Silicon Valley, Slavoj Žižek, software patent, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, subscription business, tech worker, technological determinism, technoutopianism, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The Nature of the Firm, the scientific method, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thomas Davenport, Thorstein Veblen, tragedy of the anticommons, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, Whole Earth Catalog, Yochai Benkler

Up until the breakthrough of the industrial revolution, the product of human labour probably increased much more in return to the worker’s skill than to the perfection of tools.26 The lessons from the computer underground bring into relief a debate on capitalism and deskilling that raged in the 1970s and 1980s. The controversy took place against the backdrop of the post-industrial vision that capitalism had advanced beyond class conflicts and monotonous work assignments. Harry Braverman targeted one of its assumptions, that the skills of workers had automatically been upgraded when blue-collar jobs were replaced by white-collar jobs. He insisted that the logic of capital is to deskill the workforce, irrespectively if they are employed in a factory or in an office: ”By far the most important in modern production is the breakdown of complex processes into simple tasks that are performed by workers whose knowledge is virtually nil, whose so-called training is brief, and who may thereby be treated as interchangeable parts.”27 Braverman’s contribution to the debate was very influential.

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In the traditional left and in academia, however, indifference and suspicion has been the predominant attitude towards the subject for a long time.16 Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, Marxist scholars were preoccupied with demystifying the hype and vulgarities of post-industrial ideology along with the many unwarranted hopes attached to information technology and the Internet. Progressive academics are concerned about electronic surveillance, intensified deskilling of workers due to microprocessors, big business lobbying for global enforcement of intellectual property monopolies, and the Goliath-scale acquisitions by media corporations, all trends that seem to run in consistency with Internet’s roots in Pentagon’s nuclear warfare strategies.17 Though these perils are very real, this book will investigate capital’s bid to commodify information from a different angle altogether.

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The shortcomings of the proprietary development model translate into advantages for user-centred innovation models based on less strict license schemes. A paradoxical series of events have brought about user empowerment. We trace it to the termination of craft skills inside the capitalist production process. Deskilling of employees has come full circle with the reskilling of non-employees. Tools and skills are cheapened and spread from the capitalist production site to the whole of society. Arguably, the means of production are being re-appropriated by the proletariat in this way. It should be kept in mind, however, that user-centred innovation models are enrolled in capital’s valorisation process.

The Glass Cage: Automation and Us by Nicholas Carr

Airbnb, Airbus A320, Andy Kessler, Atul Gawande, autonomous vehicles, Bernard Ziegler, business process, call centre, Captain Sullenberger Hudson, Charles Lindbergh, Checklist Manifesto, cloud computing, cognitive load, computerized trading, David Brooks, deep learning, deliberate practice, deskilling, digital map, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, drone strike, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, Flash crash, Frank Gehry, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane: The New Division of Labor, Frederick Winslow Taylor, future of work, gamification, global supply chain, Google Glasses, Google Hangouts, High speed trading, human-factors engineering, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, Internet of things, Ivan Sutherland, Jacquard loom, James Watt: steam engine, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Kevin Kelly, knowledge worker, low interest rates, Lyft, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, natural language processing, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Norbert Wiener, Oculus Rift, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, place-making, plutocrats, profit motive, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, randomized controlled trial, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, robot derives from the Czech word robota Czech, meaning slave, scientific management, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, software is eating the world, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, systems thinking, tacit knowledge, TaskRabbit, technological determinism, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, TED Talk, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, turn-by-turn navigation, Tyler Cowen, US Airways Flight 1549, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, William Langewiesche

“The data suggest that despite the substantial cost and increasing technical sophistication of EMRs, EMR use failed to achieve desirable levels of clinical improvement,” wrote the researchers. Patrick J. O’Connor et al., “Impact of an Electronic Medical Record on Diabetes Quality of Care,” Annals of Family Medicine 3, no. 4 (July 2005): 300–306. 13.Timothy Hoff, “Deskilling and Adaptation among Primary Care Physicians Using Two Work Innovations,” Health Care Management Review 36, no. 4 (2011): 338–348. 14.Schulte, “Growth of Electronic Medical Records.” 15.Hoff, “Deskilling and Adaptation.” 16.Danielle Ofri, “The Doctor vs. the Computer,” New York Times, December 30, 2010. 17.Thomas H. Payne et al., “Transition from Paper to Electronic Inpatient Physician Notes,” Journal of the American Medical Information Association 17 (2010): 108–111. 18.Ofri, “Doctor vs. the Computer.” 19.Beth Lown and Dayron Rodriguez, “Lost in Translation?

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Over the last thirty years, dozens of psychologists, engineers, and ergonomics, or “human factors,” researchers have studied what’s gained and lost when pilots share the work of flying with software. They’ve learned that a heavy reliance on computer automation can erode pilots’ expertise, dull their reflexes, and diminish their attentiveness, leading to what Jan Noyes, a human-factors expert at Britain’s University of Bristol, calls “a deskilling of the crew.”19 Concerns about the unintended side effects of flight automation aren’t new. They date back at least to the early days of glass cockpits and fly-by-wire controls. A 1989 report from NASA’s Ames Research Center noted that as computers had begun to multiply on airplanes during the preceding decade, industry and governmental researchers “developed a growing discomfort that the cockpit may be becoming too automated, and that the steady replacement of human functioning by devices could be a mixed blessing.”

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As physicians come to rely on computers to aid them in more facets of their everyday work, the technology is influencing the way they learn, the way they make decisions, and even their bedside manner. A study of primary-care physicians who adopted electronic records, conducted by Timothy Hoff, a professor at SUNY’s University at Albany School of Public Health, reveals evidence of what Hoff terms “deskilling outcomes,” including “decreased clinical knowledge” and “increased stereotyping of patients.” In 2007 and 2008, Hoff interviewed seventy-eight physicians from primary-care practices of various sizes in upstate New York. Three-fourths of the doctors were routinely using EMR systems, and most of them said they feared computerization was leading to less thorough, less personalized care.

The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling by Arlie Russell Hochschild

affirmative action, airline deregulation, Boeing 747, call centre, cognitive dissonance, deskilling, emotional labour, Frederick Winslow Taylor, job satisfaction, late capitalism, longitudinal study, new economy, planned obsolescence, post-industrial society, profit motive, randomized controlled trial, telemarketer

Complex tasks in which a craftsman used to take pride are divided into simpler, more repetitive segments, each more boring and less well paid than the original job. Work is deskilled and the worker belittled. But celebrants and critics alike have not inspected at close hand or with a social-psychological eye what it is that "people jobs" actually require of workers. They have not inquired into the actual nature of this labor. Some do not know exactly what, in the case of emotional labor, becomes deskilled. A second discourse, closer to the person and more remote from the overall organization of work, concerns the display of feeling. The works of Erving Coffman introduce us to the many minor traffic rules of face-to-face interaction, as they emerge at a card game, in an elevator, on the street, or at the dining table of an insane asylum.

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The lessons in deep acting-acting "as if the cabin is your home" and "as if this unruly passenger has a traumatic past" -are themselves a new development in deskilling. The "mind" of the emotion worker, the source of the ideas about what mental moves are needed to settle down an "irate;' has moved upstairs in the hierarchy so that the worker is restricted to implementing standard procedures. In the course of offering skills, trainers unwittingly contribute to a system of deskilling. The skills they offer do not subtract from the worker's autonomous control over when and how to apply them; as the point is made in training, "It will be up to you to decide how to handle any given problem on line."

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How were the magazines handed out? With a smile? With a sincere smile? The fact that trainers work hard at making a tough job easier and at making travel generally more pleasant only makes this element of deskilling harder to see. The fact that their training manuals are prepared for them and that they are not themselves entirely free to "tell it like it is" only illustrates again how deskilling is the outcome of specialization and standardization. Sensing this, most of the flight attendants I observed were concerned to establish that theirs was an honorable profession requiring a mastery of "real" skills.

Riding for Deliveroo: Resistance in the New Economy by Callum Cant

Airbnb, algorithmic management, call centre, capitalist realism, collective bargaining, deskilling, Elon Musk, fixed-gear, future of work, gamification, gig economy, housing crisis, illegal immigration, independent contractor, information asymmetry, invention of the steam engine, machine readable, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, new economy, Pearl River Delta, race to the bottom, ride hailing / ride sharing, scientific management, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, strikebreaker, tech worker, union organizing, Winter of Discontent, women in the workforce

All the previous examples of successful organizing I knew of, such as the IWGB courier branch, or those who organized with the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) in Chicago in the early 2000s, had relied on a subcultural courier community to create a sense of solidarity.3 Workers knew each other because they had all participated in these mad cross-city courier races, gone to the same pubs, used the same bike shops, and been part of a common social scene. But that wasn’t the case for us. We were an undifferentiated mass of deskilled labour. Small groups of workers did have things in common, but it was rare you found something apart from bikes and working conditions you could all chat about. Trade unionists involved in the original London dispute told me that the groups which had started the strike there met outside of work in one of two places: either Gabber raves or Friday prayers.

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In order to do so, managers needed to understand the labour process at least as well as the workers who currently dominated it. Taylor’s thesis was that, by making management more scientific, its effectiveness could be improved.2 Harry Braverman, a Marxist intellectual, identified Taylor’s system of scientific management as having two processes at its core: ‘work intensification’ and ‘deskilling’3 – that is to say, making workers work harder, and reducing workers’ control over their own work. These two processes remain the fundamental strategies of capitalist management today. So, when we are discussing a job, we’re also discussing a specific conflict. It’s a conflict between the strategies of resistance developed by the workers and the system of control developed by the boss.

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It’s important to understand these developments first, so that we can understand the way in which workers reacted with their own strategic resistance. So, the rest of this chapter focuses on explaining and analysing the ways in which indeterminate labour-power is managed by Deliveroo’s system of control in order to intensify work, deskill labour, and cut costs. Algorithmic Management One thing was obvious to me, as soon as I started working for Deliveroo: it was great not having a supervisor. There was no one breathing down my neck, telling me to go faster, do this, do that. When I’d worked in a hotel kitchen, I couldn’t lounge about.

Arriving Today: From Factory to Front Door -- Why Everything Has Changed About How and What We Buy by Christopher Mims

air freight, Airbnb, Amazon Robotics, Amazon Web Services, Apollo 11, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, big-box store, blue-collar work, Boeing 747, book scanning, business logic, business process, call centre, cloud computing, company town, coronavirus, cotton gin, COVID-19, creative destruction, data science, Dava Sobel, deep learning, dematerialisation, deskilling, digital twin, Donald Trump, easy for humans, difficult for computers, electronic logging device, Elon Musk, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, gentrification, gig economy, global pandemic, global supply chain, guest worker program, Hans Moravec, heat death of the universe, hive mind, Hyperloop, immigration reform, income inequality, independent contractor, industrial robot, interchangeable parts, intermodal, inventory management, Jacquard loom, Jeff Bezos, Jessica Bruder, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Joseph Schumpeter, Kaizen: continuous improvement, Kanban, Kiva Systems, level 1 cache, Lewis Mumford, lockdown, lone genius, Lyft, machine readable, Malacca Straits, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, minimum wage unemployment, Nomadland, Ocado, operation paperclip, Panamax, Pearl River Delta, planetary scale, pneumatic tube, polynesian navigation, post-Panamax, random stow, ride hailing / ride sharing, robot derives from the Czech word robota Czech, meaning slave, Rodney Brooks, rubber-tired gantry crane, scientific management, self-driving car, sensor fusion, Shenzhen special economic zone , Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, six sigma, skunkworks, social distancing, South China Sea, special economic zone, spinning jenny, standardized shipping container, Steve Jobs, supply-chain management, surveillance capitalism, TED Talk, the scientific method, Tim Cook: Apple, Toyota Production System, traveling salesman, Turing test, two-sided market, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, Upton Sinclair, vertical integration, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, workplace surveillance

“Whether a customer, be that Amazon or Walgreens, says you have to pick 800 items an hour or 300 an hour, that’s a function of the type of inventory you’re handling, and management philosophy,” says Mick. If one of the hallmarks of Fordism and mass production is the process of making tasks so simple that anyone can do them with almost no training, a process known as “de-skilling,” then the factory-like supply chain of Amazon is Fordism on a whole new level. Indeed, without de-skilling, Amazon could not exist. De-skilling is what makes it possible for Amazon to continue to function despite relatively high rates of turnover. It’s also what makes it possible for the company to hire hundreds of thousands of seasonal employees every year and, whatever their background, turn them into productive associates within a day or two.

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In the same way, the genius of Amazon is that all you need to possess in order to work in one of its warehouses are sensorimotor skills most people acquired by the time they’re in grade school. De-skilling and higher wages aren’t just a good way for Amazon to staff up as it rapidly grows. They’re also, arguably, absolute necessities in a tight labor market. Just before Amazon announced its $15-an-hour wage, the official unemployment rate in the United States dipped below 4 percent. Once the pandemic hit and Amazon needed to hire at a record pace, de-skilling was even more important, because it meant the company could take on almost anyone. Even with jobs that require little in terms of skills, Amazon faces the challenge that as it expands its network of fulfillment centers, many others are doing the same, and often in the same areas.

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It was a huge departure from the difficult process of casting that preceded it, which required that trained patternmakers, the role in which Frederick Taylor originally found himself, craft shapes from wood and then hand them off to other skilled craftsmen who would use them to make an impression in sand that could be filled with molten iron. Economists call the process of replacing experienced craftspeople with machines that can be run by more easily trained workers “deskilling,” and it’s integral to the modern economy. From preparing a meal in a fast-food joint to driving for Uber, countless careers that used to require a significant amount of experience and skill have now been turned into jobs that require hardly any at all. From the beginning of the twentieth century to 1915, adherents of Taylorism brought his methods to nearly 200 American businesses.

Only Humans Need Apply: Winners and Losers in the Age of Smart Machines by Thomas H. Davenport, Julia Kirby

"World Economic Forum" Davos, AI winter, Amazon Robotics, Andy Kessler, Apollo Guidance Computer, artificial general intelligence, asset allocation, Automated Insights, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, behavioural economics, business intelligence, business process, call centre, carbon-based life, Clayton Christensen, clockwork universe, commoditize, conceptual framework, content marketing, dark matter, data science, David Brooks, deep learning, deliberate practice, deskilling, digital map, disruptive innovation, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, Edward Lloyd's coffeehouse, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, estate planning, financial engineering, fixed income, flying shuttle, follow your passion, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane: The New Division of Labor, Freestyle chess, game design, general-purpose programming language, global pandemic, Google Glasses, Hans Lippershey, haute cuisine, income inequality, independent contractor, index fund, industrial robot, information retrieval, intermodal, Internet of things, inventory management, Isaac Newton, job automation, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joi Ito, Khan Academy, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, lifelogging, longitudinal study, loss aversion, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, Narrative Science, natural language processing, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, nuclear winter, off-the-grid, pattern recognition, performance metric, Peter Thiel, precariat, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, Ray Kurzweil, Richard Feynman, risk tolerance, Robert Shiller, robo advisor, robotic process automation, Rodney Brooks, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, six sigma, Skype, social intelligence, speech recognition, spinning jenny, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, strong AI, superintelligent machines, supply-chain management, tacit knowledge, tech worker, TED Talk, the long tail, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Works Progress Administration, Zipcar

That is undeniably a rare talent, but it’s probably not something anyone explicitly trained for, let alone did a residency in. We should pause here to mention the threat of “deskilling,” since the physician advisor’s evolution is such a prime example of it. The term, first coined by the Marxist sociologist Harry Braverman, is commonly used to describe both what automation does to jobs and what it does to the labor force. The jobs are deskilled when technologies are introduced that no longer require workers to have formerly necessary skills—meaning that semiskilled or unskilled workers can now hold those jobs. In turn, the labor force is deskilled when, enough machines having taken over a particular task, the skill becomes a “lost art” to people.

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A simple example courtesy of a 2014 survey of Britons: 40 percent of them admitted to relying completely on autocorrect technology to get their spelling right in daily correspondence—and more than half of those say if they were forced to go without spellcheck, they would “panic.” Yet 90 percent say it is still “absolutely crucial” for children to learn to spell properly.3 For Braverman, and many thinkers since, deskilling is a very dangerous phenomenon. As early as 1974, he was already predicting its inevitable creep into knowledge work, and worrying about the emergence of a “white collar proletariat.” We do expect deskilling to accelerate as computers take on more knowledge work tasks. Imagine the art of teaching, for example. Today a teacher in an elementary grade performs a number of important educational functions.

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There are already technologies that can read CT scans and MRIs and seize upon the likely lesions that may mean cancer. They highlight the suspicious spots with prominent brackets so that any doctor or nurse can see the problem. Looking ahead, as the prices of imaging devices continue to fall, the day will come when every family doctor’s office has one—thoroughly deskilling the interpretation of radiologic findings. Aunt Minnie is rolling over in her grave. Not surprisingly, the number of medical students applying for radiology internships in the United States has been dropping steadily over the past several years. But again, there are still parts of what is today a radiologist’s job in a hospital setting that no machine can perform.

Rule of the Robots: How Artificial Intelligence Will Transform Everything by Martin Ford

AI winter, Airbnb, algorithmic bias, algorithmic trading, Alignment Problem, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, artificial general intelligence, Automated Insights, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, basic income, Big Tech, big-box store, call centre, carbon footprint, Chris Urmson, Claude Shannon: information theory, clean water, cloud computing, commoditize, computer age, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, coronavirus, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, data is the new oil, data science, deep learning, deepfake, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, deskilling, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, factory automation, fake news, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, George Floyd, gig economy, Gini coefficient, global pandemic, Googley, GPT-3, high-speed rail, hype cycle, ImageNet competition, income inequality, independent contractor, industrial robot, informal economy, information retrieval, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, Law of Accelerating Returns, license plate recognition, low interest rates, low-wage service sector, Lyft, machine readable, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, Mitch Kapor, natural language processing, Nick Bostrom, Northpointe / Correctional Offender Management Profiling for Alternative Sanctions, Ocado, OpenAI, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, passive income, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, Phillips curve, post scarcity, public intellectual, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, remote working, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Gordon, Rodney Brooks, Rubik’s Cube, Sam Altman, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, social distancing, SoftBank, South of Market, San Francisco, special economic zone, speech recognition, stealth mode startup, Stephen Hawking, superintelligent machines, TED Talk, The Future of Employment, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, the scientific method, Turing machine, Turing test, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, very high income, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, Y Combinator

Now drivers with no knowledge of London streets whatsoever, but access to a smartphone, are able to compete directly, and the onslaught from ride-sharing services and other taxi-like options has had a dramatic and negative impact on the livelihoods of London taxi drivers. In general, de-skilling acts to push down wages by making the job accessible to people will little or no training or experience, while at the same time making workers more interchangeable. This in turn allows businesses to tolerate high turnover rates and further undermines the bargaining power of workers. As both automation and de-skilling progress, there is every reason to expect that inequality will grow and that the fruits of innovation will continue to accrue increasingly to the top of the income distribution.

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And, as we’ll see, there are very good reasons to believe that the coronavirus pandemic and the associated economic downturn will accelerate the impact of artificial intelligence on the job market. Even if we set aside the complete elimination of jobs through automation, technology is already affecting the job market in other ways that should concern us. Middle class jobs are at risk of being deskilled, so that a low-wage worker with little training, but who is augmented by technology, can step into a role that once would have commanded a higher wage. People are increasingly working under the control of algorithms that monitor or pace their work, in effect treating them like virtual robots. Many of the new opportunities being created are in the “gig” economy, where workers typically have unpredictable hours and incomes.

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The company reportedly spent nearly a billion dollars on the machines in 2019 and expected to install them in nearly all its U.S. locations.36 The automated kiosks are already ubiquitous in McDonald’s European restaurants. The jobs in the back of the restaurant cooking and preparing food are also likely to see increased automation in the near future. These jobs have already been largely deskilled and divided into a series of highly routine tasks. This is part of an industry strategy to keep wages low and adapt to employee turnover rates that were as high as 150 percent in 2019.37 The mechanized nature of these jobs makes it highly feasible to gradually substitute automated machines for workers.

Work Won't Love You Back: How Devotion to Our Jobs Keeps Us Exploited, Exhausted, and Alone by Sarah Jaffe

Ada Lovelace, air traffic controllers' union, Amazon Mechanical Turk, antiwork, barriers to entry, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, big-box store, Black Lives Matter, blue-collar work, Boris Johnson, call centre, capitalist realism, Charles Babbage, collective bargaining, coronavirus, COVID-19, deindustrialization, delayed gratification, dematerialisation, desegregation, deskilling, do what you love, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, emotional labour, feminist movement, Ferguson, Missouri, financial independence, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, future of work, gamification, gender pay gap, gentrification, George Floyd, gig economy, global pandemic, Grace Hopper, green new deal, hiring and firing, illegal immigration, immigration reform, informal economy, job automation, job satisfaction, job-hopping, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, late capitalism, lockdown, lone genius, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, mass incarceration, means of production, mini-job, minimum wage unemployment, move fast and break things, Naomi Klein, new economy, oil shock, Peter Thiel, post-Fordism, post-work, precariat, profit motive, Rana Plaza, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, Rosa Parks, school choice, Silicon Valley, social distancing, Steve Jobs, TaskRabbit, tech billionaire, tech worker, traumatic brain injury, uber lyft, union organizing, universal basic income, unpaid internship, W. E. B. Du Bois, wages for housework, War on Poverty, WeWork, women in the workforce, work culture , workplace surveillance , Works Progress Administration

Burnout, associated, in particular, with the millennial generation, in the case of retail workers, could be the exhaustion that comes from convincing oneself over and over again that low-wage work is fun and fulfilling, even if not deserving of higher wages. 40 And now even emotional labor, rarely recognized as requiring skill in the first place, is undergoing its own process of deskilling. Big-box stores like Walmart and Target give workers scripts to follow when they interact with customers, foreclosing their own ability to make decisions, and secret shoppers might also check to see how closely workers follow such a script. Such deskilling itself seems once again to point toward full automation, but in the moment, it’s just another tactic of control. 41 The coronavirus pandemic accelerated many of the trends already existing in retail.

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13 WHERE TEACHERS HAD AT FIRST BEEN EXPECTED TO CARE FOR THEIR students, once they’d unionized, administrators found such caring workers unruly. Instead of saints, they had become hell-raisers. School officials began to look to the new “science” of management, Frederick Winslow Taylor’s ideas about compartmentalizing and deskilling work, to control their troublesome workers. Teachers’ interpersonal skills had never been recognized as such, and now those skills were being defined out of existence entirely. Standardized testing, the bête noire of today’s teachers’ unions, first arose at this time, along with the idea of tracking students by class background into vocational or more elite programs. 14 With the advent of the first Red Scare, after the Communist revolution in Russia, administrators found a new way to control educators who might have ideas about running schools.

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The language that Education Secretary Arne Duncan and his allies in the now-sprawling private education reform industry used was “putting students first,” the implication being that selfish teachers and their unions did the exact opposite. 38 Yet these reforms were designed in fact to produce less-caring teachers. Whether it was bringing in short-term outsider teachers, from programs like Teach for America, or imposing weeks of standardized testing, the reformers deskilled teachers while denying they were doing so. After all, teachers’ concern and care had never been recognized as skills to begin with. They were just attributes of naturally caring workers. 39 Schools are the hinge point of neoliberalism, a place where it has been imposed and where the blame is placed for its harms.

Rise of the Robots: Technology and the Threat of a Jobless Future by Martin Ford

3D printing, additive manufacturing, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, AI winter, algorithmic management, algorithmic trading, Amazon Mechanical Turk, artificial general intelligence, assortative mating, autonomous vehicles, banking crisis, basic income, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, Bernie Madoff, Bill Joy: nanobots, bond market vigilante , business cycle, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, Charles Babbage, Chris Urmson, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, computer age, creative destruction, data science, debt deflation, deep learning, deskilling, digital divide, disruptive innovation, diversified portfolio, driverless car, Erik Brynjolfsson, factory automation, financial innovation, Flash crash, Ford Model T, Fractional reserve banking, Freestyle chess, full employment, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Gunnar Myrdal, High speed trading, income inequality, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, informal economy, iterative process, Jaron Lanier, job automation, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John von Neumann, Kenneth Arrow, Khan Academy, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, large language model, liquidity trap, low interest rates, low skilled workers, low-wage service sector, Lyft, machine readable, machine translation, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, McJob, moral hazard, Narrative Science, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Norbert Wiener, obamacare, optical character recognition, passive income, Paul Samuelson, performance metric, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, post scarcity, precision agriculture, price mechanism, public intellectual, Ray Kurzweil, rent control, rent-seeking, reshoring, RFID, Richard Feynman, Robert Solow, Rodney Brooks, Salesforce, Sam Peltzman, secular stagnation, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley billionaire, Silicon Valley startup, single-payer health, software is eating the world, sovereign wealth fund, speech recognition, Spread Networks laid a new fibre optics cable between New York and Chicago, stealth mode startup, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, strong AI, Stuxnet, technological singularity, telepresence, telepresence robot, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Coming Technological Singularity, The Future of Employment, the long tail, Thomas L Friedman, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, uber lyft, union organizing, Vernor Vinge, very high income, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, women in the workforce

In any case, production of yachts and Ferraris will increasingly be automated. And how many personal trainers and celebrity chefs do the .01 percent really need? * This “fast food effect” may loom large for skilled workers in many other fields. Long before robots are able to completely replace these workers, technology may deskill the jobs and drive wages down. A classic example of deskilling involves London taxi drivers. Entering this profession requires memorizing an extraordinary amount of information about London’s street layout. This is referred to as “The Knowledge” and has been required of cab drivers since 1865. Neuroscientist Eleanor Maguire of University College London found that all this memorization actually resulted in changes to the drivers’ brains: London cabbies, on average, developed a larger memory center (or hippocampus) than people in other occupations.

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As of 2012, average hourly wages for college graduates were more than 80 percent higher than the wages of high school graduates.40 The college wage premium is a reflection of what economists call “skill biased technological change” (SBTC).* The general idea behind SBTC is that information technology has automated or deskilled much of the work handled by less educated workers, while simultaneously increasing the relative value of the more cognitively complex tasks typically performed by college graduates. Graduate and professional degrees convey still higher incomes, and in fact, since the turn of the century, things are looking quite a bit less rosy for young college graduates who don’t also have an advanced degree.

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This type of innovation had a different impact on workers; for those with the right skill set, computers increased their value, just as the innovations in the postwar era had done for nearly everyone. For many other workers, however, computers had a less positive effect. Some types of jobs began to be either destroyed entirely or deskilled, making workers less valuable—at least until they were able to retrain for jobs that leveraged computer technology. As information technology gained in importance, labor’s share of income gradually began to decline. Jet aircraft remained largely unchanged from the 1970s but increasingly used computers in their instrumentation and controls.

In the Age of the Smart Machine by Shoshana Zuboff

affirmative action, American ideology, blue-collar work, collective bargaining, computer age, Computer Numeric Control, conceptual framework, data acquisition, demand response, deskilling, factory automation, Ford paid five dollars a day, fudge factor, future of work, industrial robot, information retrieval, interchangeable parts, job automation, lateral thinking, linked data, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, old-boy network, optical character recognition, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, pneumatic tube, post-industrial society, radical decentralization, RAND corporation, scientific management, Shoshana Zuboff, social web, systems thinking, tacit knowledge, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, union organizing, vertical integration, work culture , zero-sum game

You just follow the keys. If in the cases of the benefits analysts and transfer assistants the primary effect of computerization was a reduction in opportunities for the exercise of already acquired know-how, then these cases would indeed conform to the typical pattern of craft deskilling as a result of automation. This component of deskilling does indeed appear to be amply accounted for both in the observations of the clerks and in the explicit intentions of their managers. However, computerization has transfigured these jobs in yet another way. These parallel effects illus- trate the discontinuity between clerical jobs that have retained some vestige of the managerial process, as reflected in the ongoing necessity for interpersonal coordination and communication, and clerical jobs that have been pushed more fully into the domain of actino-on, which demands little in the way of skill but makes considerable demands upon stamina.

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., 77 Class struggle, 283; see also Social strat- ification Clay-getting, 37 Clerical work, 215-16; computer- mediation of, 129-33; origins of, 98-99, 113-23; see also Office work Closed loop computer system, 253 Coal excavation, 37 Cobb, Jonathan, 239 Codification, 178-85 Cognitive activity: and the abstraction Index of industrial work, 73; in action- centered skills, 73, 75-76, 185-95; in intellective skills, 185-95,216- 17 Cohen, Patricia Cline, 447n 17 Collective activity, 197-200, 204, 206; and learning of crafts, 176-77 Collective bargaining, see Trade union movement; Unions Collective responsibility, 355-61 Commercial schools, Ill, 116, 232 Communication: clerk's role and, 118-19, 125; informal, in computer medium, 362-86; manager's role and, 101-3, 105, 361; organized, 101-2; in posthierarchical organi- zations, 400; shared context as re- quirement for, 196, 204-5; see also Oral culture; Social exchange; Writ- ten word Computer-aided design, 419-22 Computer-aided manufacturing, 419- 22 Computer-aided process planning, 421-22 Computer conferencing, 15-16, 1 79, 363-72 Computer-integrated manufacturing, 421-22 Computer phobia, 259 Computer systems, see Information technology Concentration, 132, 156, 171, 440n6 Confidentiality, 380 Conformity, see Anticipatory confor- mity; Obedience Congressional Office of Technology Assessment, 416, 420 Context-dependent skills, 61, 69, 106; see also Action-centered skills; Ac- tion context Continuous-process production, 20- 22; automation limited in, 59-60; scope of computer applications in, 418-19, 421; skill and effort in, 51- 53; social and psychological issues and, 51-56 Control, sense of, 51, 157; loss of, 62- 70, 132, 344-46; and prospect of Index socially integrated workplace, 404- 12; and visibility in computer me- dium, 344, 346 Control techniques, 313-14; impact of, 31 9-61; intensification of pro- duction and, 33; managerial author- ity maintained by, 313; uses of, 389, 392, 400, 404-5, 452nl0; see also Surveillance Conveyor belt, 47 Convicts and paupers, 225, 320 Corporal punishment, 225 Cost data, 253, 255-67, 372, 424-25 Cottage industries, 31, 227 Counterculture values, 241 Court society, 29-30, III Craft work: automation and, 51, 53- 54, 59; autonomy associated with, 41; deskilling of, 107, 113, 136, 215,283; effort as organized by, 45- 46; executive work as, 99-107; in- dustrialization and, 37-42; shared action necessary for learning, 176- 77; social integration stemming from, 41,50,53-54 Crossman, E. R. F. W., 52-53, 55, 94 Crozier, Michel, 11 7 Curtis Publishing Company, 118 Dartmouth College, 232 Darwin, Charles, 228 Data access policy, 356-61,385,392 Davis, James J., 40, 53 Decision-making role, 104-5 Deductive reasoning, 93 Defense Department studies, 415 Deskilling, 57, 215, 283; as paradigm of rationalization of work, 107; ra- tionalization of office work as ver- sion of, 113 Differential wage schemes, 43, 45, 50, 414 Discrete parts manufacturing, 418-21 Dismissals, 225, 326, 431n30 Dissent, 402-12 Division of labor, 45 5n 14; computer mediation of, 392-95; industrializa- 461 tion and, 37, 43; in socially inte- grated workplace, 404-12; urban- ization and, 25; see also Hierarchical authority; Management; Middle management Drucker, Peter, 108 Drug use, 6 Drunkenness, 32, 34-35 Eaton, Seymour, 100-101 Education, 207; and challenges to managerial authority, 240; class boundaries in industry rigidified by, 227-28,230-31,235-40; intellec- tive competence and, 443-44n28 IIElectronicese," 3 71 Electronic text, mastering, 1 74-218 Elias, Norbert, 26-28 Ellis, Havelock, 446n 1 5 Erasmus, 26 Errors, 138, 342, 415-16 Evaluation procedures, 294-95, 392; individual internalization of, 350 Executive secretaries, 122-23 Executive work, 436n 13, 441 n 10; as craft, 99-107; rationalization of, 98, 107-10, span of authority of, 452- 5 3n 15; see also Management Existential philosophies, 241 Expense tracking, 253, 255-67, 372, 424-25 Experience and the Creation of Meaning (Gendlin),423-24 Experience-based knowledge, 36-42 Eyestrain, 120, 141 Factories, early, 31- 36 Festinger, Leon, 450nl Field-research methodology, 14, 423- 29; data analysis, 428-29; data- gathering techniques, 426-27; in- terview procedures, 427-28 Financial services industry, 438n55; see also Banking industry Fines, 14-15,33-34,225 462 Flexible manufacturing systems, 420- 21 Follett, Mary Parker, 109, 11 7 Food and beverage industries, 419 Ford, Henry, 108 Ford Motor Company, 34, 47-48; Highland Park auto assembly plant, 47,69 Foremen, 35, 51,335,353 Fortune, 421 Foucault, Michel, 319-20, 452n9 Fox, Alan, 233 Fragmentation of tasks, 43, 47 Frames of Mind (Gardner), 193 Functional authority, 207-8 Functions of the Executive, The (Barnard), 101 Gallie, Duncan, 54 Galton, Francis, 446n 15 Gardner, Howard, 193-95, 206, 435n7 Garfinkle, Harold, 439n4 Gendlin, Eugene, 423, 454n9 General Electric, 122 General Foods, 242 General Motors, 420 Gerstenberg, Charles, 447n 1 7 Gilbreth, Frank, 42, 45 Gilligan, Carol, 428 Ginzberg, Eli, 236 G lassmaking, 38, 42 Goddard, H.

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The thinking this operator refers to is of a different quality from the thinking that attended the display of action-centered skills. It combines abstraction, explicit inference, and procedural reasoning. Taken to- gether, these elements make possible a new set of competencies that I 76 KNOWLEDGE AND COMPUTER-MEDIATED WORK call intellective skills. As long as the new technology signals only deskil- ling-the diminished importance of action-centered skills-there will be little probability of developing critical judgment at the data inter- face. To rekindle such judgment, though on a new, more abstract foot- ing, a reskilling process is required. Mastery in a computer-mediated environment depends upon developing intellective skills.

Green Economics: An Introduction to Theory, Policy and Practice by Molly Scott Cato

Albert Einstein, back-to-the-land, banking crisis, banks create money, basic income, Bretton Woods, Buy land – they’re not making it any more, carbon footprint, carbon tax, central bank independence, clean water, Community Supported Agriculture, congestion charging, corporate social responsibility, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, degrowth, deskilling, energy security, food miles, Food sovereignty, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, gender pay gap, green new deal, income inequality, informal economy, intentional community, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), job satisfaction, land bank, land reform, land value tax, Mahatma Gandhi, market fundamentalism, Money creation, mortgage debt, Multi Fibre Arrangement, passive income, peak oil, price stability, profit maximization, profit motive, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, reserve currency, Rupert Read, seminal paper, the built environment, The Spirit Level, Tobin tax, tontine, University of East Anglia, wikimedia commons

Such good work should meet three criteria: what it produces should be useful and necessary; it should allow the worker to fulfil his/her potential; and it should be within a cooperative workplace to allow us to make unselfish relationships. Schumacher considered that ‘this threefold function makes work so central to human life that it is truly impossible to conceive of life at the human level without work’.20 Deskilling and reskilling As long ago as 1974, Braverman discussed the way in which, in the industrialized economies, an increasing number of jobs were being ‘deskilled’, that is to say, craft and specialist knowledge was no longer required to perform them.21 62 GREEN ECONOMICS His was a Marxist analysis, and hence he couched his thesis in terms of the ‘proletarianization’ of labour, and its consequent reduced power for negotiating a fair share of the exchange value of the product.

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Intellectual roots: Greeks, socialists and anarchists Spiritual dimensions Key figures and ideas Challenging economics in the academy 17 18 19 21 30 3 Economics and Identity Sustainability values, not monetary value The guiding vision: Balance, not growth Economics and relationship Re-embedding economics in nature Not squaring the circle but closing the loop 35 35 38 41 45 47 PART II VISION FOR THE FUTURE 4 Work Will a green economy mean more work or less? Whose work is it anyway? Deskilling and reskilling Greening production and distribution 55 56 59 61 64 vi GREEN ECONOMICS 5 Money The politics of money Money and global injustice Money creation: Financially and ecologically unstable How money wastes people Local currencies for a localized world Conclusion 71 72 74 77 79 81 85 6 Green Business: From Maximizing Profits to a Vision of Conviviality Limitations of market and technological solutions Issues of scale and ownership Learning to switch the lights off Low-carbon growth as the flourishing of the convivial economy 89 90 92 95 98 PART III POLICIES FOR A GREEN ECONOMY 7 The Policy Context The ecological modernization discourse Policy responses to climate change What’s wrong with GDP?

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This represents a full 34 per cent of the total value of the UK food and drinks industry. At a deeper level, the international division of labour leaves us disempowered and useless, what Milani refers to as ‘cog-labour’, subject to decisions made by corporations about what we should consume and how it should be made.23 Within the globalized economy the process of deskilling has continued, with complex operations now performed by computers and more routine work outsourced or performed by low-paid, part-time staff. The quality of these jobs in the traditional sense of pay rates and terms and conditions of employment has declined radically; but so has their quality in terms of nurture of the human spirit.

The fortune at the bottom of the pyramid by C. K. Prahalad

"World Economic Forum" Davos, barriers to entry, business cycle, business process, call centre, cashless society, clean water, collective bargaining, corporate social responsibility, deskilling, digital divide, disintermediation, do well by doing good, farmers can use mobile phones to check market prices, financial intermediation, Hernando de Soto, hiring and firing, income inequality, information asymmetry, late fees, Mahatma Gandhi, market fragmentation, microcredit, new economy, profit motive, purchasing power parity, rent-seeking, shareholder value, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, time value of money, transaction costs, vertical integration, wealth creators, working poor

Both have, through careful consideration of process innovation, achieved the requirements we set forth for successful BOP innovations: price performance, scaling, innovative high-technology hybrids, and sustainable, ecologically friendly development. 7. Deskilling of Work In most BOP markets there is a shortage of talent. Work must, therefore, be deskilled. One of the major goals facing the developing world and, by implication, the developed world is active surveillance of the spread of infectious diseases. The spread of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Products and Services for the BOP Aravind 39 Amul Origination Use of more than 1000 eye camps around the “catchment area.”

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In BOP markets, the presence of a logistics infrastructure cannot be assumed. Often, innovation must focus on building a logistics infrastructure, including manufacturing that is sensitive to the prevailing conditions. Accessing potential consumers and educating them can also be a daunting task to the uninitiated. 7. Deskilling work is critical. Most BOP markets are poor in skills. The design of products and services must take into account the skill levels, poor infrastructure, and difficulty of access for service in remote areas. 8. Education of customers on product usage is key. Innovations in educating a semiliterate group on the use of new products can pose interesting challenges.

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They travel from all over India with their families to get treatment at Jaipur Foot but cannot afford boarding and lodging, much less stay for an extended time in a new location. The prosthetics must be custom-fitted in a day. From the perspective of Jaipur Foot, the prosthetics must be fitted with less than fully trained physicians, as there is a shortage of doctors and hospital space. The job of fitting a custom-developed artificial leg must be “deskilled.” On top of this, prices must be reasonable, as most clients are poor. They cannot afford the typical $7,000 to $8,000 per foot cost of prosthetics. At best they can afford $50. 36 The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid This might appear to be a daunting and impossible task. How can one develop a prosthetic that is more advanced in functionality, for 1/200 of the cost, can be custom-fitted by semiskilled paramedics in one visit (one day at the clinic), and last for a period of four to five years?

Inventing the Future: Postcapitalism and a World Without Work by Nick Srnicek, Alex Williams

3D printing, additive manufacturing, air freight, algorithmic trading, anti-work, antiwork, back-to-the-land, banking crisis, basic income, battle of ideas, blockchain, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, business cycle, call centre, capital controls, capitalist realism, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, centre right, collective bargaining, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, David Graeber, decarbonisation, deep learning, deindustrialization, deskilling, Doha Development Round, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, Ferguson, Missouri, financial independence, food miles, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, future of work, gender pay gap, general purpose technology, housing crisis, housing justice, income inequality, industrial robot, informal economy, intermodal, Internet Archive, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, late capitalism, liberation theology, Live Aid, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, market design, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, mass incarceration, means of production, megaproject, minimum wage unemployment, Modern Monetary Theory, Mont Pelerin Society, Murray Bookchin, neoliberal agenda, New Urbanism, Occupy movement, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, Overton Window, patent troll, pattern recognition, Paul Samuelson, Philip Mirowski, post scarcity, post-Fordism, post-work, postnationalism / post nation state, precariat, precautionary principle, price stability, profit motive, public intellectual, quantitative easing, reshoring, Richard Florida, rising living standards, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Ronald Reagan, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, Slavoj Žižek, social web, stakhanovite, Steve Jobs, surplus humans, synthetic biology, tacit knowledge, technological determinism, the built environment, The Chicago School, The Future of Employment, the long tail, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, universal basic income, wages for housework, warehouse automation, We are all Keynesians now, We are the 99%, women in the workforce, working poor, working-age population

Craftwork was transformed too, with machinery appearing as an alien intervention into the production process. Work that had traditionally been undertaken by a skilled labourer was now broken down into its deskilled constituent tasks, and often carried out using machinery.11 Workers became assigned to partial tasks, and tools that had once been governed by workers became machines that rhythmically conducted the labourers.12 Work became increasingly repetitive, deskilled and ruled by machinery – with greater demand for cheap unskilled labourers (particularly women and children).13 In the early twentieth century, this tendency began to shift with the introduction of technologies that eliminated the most routine and mundane of manual tasks (such as hauling and conveying goods).

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These subsistence economies produce goods for the market – small trinkets, for example – but they are organised as non-capitalist forms of production in that they do not seek to accumulate.39 These types of economies increasingly dominate the labour market of the developing world, ranging from 30 to 80 per cent of the working population in any given country.40 A third latent group exists primarily in pre-capitalist economic formations that can be readily mobilised into the capitalist labour market. This includes the reservoir of proto-proletarians (including peasants), but this group also includes unwaged domestic labourers, as well as salaried professionals who are under threat of being returned to the proletariat, often through deskilling (for example, medical professionals, lawyers and academics).41 The importance of this group is that it forms an additional reservoir of labour for capitalism when existing labour markets are tight.42 Finally, in addition to the other strata, a vast number of people are considered economically inactive (including the discouraged, the disabled and students).43 Overall, determining the precise size and nature of the global surplus population is difficult with existing data, and subject to fluctuations as individuals move in and out of categories, but a variety of measures converge to suggest it significantly outnumbers the active working class.44 This is the crisis of work that capitalism faces in the coming years and decades: a lack of formal or decent jobs for the growing numbers of the proletarian population.

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Skilled workers became increasingly necessary in overseeing the new machines, carrying out expanding service work, and managing the increasingly large firms that were emerging.14 The need for skilled labour was further amplified in the early twentieth century by the rise of office technologies – typewriters, photocopiers, and so on – that required relatively well-educated operators. In other words, technology is not uniformly deskilling, and the increased demand for skilled labour over the past century testifies to that.15 Over this period, manufacturing employment continued to decline, due to its susceptibility to productivity-enhancing technology.16 The automation of mass-production manufacturing in the early twentieth century was eventually extended, with the automation of small-batch manufacturing.17 While the industrial sector employed 1,000 robots in 1970, today it uses over 1.6 million robots.18 In terms of employment, manufacturing has reached a global saturation point.

Architects of Intelligence by Martin Ford

3D printing, agricultural Revolution, AI winter, algorithmic bias, Alignment Problem, AlphaGo, Apple II, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, barriers to entry, basic income, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, Bayesian statistics, Big Tech, bitcoin, Boeing 747, Boston Dynamics, business intelligence, business process, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, cloud computing, cognitive bias, Colonization of Mars, computer vision, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, correlation does not imply causation, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, DARPA: Urban Challenge, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, deskilling, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Douglas Hofstadter, driverless car, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ernest Rutherford, fake news, Fellow of the Royal Society, Flash crash, future of work, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, gig economy, Google X / Alphabet X, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hans Moravec, Hans Rosling, hype cycle, ImageNet competition, income inequality, industrial research laboratory, industrial robot, information retrieval, job automation, John von Neumann, Large Hadron Collider, Law of Accelerating Returns, life extension, Loebner Prize, machine translation, Mark Zuckerberg, Mars Rover, means of production, Mitch Kapor, Mustafa Suleyman, natural language processing, new economy, Nick Bostrom, OpenAI, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, optical character recognition, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, phenotype, Productivity paradox, radical life extension, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, Robert Gordon, Rodney Brooks, Sam Altman, self-driving car, seminal paper, sensor fusion, sentiment analysis, Silicon Valley, smart cities, social intelligence, sparse data, speech recognition, statistical model, stealth mode startup, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Pinker, strong AI, superintelligent machines, synthetic biology, systems thinking, Ted Kaczynski, TED Talk, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, theory of mind, Thomas Bayes, Travis Kalanick, Turing test, universal basic income, Wall-E, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, women in the workforce, working-age population, workplace surveillance , zero-sum game, Zipcar

However, we could also have the other end of the spectrum, where if the person’s being complemented by a machine—even if the machine is only 30% of the work, but the machine is doing all the value-added portion of that work—then what’s left over for the human being is deskilled or less complex. That can lead to lower wages because now many more people can do those tasks that previously required specialized skills, or required a certification. That means that what you’ve done by introducing machines into that occupation could potentially put pressure on wages in that occupation. This idea of complementing work has this wide range of potential outcomes, and we tend just to celebrate the one end of the result spectrum, and not talk as much about the other, deskilled, end of the spectrum. This by the way also increases the challenge of reskilling on an ongoing basis as people work alongside ever evolving and increasingly capable machines.

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There are many examples of service work and service technician work, whether it’s through the call center, or even people physically showing up to done on-site repairs, where some portions of that work are going through this massive deskilling—because the knowledge is embedded in either technology, or scripts, or some other way to encapsulate the knowledge required to solve the problem. In the end, what’s left over is something much more deskilled. MARTIN FORD: So, it sounds like overall, you’re more concerned about the impact on wages than outright unemployment? JAMES MANYIKA: Of course you always worry about unemployment, because you can always have this corner-case scenario that could play out, which results in a game over for us as far as employment is concerned.

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It seems as though we’re at an inflection point today, where there are soon going to be tools that are able to automate a much broader range of tasks than anything in the past. These tools will replace cognitive and intellectual tasks, and not just manual work. Is there potential for lots of job losses, deskilling of jobs, depressed wages, and so forth? FEI-FEI LI: I don’t pretend to be an economist, but capitalism is one form of human societal order and it is what, 100 years old? What I’m saying is that no one can predict that capitalism is the only form of human society going forward; nor can anyone predict how technology is going to morph in that future society.

Platform Capitalism by Nick Srnicek

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, additive manufacturing, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, Big Tech, Californian Ideology, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, cloud computing, collaborative economy, collective bargaining, data science, deindustrialization, deskilling, Didi Chuxing, digital capitalism, digital divide, disintermediation, driverless car, Ford Model T, future of work, gig economy, independent contractor, Infrastructure as a Service, Internet of things, Jean Tirole, Jeff Bezos, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, liquidity trap, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, mittelstand, multi-sided market, natural language processing, Network effects, new economy, Oculus Rift, offshore financial centre, pattern recognition, platform as a service, quantitative easing, RFID, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Gordon, Salesforce, self-driving car, sharing economy, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, software as a service, surveillance capitalism, TaskRabbit, the built environment, total factor productivity, two-sided market, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, unconventional monetary instruments, unorthodox policies, vertical integration, warehouse robotics, Zipcar

This was the source of capitalism’s immense dynamism, as capitalists tend to increase labour productivity constantly and to outdo one another in generating profits efficiently. But technology is also central to capitalism for other reasons, which we will examine in more detail later on. It has often been used to deskill workers and undermine the power of skilled labourers (though there are countertendencies towards reskilling as well).3 These deskilling technologies enable cheaper and more pliable workers to come in and replace the skilled ones, as well as transferring the mental processes of work to management rather than leaving it in the hands of workers on the shop floor. Behind these technical changes, however, lies competition and struggle – both between classes, in their struggle to gain strength at one another’s expense, and between capitalists, in their efforts to lower the costs of production below the social average.

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These factories were oriented towards mass production, top-down managerial control, and a ‘just in case’ approach that demanded extra workers and extra inventories in case of surges in demand. The labour process was organised along Taylorist principles, which sought to break tasks down into smaller deskilled pieces and to reorganise them in the most efficient way; and workers were gathered together in large numbers in single factories. This gave rise to the mass worker, capable of developing a collective identity on the basis of fellow workers’ sharing in the same conditions. Workers in this period were represented by trade unions that reached a balance with capital and repressed more radical initiatives.5 Collective bargaining ensured that wages grew at a healthy pace, and workers were increasingly bundled into manufacturing industries with relatively permanent jobs, high wages, and guaranteed pensions.

The New Division of Labor: How Computers Are Creating the Next Job Market by Frank Levy, Richard J. Murnane

Atul Gawande, business cycle, call centre, computer age, Computer Numeric Control, correlation does not imply causation, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deskilling, digital divide, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane: The New Division of Labor, Gunnar Myrdal, hypertext link, index card, information asymmetry, job automation, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, low skilled workers, low-wage service sector, PalmPilot, pattern recognition, profit motive, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, speech recognition, tacit knowledge, talking drums, telemarketer, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, working poor

., electrical engineering is one of sixteen major engineering occupations classified in BLS statistics). 44 CHAPTER 3 The shift that Jeremy Rifkin feared, a “deskilled” occupational structure, requires that the total number of low-skilled jobs ( janitors plus security guards plus food preparation and service workers, etc.) increases more than the total number of higher-skilled jobs (lawyers plus doctors plus electrical engineers plus mechanical engineers, and so on). These totals are the kind of occupational categories displayed in figure 3.2, where the food preparation and service workers are included in Service Occupations. Once we move from individual job titles to occupational categories, the evidence of deskilling disappears. Between 1969 and 1999, the number of adults employed as Service Workers grew from 11.6 percent to 13.9 percent of the adult work force, but Managers, Administrators, Professional Workers, and Technicians taken together—the highest paid categories—grew from 23 percent to 33 percent.

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This page intentionally left blank INDEX Abate, Gary, 79 accountability, in education reform, 134–36 accountants, 36–37 Ad Hoc Committee on the Triple Revolution, 1–2, 5, 35 after-school programs, 142 agriculture, 36–37, 102–3 aircraft design, 31–33 anti-theft car alarm, 71–72 assembly line, 15, 20–21 assessment: as component of educational standards, 135–36; in computer skills training, 123 AT&T, 99–100 ATM machines, 21 attorneys, 90–92 Autor, David, 47, 52 auto repair, 57–58, 60, 62–63, 71–72, 103–4 banking, 21, 52–53, 72–75 Basic Blue (IBM), 110–20, 128–30 behavior, modifying, in management training, 117 Behrens, John, 123, 125 Being Fluent with Information Technology (National Research Council), 107 Belous, Alex, 121, 124 Blois, Marsden, 61 body language, 29, 86–88, 91 Boeing, 31–34 bond trading, 13–14, 24 Boston, standards-based education reform in, 136–38 Boston Plan for Excellence, 137, 147 “bridge to sales,” 100–101 Brown, John Seely, 60, 94 Buckner, Tom and Rozann, 65–66 Burtless, Gary, 152 Bush, George, 134 “Cabot Bank,” 52–53, 72–75 call centers, 3, 100–102, 151 case-based reasoning, and creative thinking, 23, 59, 166n.1 Casey, Jonna, 142 CATIA computer assisted design software, 32–33 change: pace of, 101–3; three-step process of, 33–34 170 chess playing, 7, 22, 58–59 circuit boards, 78–81 Cisco Academy Training Centers, 124 Cisco Certified Networking Associate, 127–28 Cisco Learning Institute, 124 Cisco Networking Academies, 120–30 Cisco Systems, 120–30 class issue, 154–55 classroom time, 122–25, 130 Clinton, Bill, 134 coaching, for teachers, 137 cognitive tutors, computer-based, 82 Collaborative Coaching and Learning, 137 collaborative learning, 113 college graduates, wages of, 6, 44–47, 134, 154, 162n.15 combine harvester, 36 “Common Core of Learning,” 135 comparative advantage, principle of, 35–36, 47, 159n.5 compensation, for lower income families, 155 competitive advantage, 34 competitive strategies, 32–33, 43, 101 complementarity, with human labor, 14, 29–30, 34, 68, 94–95, 105 complex communication, 5–6, 9, 28–29, 47–49, 54, 76–81, 92–95, 104, 107–8, 150–51; teaching of, 109–20, 128–30, 132–33, 147–48, 156–57 computer-assisted design and manufacturing, 31–33, 79 Computerized Circuit Design (CCD), 78–81 computer prices, 105–6 computer skills, 105–8, 120–28 content, as component of educational standards, 134 context, 25, 85 conversation, and complex communication, 79–82 Cooper, Andy, 66–68 “The Corporation: Will It Be Managed by Machines?” (Simon), 8–9, 35–36, 38–39 cost savings, 33 cross-selling, 67 Current Population Survey, 44 curriculum development, 118, 121–24 customer service, 83–84, 99–101, 150–51, 164n.9 Dame, Ed, 79 Dassault Systèmes, 32–33 INDEX database, computerized, 70, 72, 84, 100–102, 150 deGroot, Andreas, 58–59 deskilling, 44 Desktop Underwriter, 17–18, 25 Deutsche Bourse (Frankfurt), 13 diagnostic process, 57–58, 60–62 Dictionary of Occupational Titles (DOT) (U.S. Department of Labor), 49, 52 digital divide, 105–8 DiNardo, John, 107 diplomacy, 91 distance learning, 113–14, 117 division of labor, 73; use of term, 2, 159n.2 “Dorsey, Carol,” 116 Dreyfus, Stuart, 22; and Hubert Dreyfus, 160n.12 Drucker, Peter, 38, 41; Practice of Management, 7–8 Duguid, Paul, 60, 94 earnings gap.

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., Transforming Traditional Agriculture, 102 scientific management, 93 secretary, 4 securities industry, 13–14, 24, 36–37, 53, 85–89, 164n.12 security guard, 41–42 self-selection, 129 shipping, computerized, 33 Silver, Dr. Jeff, 60–61 “Simmons, Mary,” 99–102, 106, 150–51 Simon, Herbert, 20, 63, 149; “The Corporation: Will It Be Managed by Machines?” 8–9, 35– 36, 38–39 simulations, 113, 127 skills, workers’, 34, 47–52. See also deskilling Smith, Adam, 2; Wealth of Nations, 73 software design, 109–10 Soltis, Jim, 110, 112, 114, 116–17 solutions, documenting. See problem documentation speech recognition software, 3, 25–26, 85, 151, 160n.10 speed, and competitiveness, 81 standards, educational, 134–35. See also education reform, standards-based 173 stockbrokers, 13–14, 24, 53, 85–89, 164n.12 substitution, for human labor, 14–15, 18, 24, 29–30, 34, 43, 54, 94, 134, 150–52 “Sylvan, Frank,” 89–92 task change, 50–53 tasks: nonroutine manual, 48, 50; routine, 37– 38, 41–42; routine cognitive, 48–52, 54; routine manual, 48, 50, 54 Taylor, Frederick, 93 Taylor, William, 144–45 teachers, 77–78, 137, 144; for computer skills training, 123–25; elementary school, 132–33; for management training, 118 teaching, 81–82; of complex communication, 109–20, 128–30, 132–33, 147–48, 156–57; of expert thinking, 120–30, 132–33, 147–48, 156–57 technicians, 38, 41, 43; auto, 57–58, 60, 62–63, 71–72, 103–4; computer programmers, 151– 52; office machine, 59–60, 69 telecommunications industry, 99–102 telegraph, 15, 160n.3 testing, standardized, 104–5, 135–36, 138–46, 148 tracking, in corporate training, 113–14, 119 trade restrictions, 154 trainers.

Postcapitalism: A Guide to Our Future by Paul Mason

air traffic controllers' union, Alan Greenspan, Alfred Russel Wallace, bank run, banking crisis, banks create money, Basel III, basic income, Bernie Madoff, Bill Gates: Altair 8800, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, business cycle, business process, butterfly effect, call centre, capital controls, carbon tax, Cesare Marchetti: Marchetti’s constant, Claude Shannon: information theory, collaborative economy, collective bargaining, commons-based peer production, Corn Laws, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, credit crunch, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, David Graeber, deglobalization, deindustrialization, deskilling, discovery of the americas, disinformation, Downton Abbey, drone strike, en.wikipedia.org, energy security, eurozone crisis, factory automation, false flag, financial engineering, financial repression, Firefox, Fractional reserve banking, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, game design, Glass-Steagall Act, green new deal, guns versus butter model, Herbert Marcuse, income inequality, inflation targeting, informal economy, information asymmetry, intangible asset, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Perry Barlow, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, late capitalism, low interest rates, low skilled workers, market clearing, means of production, Metcalfe's law, microservices, middle-income trap, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, mortgage debt, Network effects, new economy, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, Norbert Wiener, Occupy movement, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, Paul Samuelson, payday loans, Pearl River Delta, post-industrial society, power law, precariat, precautionary principle, price mechanism, profit motive, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, reserve currency, RFID, Richard Stallman, Robert Gordon, Robert Metcalfe, scientific management, secular stagnation, sharing economy, Stewart Brand, structural adjustment programs, supply-chain management, technological determinism, The Future of Employment, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Transnistria, Twitter Arab Spring, union organizing, universal basic income, urban decay, urban planning, vertical integration, Vilfredo Pareto, wages for housework, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, Yochai Benkler

No previous generation has ever been exposed to such an extraordinary acceleration of technical power over reality, with corresponding social changes and ethical responsibilities.’36 It was the increase in computing power that enabled a complex global finance system. It underpinned the growth of the money supply as digital systems replaced the need for cash. It enabled the physical redistribution of production and supply to the emerging markets, where labour was cheap. It de-skilled the engineering worker, made the labour of semi-skilled workers redundant and accelerated the growth of low-skilled service work. But though info-tech has become, as Floridi writes, ‘the characteristic technology of our time’, its emergence takes the form of a disappearing act. Mainframes are born then disappear to be replaced by servers, which also disappear from corporate HQs and now sit in vast air-conditioned sheds elsewhere.

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When the golden age stalls, it is often because euphoria has produced sectoral over-investment, or inflation, or a hubristic war led by the dominant powers. There is usually a traumatic ‘break point’ – where uncertainty over the future of business models, currency arrangements and global stability becomes general. Now the first adaptation begins: there is an attack on wages and an attempt to de-skill the workforce. Redistribution projects, such as the welfare state or the public provision of urban infrastructure, come under pressure. Business models evolve rapidly in order to grab what profit there is; the state is urged to organize more rapid change. Recessions become more frequent. If the initial attempt to adapt fails (as it did in the 1830s, 1870s and 1920s), capital retreats from the productive sector and into the finance system, so that crises assume a more overtly financial form.

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When we look closely at social history, each ‘failed adaptation’ phase happens because of working-class resistance; each successful one is organized by the state. During the first long wave, roughly between 1790 and 1848 in Britain, you have an industrial economy trapped within an aristocratic state. A prolonged crisis begins in the late 1820s, characterized by the factory owners’ determination to survive by de-skilling the workforce and cutting wages, and also by chaos in the banking system. Working-class resistance – the Chartist movement culminating in the General Strike of 1842 – forces the state to stabilize the economy. But in the 1840s a successful adaptation takes place: the Bank of England gains a monopoly over the issue of banknotes; factory legislation ends the dream of replacing the skilled male workers with women and children.

Seventeen Contradictions and the End of Capitalism by David Harvey

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Alvin Toffler, bitcoin, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, business climate, California gold rush, call centre, central bank independence, Charles Babbage, classic study, clean water, cloud computing, collapse of Lehman Brothers, colonial rule, company town, cotton gin, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, death from overwork, deindustrialization, demographic dividend, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, drone strike, end world poverty, falling living standards, fiat currency, first square of the chessboard, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, Food sovereignty, Frank Gehry, future of work, gentrification, global reserve currency, Great Leap Forward, Guggenheim Bilbao, Gunnar Myrdal, Herbert Marcuse, income inequality, informal economy, invention of the steam engine, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jane Jacobs, Jarndyce and Jarndyce, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Joseph Schumpeter, Just-in-time delivery, knowledge worker, low skilled workers, Mahatma Gandhi, market clearing, Martin Wolf, means of production, microcredit, military-industrial complex, Money creation, Murray Bookchin, new economy, New Urbanism, Occupy movement, peak oil, phenotype, planned obsolescence, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, quantitative easing, rent-seeking, reserve currency, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, scientific management, short selling, Silicon Valley, special economic zone, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, wages for housework, Wall-E, women in the workforce, working poor, working-age population

Commensurate organised action and planning to meet the new eventualities and the provision of sufficient use values must be thought through and gradually implemented. This has to be done at the same time as the left has also to mount a rearguard action against the technologies of increasingly predatory practices of accumulation by dispossession, further bouts of deskilling, the advent of permanent joblessness, ever-increasing social inequality and accelerating environmental degradation. The contradiction that faces capital morphs into a contradiction that necessarily gets internalised within anti-capitalist politics. Contradiction 9 Divisions of Labour The division of labour should, by rights, be positioned as one of the foundational features of what capital is all about.

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Much of this evolution directly or indirectly aimed to undermine the power of labour, both in the workplace and in the labour market. The bias of technological change has all along been against the interests of labour and in particular against the kinds of power that labour acquired through the acquisition of scarce and monopolisable skills. One important direction in capital–labour relations has been towards deskilling, a phenomenon that Marx noted in Capital and which was brought back centre stage in Harry Braverman’s influential and controversial book Labor and Monopoly Capital, published in 1974.1 Braverman argued that capital, particularly in its monopoly form, had a vested interest in degrading skills and so destroying any sense of pride that might attach to working for capital, while disempowering labour particularly at the point of production.

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One important direction in capital–labour relations has been towards deskilling, a phenomenon that Marx noted in Capital and which was brought back centre stage in Harry Braverman’s influential and controversial book Labor and Monopoly Capital, published in 1974.1 Braverman argued that capital, particularly in its monopoly form, had a vested interest in degrading skills and so destroying any sense of pride that might attach to working for capital, while disempowering labour particularly at the point of production. There had been a long history of struggle over this. In the nineteenth century the ideologists of capital – Charles Babbage and Andrew Ure in particular – were much cited by Marx as evidence of capital’s penchant for deskilling. Braverman likewise made much of Frederick Taylor’s efforts at scientific management to disaggregate production processes to the point where a ‘trained gorilla’ would be able to undertake production tasks. The ‘science’ involved here was one in which time and motion studies were brought together with techniques of specialisation to simplify all the tasks, to maximise the efficiency and minimise the costs of production in any given sector or individual firm.

The Wealth of Humans: Work, Power, and Status in the Twenty-First Century by Ryan Avent

3D printing, Airbnb, American energy revolution, assortative mating, autonomous vehicles, Bakken shale, barriers to entry, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, BRICs, business cycle, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Clayton Christensen, cloud computing, collective bargaining, computer age, creative destruction, currency risk, dark matter, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, disruptive innovation, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, driverless car, Edward Glaeser, Erik Brynjolfsson, eurozone crisis, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, falling living standards, financial engineering, first square of the chessboard, first square of the chessboard / second half of the chessboard, Ford paid five dollars a day, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of work, general purpose technology, gig economy, global supply chain, global value chain, heat death of the universe, hydraulic fracturing, income inequality, independent contractor, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, intangible asset, interchangeable parts, Internet of things, inventory management, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, knowledge economy, low interest rates, low skilled workers, lump of labour, Lyft, machine translation, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, mass immigration, means of production, new economy, performance metric, pets.com, post-work, price mechanism, quantitative easing, Ray Kurzweil, rent-seeking, reshoring, rising living standards, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, savings glut, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, software is eating the world, supply-chain management, supply-chain management software, tacit knowledge, TaskRabbit, tech billionaire, The Future of Employment, The Nature of the Firm, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade liberalization, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, very high income, warehouse robotics, working-age population

Uber entered markets with a new business structure that took advantage of technology – smartphones equipped with GPS – that made that prior knowledge (and ‘the knowledge’) much less important and valuable, and which made the process of getting a cab easier and faster for users. In doing so it allowed relatively unskilled drivers to enter the business in vast numbers; many more people can operate a smartphone than can learn the entire maze that is London. It routinized and deskilled the labour involved. The cleverness of the technology at work and the business model are such that the cost of cab rides to users is often lower than the cost of taking a traditional cab, while Uber drivers, according to one analysis at least, earn more money per hour than traditional drivers: about $19 per hour compared to roughly $13 per hour for taxi drivers as a whole.

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(Cheaper cab rides can occur alongside higher wages because Uber’s technology allows drivers to use their time more effectively.)6 The parallel is not perfect, however. Uber’s success rests on the clever sidestepping of taxicab and employment regulation (tricks that have earned it significant legal scrutiny and which may not survive sustained legal challenges). Yet the firm’s business does demonstrate how the technological deskilling of an occupation can lead to both a better experience for consumers and better pay for some workers. Yet the example is not especially cheering. Many more of the digital revolution’s disruptive business models work by reducing employment of less-skilled workers than by creating new opportunities for them.

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Acemoglu, Daron ageing populations agency, concept of Airbnb Amazon American Medical Association (AMA) anarchism Andreessen, Marc Anglo-Saxon economies Apple the iPhone the iPod artisanal goods and services Atkinson, Anthony Atlanta, Georgia austerity policies automation in car plants fully autonomous trucks of ‘green jobs’ during industrial revolution installation work as resistant to low-pay as check on of menial/routine work self-driving cars and technological deskilling automobiles assembly-line techniques automated car plants and dematerialization early days of car industry fully autonomous trucks self-driving cars baseball Baumol, William Belgium Bernanke, Ben Bezos, Jeff black plague (late Middle Ages) Boston, Massachusetts Brazil BRIC era Bridgewater Associates Britain deindustrialization education in extensions of franchise in financial crisis (2008) Great Exhibition (London 1851) housing wealth in and industrial revolution Labour Party in liberalization in political fractionalization in real wages in social capital in surpassed by US as leading nation wage subsidies in Brontë, Charlotte Brynjolfsson, Erik bubbles, asset-price Buffalo Bill (William Cody) BuzzFeed Cairncross, Frances, The Death of Distance (1997) capital ‘deepening’ infrastructure investment investment in developing world career, concept of cars see automobiles Catalan nationalism Central African Republic central banks Chait, Jonathan Charlotte chemistry, industrial Chicago meat packers in nineteenth-century expansion of World’s Columbia Exposition (1893) China Deng Xiaoping’s reforms economic slow-down in era of rapid growth foreign-exchange reserves ‘green jobs’ in illiberal institutions in inequality in iPod assembly in technological transformation in wage levels in Chorus (content-management system) Christensen, Clayton Cisco cities artisanal goods and services building-supply restrictions growth of and housing costs and industrial revolution and information membership battles in rich/skilled and social capital clerical work climate change Clinton, Hillary Coase, Ronald Columbia University, School of Mines communications technology communism communities of affinity computing app-based companies capability thresholds cloud services cycles of experimentation desktop market disk-drive industry ‘enterprise software’ products exponential progress narrative as general purpose technology hardware and software infrastructure history of ‘Moore’s Law’ and productivity switches transistors vacuum tubes see also digital revolution; software construction industry regulations on Corbyn, Jeremy Corliss steam engine corporate power Cowen, Tyler craft producers Craigslist creative destruction the Crystal Palace, London Dalio, Ray Dallas, Texas debt deindustrialization demand, chronically weak dematerialization Detroit developing economies and capital investment and digital revolution era of rapid growth and industrialization pockets of wealth in and ‘reshoring’ phenomenon and sharp slowdown and social capital see also emerging economies digital revolution and agency and company cultures and developing economies and distance distribution of benefits of dotcom tech boom emergence of and global imbalances and highly skilled few and industrial institutions and information flows investment in social capital niche markets pace of change and paradox of potential productivity and output and secular stagnation start-ups and technological deskilling techno-optimism techno-pessimism as tectonic economic transformation and trading patterns web journalism see also automation; computing; globalization discrimination and exclusion ‘disruption’, phenomenon of distribution of wealth see inequality; redistribution; wealth and income distribution dotcom boom eBay economics, classical The Economist education in emerging economies during industrial revolution racial segregation in USA and scarcity see also university education electricity Ellison, Glenn Ellison, Sara Fisher emerging economies deindustrialization economic growth in education in foreign-exchange reserves growth in global supply chains highly skilled workers in see also developing economies employment and basic income policy cheap labour as boost to and dot.com boom in Europe and financial crisis (2008) ‘green jobs’ low-pay sector minimum wage impact niche markets in public sector ‘reshoring’ phenomenon as rising globally and social contexts and social membership as source of personal identity and structural change trilemma in USA see also labour; wages Engels, Friedrich environmental issues Etsy euro- zone Europe extreme populist politics liberalized economies political fractionalization in European Union Facebook face-recognition technology factors of production land see also capital; labour ‘Factory Asia’ factory work assembly-line techniques during industrial revolution family fascism Federal Reserve financial crisis (2008) financial markets cross-border capital flows in developing economies Finland firms and companies Coase’s work on core competencies culture of dark matter (intangible capital) and dematerialization and ‘disruption’ ‘firm-specific’ knowledge and information flows internal incentive structures pay of top executives shifting boundaries of social capital of and social wealth start-ups Ford, Martin, Rise of the Robots (2015) Ford Motor Company fracking France franchise, electoral Friedman, Milton Fukuyama, Francis Gates, Bill gender discrimination general purpose technologies enormous benefits from exponential progress and skilled labour supporting infrastructure and time lags see also digital revolution Germany ‘gig economy’ Glaeser, Ed global economy growth in supply chains imbalances lack of international cooperation savings glut and social consensus globalization hyperglobalization and secular stagnation and separatist movements Goldman Sachs Google Gordon, Robert Gothenburg, Sweden Great Depression Great Depression (1930s) Great Exhibition, London (1851) Great Recession Great Stagnation Greece ‘green jobs’ growth, economic battle over spoils of boom (1994-2005) and classical economists as consistent in rich countries decline of ‘labour share’ dotcom boom emerging economies gains not flowing to workers and industrial revolution Kaldor’s ‘stylized facts of’ and Keynes during liberal era pie metaphor in post-war period and quality of institutions and rich/elite cities rich-poor nation gap and skilled labour guilds Hansen, Alvin Hayes, Chris, The Twilight of the Elites healthcare and medicine hedge funds and private equity firms Holmes, Oliver Wendell Hong Kong housing in Bay-Area NIMBY campaigns against soaring prices pre-2008 crisis zoning and regulations Houston, Texas Huffington Post human capital Hungary IBM identity, personal immigration and ethno-nationalist separatism and labour markets in Nordic countries and social capital income distribution see inequality; redistribution; wealth and income distribution India Indonesia industrial revolution automation during and economic growth and growth of cities need for better-educated workers and productivity ‘second revolution’ and social change and wages and World’s Fairs inequality and education levels between firms and housing wealth during industrial revolution during liberal era between nations pay of top executives rise of in emerging economies and secular stagnation in Sweden wild contingency of wealth see also rich people; wealth and income distribution inflation in 1970s hyperinflation information technology see computing Intel interest rates International Space Station (ISS) iRobot ISIS Italy Jacksonville, Florida Jacquard, Joseph Marie Japan journalism Kaldor, Nicholas Keynes, John Maynard Kurzweil.

The Precariat: The New Dangerous Class by Guy Standing

8-hour work day, banking crisis, barriers to entry, basic income, behavioural economics, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, bread and circuses, call centre, Cass Sunstein, centre right, collective bargaining, company town, corporate governance, crony capitalism, death from overwork, deindustrialization, deskilling, emotional labour, export processing zone, fear of failure, full employment, Herbert Marcuse, hiring and firing, Honoré de Balzac, housing crisis, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, independent contractor, information security, it's over 9,000, job polarisation, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, labour market flexibility, labour mobility, land reform, libertarian paternalism, low skilled workers, lump of labour, marginal employment, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, means of production, mini-job, moral hazard, Naomi Klein, nudge unit, old age dependency ratio, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, pension time bomb, pensions crisis, placebo effect, post-industrial society, precariat, presumed consent, quantitative easing, remote working, rent-seeking, Richard Thaler, rising living standards, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, science of happiness, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, technological determinism, The Market for Lemons, The Nature of the Firm, The Spirit Level, Tobin tax, transaction costs, universal basic income, unpaid internship, winner-take-all economy, working poor, working-age population, young professional

But one can see how someone psychologically trapped in long-term employment loses control and drifts closer to a form of precarious dependency. If the ‘parent’ becomes displeased, or is unable or unwilling to continue the fictive parental role, the person will be plunged into the precariat, without the skills of autonomy and developmental prowess. Long-term employment can deskill. As elaborated elsewhere (Standing, 2009), this was one of the worst aspects of the era of labourism. Although one must beware of stretching the definition too far, another feature of precariatisation is what should be called fictitious occupational mobility, epitomised by the postmodernist phenomenon of ‘uptitling’, elegantly satirised by The Economist (2010a).

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Competitiveness through use of temporary labour is increasingly important in the global system as companies seek to emulate what is done in other countries and by market leaders in their sector – a pattern known as ‘the dominance effect’. Multinationals try to establish their employment model in places where they set up subsidiaries, usually edging out local practices. Thus McDonald’s ‘best practice’ model involves deskilling, removal of long-serving employees, union busting, and lower wages and enterprise benefits. Others follow suit. Observers have highlighted the repertoires of labour practices on which managers can draw (Amoore, 2000; Sklair, 2002; Elger and Smith, 2006; Royle and Ortiz, 2009). Some use ‘yellow unions’ – set up and run by employers – to defeat independent unions.

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It is no surprise that the post-2008 scene in the United States produced part-time mini-financiers doing deals from their bedrooms or kitchens for a few clients, imagined as well as real. Stratification is going deep into all sorts of occupations. With job insecurity the flip side of functional flexibility and linked to re-regulation of occupations, enterprises can stratify workers almost along class lines, shunting less effective performers into dead-end or deskilling jobs while reserving salaried posts that preserve occupational credentials for favourites. Although stratifying decisions may be grounded in assessments of capacities, control of occupational structures by managers and administrative rules increases the scope for diverting people from a professional niche into a precariat channel.

Work in the Future The Automation Revolution-Palgrave MacMillan (2019) by Robert Skidelsky Nan Craig

3D printing, Airbnb, algorithmic trading, AlphaGo, Alvin Toffler, Amazon Web Services, anti-work, antiwork, artificial general intelligence, asset light, autonomous vehicles, basic income, behavioural economics, business cycle, cloud computing, collective bargaining, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, correlation does not imply causation, creative destruction, data is the new oil, data science, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deep learning, DeepMind, deindustrialization, Demis Hassabis, deskilling, disintermediation, do what you love, Donald Trump, driverless car, Erik Brynjolfsson, fake news, feminist movement, Ford Model T, Frederick Winslow Taylor, future of work, Future Shock, general purpose technology, gig economy, global supply chain, income inequality, independent contractor, informal economy, Internet of things, Jarndyce and Jarndyce, Jarndyce and Jarndyce, job automation, job polarisation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, knowledge economy, Loebner Prize, low skilled workers, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, moral panic, Network effects, new economy, Nick Bostrom, off grid, pattern recognition, post-work, Ronald Coase, scientific management, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, SoftBank, Steve Jobs, strong AI, tacit knowledge, technological determinism, technoutopianism, TED Talk, The Chicago School, The Future of Employment, the market place, The Nature of the Firm, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, Turing test, Uber for X, uber lyft, universal basic income, wealth creators, working poor

It just assumes a replacement, as though you could dismiss the body and therefore dismiss the problems of difficulty or imagination, from the world of work. I would like to make an observation, which follows from this, about de-skilling. In Adam Smith’s discussion of the division of labour, he understood intuitively that a machine, organised in a certain way, could “de-skill” by stupefying the worker. The key part of his observation was the modifier, “in a certain way”. This is a matter of how machines themselves are configured. Configured in one way high tech machines do indeed stupefy and so de-skill the worker. The most obvious example is Google Maps, which replace environmental reasoning and place memory by prescriptive routing, involving no perceptual intake on the part of the user.

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There is now also a growing concern about the momentum that the working poor model gains in France and about the costs of the fairly tight safety net used to buffer it. In fact, the polarisation of the labour market paves the way for a growing structural inequality. Jobs are concentrating at the two extremities: skilled and well-paid jobs in sophisticated sectors, and unskilled and/or deskilled low paid jobs in unsophisticated services. Yet, because low skill, low wage jobs must be created to increase the employment rate, this increase inevitably leads to an increase in income inequality (Artus 2017). 68 P.-M. Menger This can be called a curse of higher employment rates. Higher income inequality—yet not the astronomically high rate observed in the US— must be tolerated if the aim is to obtain a higher employment rate.

Class Acts: Service and Inequality in Luxury Hotels by Rachel Sherman

Abraham Maslow, deskilling, emotional labour, income inequality, indoor plumbing, invisible hand, knowledge worker, means of production, move 37, new economy, pink-collar, Savings and loan crisis, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thorstein Veblen, union organizing, upwardly mobile, work culture , yield management

They took capitalist labor relations for granted and usually assumed a congruence of interests between workers and capitalists.26 In 1974, Harry Braverman inaugurated critical labor process studies with Labor and Monopoly Capital, a scathing indictment of capitalist production methods and worker deskilling. Using a Marxist approach, Braverman looked at how the separation of mental and manual labor allows managers to control workers’ labor power. Braverman’s analysis spawned a generation of studies concerned with managerial control of workers within the labor process, in varying institutional and historical contexts.27 Responding to what many believed to be an overly mechanistic and pessimistic view on Braverman’s part, scholars in this tradition also began to look at worker subjectivity, agency, resistance, and gender.28 The contemporary critical sociology of work remains indebted to the work of Braverman and his intellectual descendants.

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This recasting of the meaning of money also distanced guests from workers, who often said, “It isn’t a lot of money to them.” Finally, the very self-subordination that workers are supposed to provide as part of luxury service became a source of competence, as these examples have shown. In contrast to McDonald’s, where routines constrain workers, or airlines, where behavioral specifications are a form of emotional “deskilling,”17 luxury hotel workers can code themselves as skilled not in spite of but because of the interactive requirements of their work. Money Games Workers who received tips and commissions in these sites also played games around these material incentives, developing myriad strategies and using predictive typologies to negotiate their effort.

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Nonetheless, assistant managers, who had largely stayed away from the door in the past, began coming outside more often and asking the doormen what each car was doing there, micromanaging the allocation of curb space. Petra also posted a new memo: “All cars are to be taken immediately to the garage.” These new practices curtailing their autonomy irritated the doormen, partly because their income was threatened, but also largely because they did not want to feel they were being supervised and deskilled. As Zeke put it, “The managers are getting more managerial lately.” He complained, “Now I don’t just have to look out for meter maids; I have to watch out for managers as well. . . . After ten years in this job I don’t like UC_Sherman (O).qxd 10/3/2006 2:01 PM Page 147 Games, Control, and Skill 147 anyone looking over my shoulder.”

Cheap: The High Cost of Discount Culture by Ellen Ruppel Shell

accelerated depreciation, Alan Greenspan, barriers to entry, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, big-box store, bread and circuses, business cycle, cognitive dissonance, computer age, cotton gin, creative destruction, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, delayed gratification, deskilling, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, fear of failure, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, Frederick Winslow Taylor, George Akerlof, global supply chain, global village, Howard Zinn, income inequality, interchangeable parts, inventory management, invisible hand, James Watt: steam engine, Joseph Schumpeter, Just-in-time delivery, knowledge economy, Lewis Mumford, loss aversion, market design, means of production, mental accounting, Monkeys Reject Unequal Pay, Pearl River Delta, planned obsolescence, Ponzi scheme, price anchoring, price discrimination, race to the bottom, Richard Thaler, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, scientific management, side project, Steve Jobs, The Market for Lemons, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, trade liberalization, traveling salesman, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, ultimatum game, Victor Gruen, washing machines reduced drudgery, working poor, yield management, zero-sum game

As North reported in 1808, “To make my contract for pistols advantageous for the United States and to myself I must go to a great proportion of the expense before I deliver any pistols. I find that by confining a workman to one particular limb of the pistol until he has made two thousand, I save at least one quarter of his labor, to what I should provided (that) I finished them by small quantities; and the work will be as much better as it is quicker made.” This “de-skilling” of the gun-making process transformed gun smithing from a masterly craft to a well orchestrated routine, thereby growing efficiencies well beyond expectations. North not only fulfilled the terms of his contract within his deadline, but was awarded another one to produce an additional twenty thousand pistols, the components of which were “to correspond so exactly that any limb or part of one pistol may be fitted to any other pistol of the twenty thousand.”

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LEGIONS OF PH.D.’S have for decades studied the intricacies of why people are willing to pay what they do, yet pricing remains a most imperfect “science.” In the words of one economist, “For most businesses, pricing is a profit-leaking paradox.” Blame this on Wanamaker’s scrappy invention, the price tag. Virtually the opposite of auctions, price tags fix the price and discourage bargaining, thereby de-skilling the salesclerk’s job. Lower-skilled jobs are lower-paying jobs, so this saves retailers money. But fixed prices also carry a significant cost: By reducing or even eliminating the possibility of price negotiation, they create gaps between supply and demand, leaving stores holding too much of what customers aren’t willing to pay for and selling too cheaply merchandise for which customers would be willing to pay more.

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Neither Woolworth nor Walton showed any particular allegiance to his workers or provided for them beyond the minimum level necessary to promote profit. At IKEA, workers are treated with respect and consideration (they get benefits and sometimes bonuses), but they are interchangeable and ultimately disposable. The de-skilling of labor is as critical to IKEA’s business model as it is for every discount business model: Centralized capital, not craftsmanship, is where the power lies. This is no socialist screed, it is undeniable fact, and to accept it is to better understand the trade-offs. Outsourcing to the customer critical functions—service, delivery, and assembly—keeps prices low by avoiding the cost of wages and benefits.

The Refusal of Work: The Theory and Practice of Resistance to Work by David Frayne

anti-work, antiwork, basic income, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, Californian Ideology, call centre, capitalist realism, classic study, clockwatching, critique of consumerism, David Graeber, deindustrialization, deskilling, emotional labour, Ford Model T, future of work, Herbert Marcuse, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, low skilled workers, McJob, means of production, moral panic, new economy, Paradox of Choice, post-work, profit motive, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Skype, unpaid internship, work culture , working poor, young professional

In recent times, we have witnessed the relatively unmitigated rise of the working poor,7 and the zero-hours contract.8 For those attempting to insulate themselves from the shifting currents of the labour market by investing in education, the old guarantee that educational credentials ensure a future of secure, well-paid and interesting work is also being eroded. An extensive analysis by Philip Brown and colleagues suggests that a combination of factors – the rapid expansion of higher education, the globalisation of job competition, and the deskilling of work – are leading huge numbers of graduates into an ‘opportunity trap’, as they fail to find a home for their specialised skills in the labour market (Brown et al., 2011).9 Even if economic growth could manage to keep pace with the demand for jobs, what would be the environmental costs of continuing expansion?

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In his description of the bakers, Sennett resisted using the word alienation in the traditional Marxist sense, where it represents the spark that ignites the worker’s struggle, instead suggesting that the bakers had merely become indifferent to their work. What is significant here is that the process of computerisation and deskilling that Sennett describes can be observed even in society’s most coveted jobs. Even in high-tier jobs, knowledge can be encapsulated in electronic process manuals, which map out the procedures of the job to the last detail, or by semi-automated computer programs, which perform work tasks with a minimum of human intervention (Brown et al., 2011).

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An emancipatory social science would resist normalising lifestyles based on work and consumerism, and avoid the suggestion that deviation from this norm always necessarily entails an experience of deprivation and shame. What we might hope to see are more research projects that think through those exemplary experiences and practices that explore ways of living, co-operating, expressing and creating, outside the de-skilled and micro-managed sphere of employment. What we might hope to see are more research projects that remain open to the possibility of meeting needs in less conventional ways, outside the ambit of economic exchange relations. Through their investigations, perhaps researchers will be able to shed more light on the unsung inventiveness of people who are already developing their own conceptions of pleasure, sufficiency, wealth and well-being, fit for a less work-centred society.

The Computer Boys Take Over: Computers, Programmers, and the Politics of Technical Expertise by Nathan L. Ensmenger

barriers to entry, business process, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, computer age, deskilling, Donald Knuth, Firefox, Frederick Winslow Taylor, functional programming, future of work, Grace Hopper, informal economy, information retrieval, interchangeable parts, Isaac Newton, Jacquard loom, job satisfaction, John von Neumann, knowledge worker, Larry Ellison, loose coupling, machine readable, new economy, no silver bullet, Norbert Wiener, pattern recognition, performance metric, Philip Mirowski, post-industrial society, Productivity paradox, RAND corporation, Robert Gordon, scientific management, Shoshana Zuboff, sorting algorithm, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, systems thinking, tacit knowledge, technological determinism, the market place, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Thorstein Veblen, Turing machine, Von Neumann architecture, world market for maybe five computers, Y2K

The most popular and widely adopted solution, however, was the development of automatic programming technologies. These new tools promised to “eliminate the middleman” by allowing users to program their computers directly, without the need for expensive programming talent.2 The computer would program itself. Despite their associations with deskilling and routinization, automatic programming systems could also work to the benefit of occupational programmers and academic computer scientists. High-level programming promised to reduce the tedium associated with machine coding, and allowed programmers to focus on more system-oriented—and high-status—tasks such as analysis and design.

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In Labor and Monopoly Capital: The Degradation of Work in the Twentieth Century, Braverman argued that the basic social function of engineers and managers was to oversee the fragmentation, routinization, and mechanization of labor. Cloaked in the language of progress and efficiency, the process of routinization was characterized primarily as a means of disciplining and controlling a recalcitrant workforce. The ultimate result was the deskilling and degradation of the worker. In his 1977 book Programmers and Managers: The Routinization of Computer Programming in the United States, Kraft described a similar process at work in the computer industry. “Programmers, systems analysts, and other software workers are experiencing efforts to break down, simplify, routinize, and standardize their own work so that it, too, can be done by machines rather than people.”

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His analysis was remarkably comprehensive, covering such issues as training and education, structured programming techniques (“the software manager’s answer to the conveyor belt”), the social organization of the workplace (aimed at reinforcing the fragmentation between “head” planning and “hand” labor), and careers, pay, and professionalism (encouraged by managers as a means of discouraging unions). Greenbaum followed Kraft’s conclusions and methodology closely in her book In the Name of Efficiency: Management Theory and Shopfloor Practice in Data-Processing Work in 1979. More recently, she has defended their application of the Braverman deskilling hypothesis: “If we strip away the spin words used today like ‘knowledge’ worker, ‘flexible’ work, and ‘high tech’ work, and if we insert the word ‘information system’ for ‘machinery,’ we are still talking about management attempts to control and coordinate labor processes.”30 There is validity to both interpretations of the changing attitude of managers toward programmers that occurred in the late 1960s.

Why We Drive: Toward a Philosophy of the Open Road by Matthew B. Crawford

1960s counterculture, Airbus A320, airport security, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Boeing 737 MAX, British Empire, Burning Man, business logic, call centre, classic study, collective bargaining, confounding variable, congestion pricing, crony capitalism, data science, David Sedaris, deskilling, digital map, don't be evil, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elon Musk, emotional labour, en.wikipedia.org, Fellow of the Royal Society, Ford Model T, gamification, gentrification, gig economy, Google Earth, Great Leap Forward, Herbert Marcuse, hive mind, Ian Bogost, income inequality, informal economy, Internet of things, Jane Jacobs, labour mobility, Lyft, mirror neurons, Network effects, New Journalism, New Urbanism, Nicholas Carr, planned obsolescence, Ponzi scheme, precautionary principle, Ralph Nader, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Sam Peltzman, security theater, self-driving car, sharing economy, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, smart cities, social graph, social intelligence, Stephen Hawking, surveillance capitalism, tacit knowledge, tech worker, technoutopianism, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the High Line, time dilation, too big to fail, traffic fines, Travis Kalanick, trolley problem, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, Unsafe at Any Speed, urban planning, Wall-E, Works Progress Administration

Seat belts are more obtrusive, and Peltzman does find that they alter our risk budget to make us drive less carefully. Antilock brakes and electronic stability control, which did not exist when Peltzman did his study, would seem to belong to a different category. Such minders can save you in a panic situation, but they also have a slight deskilling effect. They prevent a driver from learning the behavior of his car at the limits of traction, and how the car’s chassis dynamics can be made to work for him or against him in the timing and modulation of steering and brake inputs. For example, it takes a certain amount of time for the weight of the car to transfer to the outside wheels in a turn, or to the front wheels under braking.

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“Dennis Tajer, an American Airlines captain and a spokesman for the airline’s pilots’ union, said Boeing and Airbus had encouraged that sort of reliance on automation by pitching their planes to carriers as capable of being flown by lesser-trained pilots. ‘We’ve seen insidious marketing of aircraft to accommodate less experienced and perhaps a lower grade of pilot,’ he said.” He says this with the indignation of a trained professional, but of course from the perspective of an airline looking to save money, the deskilling he refers to is a feature, not a bug. 10.According to Representative Peter A. DeFazio (D-Ore.), chairman of the House Transportation Committee, as reported in the Washington Post, Boeing’s internal communications “paint a deeply disturbing picture of the lengths Boeing was apparently willing to go to in order to evade scrutiny from regulators, flight crews, and the flying public, even as its own employees were sounding alarms internally.” https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/trafficandcommuting/internal-boeing-documents-show-employees-discussing-efforts-to-mani/2020/01/09/83a0c6ec-334f-11ea-91fd-82d4e04a3fac_story.html. 11.When a self-driving Uber struck and killed a pedestrian in Tempe, Arizona, in March, 2018, the National Transportation Safety Board launched a twenty-month investigation, at the conclusion of which it was revealed that Uber’s self-driving system was not programmed to recognize a pedestrian crossing outside of a crosswalk.

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Boudette, “Building a Road Map for the Self-Driving Car,” New York Times, March 2, 2017. 8.Jody Rosen, “The Knowledge, London’s Legendary Taxi-Driver Test, Puts Up a Fight in the Age of GPS,” New York Times Style Magazine, November 10, 2014, https://www.nytimes.com/2014/11/10/t-magazine/london-taxi-test-knowledge.html. 9.In much commentary and reportage, several unrelated developments get mixed up together: driverless cars, electric vehicles, and ride hailing. I believe this fuzziness is deliberately cultivated, as it imparts a sheen of technological progress to the ride-hailing firms when in fact their core business is one of labor arbitrage. Their innovation is merely to exploit the deskilling effect of GPS for this purpose. The main divide across which they practice labor arbitrage is time of residence in a city, which corresponds to the acquisition of knowledge held independently, without reliance on GPS. Continued high levels of immigration guarantee a persistent gradient—of personal knowledge—along which to conduct this labor arbitrage.

Private Government: How Employers Rule Our Lives (And Why We Don't Talk About It) by Elizabeth S. Anderson

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, barriers to entry, call centre, collective bargaining, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, declining real wages, deskilling, feminist movement, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, independent contractor, invisible hand, Jeremy Corbyn, manufacturing employment, means of production, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, principal–agent problem, profit motive, Ronald Coase, scientific management, shareholder value, Socratic dialogue, spinning jenny, The Nature of the Firm, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trickle-down economics, Tyler Cowen

With such a short, easy bridge from one rank to the next, it was relatively easy for workers to reconcile the hierarchy that did exist with egalitarian republican values.96 The Industrial Revolution dramatically widened the gulf between employers and employees in manufacturing. Employers no longer did the same kind of work as employees, if they worked at all. Mental labor was separated from manual labor, which was radically deskilled. Ranks within the firm multiplied. Leading executives might not even work in the same building. This facilitated a severe degradation of working conditions. Workers were subject to the relentless, grueling discipline of the clock and the machine. Employers, instead of drinking with their workers, preached temperance, industry, punctuality, and discipline.

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In this light, let us now return to the contrast between Smith and Marx with which this lecture opened. It is often supposed that their differing assessments of market society were based on fundamentally opposed values. Yet both marveled at the ways market society drove innovation, productive efficiency, and economic growth. And both deplored the deskilling and stupefying effects of an increasingly fine-grained division of labor on workers.99 They differed rather on what they expected market society to offer to workers. Smith’s greatest hope—the hope shared by labor radicals from the Levellers to the Chartists, from Paine to Lincoln—was that freeing up markets would dramatically expand the ranks of the self-employed, who would exercise talent and judgment in governing their own productive activities, independent of micromanaging bosses.

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Workers of all races who live in towns devastated from plant closures due to competition from abroad also suffer from high unemployment, because their mobility is low.32 Much of the time, the entire economy operates in periods of substantial unemployment or underemployment, affecting workers generally: even if they have a job, the cost of job loss is so high they have to put up with nearly any abuse just to hang on to an income. Meanwhile, employers use their power to design workplaces to create a fine-grained division of labor in which workers are deskilled and thus easily replaceable. Cowen argues that workers get compensated with higher wages when employers impose adverse working conditions on them, and that, if anything, the tax code biases the market in favor of too many “perks” and not enough wages. I don’t think we should trivialize basic requirements of human dignity and well-being, such as freedom to use the bathroom, as mere “perks.”

AI Superpowers: China, Silicon Valley, and the New World Order by Kai-Fu Lee

"World Economic Forum" Davos, AI winter, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, algorithmic bias, algorithmic trading, Alignment Problem, AlphaGo, artificial general intelligence, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, basic income, bike sharing, business cycle, Cambridge Analytica, cloud computing, commoditize, computer vision, corporate social responsibility, cotton gin, creative destruction, crony capitalism, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, Didi Chuxing, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, fake news, full employment, future of work, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, gig economy, Google Chrome, Hans Moravec, happiness index / gross national happiness, high-speed rail, if you build it, they will come, ImageNet competition, impact investing, income inequality, informal economy, Internet of things, invention of the telegraph, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, Lean Startup, low skilled workers, Lyft, machine translation, mandatory minimum, Mark Zuckerberg, Menlo Park, minimum viable product, natural language processing, Neil Armstrong, new economy, Nick Bostrom, OpenAI, pattern recognition, pirate software, profit maximization, QR code, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Robert Mercer, Rodney Brooks, Rubik’s Cube, Sam Altman, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, SoftBank, Solyndra, special economic zone, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, strong AI, TED Talk, The Future of Employment, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, urban planning, vertical integration, Vision Fund, warehouse robotics, Y Combinator

The steam engine and electrification were crucial pieces of the first and second Industrial Revolutions (1760–1830 and 1870–1914, respectively). Both of these GPTs facilitated the creation of the modern factory system, bringing immense power and abundant light to the buildings that were upending traditional modes of production. Broadly speaking, this change in the mode of production was one of deskilling. These factories took tasks that once required high-skilled workers (for example, handcrafting textiles) and broke the work down into far simpler tasks that could be done by low-skilled workers (operating a steam-driven power loom). In the process, these technologies greatly increased the amount of these goods produced and drove down prices.

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While the most recent GPT proliferated across the economy, real wages for the median of Americans have remained flat for over thirty years, and they’ve actually fallen for the poorest Americans. One reason why ICT may differ from the steam engine and electrification is because of its “skill bias.” While the two other GPTs ramped up productivity by deskilling the production of goods, ICT is instead often—though not always—skill biased in favor of high-skilled workers. Digital communications tools allow top performers to efficiently manage much larger organizations and reach much larger audiences. By breaking down the barriers to disseminating information, ICT empowers the world’s top knowledge workers and undercuts the economic role of many in the middle.

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It will perform many kinds of physical and intellectual tasks with a speed and power that far outstrip any human, dramatically increasing productivity in everything from transportation to manufacturing to medicine. Unlike the GPTs of the first and second Industrial Revolutions, AI will not facilitate the deskilling of economic production. It won’t take advanced tasks done by a small number of people and break them down further for a larger number of low-skill workers to do. Instead, it will simply take over the execution of tasks that meet two criteria: they can be optimized using data, and they do not require social interaction.

Why We Work by Barry Schwartz

Atul Gawande, call centre, deskilling, do well by doing good, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, future of work, Higgs boson, if you build it, they will come, invisible hand, job satisfaction, meta-analysis, Paradox of Choice, scientific management, Silicon Valley, TED Talk, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Toyota Production System

All teachers, novice or expert, weak or strong, would be required to follow the standardized system. Teachers on the front lines often complain about what is left out of the teach-to-test paradigm, pointing out that at best, these tests are only one indicator of student learning. One of the chief criticisms many teachers make is that the system is dumbing down their teaching. It is de-skilling them. It is not allowing them to use their judgment, nor is it helping them to develop the judgment they need to teach well. They are encouraged, says education scholar Linda Darling-Hammond, “to present material that [is] beyond the grasp of some and below the grasp of others, to sacrifice students’ internal motivations and interests in the cause of ‘covering the curriculum,’ and to forgo the teachable moment, when students [are] ready and eager to learn, because it [happens] to fall outside of the prescribed sequence of activities.”

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Virtually all of the practices that we’ve learned lead to good work are violated by the reliance on detailed scripts to produce assembly-line education. It is the very antithesis of smart job design. Over time, it is sure to produce the antithesis of smart performance. And the most tragic consequence of this de-skilling is that it will either drive the energy, engagement, and enthusiasm out of good teachers, or it will drive these good teachers out of education. But there is another aspect of many modern work settings that may be even more destructive to good work than routinization and excessive supervision.

Theory and Practice of Group Psychotherapy by Irvin D. Yalom, Molyn Leszcz

cognitive dissonance, conceptual framework, confounding variable, delayed gratification, deskilling, epigenetics, experimental subject, impulse control, meta-analysis, randomized controlled trial, TED Talk, the scientific method, traveling salesman, unbiased observer

The therapist is in them, observes their actions from over their shoulder, participates in imaginary conversations with them. When several members of a group share this desire for an all-knowing, all-caring leader, the meetings take on a characteristic flavor. The group seems helpless and dependent. The members deskill themselves and seem unable to help themselves or others. Deskilling is particularly dramatic in a group composed of professional therapists who suddenly seem unable to ask even the simplest questions of one another. For example, in one meeting a group may talk about loss. One member mentions, for the first time, the recent death of her mother.

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The leader expressed his fantasy that Stewart was a plant, that he could not possibly be just beginning his training, since he conducted himself like a veteran with ten years’ group experience. The comment evoked a flood of tensions. It was not easily forgotten by the group and, for sessions to come, was periodically revived and angrily discussed. With his comment, the therapist placed the kiss of death on Stewart’s brow, since thereafter the group systematically challenged and deskilled him. It is to be expected that the therapist’s positive evaluation of one member will evoke feelings of sibling rivalry among the others. The struggle for dominance, as I will discuss in chapter 11, fluctuates in intensity throughout the group. It is much in evidence at the beginning of the group as members jockey for position in the pecking order.

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If therapists’ comments, even when repeated, fall on deaf ears, if therapists feel ignored by the group, if they find it extraordinarily difficult to influence the meeting, then it is clear that the resistance is powerful and that the group needs to be addressed as well as the individual members. It is not an easy undertaking. It is anxiety-provoking to buck the entire group, and therapists may feel deskilled in such meetings. The group may also avoid work by more literal flight—absence or tardiness. Whatever the form, however, the result is the same: in the language of the group dynamicist, locomotion toward the attainment of group goals is impeded, and the group is no longer engaged in its primary task.

Liberty's Dawn: A People's History of the Industrial Revolution by Emma Griffin

agricultural Revolution, Corn Laws, deskilling, equal pay for equal work, full employment, gentrification, informal economy, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, labour mobility, spinning jenny, Thomas Malthus, trickle-down economics, University of East Anglia, urban sprawl, women in the workforce, working poor

Coopers: formal apprenticeships (Hart, 7/2, p. 151; and Nicol, p. 25). 25. Gammage p. 37; North, p. 103; Murdoch, pp. 8–12; Whetstone, p. 60; E. Davis, p. 10. Coach-­trimming refers to the painting of horse-­drawn carriages. 26. On deskilling, see in particular, Harry Braverman, Labor and Monopoly Capital: the Degradation of Work in the Twentieth Century (New York, 1974). See also Stephen J. Nicholas and Jacqueline M. Nicholas, ‘Male literacy, “deskilling”, and the industrial revolution’, Journal of Interdisciplinary History, 23/1 (1992), pp. 1–18. 27. Dunning, pp. 120–4. See also Struthers, pp. xxxiv–xxxvi. 28. Dunning, p. 124. 29. Aird, pp. 10–11; Memoirs of a Printer’s Devil, pp. 91–2: Bertram, pp. 3–28; Autobiography of Scotch Lad, pp. 26–33; Adams, pp. 81–90; Leno, pp. 8–9; [Smith], pp. 6–8; Paterson, pp. 60–2; J.

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Amongst those who became skilled labourers without ever mustering the means to pay their master a premium were a coach-­trimmer, chair-­maker, knife-­grinder, shopkeeper, and a maker of pearl ornaments.25 The creation of new ways to learn a skilled trade has sometimes been dismissed as evidence of the ‘deskilling’ of the independent artisan that occurred during the industrial revolution.26 But the beauty of skilled labour 4017.indd 28 25/01/13 8:21 PM m e n at w o r k 29 is very much in the eye of the beholder. Of course, the protected status of those who had served an apprenticeship was valuable to the fortunate few; but it did little for those who by dint of poverty were left outside.

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At the same time, rapid urbanisation made the kinds of control that the trade societies had previously exercised over entry to their ranks impossible to enforce. Industrialisation certainly did carry a degree of social turmoil along with it in much the way that many of the pessimists have maintained. It may also have led to the ‘deskilling’ of some trades. Yet many at the bottom of society proved extremely adept at grasping opportunity from the chaos.33 No matter how skills had been acquired, the learning of a trade could usher in a more comfortable and prosperous working life. In even the humblest branches of skilled labour the ability to work a trade carried the promise of better-paid and more regular employment, which together represented a very significant advantage indeed.

Driverless Cars: On a Road to Nowhere by Christian Wolmar

Airbnb, autonomous vehicles, Beeching cuts, bitcoin, Boris Johnson, BRICs, carbon footprint, Chris Urmson, cognitive dissonance, congestion charging, connected car, deskilling, Diane Coyle, don't be evil, driverless car, Elon Musk, gigafactory, high net worth, independent contractor, RAND corporation, ride hailing / ride sharing, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, smart cities, technological determinism, Tesla Model S, Travis Kalanick, wikimedia commons, Zipcar

Despite Musk’s confidence, the problems posed by Level 2 are exacerbated in Level 3, in which the main 39 Driverless Cars: On a Road to Nowhere difference is that while the driver must still remain vigilant and ready to intervene in an emergency, responsibility for all the critical safety functions is shifted to the car. The added risk is that drivers will lose focus, and therefore not know when or whether to intervene, or they will be too slow to react. An even greater conundrum about the long-term effect of Level 3 is the deskilling of motorists who become accustomed to adopting a solely supervisory role when driving. Driver aids in general have already been shown to reduce the skill set of motorists. According to Adrian Lund, president of the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety in the United States: There are lots of concerns about people checking out and we are trying to monitor that now.

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Experience of other industries, notably nuclear power, suggests that there are enormous risks with control systems that relegate the operator to a managerial role whose only job is to intercede in the case of an emergency. In both the aviation and maritime industries there have been examples of the negative effect of this deskilling. In aviation, pilots who 40 The triple revolution have become used to relying on autopilot, which flies the aircraft much of the time, have found it difficult to react correctly to emergency situations. This was most apparent in the disaster involving an Air France A330 that plunged into the Atlantic in June 2009, killing all 228 people on board.

The Revenge of Analog: Real Things and Why They Matter by David Sax

Airbnb, barriers to entry, big-box store, call centre, cloud computing, creative destruction, death of newspapers, declining real wages, delayed gratification, dematerialisation, deskilling, Detroit bankruptcy, digital capitalism, digital divide, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, game design, gentrification, hype cycle, hypertext link, informal economy, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, low cost airline, low skilled workers, mandatory minimum, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, military-industrial complex, Minecraft, new economy, Nicholas Carr, off-the-grid, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), PalmPilot, Paradox of Choice, Peter Thiel, Ponzi scheme, quantitative hedge fund, race to the bottom, Rosa Parks, Salesforce, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, Sheryl Sandberg, short selling, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, Snapchat, Steve Jobs, technoutopianism, TED Talk, the long tail, Travis Kalanick, Tyler Cowen, upwardly mobile, warehouse robotics, Whole Earth Catalog, work culture

The challenge, according to Vega, was to undo the classic assembly-line mentality most of the workers had grown up with, and make them understand that they were an active and dynamic part of the manufacturing process. The term economists have used for this is reskilling, which is the antidote to the phenomenon of deskilling that has been a natural consequence of automating workflow. In his excellent book on the cost of automation, The Glass Cage, Nicholas Carr defines deskilling: “As more skills are built into the machine, it assumes more control over the work, and the worker’s opportunity to engage in and develop deeper talents, such as those involved in interpretation and judgment, dwindles.

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When automation reaches its highest level, when it takes command of the job, the worker, skill wise, has nowhere to go but down.” Carr tracks the consequences of this, from plane crashes that occurred because pilots became too reliant on autopilot to doctors who miss diseases because they use diagnostic software. The most common example of deskilling I see involves Uber drivers who blindly follow their GPS guidance, even while I am shouting from the backseat that I can see the address out the window. Reskilling seeks to return human judgment to the automated workplace. “It’s our ability to make sense of things,” Carr writes, “to weave the knowledge we draw from observation and experience, from living, into a rich and fluid understanding of the world that we can then apply to any task or challenge.

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See software computers analog as the future of, 225 in defining digital, xiv design and, 32, 222, 223 in education, 181, 182, 183–185, 187, 196, 199 film manufacturing and, 65 in gaming, 81 and the Great Recession, 156, 157 job creation and, 161–162 music and, ix–x, 7–8, 23, 26 security of, safeguards for, 224 at summer camp, 234 years living with, 237 See also laptops Compuware, 171 Condé Nast, 105, 107 Contributoria (newspaper), 116, 117 Cool Tools: A Catalog of Possibilities (Kelly), 228–229 Cool Tools (blog), 228 correspondence courses, 178, 201, 202 counterculture, 12–13, 206, 225, 229 Coursera, 201 Cowen, Tyler, 166 Craigslist, 107, 124, 126, 146 Cramped, The (blog), 37 Cranium, 76 Creative Cloud, 47 creative destruction, 153, 154, 162, 168 creative-thinking skills, developing, 192, 195, 199, 218 creativity defining jobs by, 154, 155, 158 friction and, 219 limiting, 132, 181, 188 potential for, 35, 36, 39, 63 Criminal Records, 14 critical-thinking skills, developing, 199 Crosley, 17–18, 22 crowdfunding, xvii, 43, 73, 91–92, 94, 95–96, 98, 105, 116, 191 Crupnick, Russ, 18, 19 Cuban, Larry, 179–180, 183 curated content, 223, 224 custom newspapers, 116, 117–120 customer acquisition, 133, 137 cybersecurity, 224 Daily Telegraph, The (newspaper), 114 D’Angelo, 27 Danzig, Richard, 224 Dark Side of the Moon (album), 26 data centers, 161 Dauch, Colby, 84 Daviau, Rob, 84 Davies, Russell, 117 Davis, Miles, 25 Days of Wonder, 91 De Koven, Bernie, 81 Dead Fish Museum, The (D’Ambrosio), 130 Dead Weather, 21 Deal: American Dream, 95–96 Dean, Paul, 90 Delayed Gratification (magazine), 106, 107 Demby, Eric, 145 Department of Record Stores, 13–14 Descalzo, Marco, 57 design business, 32–33, 36 design thinking, 193, 197, 198–199, 199–201, 225 Design Week, 29–30, 32, 47–48 deskilling, 158–159 desktop publishing software, 105 Detroit, economy of, 152, 155–156, 157 Detroit Future City, 171 digital ads, 108, 109, 110, 133 digital age, 9, 31, 182 digital books. See eBooks digital businesses investing in, 170–172 market valuation of, 170, 171 See also specific businesses digital cameras, 54, 55–56, 61, 62, 70, 231 digital distraction, xv digital divide, bridging, testing the theory behind, 183–184, 185 digital downloads, x, xvi, 9, 10, 12, 16, 18, 19, 22 digital economy, 152–155, 160, 161, 163, 165, 166, 170 digital education technology.

Prediction Machines: The Simple Economics of Artificial Intelligence by Ajay Agrawal, Joshua Gans, Avi Goldfarb

Abraham Wald, Ada Lovelace, AI winter, Air France Flight 447, Airbus A320, algorithmic bias, AlphaGo, Amazon Picking Challenge, artificial general intelligence, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, basic income, Bayesian statistics, Black Swan, blockchain, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Captain Sullenberger Hudson, carbon tax, Charles Babbage, classic study, collateralized debt obligation, computer age, creative destruction, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data acquisition, data is the new oil, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, deskilling, disruptive innovation, driverless car, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, financial engineering, fulfillment center, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, Google Glasses, high net worth, ImageNet competition, income inequality, information retrieval, inventory management, invisible hand, Jeff Hawkins, job automation, John Markoff, Joseph Schumpeter, Kevin Kelly, Lyft, Minecraft, Mitch Kapor, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, Nate Silver, new economy, Nick Bostrom, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, OpenAI, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, performance metric, profit maximization, QWERTY keyboard, race to the bottom, randomized controlled trial, Ray Kurzweil, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Solow, Salesforce, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Jurvetson, Steven Levy, strong AI, The Future of Employment, the long tail, The Signal and the Noise by Nate Silver, Tim Cook: Apple, trolley problem, Turing test, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, US Airways Flight 1549, Vernor Vinge, vertical integration, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, William Langewiesche, Y Combinator, zero-sum game

To gain experience about all your customers, you may sometimes need to degrade the product for those customers in order to get feedback that will benefit everyone. Humans Also Need Experience The scarcity of experience becomes even more salient when you consider the experience of your human resources. If the machines get the experience, then the humans might not. Recently, some expressed concern that automation could result in the deskilling of humans. Air France Flight 447 crashed into the Atlantic on route from Rio de Janeiro to Paris in 2009. The crisis began with bad weather, but escalated when the plane’s autopilot disengaged. At the helm during that time, unlike Sully in the US Airways plane, a relatively inexperienced pilot poorly handled the situation, according to reports.

…

What will we do when we don’t drive most of the time but have a car that hands control to us during an extreme event? What will our children do? The solutions involve ensuring that humans gain and retain skills, reducing the amount of automation to provide time for human learning. In effect, experience is a scarce resource, some of which you need to allocate to humans to avoid deskilling. The reverse logic is also true. To train prediction machines, having them learn through the experience of potentially catastrophic events is surely valuable. But if you put a human in the loop, how will that machine’s experience emerge? And so another trade-off in generating a pathway to learning is between human and machine experience.

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See also uncertainty AI canvas for, 134–138 AI’s impact on, 3 centrality of, 73–74 cheap prediction and, 29 complexity and, 103–110 decomposing, 133–140 on deployment timing, 184–187 elements of, 74–76, 134–138 experiments and, 99–100 fully automated, 111–119 human strengths in, 98–102 human weaknesses in prediction and, 54–58 judgment in, 74, 75–76, 78–81, 83–94, 96–97 knowledge in, 76–78 modeling and, 99, 100–102 predicting judgment and, 95–102 preferences and, 88–90 satisficing in, 107–109 work flow analysis and, 123–131 decision trees, 13, 78–81 Deep Genomics, 3 deep learning approach, 7, 13 back propagation in, 38 flexibility in, 36 to language translation, 26–27 security risks with, 203–204 DeepMind, 7–8, 183, 187, 222, 223 Deep Thinking (Kasporov), 63 demand management, 156–157 dependent variables, 45 deployment decisions, 184–187 deskilling, 192–193 deterministic programming, 38, 40 Didi, 219 disparate impact, 197 disruptive technologies, 181–182 diversity, 201–202 division of labor, 53–69 human/machine collaboration, 65–67 human weaknesses in prediction and, 54–58 machine weaknesses in prediction and, 58–65 prediction by exception and, 67–68 dog fooding, 184 drone weapons, 116 Dropbox, 190 drug discovery, 28, 134–138 Dubé, J.

On the Clock: What Low-Wage Work Did to Me and How It Drives America Insane by Emily Guendelsberger

Adam Curtis, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Amazon Picking Challenge, autism spectrum disorder, basic income, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, cognitive dissonance, company town, David Attenborough, death from overwork, deskilling, do what you love, Donald Trump, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, future of work, hive mind, housing crisis, independent contractor, Jeff Bezos, Jessica Bruder, job automation, job satisfaction, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Jon Ronson, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, Kiva Systems, late capitalism, Lean Startup, market design, McDonald's hot coffee lawsuit, McJob, Minecraft, Nicholas Carr, Nomadland, obamacare, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, pattern recognition, precariat, Richard Thaler, San Francisco homelessness, scientific management, Second Machine Age, security theater, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, speech recognition, TaskRabbit, tech worker, The Future of Employment, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tony Hsieh, Toyota Production System, Travis Kalanick, union organizing, universal basic income, unpaid internship, Upton Sinclair, wage slave, working poor

The digital ghosts of his stopwatches and “one best way” have infiltrated previously hard-to-quantify sectors of the US workforce, digitally deskilling and speeding up work. Techno-Taylorism has gotten the most attention as it starts making inroads into high-wage jobs such as law, medicine, and journalism, but it’s already a way of life in the low-wage sector—fast food, call centers, nursing, elder care, etc. It’s very difficult for modern unskilled workers to avoid working in a techno-Taylorized environment defined by mistrust and contempt. This is because technology also multiplies Taylorism’s second prong—deskilling. “If you don’t know what to do, just check your scanner—it’ll tell you” is Michelle’s golden rule, and it’s true.

…

And a workforce of miserable, bored, hard-to-supervise workers quickly leads to soldiering, or situations like the shipworkers playing cards all day while one guy makes a lot of noise with a hammer. At the turn of the century, growth and division of labor were approaching that point of diminishing returns.* But Taylorism had no ceiling. Its combination of objective-seeming data analysis, specific productivity goals, monitoring, and deskilling was the system that growing factories had been desperate for. By conceiving of workers as numbers in an equation rather than individual humans, Taylor made it possible for companies to expand enormously, employing thousands and even millions of workers without losing control over them. Taylorism revolutionized American industry.

…

The silicon computer chip was invented in the late ’50s, but it took until 1971 for Intel to come out with the first widely successful commercial version. What would Taylor think of all this? is another hypothetical to distract myself with. My scanner gun is his vision incarnate—my own personal stopwatch and pitiless robo-manager rolled into one. Amazon’s system constantly watches, times, deskills, and micromanages hundreds of thousands of workers in real time, all day, every day. Would Taylor be horrified that his fears about the abuse of his ideas had come true? Or would he jizz in his pants? I force myself to keep walking through those first weeks at SDF8. And, as the nice blue-badge lady promised, it does start to get a little easier.

Inside the Robot Kingdom: Japan, Mechatronics and the Coming Robotopia by Frederik L. Schodt

carbon-based life, computer age, Computer Numeric Control, computer vision, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, factory automation, game design, guest worker program, industrial robot, Jacques de Vaucanson, Norbert Wiener, post-industrial society, robot derives from the Czech word robota Czech, meaning slave, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, telepresence, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, V2 rocket, warehouse automation, Whole Earth Review, women in the workforce

The movement of a painting or arc-welding robot's arm is a digitalization of that of a skilled worker; it is programmed to imitate and usurp his actions. One result is a polarization of skills. More and more people with advanced skills are needed to maintain the equipment and to program it, but others find themselves doing tasks that have been "de-skilled"—merely stacking widgets for the robot to handle, or pushing a button. De-skilling carries with it special hidden dangers for Japan. Many Japanese pride themselves on their craftsmanship, and in conversation the expression "we Japanese are clever with our hands" is used to imply the superiority of everything from Japanese products to the Japanese race itself. And Japanese are dexterous: foreigners marveling over Japan's postwar economic miracle would do well to look not only at books on management but also at clerks carefully wrapping gifts in department stores.

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If we look at the evolution of machines, we can divide them into four stages—of labor saving through automation; materials saving through multimodel, small batch production; energy saving, as in more efficient machinery; and finally, what I call skill-saving machinery, as in the case of the sushi robot."4 "Skill saving" is the flip side of "de-skilling." Sushi robots augment the work of a skilled chef or amplify the skills of an amateur—for take-out orders and quick snacks where time, rather than formality and tradition, is important and where the store can ill afford to hire another fully trained, highly paid chef. But skill saving is obviously not limited to the world of sushi.

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See NC machine tools comic books, 73, 75, 79, 81-84,152 continuous path, 36 craftsmanship: as factor in economic success, 162-63; tradition of, 57 cybernetics, 31, 63, 205 Cyborg, 205 Cybot society, 205 Daedalus, 55 Dainichi Kiko, 107,137 Daiwa House Industry, 178-79 dashi floats, 63 definitions of robots: 43, International Standards Organization (ISO), 40; JIRA, 37-38; Kojien, 30; RIA, 37; Webster's New Collegiate Dictionary, 29 degrees of freedom, 35 deindustrialization, 184-85,187-89 Deming, W Edward, 139 Deming Award, 117 design: of ART project robots, 225-33; of industrial robots, 126-27,173-75; of toy robots, 95-98,105 "de-skilling," 163,172 Devol, George C, 31-34, 37, 44, 111 direct-drive robots, 129,149 Doraemon, 80-81,107 dynamic stability, 230 Emperor of Japan, opinion on technology of, 77 Engelberger, Joseph E, 17, 33-35, 43, 111, 113-14,117,122,134,189,196. See also Joseph E Engelberger Award ETL (Electrotechnical Laboratory), 43, 217-18 exoskeletons, 49, 87 Expo '85,13, 203, 207 exports: of industrial robots, 127,130,145,148; of toy robots, 91-95,101-104,106 Extraordinary Measures Law for Promotion of Specific Electronic and Machinery Industries, 43,112 FA (factory automation), 40-42, 45 factionalism, 221-22 "Factory of the Future," 44,134 fantasy robots: as "cuddly machines," 79-81; effect of peace ideology on, 82; Japanese and American animation titles, 85; warrior robots, 82-90, Fanuc: description of plants, 131-34; discipline at, 140-41; history of, 134; lack of QC circles at, 139; problems with GMF, 147-48; profits of, 137; quality control at, 139; strengths of, 144; venture with General Electric, 148; venture with GMF, 143-49; workers at, 138-41 fatalities, robot caused, 164 feedback, 31-32, 48, 216 Fifth Generation Project, 222 fixed-sequence robot, 45 57 flexible automation, 180, 226; Casio's implementation of, 46-48; Devol's concept of, 31; need for, 112,120,125 FMS (flexible manufacturing systems), 44, 45 Frankenstein, 56, 78, 198 "Frankenstein complex," 198-99 Fujiko Fujio, 80 fukoku kyohei ("rich nation, strong military"), 74 genba shugi, 162 gijutsu rikkoku, 43 GM (General Motors), 18, 126, 143-48; problems with robots at, 148,150 GMF Robotics, 142-49 Gobe-e, Zeniya, 71 Gobots, 97 Golem, 199 governor, 57, 60-61 government policies, 93-94,121-24 Gundam.

Seeing Like a State: How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed by James C. Scott

agricultural Revolution, Boeing 747, business cycle, classic study, clean water, colonial rule, commoditize, company town, deskilling, facts on the ground, germ theory of disease, Great Leap Forward, informal economy, invention of writing, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, Kenneth Arrow, land reform, land tenure, Lewis Mumford, Louis Pasteur, megaproject, new economy, New Urbanism, post-Fordism, Potemkin village, price mechanism, profit maximization, Recombinant DNA, road to serfdom, scientific management, Silicon Valley, stochastic process, Suez canal 1869, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the scientific method, Thorstein Veblen, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, vertical integration, working poor

We must learn to combine the public-meeting democracy of the working people-turbulent, surging, overflowing its banks like a spring flood-with iron discipline while at work, with unquestioning obedience to the will of a single person, the Soviet leader, while at work ."14 In this respect, Lenin joins many of his capitalist contemporaries in his enthusiasm for Fordist and Taylorist production technology. What was rejected by Western trade unions of the time as a "de-skilling" of an artisanal workforce was embraced by Lenin as the key to rational state planning.45 There is, for Lenin, a single, objectively correct, efficient answer to all questions of how to rationally design production or administration.46 Lenin goes on to imagine, in a Fourierist vein, a vast national syndicate that will virtually run itself.

…

So are those of large irrigation projects, where authorities decide when to release the water, how to distribute it, and what water fees to charge, or of agricultural plantations, where the workforce is supervised as if it were in a factory setting.69 For colonialized farmers, the effect of such centralization and expertise was a radical de-skilling of the cultivators themselves. Even in the context of family farms and a liberal economy, this was in fact the utopian prospect held up by Liberty Hyde Bailey, a plant breeder, apostle of agricultural science, and the chairman of the Country Life Commission under Theodore Roosevelt. Bailey declared, "There will be established in the open country plant doctors, plant breeders, soil experts, health experts, pruning and spraying experts, forest experts, recreation experts, market experts, ...

…

One of the major purposes of state simplifications, collectivization, assembly lines, plantations, and planned communities alike is to strip down reality to the bare bones so that the rules will in fact explain more of the situation and provide a better guide to behavior. To the extent that this simplification can be imposed, those who make the rules can actually supply crucial guidance and instruction. This, at any rate, is what I take to be the inner logic of social, economic, and productive de-skilling. If the environment can be simplified down to the point where the rules do explain a great deal, those who formulate the rules and techniques have also greatly expanded their power. They have, correspondingly, diminished the power of those who do not. To the degree that they do succeed, cultivators with a high degree of autonomy, skills, experience, self-confidence, and adaptability are replaced by cultivators following instructions.

The World Beyond Your Head: On Becoming an Individual in an Age of Distraction by Matthew B. Crawford

airport security, behavioural economics, Cass Sunstein, choice architecture, collateralized debt obligation, creative destruction, David Brooks, delayed gratification, dematerialisation, deskilling, digital Maoism, Google Glasses, hive mind, index card, informal economy, Jaron Lanier, large denomination, new economy, new new economy, Norman Mailer, online collectivism, Plato's cave, plutocrats, precautionary principle, Richard Thaler, Rodney Brooks, scientific management, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Stanford marshmallow experiment, tacit knowledge, the built environment, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, theory of mind, Walter Mischel, winner-take-all economy

In such an ecology, the perception of a skilled practitioner is “tuned” to the features of the environment that are pertinent to effective action; extraneous information is dampened and irrelevant courses of action disappear. As a result, choice is simplified and momentum builds. Action becomes unimpeded. In a previous book, Shop Class as Soulcraft, I wrote about the de-skilling of everyday life. The core theme was individual agency: the experience of seeing a direct effect of your actions in the world, and knowing that these actions are genuinely your own. I suggested that genuine agency arises not in the context of mere choices freely made (as in shopping) but rather, somewhat paradoxically, in the context of submission to things that have their own intractable ways, whether the thing be a musical instrument, a garden, or the building of a bridge.

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As the world becomes more confusing, seemingly controlled by vast impersonal forces (e.g., “globalization” or “collateralized debt obligations”) that no single individual can fully bring within view; as the normative expectation becomes to land a cubicle job, in which the chain of cause and effect can be quite dispersed and opaque; as home life becomes deskilled (we outsource our cooking to corporations, our house repairs to immigrant guest workers); as the material basis of modern life becomes ever more obscured, and the occasions for skillful action are removed to sites overseas, where things are made; to sites nearby but socially invisible, where things are tended and repaired; and to sites unknown, where elites orchestrate commercial and political forces—when all of this is the case, the experience of individual agency becomes somewhat elusive.

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Our efforts on that front get confused and misdirected when we live under a public doctrine of individualism that systematically dismantles shared frames of meaning. The reason we need such frames is that only within them can we differentiate ourselves as not merely different, but excellent. Without that vertical dimension, we get the sameness of mass solipsism rather than true individuality. The de-skilling of everyday life, which is a function of our economy, thus has implications that reach far beyond the economy. It is integral to a larger set of developments that continue to reshape the kinds of selves we become, and the set of human possibilities that remains open to us. 9 THE CULTURE OF PERFORMANCE In The Weariness of the Self, Alain Ehrenberg offers a cultural history of depression.

Ghost Road: Beyond the Driverless Car by Anthony M. Townsend

A Pattern Language, active measures, AI winter, algorithmic trading, Alvin Toffler, Amazon Robotics, asset-backed security, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, big-box store, bike sharing, Blitzscaling, Boston Dynamics, business process, Captain Sullenberger Hudson, car-free, carbon footprint, carbon tax, circular economy, company town, computer vision, conceptual framework, congestion charging, congestion pricing, connected car, creative destruction, crew resource management, crowdsourcing, DARPA: Urban Challenge, data is the new oil, Dean Kamen, deep learning, deepfake, deindustrialization, delayed gratification, deliberate practice, dematerialisation, deskilling, Didi Chuxing, drive until you qualify, driverless car, drop ship, Edward Glaeser, Elaine Herzberg, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, extreme commuting, financial engineering, financial innovation, Flash crash, food desert, Ford Model T, fulfillment center, Future Shock, General Motors Futurama, gig economy, Google bus, Greyball, haute couture, helicopter parent, independent contractor, inventory management, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, Jevons paradox, jitney, job automation, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, Lewis Mumford, loss aversion, Lyft, Masayoshi Son, megacity, microapartment, minimum viable product, mortgage debt, New Urbanism, Nick Bostrom, North Sea oil, Ocado, openstreetmap, pattern recognition, Peter Calthorpe, random walk, Ray Kurzweil, Ray Oldenburg, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rodney Brooks, self-driving car, sharing economy, Shoshana Zuboff, Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart cities, Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia, SoftBank, software as a service, sovereign wealth fund, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, surveillance capitalism, technological singularity, TED Talk, Tesla Model S, The Coming Technological Singularity, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, The Great Good Place, too big to fail, traffic fines, transit-oriented development, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, urban planning, urban sprawl, US Airways Flight 1549, Vernor Vinge, vertical integration, Vision Fund, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics

For instance, one UK study identified a veteran local driver who logged 44 percent fewer miles in 35 percent less time than a novice making the same set of deliveries. The deskilling of local delivery has also inevitably driven down wages, provoking a growing worker backlash against firms like “Slaveroo.” The centralization of dispatch to the cloud has also eliminated the local middlemen who once provided a handy pressure point for police when traffic, parking, or road-safety issues came up. For shippers, however, the costly gains obtained by deskilling delivery haven’t been enough. With few remaining options, many are turning to automation to slash costs and increase speed over the last mile.

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“automated” vehicles, 39 Autonomy (Burns), 214 autonomy, defined, 42 Autophobia (Ladd), 80 Autopilot (Tesla), 26–29 Autor, David, 150, 151, 152, 155 Baidu, 54 Bezos, Jeff, 221 Big Dog (Boston Dynamics), 79 big mobility, 239–47 bike sharing Bird Rides, 65, 66, 67 dockless bike-share, 64–65, 66, 67 docks, 64 Lime Bike, 67 microsprawl and, 202 rebalancing problem, 64–65 smartphone apps, 64 Vélib system (Paris), 63 VeoRide, 67 “white bikes,” 63 Bird Rides, 65, 66, 67 “block captain” ushers, 78 Bloomberg Philanthropies, 214 Blue Apron, 141, 145–46 Blue Gene/L (IBM), 36 Blueprint for Autonomous Urbanism, 193–94, 196, 242 Boston Dynamics, 79 Bostrom, Nick, 236–37, 238 Brooks, Rodney, 235 Brown, Joshua, 28 Burns, Larry, 214 buses bus rapid transit (BRT), 69–70, 72 CityPilot system, 72 driverless city buses, 216 platoons and platooning, 69–70, 70–71 software trains, 70–71, 70–72, 197, 200–201, 202, 204, 206 BVG (Berlin), 216 CalPers, 182–83 Calthorpe, Peter, 202 Caltrans, 170 carbon emissions AVs as tool for reducing, 19, 137 driverless shuttles and, 105 from manufacturing of clothing, 148 microsprawl and, 200, 202, 203, 204 platooning and, 68 software trains and, 72 Careem, 177 car-lite communes, 14–15, 60, 121, 244, 253, 254 Charles I (king), 161 Charlier, Frederic, 170–71 Cheetah 3 (MIT), 79 Chicago parking-meter contract, 173 Chin, Ryan, 62–63 Christine (King), 42 circular economies, 146–49, 196, 221 Citi Bike docks (New York City), 64 CityMobil2, 102–5 CityPilot system, 72 civic caravans, 73–75, 76–77, 77, 199 Clarke, Randy, 72 ClearRoad, 169–72, 216 clothing AirCloset, 148 carbon emissions from manufacturing, 148 in circular economies, 148–49 Rent the Runway, 140–41, 145 CloudKitchens, 140 coal and Jevons effect, 143–45 Coal Question, The (Jevons), 144 code and programming for AVs malleability of, 228, 245, 248 pushing code, 227 role in shaping driverless revolution, 227–28, 247–49 writing compared to coding, 226–27 see also computers and self-driving vehicles Cody (IDEO), 125 cognitive tasks and automation, 150–51, 151, 152–53 complete streets (shared streets), 208–9 computers and self-driving vehicles data exhaust, 108–12 data logged daily, 35, 108 microtransit mesh, 107–8, 111, 157 Pegasus onboard AV computer, 35–36 scan, study, and steer as basic tasks, 34–38 supercomputer location under seat, 84 vehicular variety increase, 53 see also code and programming for AVs; deep learning; reprogramming mobility computer vision, 152, 230, 231 congestion pricing at the curb, 223 electronic tolling, 169–72 mobility policy and, 182 in New York City, 165–67, 167, 168, 172–73 speculation or perverse incentives, 172–73 support for, 167–69 Uber, 179, 181 Vickrey’s study of, 165–66 weaponization by speculators, 17 see also financialization of mobility continuous delivery compared to historical shopping habits, 115–16, 120–21 and last mile logistics, 121–29 costs decline in twentieth century, 130 deskilling of delivery, 124 effect of instant delivery, 218 efficiency improvements and rebound effect, 145–47 free or cheap delivery and, 116–17, 204 freight AVs and, 125–26 fulfillment centers, 121, 123, 132, 136–37, 152, 158 impact on jobs, 155 impact on local businesses, 140–42 kippleization and, 142–43 nighttime delivery, 128–29, 130 overview, 120–21 package lockers and, 127, 130, 219, 221 piggybacking deliveries, 126–27 same-day delivery, 119, 123–24, 132–33, 138 see also e-commerce conveyors in circular economies, 148 deep learning, 57 Kiwibots, 57 last-mile deliveries, 124–25 maintenance, repair, and remote monitoring, 132 overview, 56–57, 60–61 Starship conveyors, 55–56, 57, 125, 192 Coord, 232–33 Cops (TV show), 24 Coresight Research, 117 core (urban core), 187, 188, 188–96, 194–95 Costco, 116 Could This Be You (TV show), 24 creative destruction, defined, 137 Credit Suisse, 117 cruise control, 24–25, 26 curb pricing and curb-access fees, 220–21, 222–23, 232 Curbs API, 232–33 Cushman & Wakefield, 117 Daimler, 6, 68, 69, 72, 190 Daley, Richard, 173 DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) Grand Challenges, 6–7, 68, 104, 133, 230 data collaboratives, 233 data exhaust, 108–12 Death and Life of Great American Cities, The (Jacobs), 57 deaths caused by motor vehicles, 9, 38, 156 deep learning advances in, 39, 42 computer power consumption, 37 conveyors, 57 fleet learning, 37 human intelligence tasks (HITs) required, 41 limits of, 235–36 neural networks, 36–37, 84, 235 occupancy grid, 37 overview, 36–37 and task model, 152 training, 37, 41, 153, 235 see also artificial intelligence; machine learning Deliveroo, 56, 124 delivery, continuous.

Rendezvous With Oblivion: Reports From a Sinking Society by Thomas Frank

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, behavioural economics, Bernie Sanders, big-box store, business climate, business cycle, call centre, crowdsourcing, David Brooks, deindustrialization, deskilling, Donald Trump, edge city, fake news, Frank Gehry, high net worth, income inequality, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, McMansion, military-industrial complex, new economy, New Urbanism, obamacare, offshore financial centre, plutocrats, Ponzi scheme, profit maximization, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, Ralph Nader, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, Steve Bannon, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, too big to fail, urban planning, Washington Consensus, Works Progress Administration

In fact, the conditions of employment have been engineered almost as carefully as the brands and the burgers—engineered to achieve the complete interchangeability of workers. In his classic Fast Food Nation (2001), Eric Schlosser describes the industry’s manic pursuit of standardization. The food arrives at the restaurant mostly frozen; the machines that do the cooking are foolproof; virtually no skills are required. “Jobs that have been ‘de-skilled’ can be filled cheaply,” writes Schlosser. “The need to retain any individual worker is greatly reduced by the ease with which he or she can be replaced.” Indeed, these are not really restaurants at all but “food systems,” a term favored by the companies themselves. And naturally these systematizers are militantly anti-union.

…

I thought about that nightmare of automation for quite a while after Berman’s ad ran. It has a grain of truth to it, of course. Journalists have been replaced with bloggers and crowd-sourcing. Factory hands have been replaced with robots. University professors are being replaced with adjuncts and MOOCs. What else might the god Efficiency choose to de-skill? Here’s a suggestion: how about the ideological carnival barkers in D.C.? The fast-food strike triggered a predictable pundit reaction, and as I watched the creaking libertarian apparatus send its suit-and-tie spokesmen before the cameras to denounce unions, I wondered how long capital would stand to be represented in this old-fashioned way.

A World Without Work: Technology, Automation, and How We Should Respond by Daniel Susskind

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 3D printing, agricultural Revolution, AI winter, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, algorithmic trading, AlphaGo, artificial general intelligence, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, Big Tech, blue-collar work, Boston Dynamics, British Empire, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, cloud computing, computer age, computer vision, computerized trading, creative destruction, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, demographic transition, deskilling, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Douglas Hofstadter, driverless car, drone strike, Edward Glaeser, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, fake news, financial innovation, flying shuttle, Ford Model T, fulfillment center, future of work, gig economy, Gini coefficient, Google Glasses, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hans Moravec, income inequality, income per capita, industrial robot, interchangeable parts, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jacques de Vaucanson, James Hargreaves, job automation, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John von Neumann, Joi Ito, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, Kevin Roose, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Larry Ellison, low skilled workers, lump of labour, machine translation, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, Metcalfe’s law, natural language processing, Neil Armstrong, Network effects, Nick Bostrom, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, Paul Samuelson, Peter Thiel, pink-collar, precariat, purchasing power parity, Ray Kurzweil, ride hailing / ride sharing, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Sam Altman, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, social intelligence, software is eating the world, sovereign wealth fund, spinning jenny, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, strong AI, tacit knowledge, technological solutionism, TED Talk, telemarketer, The Future of Employment, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, the scientific method, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thorstein Veblen, Travis Kalanick, Turing test, Two Sigma, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, universal basic income, upwardly mobile, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We are the 99%, wealth creators, working poor, working-age population, Y Combinator

If he actually existed, he would have been a professional of sorts—perhaps even a card-carrying member of the Worshipful Company of Clothworkers, a prestigious club for people of his trade. And the mechanical looms that displaced Ned and his comrades meant that someone with less skill, without Ned’s specialized training, could take his place. These new machines were “de-skilling,” making it easier for less-skilled people to produce high-quality wares that would have required skilled workers in the past. The share of unskilled workers in England appears to have doubled from the late 1500s to the early 1800s.12 This change was no accident. Andrew Ure, an influential figure who acted as a sort of early management consultant to manufacturers, called for taking away tasks from “the cunning workman” and replacing him with machines so simple to use that “a child may superintend” instead.

…

From Max Roser and Mohamed Nagdy, “Returns to Education,” https://ourworldindata.org/returns-to-education (accessed 1 May 2018). 11.  See Daron Acemoglu, “Technical Change, Inequality, and the Labor Market,” Journal of Economic Literature 40, no. 1 (2002): 7–72. 12.  For England, see Alexandra Pleijt and Jacob Weisdorf, “Human Capital Formation from Occupations: The ‘Deskilling Hypothesis’ Revisited,” Cliometrica 11, no. 1 (2017): 1–30. A similar story unfolded in the United States; see Kevin O’Rourke, Ahmed Rahman, and Alan Taylor, “Luddites, the Industrial Revolution, and the Demographic Transition,” Journal of Economic Growth 18, no. 4 (2013): 373–409. 13.  Quoted in Ben Seligman, Most Notorious Victory: Man in an Age of Automation (New York: Free Press, 1966), p. 11. 14.  

…

Quarterly Journal of Economics 133, no. 2 (2018): 553–609. Piketty, Thomas, and Gabriel Zucman. “Capital Is Back: Wealth–Income Ratios in Rich Countries 1700–2010.” Quarterly Journal of Economics 129, no. 3 (2014): 1255–1310. Pleijt, Alexandra, and Jacob Weisdorf. “Human Capital Formation from Occupations: The ‘Deskilling Hypothesis’ Revisited.” Cliometrica 11, no. 1 (2017): 1–30. Polanyi, Michael. The Tacit Dimension. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1966. Popper, Karl. The Open Society and Its Enemies, vol. 1: The Age of Plato. London: Routledge, 1945. Putnam, Hilary. “Much Ado About Not Very Much.” Daedalus 117, no. 1 (1988): 269–81.

The Rise of the Network Society by Manuel Castells

air traffic controllers' union, Alan Greenspan, Apple II, Asian financial crisis, barriers to entry, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Bob Noyce, borderless world, British Empire, business cycle, capital controls, classic study, complexity theory, computer age, Computer Lib, computerized trading, content marketing, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, declining real wages, deindustrialization, delayed gratification, dematerialisation, deskilling, digital capitalism, digital divide, disintermediation, double helix, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, edge city, experimental subject, export processing zone, Fairchild Semiconductor, financial deregulation, financial independence, floating exchange rates, future of work, gentrification, global village, Gunnar Myrdal, Hacker Ethic, hiring and firing, Howard Rheingold, illegal immigration, income inequality, independent contractor, Induced demand, industrial robot, informal economy, information retrieval, intermodal, invention of the steam engine, invention of the telephone, inventory management, Ivan Sutherland, James Watt: steam engine, job automation, job-hopping, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Kanban, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, labor-force participation, laissez-faire capitalism, Leonard Kleinrock, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, megacity, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, moral panic, new economy, New Urbanism, offshore financial centre, oil shock, open economy, packet switching, Pearl River Delta, peer-to-peer, planetary scale, popular capitalism, popular electronics, post-Fordism, post-industrial society, Post-Keynesian economics, postindustrial economy, prediction markets, Productivity paradox, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, RAND corporation, Recombinant DNA, Robert Gordon, Robert Metcalfe, Robert Solow, seminal paper, Shenzhen special economic zone , Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, social software, South China Sea, South of Market, San Francisco, special economic zone, spinning jenny, statistical model, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Strategic Defense Initiative, tacit knowledge, technological determinism, Ted Nelson, the built environment, the medium is the message, the new new thing, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, total factor productivity, trade liberalization, transaction costs, urban renewal, urban sprawl, vertical integration, work culture , zero-sum game

To find patterns of regularity behind this confusing scene, we must have the patience to abstract successive layers of social causation, to first deconstruct, then reconstruct the emerging pattern of work, workers, and labor organization that characterize the new, informational society. Let us start with information technology. Mechanization first, automation later, have been transforming human labor for decades, always triggering similar debates around issues of workers’ displacement, deskilling versus reskilling, productivity versus alienation, management control versus labor autonomy.48 To follow a French “filière” of analysis over the past half-century, Georges Friedmann criticized “le travail en miettes” (piecemeal work) of the Taylorist factory; Pierre Naville denounced the alienation of workers under mechanization; Alain Touraine, on the basis of his pioneering sociological study in the late 1940s on the technological transformation of Renault factories, proposed his typology of work processes as A/B/C (craft, assembly line, and innovation work); Serge Mallet announced the birth of “a new working class” focused on the capacity to manage and operate advanced technology; and Benjamin Coriat analyzed the emergence of a post-Fordist model in the labor process, on the basis of linking up flexibility and integration in a new model of relationships between production and consumption.

…

As for office automation, it has gone through three different phases, largely determined by available technology.55 In the first phase, characteristic of the 1960s and 1970s, mainframe computers were used for batch processing of data; centralized computing by specialists in data-processing centers formed the basis of a system characterized by the rigidity and hierarchical control of information flows; data entry operations required substantial efforts since the goal of the system was the accumulation of large amounts of information in a central memory; work was standardized, routinized, and, in essence, deskilled for the majority of clerical workers, in a process analyzed, and denounced, by Braverman in his classic study.56 The following stages of automation, however, were substantially different. The second phase, in the early 1980s, was characterized by the emphasis on the use of microcomputers by the employees in charge of the actual work process; although they were supported by centralized databases, they interacted directly in the process of generating information, although often requiring the support of computer experts.

…

However, since this labor practice relies essentially on the occupational subservience of highly educated Japanese women, which will not last for ever, I propose the hypothesis that it is just a matter of time until the hidden flexibility of the Japanese labor market diffuses to the core labor force, calling into question what has been the most stable and productive labor relations system of the late industrial era.129 Thus, overall, there is indeed a fundamental transformation of work, workers, and working organizations in our societies, but it cannot be apprehended in the traditional categories of obsolete debates over the “end of work” or the “deskilling of labor.”130 The prevailing model for labor in the new, information-based economy is that of a core labor force, formed by information-based managers and by those whom Reich calls “symbolic analysts,” and a disposable labor force that can be automated and/or hired/fired/offshored, depending upon market demand and labor costs.

Trust: The Social Virtue and the Creation of Prosperity by Francis Fukuyama

Alvin Toffler, barriers to entry, Berlin Wall, blue-collar work, business climate, business cycle, capital controls, classic study, collective bargaining, corporate governance, corporate raider, creative destruction, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, double entry bookkeeping, equal pay for equal work, European colonialism, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, George Gilder, glass ceiling, Glass-Steagall Act, global village, Gunnar Myrdal, hiring and firing, industrial robot, Jane Jacobs, job satisfaction, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, Joseph Schumpeter, Kanban, Kenneth Arrow, land reform, liberal capitalism, liberation theology, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, mittelstand, price mechanism, profit maximization, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, Ronald Coase, scientific management, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Nature of the Firm, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transaction costs, transfer pricing, traveling salesman, union organizing, vertical integration, W. E. B. Du Bois

An important school of American sociologists believed that there would be a gradual convergence on the Taylorite labor-management relations model in all advanced societies.21 This view was shared by many of the critics of modern industrial society from Karl Marx to Charlie Chaplin, who believed the Taylorite division of labor was the inevitable consequence of the capitalist form of industrialization.22 Under this system, man was destined to become alienated: the machines he had built to serve himself had in effect become his masters, reducing the human being to a cog in a system of mechanical production. The deskilling of the workforce would be accompanied by a decrease in trust in society as a whole; people would relate to each other through the legal system, not as members of organic communities. The pride in skill and work that accompanied craft production would be gone, as well as the unique and varied products that craftsmen produced.

…

Work in itself therefore has a positive utility apart from the way it is compensated. But the type of work matters very much. The autonomy of craftsmen—the skills they marshaled and the creativity and intelligence they displayed in fabricating a finished product—were essential to satisfaction. For this reason, the shift to mass production and the deskilling of the workforce robbed workers of something very important that could not be compensated by higher wages. As mass production proliferated, however, it became evident that Taylorism was not the only model of industrial modernity, that skill and craftsmanship did not disappear, and that trust relationships remained critical to the proper functioning of modern workplaces.

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The former sold 30,000 copies by 1922, and the latter went through thirty successive printings in the following years, leading to minor cults of Taylorismus and Fordismus.1 The enormous advance in productivity represented by Ford’s Highland Park facility impressed on German manufacturers the need to adopt mass production techniques in their own operations, and lay behind the “rationalization” movement in German industry during the mid-1920s. But while German industry adopted mass production, Taylorismus never sat very well with German managers and industrial engineers, much less German workers. The deskilling of the workforce, its overspecialization, and the unsatisfying nature of blue-collar work in a Taylorite factory threatened the long-standing German belief in the importance of Arbeitsfreude, or “joy in work,” whose origins lay in Germany’s powerful premodern craft traditions. Industrial engineers who wrote on the subject of factory organization in this period, like Gustav Frenz, Paul Rieppel, Friedrich von Gottl-Ottlilienfeld, and Goetz Briefs, all tended to distinguish between Taylorism and what they regarded as the more human system that Ford actually implemented.2 That is, while Taylor and Ford are closely linked in historical memory as the codifier and implementer, respectively, of the low-trust mass production factory system, Ford’s early plants actually practiced a form of company paternalism that was never part of Taylor’s scientific management principles.

The Digital Doctor: Hope, Hype, and Harm at the Dawn of Medicine’s Computer Age by Robert Wachter

activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, AI winter, Airbnb, Atul Gawande, Captain Sullenberger Hudson, Checklist Manifesto, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, Clayton Christensen, cognitive load, collapse of Lehman Brothers, computer age, creative destruction, crowdsourcing, deep learning, deskilling, disruptive innovation, driverless car, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, Firefox, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane: The New Division of Labor, general purpose technology, Google Glasses, human-factors engineering, hype cycle, Ignaz Semmelweis: hand washing, Internet of things, job satisfaction, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, knowledge worker, lifelogging, Marc Benioff, medical malpractice, medical residency, Menlo Park, minimum viable product, natural language processing, Network effects, Nicholas Carr, obamacare, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer, personalized medicine, pets.com, pneumatic tube, Productivity paradox, Ralph Nader, RAND corporation, Richard Hendricks, Robert Solow, Salesforce, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, six sigma, Skype, Snapchat, software as a service, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, TED Talk, The future is already here, the payments system, The Wisdom of Crowds, Thomas Bayes, Toyota Production System, Uber for X, US Airways Flight 1549, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, Yogi Berra

Experts call this phenomenon deskilling, and preventing it is a major focus of today’s aviation safety efforts. In his 2014 book, The Glass Cage, Nicholas Carr describes the challenge. “How do you measure the expense of an erosion of effort and engagement, or a waning of agency and autonomy, or a subtle deterioration of skill?” he asked. “You can’t. Those are the kinds of shadowy, intangible things that we rarely appreciate until after they’re gone.” In a perverse way, we’ve been lucky that the current state of health IT is so woeful. It gives us the time we need to begin to sort out how to prevent such deskilling and disengagement before the computers really take over.

…

., 9–10, 11–12, 17 Bush, Jonathan, 89, 226–233 Carr, Nicholas, 275 case-mix adjustment, 40 Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, 67–68 CellScope, 240–241, 242 Cerner, 8, 86, 187, 222, 231 Chan, Benjamin, 139–141, 149–153, 155–157 Chang, Paul, 53, 62 the chart, 44–45 The Checklist Manifesto (Gawande), 121–122 Christensen, Clay, 12, 61, 217, 229 clinical research, 263–264 clinical trials, 33 clinicopathologic correlation, 31 Clinton, Hillary, 11 Clinton, William “Bill”, 9, 189 Code Blue, 2–4 Codman, Ernest, 36 cognitive computing, 146 cognitive load, 150–151 complementary innovations, 245 computer systems, replacing the physician’s brain, 93–104 computerized decision support for clinicians, 248, 251, 260 computerized provider order entry (CPOE), 130 “Connecting for Health” initiative, 10, 17 cookbook medicine, 120 Cramer, Jim, 233 creative destruction, 250–251 The Creative Destruction of Medicine (Topol), 250 CT scans, 50–51 quality of images, 52–53 stacking, 53 data. See big data data entry, 74 See also scribes data janitors, 117 data wrangling, 117 “death panel” canard, 15 deBronkart, Dave, 198 Delbanco, Tom, 172–178 DeSalvo, Karen, 115–116, 216–217 deskilling, 275 Dhaliwal, Gurpreet, 99, 110, 112 diagnosis, 94–104 See also Isabel DICOM, 51 differential diagnoses, 97 disruptive innovation, 61, 217 distractions, 83–84 doctor visits, 263 doctor-patient relationships, 29–30, 173–174 and technology, 27–28 Doctors and Their Patients (Shorter), 30 doctor’s notes, 30–34, 268 the faceless note, 78–80 See also medical records Donabedian, Avedis, 23 dosage errors, 127–130 See also Pablo Garcia medical error case dosage limits, 133–134 Dougherty, Michelle, 82 Doximity, 238 Doyle, Arthur Conan, 97 Dr.

The Reluctant Carer: Dispatches From the Edge of Life by The Reluctant Carer

call centre, cognitive dissonance, deskilling, disinformation, gig economy, Jeff Bezos, load shedding, place-making, stem cell, telemarketer, trolley problem

I know my dad like a trainer knows his elephant. If he doesn’t believe he can do it then he just won’t go. A one-off performance for the physios does not equal mobility. The house is like a theatre, we can’t afford to book him unless it is for multiple shows. A hospital admission, I have learnt, leads to a rapid de-skilling on all sides. A haemorrhaging of tolerance and ability in both the cared for and the caring. It makes for messy reunions. It is not the technical skills that desert us, one can still do the things, but the emotional framework that sustains the actions. That’s what suffers. This perhaps is what we really mean by coping.

…

As though it was running at Aintree and he wanted me to put a bet on. Liquid Soap, fiver each way. I buy some. Evidently he is OK. We are safely back to normal. Perfectly repositioned in the everyday. Except I am not. Something still roils inside. I call a friend who has been through all this before, even the attempted parental suicide. We talk about the de-skilling. How the elderly realm is strange territory, another dimension where you can learn the language, but cannot take it with you. Something’s lost as you leave. They are working with a different alphabet, a new mythology, prayer book and legal system each time you return. Each comeback feels like Gulliver’s travels, except that you feel large and small in the same country.

Innovation and Its Enemies by Calestous Juma

3D printing, additive manufacturing, agricultural Revolution, Asilomar, Asilomar Conference on Recombinant DNA, autonomous vehicles, behavioural economics, big-box store, biodiversity loss, business cycle, Cass Sunstein, classic study, clean water, collective bargaining, colonial rule, computer age, creative destruction, CRISPR, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, deskilling, disruptive innovation, driverless car, electricity market, energy transition, Erik Brynjolfsson, fail fast, financial innovation, global value chain, Honoré de Balzac, illegal immigration, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, invention of movable type, invention of the printing press, Joseph Schumpeter, knowledge economy, loss aversion, Marc Andreessen, means of production, Menlo Park, mobile money, New Urbanism, Nicholas Carr, pensions crisis, phenotype, precautionary principle, Ray Kurzweil, Recombinant DNA, refrigerator car, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, smart grid, smart meter, stem cell, Steve Jobs, synthetic biology, systems thinking, tacit knowledge, technological singularity, The Future of Employment, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, Travis Kalanick

Concerns in the 1970s over the use of microprocessors in industry were restricted to the possible impact on labor displacement in the manufacturing sectors. Workers and labor organizations around the world protested the use of this emerging technology. Echoes of these debates are heard today in discussions on “de-skilling” of the labor force and erosion of human capital. “The opportunities for conflict are much wider when we consider human capital. Skills and experience are acquired over a lifetime, but the ability to learn new skills declines over the life cycle. Workers beyond the student or apprentice stage can be expected to question new techniques insofar as innovation makes their skills obsolete and thus irreversibly reduces their expected lifespan earnings.”108 Fear that using computers as educational tools in schools would displace teachers is still in public consciousness, despite the rapid adoption of this technology for teaching purposes.

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See Direct current Death Commission (NY State), 161–162 Death penalty, 160–164 Deaths from electricity, 159–160 from refrigerator gas leaks, 183, 184 Decca Records, 212, 216, 218 Dedicated biotechnology firms (DBFs), 230–231 Deere, John, 123 DeKalb Genetics Corporation, 232–233 Deliberative decisionmaking, 282–283 Demonization. See Stigmatization Dengue fever, 255–256 Denmark transgenic products, suspending of authorization for, 240 xerophthalmia in, 112 Department of ___. See name of specific US department De-skilling, 40 Desserts Frozen with Ice and Salt (Pennington), 182 Destructive creation, 222, 298 Detroit Edison Station, 157–158 Developing world access to scientific and technical knowledge, 13 biosafety regulations, 241 complex decisions by, 286–287 fish, demand for, 259 healthcare leapfrogging, 285 protein consumption, 34 technologies, views on, 291–292 “Devil’s Instrument,” telephone as, 309 al-Dhabani, Muhamad, 47–48 Diamond v.

…

See AquAdvantage salmon Salt, use in ice cooling, 177 Sandoz company, 232–233 Schools, computers in, 41 Schultz, Theodore William, 95, 116 Schumpeter, Joseph on consumers’ tastes, changes in, 45 creative destruction, concept of, 16–17, 19, 39, 42, 47, 121, 129, 139, 280, 309 economic development, application of complex systems thinking to, 27 on economic gains from innovation, 203 on equilibrium, 27 on entrepreneurs, 258 innovation, taxonomy of, 175 on leadership, 282 railroads, characterization of impact of, 122 on resistance to innovation, 1, 96 social transformation and, 16–23 on technological innovation, 225, 293–294 Schuylkill River, ice from, 181 Science advisory bodies, 286–287 science-based approval processes, need for, 277–278 science-based regulation, 236–244, 277 scientific and technical knowledge, developing world’s access to, 13 scientific information, democratization of, 313 scientific research, dynamics of success in, 327n115 scientific uncertainty, about new technologies, 120, 239–240 scientists, communication by, 312–313 Science advice importance of, 174–175 scientific advisory bodies, importance of, 7 scientific and technical advice, structures for, 287–288, 306 Scott, Leon, 207 Scribes, 71, 77 Seatbelts, social norms on, 33 Seattle, frozen pack laboratory in, 195 SEC (Securities Exchange Commission), 274–275 Second-generation biotechnology, 253–254 Secularization, of the Ottoman Empire, 91 Securities Exchange Commission (SEC), 274–275 Security, as grand challenge, 12 Sedgwick, William, 187 Seed sector, 30, 243 Selective breeding, fish farming and, 262–263 Self-driving cars, impact of, 13 Self-organizing systems, 6, 28 Selim I, Sultan, 68 Selim II, Sultan, 51 Selim III, Sultan, 93 Senate, US, 196, 215 Senefelder, Alois, 92 Shams (Syrian businessman), 51 Ships, 195, 295–296 Silent Spring (Carson), 14, 224–225, 231 Singers, prominence of, vs. bands, 219 Single path dependence, as limitation on innovation, 250 Single studies, false balance of, vs. evidence, 249–250 Singularity. See Exponential function Skepticism attitudes and, 36 of electricity, 151 means of combating, 314–315 toward innovation, sources of, 23, 36 of the written word, 74, 85 Skills de-skilling, 40 development opportunities for, 284 engineering skills, 122, 127, 137 high vs. low, 26 life skills, 140–141 musical, 205 organizational, 98 in printing, 77 Sleeping sickness (encephalomyelitis), 133 Small markets, 324n75 Smartphones, 300 Smith-Hughes Act (1917), 137 Smith-Lever Act (1914), 137 Social institutions.

Machines of Loving Grace: The Quest for Common Ground Between Humans and Robots by John Markoff

A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, AI winter, airport security, Andy Rubin, Apollo 11, Apple II, artificial general intelligence, Asilomar, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, backpropagation, basic income, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, Bill Atkinson, Bill Duvall, bioinformatics, Boston Dynamics, Brewster Kahle, Burning Man, call centre, cellular automata, Charles Babbage, Chris Urmson, Claude Shannon: information theory, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive load, collective bargaining, computer age, Computer Lib, computer vision, crowdsourcing, Danny Hillis, DARPA: Urban Challenge, data acquisition, Dean Kamen, deep learning, DeepMind, deskilling, Do you want to sell sugared water for the rest of your life?, don't be evil, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Hofstadter, Dr. Strangelove, driverless car, dual-use technology, Dynabook, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, factory automation, Fairchild Semiconductor, Fillmore Auditorium, San Francisco, From Mathematics to the Technologies of Life and Death, future of work, Galaxy Zoo, General Magic , Geoffrey Hinton, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Grace Hopper, Gunnar Myrdal, Gödel, Escher, Bach, Hacker Ethic, Hans Moravec, haute couture, Herbert Marcuse, hive mind, hype cycle, hypertext link, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, information retrieval, Internet Archive, Internet of things, invention of the wheel, Ivan Sutherland, Jacques de Vaucanson, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Jeff Hawkins, job automation, John Conway, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, Kaizen: continuous improvement, Kevin Kelly, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, Kodak vs Instagram, labor-force participation, loose coupling, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, medical residency, Menlo Park, military-industrial complex, Mitch Kapor, Mother of all demos, natural language processing, Neil Armstrong, new economy, Norbert Wiener, PageRank, PalmPilot, pattern recognition, Philippa Foot, pre–internet, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, reality distortion field, Recombinant DNA, Richard Stallman, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, Rodney Brooks, Sand Hill Road, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, semantic web, Seymour Hersh, shareholder value, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Singularitarianism, skunkworks, Skype, social software, speech recognition, stealth mode startup, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, Strategic Defense Initiative, strong AI, superintelligent machines, tech worker, technological singularity, Ted Nelson, TED Talk, telemarketer, telepresence, telepresence robot, Tenerife airport disaster, The Coming Technological Singularity, the medium is the message, Thorstein Veblen, Tony Fadell, trolley problem, Turing test, Vannevar Bush, Vernor Vinge, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We are as Gods, Whole Earth Catalog, William Shockley: the traitorous eight, zero-sum game

Like Martin Ford, Brynjolfsson and McAfee chronicled a growing array of technological applications that were redefining the workplace, or seemed poised on the brink of doing so. Of the wave of new critiques, David Autor’s thesis was perhaps the most compelling. However, even he began to hedge in 2014, based on a report that indicated a growing “deskilling” of the U.S. workforce and a declining demand for jobs that required cognitive skills. He worried that the effect was creating a downward ramp. The consequence, argued Paul Beaudry, David A. Green, and Ben Sand in a National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) working paper, was that higher-skilled workers tended to push lower-skilled workers out of the workforce.25 Although they have no clear evidence directly related to the deployment of particular types of technologies, the analysis of the consequences for the top of the workforce is chilling.

…

Indeed, in the decade from 2003 to 2013, the size of the U.S. workforce increased by more than 5 percent, from 131.4 million to 138.3 million—although, to be sure, this was a period during which the population grew by more than 9 percent. If not complete collapse, the slowing growth rate suggested a more turbulent and complex reality. One possibility is that rather than a pure deskilling, the changes observed may represent a broader “skill mismatch,” an interpretation that is more consistent with Keynesean expectations. For example, a recent McKinsey report on the future of work showed that between 2001 and 2009, jobs related to transactions and production both declined, but more than 4.8 million white-collar jobs were created relating to interactions and problem-solving.27 What is clear is that both blue-collar and white-collar jobs involving routinized tasks are at risk.

…

., 73 Joshi, Aravind Krishna, 132 Joy, Bill, 336, 343 Kaplan, Jerry, 27, 131–141 Kapor, Mitch, 140, 292 Kay, Alan, 7–8, 115, 120, 198–199, 306–310, 339–341 Kelley, David, 186 Kelly, Kevin, 17 Keynes, John Maynard, 74, 76, 326–327 Kittlaus, Dag, 310–323 Kiva Systems, 97–98, 206 knowledge acquisition problem, 287 knowledge-based systems, 285 knowledge engineering, 113, 128 Knowledge Engineering Laboratory (Stanford), 133–134 Knowledge Navigator, 188, 300, 304, 305–310, 317, 318 Kodak, 83–84 Koller, Daphne, 265 Komisar, Randy, 341 Konolige, Kurt, 268–269 Kuffner, James, 43 Kurzweil, Ray, 84–85, 116, 119, 154, 208, 336 labor force, 65–94 aging of, 93–94, 327 autonomous cars and, 25, 61–62 Brooks on, 204–208 Brynjolfsson and McAfee on, 79–80, 82–83 cybernation revolution, 73–74 deskilling of, 80–82 economic change and, 77–79, 83–84 for elder care, 236–237, 245, 327–332 growth of, xv, 10, 80–81, 326–327 Industrial Perception robots and, 241–244, 269–270 lights-out factories and, 65–68, 66, 90, 104, 206 Moravec on, 122–123 recession of 2008 and, 77–78, 325 Rifkin on automation and, 76–77 Shockley on, 97 singularity hypothesis and, 9–10, 84–94 technological unemployment, 16–18, 76–77, 104, 211 technology and displacement of, 16–18 unions and, 325–326 Wiener on, 8, 68–76 Labor-Science-Education Association, 70, 73 Lamond, Pierre, 129–130 lane-keeping software, 49, 51 language and speech recognition. see also Siri (Apple) chatbot technology, 221–225, 304 early neural network research, 146–148 Eliza, 14, 113, 172–174, 221 Hearsay-II, 282–283 natural language work by Kaplan, 135 semantic autocomplete, 284 semantic understanding, 156 Shakey and, 2 SHRDLU, 132, 170–172, 174–178 Siri’s development and, 12–13, 15, 280 (see also Siri [Apple]) software agents, 193 Lanier, Jaron, 82–83 Leach, Edmund, 90 LeCun, Yann, 148–152, 151, 156–158 Lederberg, Joshua, 113 Legg, Shane, 337–338 Leonard, John, 55 Lerner, Sandy, 134 Levandowski, Anthony, 45 Levy, Frank, 10 Lexus, 57 Licklider, J.

The Achievement Habit: Stop Wishing, Start Doing, and Take Command of Your Life by Bernard Roth

Albert Einstein, Build a better mousetrap, Burning Man, classic study, cognitive bias, correlation does not imply causation, deskilling, do what you love, fear of failure, functional fixedness, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, school choice, Silicon Valley, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, zero-sum game

A more nuanced understanding of the changes brought about by the way people choose to develop technology can be found in Harry Braverman’s scholarly treatise Labor and Monopoly Capital. Braverman points out that work that allows for self-expression satisfies human needs, and he traces the roots of the trend toward deskilling of both work and workers. In Braverman’s terms, the machines that enhance people’s skills are considered life-supporting, while those that deskill people and devalue their work are life-destroying.2 Perhaps the best spokesperson for the need to define the proper role of machines is Mahatma Gandhi. Asked whether he was opposed to machines, he answered,3 How can I be when I know that even this body is a most delicate piece of machinery?

The New Ruthless Economy: Work & Power in the Digital Age by Simon Head

Alan Greenspan, Asian financial crisis, business cycle, business process, call centre, conceptual framework, deskilling, Erik Brynjolfsson, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Great Leap Forward, informal economy, information retrieval, Larry Ellison, medical malpractice, new economy, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, scientific management, shareholder value, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, supply-chain management, telemarketer, Thomas Davenport, Toyota Production System, union organizing, work culture

As we saw in the last chapter, the role of the physician in planned, managerial medicine is very different from the role that Americans have become used to in their twohundred-year history, and indeed different from the physician's role in over two millennia of Western civilization. In the new, planned medicine, the physician's chief task is to place the patient in the correct subgroup so that the appropriate "protocol or plan" for that group can then be put into operation.13 This significant de-skilling of the physician makes him increasingly a cog in the wheel of the medical process, and so vulnerable to the disciplines of scientific management. With the declining popularity of managed care and the loosening of its control over medical decision making, it is tempting to write off this vision of the physician's diminished role as a passing aberration that will go the way of the dot-corns.

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An overriding goal of The New Ruthless Economy, and of the reengineering that underpins it, has been to turn these ideas on 187 188 THE NEW RUTHLESS ECONOMY their head so that increases in employee productivity are not matched by increases in employees' real wages and benefits, with the fruits of increased productivity diverted elsewhere—to shareholders, senior managers, and CEOs. The link between higher productivity and higher real wages and benefits breaks down when technology is used in ways that deskill most workers, undermine their security in the workplace, and leave them vulnerable to employers possessed of overwhelming power. In such an economy one would expect the figures for the growth of labor productivity and figures for the growth of real wages and benefits to grow far apart, and that is exactly what the statistics do show.

Borrow: The American Way of Debt by Louis Hyman

Alan Greenspan, asset-backed security, barriers to entry, big-box store, business cycle, cashless society, collateralized debt obligation, credit crunch, deindustrialization, deskilling, diversified portfolio, financial engineering, financial innovation, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, Home mortgage interest deduction, housing crisis, income inequality, low interest rates, market bubble, McMansion, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, Network effects, new economy, Paul Samuelson, plutocrats, price stability, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, statistical model, Tax Reform Act of 1986, technology bubble, transaction costs, vertical integration, women in the workforce

Their low prices relied on organizational innovation, not sleight of hand or damaged goods. Modeling themselves on the supermarkets of the 1920s and ’30s that had crowded out the old grocers, the discounters ran a cash-only, self-service business. Rejiggering prices and service in the new era of cheap transportation and production, discounters reinvented U.S. retail by de-skilling traditional sales work and cutting prices. The discount store’s rise was made possible by the collapse of an older retail model braced by law—in this case the fair-trade laws of the 1930s. State legislatures had passed the laws during the early 1930s in response to what was called the “chain store menace.”2 Chain stores, all too familiar today, were the hottest things in town in the 1920s.

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Self-service, it was thought, also encouraged impulse buying since shoppers could emotionally connect with freely caressed merchandise. Centralized checkout meant that a customer paid only once, not many times throughout the store, thus trimming the moment of pain. In this world of cheap goods and de-skilled labor, discounters could thrive. Their prices could be lower yet still profitable. For discounters, innovative merchandising drove growth, while department stores relied on credit to expand sales.9 One discounter, however, stood apart from the rest, and, unlike Kmart and Target, it began without a department store or dime store parent company.

The End of Work by Jeremy Rifkin

banking crisis, Bertrand Russell: In Praise of Idleness, blue-collar work, cashless society, Charles Babbage, collective bargaining, compensation consultant, computer age, deskilling, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, employer provided health coverage, Erik Brynjolfsson, full employment, future of work, general-purpose programming language, George Gilder, global village, Great Leap Forward, Herbert Marcuse, high-speed rail, hiring and firing, informal economy, interchangeable parts, invention of the telegraph, Jacques de Vaucanson, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Kaizen: continuous improvement, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, land reform, low interest rates, low skilled workers, means of production, military-industrial complex, new economy, New Urbanism, Paul Samuelson, pink-collar, pneumatic tube, post-Fordism, post-industrial society, Productivity paradox, prudent man rule, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Silicon Valley, speech recognition, strikebreaker, technoutopianism, Thorstein Veblen, Toyota Production System, trade route, trickle-down economics, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, women in the workforce, working poor, working-age population, Works Progress Administration

This other world is filling up with millions of alienated workers who are experiencing rising levels of 182 THE P RIC E 0 F PRO G RES S stress in high-tech work environments and increasing job insecurity as the Third Industrial Revolution winds its way into every industry and sector. HIGH-TECH STRESS Much has been said and written about quality-control circles, teamwork, and greater participation by employees at the worksite. Little, however, has been said or written about the de-skilling of work, the accelerating pace of production, the increased workloads, and the new forms of coercion and subtle intimidation that are used to force worker compliance with the requirements of post-Fordist production practices. The new information technologies are designed to remove whatever vestigial control workers still exercise over the production process by programming detailed instructions directly into the machine, which then carries them out verbatim.

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See Violence and crime Crop Rotation Planning System (CROPS), 113-14 Crystal Court Shopping Mall, 153 CUC International, 157 Cybernation revolution, 81-82 Daily News, 87 Davidow, William, 105 Day ojProsperity, The (Devinne), 46 Debts/deficits, worldwide, 37-38 Deere, John, 110 Defense industry, 38 Deficits. See Debts/deficits, worldwide De Martino, Nick, 161 Democratic movements, third! volunteer sector and, 278-86 Depression of 1929 impact of, on consumption, 23-24 share the work movement and, 25-29 Descartes, Rene, 43 -44 De-skilling of the workforce, 182- 86 Devinne, Paul, 46 Diamond Match Co., 128, 129 Di Bari, Vince, 160 Digital Equipment, 225, 226 Dismukes, George, 209 Dodge, Charles, 160 Dohse, Knuth, 183 Dominican Republic, third/volunteer sector in, 282 Domino Golden Syrup, 22 Donahue, Thomas R., 230 Dragon Systems, 61 Drake, Beam, Morin, 200 Dreyfus, 268 Drucker, Peter, 8, 12, 129, 171, 176 Duchin, Faye, 148 Dun & Bradstreet Software, 150 Dunlop, 137 Durning, Alan, 246 Eastern Europe, third/volunteer sector in, 279-80 Eastman, George, 129 Eastman Kodak, 105, 128 Eccles, Marriner, 31 Eckert, J.

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(Willhelm), 79 Wilkinson, George, 195 Wilkinson, John, 123 Willhelm, Sidney, 77, 79, 80 Williams, Lynn, 224, 230 Wilson, William Julius, 76 Winpisinger, William, 8, 135 Womack, James, 94-95, 96, 99,100 Woolridge, Charles, 45 Workforce college graduates in the, 172 creation of the knowledge class, 174-76 creation of new cosmopolitans, 172-77 decline in wages for the, 168, 170 de-skilling of the, 182- 86 example of how trickle-down technology does not work, 165-66 impact of de-unionization on the, 168 impact of globalization on the, 169 impact of restructuring on middle management, 7, 170-72 part-time jobs for, 167-68 statistics on unemployment! underemployed, 166-67 two-tier system, 190- 94 violence, 196 Works Progress Administration (WPA),30 Workweek, reasons for an increase in hours in the, 223 Workweek, shortened historical development of, 221-23 labor's view of, 229-30 need for management to give in to, 229-33 public's interest in, 233 - 35 recent demands for, 224-27 share the work movement and, 26-29 women and, 234 World fairs, 48-49 World Labour Report, 201 Wyss, David, 34 Xerox, 148 XLAYER,114 Young, Jeffrey, 9 Youth violence, 209-11 Zaire, third/volunteer sector in, 283 Zalusky, John, 229-30 Zenith, 204-5 Zhirinovsky, Vladimir, 214-15 Zuse, Konrad, 64

The Enigma of Capital: And the Crises of Capitalism by David Harvey

accounting loophole / creative accounting, Alan Greenspan, anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, bank run, banking crisis, Bernie Madoff, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business climate, call centre, capital controls, cotton gin, creative destruction, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, equal pay for equal work, European colonialism, failed state, financial innovation, Frank Gehry, full employment, gentrification, Glass-Steagall Act, global reserve currency, Google Earth, Great Leap Forward, Guggenheim Bilbao, Gunnar Myrdal, guns versus butter model, Herbert Marcuse, illegal immigration, indoor plumbing, interest rate swap, invention of the steam engine, Jane Jacobs, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, Just-in-time delivery, land reform, liquidity trap, Long Term Capital Management, market bubble, means of production, megacity, microcredit, military-industrial complex, Money creation, moral hazard, mortgage debt, Myron Scholes, new economy, New Urbanism, Northern Rock, oil shale / tar sands, peak oil, Pearl River Delta, place-making, Ponzi scheme, precariat, reserve currency, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, sharing economy, Shenzhen special economic zone , Silicon Valley, special drawing rights, special economic zone, statistical arbitrage, structural adjustment programs, subprime mortgage crisis, technological determinism, the built environment, the market place, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, Timothy McVeigh, too big to fail, trickle-down economics, urban renewal, urban sprawl, vertical integration, white flight, women in the workforce

Likewise, rapid shifts in labour quality requirements (e.g. the sudden need for new skills such as computer literacy) that outpace existing labour force capacities generate stresses in the labour market. Social and educational infrastructures find it hard to adapt quickly enough and the perpetual need for ‘retraining’ several times in a worker’s lifetime puts stresses on public resources as well as private energies. The production of chronic job insecurity through deskilling and reskilling is backed by technologically induced unemployment (about 60 per cent of job losses in the US in recent years are attributable to technological changes while only 30 per cent are due to the widely blamed offshoring of jobs to Mexico, China and elsewhere). Spiralling crises of disproportionality can also arise out of the uneven development of technological capacities across different sectors, producing, for example, imbalances in the output of wage goods versus means of production.

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Index Numbers in italics indicate Figures; those in bold indicate a Table. 11 September 2001 attacks 38, 41–2 subject to perpetual renewal and transformation 128 A Abu Dhabi 222 Académie Française 91 accumulation by dispossession 48–9, 244 acid deposition 75, 187 activity spheres 121–4, 128, 130 deindustrialised working-class area 151 and ‘green revolution’ 185–6 institutional and administrative arrangements 123 ‘mental conceptions of the world’ 123 patterns of relations between 196 production and labour processes 123 relations to nature 123 the reproduction of daily life and of the species 123 slums 152 social relations 123 subject to perpetual renewal and transformation 128 suburbs 150 technologies and organisational forms 123 uneven development between and among them 128–9 Adelphia 100 advertising industry 106 affective bonds 194 Afghanistan: US interventionism 210 Africa civil wars 148 land bought up in 220 neocolonialism 208 population growth 146 agribusiness 50 agriculture collectivisation of 250 diminishing returns in 72 ‘green revolution’ 185–6 ‘high farming’ 82 itinerant labourers 147 subsidies 79 AIG 5 alcoholism 151 Allen, Paul 98 Allende, Salvador 203 Amazonia 161, 188 American Bankers Association 8 American Revolution 61 anarchists 253, 254 anti-capitalist revolutionary movement 228 anti-racism 258 anti-Semitism 62 après moi le déluge 64, 71 Argentina Debt Crisis (2000–2002) 6, 243, 246, 261 Arizona, foreclosure wave in 1 Arrighi, Giovanni: The Long Twentieth Century 35, 204 asbestos 74 Asia Asian Currency Crisis (1997–98) 141, 261 collapse of export markets 141 growth 218 population growth 146 asset stripping 49, 50, 245 asset traders 40 asset values 1, 6, 21, 23, 26, 29, 46, 223, 261 Association of South East Asian Nations (ASEAN) 200 Athabaska tar sands, Canada 83 austerity programmes 246, 251 automobile industry 14, 15, 23, 56, 67, 68, 77, 121, 160–61 Detroit 5, 15, 16, 91, 108, 195, 216 autonomista movement 233, 234, 254 B Baader-Meinhof Gang 254 Bakunin, Michael 225 Balzac, Honoré 156 Bangalore, software development in 195 Bangkok 243 Bank of England 53, 54 massive liquidity injections in stock markets 261 Bank of International Settlements, Basel 51, 55, 200 Bank of New England 261 Bankers Trust 25 banking bail-outs 5, 218 bank shares become almost worthless 5 bankers’ pay and bonuses 12, 56, 218 ‘boutique investment banks’ 12 de-leveraging 30 debt-deposit ratio 30 deposit banks 20 French banks nationalised 198 international networks of finance houses 163 investment banks 2, 19, 20, 28, 219 irresponsible behaviour 10–11 lending 51 liquidity injections by central banks vii, 261 mysterious workings of central banks 54 ‘national bail-out’ 30–31 property market-led Nordic and Japanese bank crises 261 regional European banks 4 regular banks stash away cash 12, 220 rising tide of ‘moral hazard’ in international bank lending practices 19 ‘shadow banking’ system 8, 21, 24 sympathy with ‘Bonnie and Clyde’ bank robbers 56 Baran, Paul and Sweezey, Paul: Monopoly Capital 52, 113 Barings Bank 37, 100, 190 Baucus, Max 220 Bavaria, automotive engineering in 195 Beijing declaration (1995) 258 Berlin: cross-border leasing 14 Bernanke, Ben 236 ‘Big Bang’ (1986) 20, 37 Big Bang unification of global stock, options and currency trading markets 262 billionaire class 29, 110, 223 biodiversity 74, 251 biomass 78 biomedical engineering 98 biopiracy 245, 251 Birmingham 27 Bismarck, Prince Otto von 168 Black, Fischer 100 Blackstone 50 Blair, Tony 255 Blair government 197 blockbusting neighbourhoods 248 Bloomberg, Mayor Michael 20, 98, 174 Bolivarian movement 226, 256 bonuses, Wall Street 2, 12 Borlaug, Norman 186 bourgeoisie 48, 89, 95, 167, 176 ‘boutique investment banks’ 12 Brazil automobile industry 16 capital flight crisis (1999) 261 containerisation 16 an export-dominated economy 6 follows Japanese model 92 landless movement 257 lending to 19 the right to the city movement 257 workers’ party 256 Bretton Woods Agreement (1944) 31, 32, 51, 55, 171 British Academy 235 British empire 14 Brown, Gordon 27, 45 Budd, Alan 15 Buenos Aires 243 Buffett, Warren 173 building booms 173–4 Bush, George W. 5, 42, 45 business associations 195 C California, foreclosure wave in 1, 2 Canada, tightly regulated banks in 141 ‘cap and trade’ markets in pollution rights 221 capital bank 30 centralisation of 95, 110, 113 circulation of 90, 93, 108, 114, 116, 122, 124, 128, 158, 159, 182, 183, 191 cultural 21 devalued 46 embedded in the land 191 expansion of 58, 67, 68 exploitations of 102 export 19, 158 fixed 191, 213 industrial 40–41, 56 insufficient initial money capital 47 investment 93, 203 and labour 56, 88, 169–70 liquid money 20 mobility 59, 63, 64, 161–2, 191, 213 and nature 88 as a process 40 reproduction of 58 scarcity 50 surplus 16, 28, 29, 50–51, 84, 88, 100, 158, 166, 167, 172, 173, 174, 206, 215, 216, 217 capital accumulation 107, 108, 123, 182, 183, 191, 211 and the activity spheres 128 barriers to 12, 16, 47, 65–6, 69–70, 159 compound rate 28, 74, 75, 97, 126, 135, 215 continuity of endless 74 at the core of human evolutionary dynamics 121 dynamics of 188, 197 geographic landscape of 185 geographical dynamics of 67, 143 and governance 201 lagging 130 laws of 113, 154, 160 main centres of 192 market-based 180 Mumbai redevelopment 178 ‘nature’ affected by 122 and population growth 144–7 and social struggles 105 start of 159 capital circulation barriers to 45 continuity of 68 industrial/production capital 40–41 inherently risky 52 interruption in the process 41–2, 50 spatial movement 42 speculative 52, 53 capital controls 198 capital flow continuity 41, 47, 67, 117 defined vi global 20 importance of understanding vi, vii-viii interrupted, slowed down or suspended vi systematic misallocation of 70 taxation of vi wealth creation vi capital gains 112 capital strike 60 capital surplus absorption 31–2, 94, 97, 98, 101, 163 capital-labour relation 77 capitalism and communism 224–5 corporate 1691 ‘creative-destructive’ tendencies in 46 crisis of vi, 40, 42, 117, 130 end of 72 evolution of 117, 118, 120 expansion at a compound rate 45 first contradiction of 77 geographical development of 143 geographical mobility 161 global 36, 110 historical geography of 76, 117, 118, 121, 174, 180, 200, 202, 204 industrial 58, 109, 242 internal contradictions 115 irrationality of 11, 215, 246 market-led 203 positive and negative aspects 120 and poverty 72 relies on the beneficence of nature 71 removal of 260 rise of 135, 192, 194, 204, 228, 248–9, 258 ‘second contradiction of’ 77, 78 social relations in 101 and socialism 224 speculative 160 survival of 46, 57, 66, 86, 107, 112, 113, 116, 130, 144, 229, 246 uneven geographical development of 211, 213 volatile 145 Capitalism, Nature, Socialism journal 77 capitalist creed 103 capitalist development considered over time 121–4 ‘eras’ of 97 capitalist exploitation 104 capitalist logic 205 capitalist reinvestment 110–11 capitalists, types of 40 Carnegie, Andrew 98 Carnegie foundation 44 Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania 195 Carson, Rachel: Silent Spring 187 Case Shiller Composite Indices SA 3 Catholic Church 194, 254 cell phones 131, 150, 152 Central American Free Trade Association (CAFTA) 200 centralisation 10, 11, 165, 201 Certificates of Deposit 262 chambers of commerce 195, 203 Channel Tunnel 50 Chiapas, Mexico 207, 226 Chicago Board Options Exchange 262 Chicago Currency Futures Market 262 ‘Chicago School’ 246 Chile, lending to 19 China ‘barefoot doctors’ 137 bilateral trade with Latin America 173 capital accumulation issue 70 cheap retail goods 64 collapse of communism 16 collapse of export markets 141 Cultural Revolution 137 Deng’s announcement 159 falling exports 6 follows Japanese model 92 ‘Great Leap Forward’ 137, 138 growth 35, 59, 137, 144–5, 213, 218, 222 health care 137 huge foreign exchange reserves 141, 206 infant mortality 59 infrastructural investment 222 labour income and household consumption (1980–2005) 14 market closed after communists took power (1949) 108 market forcibly opened 108 and oil market 83 one child per family policy 137, 146 one-party rule 199 opening-up of 58 plundering of wealth from 109, 113 proletarianisation 60 protests in 38 and rare earth metals 188 recession (1997) 172 ‘silk road’ 163 trading networks 163 unemployment 6 unrest in 66 urbanisation 172–3 and US consumerism 109 Chinese Central Bank 4, 173 Chinese Communist Party 180, 200, 256 chlorofluoral carbons (CFCs) 74, 76, 187 chronometer 91, 156 Church, the 249 CIA (Central Intelligence Agency) 169 circular and cumulative causation 196 Citibank 19 City Bank 261 city centres, Disneyfication of 131 City of London 20, 35, 45, 162, 219 class consciousness 232, 242, 244 class inequalities 240–41 class organisation 62 class politics 62 class power 10, 11, 12, 61, 130, 180 class relations, radical reconstitution of 98 class struggle 56, 63, 65, 96, 102, 127, 134, 193, 242, 258 Clausewitz, Carl von 213 Cleveland, foreclosure crisis in 2 Cleveland, foreclosures on housing in 1 Clinton, Bill 11, 12, 17, 44, 45 co-evolution 132, 136, 138, 168, 185, 186, 195, 197, 228, 232 in three cases 149–53 coal reserves 79, 188 coercive laws of competition see under competition Cold War 31, 34, 92 Collateralised Bond Obligations (CBOs) 262 Collateralised Debt Obligations (CDOs) 36, 142, 261, 262 Collateralised Mortgage Obligations (CMOs) 262 colonialism 212 communications, innovations in 42, 93 communism 228, 233, 242, 249 collapse of 16, 58, 63 compared with socialism 224 as a loaded term 259–60 orthodox communists 253 revolutionary 136 traditional institutionalised 259 companies joint stock 49 limited 49 comparative advantage 92 competition 15, 26, 43, 70 between financial centres 20 coercive laws of 43, 71, 90, 95, 158, 159, 161 and expansion of production 113 and falling prices 29, 116 fostering 52 global economic 92, 131 and innovation 90, 91 inter-capitalist 31 inter-state 209, 256 internalised 210 interterritorial 202 spatial 164 and the workforce 61 competitive advantage 109 computerised trading 262 computers 41, 99, 158–9 consortia 50, 220 consumerism 95, 109, 168, 175, 240 consumerist excess 176 credit-fuelled 118 niche 131 suburban 171 containerisation 16 Continental Illinois Bank 261 cooperatives 234, 242 corporate fraud 245 corruption 43, 69 cotton industry 67, 144, 162 credit cards fees vii, 245 rise of the industry 17 credit crunch 140 Credit Default swaps 262 Crédit Immobilièr 54 Crédit Mobilier 54 Crédit Mobilier and Immobilier 168 credit swaps 21 credit system and austerity programmes 246 crisis within 52 and the current crisis 118 and effective demand problem 112 an inadequate configuration of 52 predatory practices 245 role of 115 social and economic power in 115 crises crises of disproportionality 70 crisis of underconsumption 107, 111 east Asia (1997–8) 6, 8, 35, 49, 246 financial crisis of 1997–8 198, 206 financial crisis of 2008 34, 108, 114, 115 general 45–6 inevitable 71 language of crisis 27 legitimation 217 necessary 71 property market 8 role of 246–7 savings and loan crisis (US, 1984–92) 8 short sharp 8, 10 south-east Asia (1997–8) 6, 8, 35, 49, 246 cross-border leasing 142–3 cultural choice 238 ‘cultural industries’ 21 cultural preferences 73–4 Cultural Revolution 137 currency currency swaps 262 futures market 24, 32 global 32–3, 34 options markets on 262 customs barriers 42, 43 cyberspace 190 D Darwin, Charles 120 DDT 74, 187 de-leveraging 30 debt-financing 17, 131, 141, 169 decentralisation 165, 201 decolonisation 31, 208, 212 deficit financing 35, 111 deforestation 74, 143 deindustrialisation 33, 43, 88, 131, 150, 157, 243 Deleuze, Gilles 128 demand consumer 107, 109 effective 107, 110–14, 116, 118, 221, 222 lack of 47 worker 108 Democratic Party (US) 11 Deng Xiaoping 159 deregulation 11, 16, 54, 131 derivatives 8 currency 21 heavy losses in (US) 261 derivatives markets creation of 29, 85 unregulated 99, 100, 219 Descartes, René 156 desertification 74 Detroit auto industry 5, 15, 16, 91, 108, 195, 216 foreclosures on housing in 1 Deutsches Bank 20 devaluation 32, 47, 116 of bank capital 30 of prior investments 93 developing countries: transformation of daily lives 94–5 Developing Countries Debt Crisis 19, 261 development path building alliances 230 common objectives 230–31 development not the same as growth 229–30 impacts and feedbacks from other spaces in the global economy 230 Diamond, Jared: Guns, Germs and Steel 132–3, 154 diasporas 147, 155, 163 Dickens, Charles: Bleak House 90 disease 75, 85 dispossession anti-communist insurgent movements against 250–51 of arbitrary feudal institutions 249 of the capital class 260 China 179–80 first category 242–4 India 178–9, 180 movements against 247–52 second category 242, 244–5 Seoul 179 types of 247 under socialism and communism 250 Domar, Evsey 71 Dongguan, China 36 dot-com bubble 29, 261 Dow 35,000 prediction 21 drug trade 45, 49 Dubai: over-investment 10 Dubai World 174, 222 Durban conference on anti-racism (2009) 258 E ‘earth days’ 72, 171 east Asia crash of 1997–8 6, 8, 35, 49, 246 labour reserves 64 movement of production to 43 proletarianisation 62 state-centric economies 226 wage rates 62 eastern European countries 37 eBay 190 economic crisis (1848) 167 economists, and the current financial crisis 235–6 ecosystems 74, 75, 76 Ecuador, and remittances 38 education 59, 63, 127, 128, 221, 224, 257 electronics industry 68 Elizabeth II, Queen vi-vii, 235, 236, 238–9 employment casual part-time low-paid female 150 chronic job insecurity 93 culture of the workplace 104 deskilling 93 reskilling 93 services 149 Engels, Friedrich 89, 98, 115, 157, 237 The Housing Question 176–7, 178 Enron 8, 24, 52, 53, 100, 261 entertainment industries 41 environment: modified by human action 84–5 environmental movement 78 environmental sciences 186–7 equipment 58, 66–7 equity futures 262 equity index swaps 262 equity values 262 ethanol plants 80 ethnic cleansings 247 ethnicity issues 104 Eurodollars 262 Europe negative population growth in western Europe 146 reconstruction of economy after Second World War 202 rsouevolutions of 1848 243 European Union 200, 226 eastern European countries 37 elections (June 2009) 143 unemployment 140 evolution punctuated equilibrium theory of natural evolution 130 social 133 theory of 120, 129 exchange rates 24, 32, 198 exports, falling 141 external economies 162 F Factory Act (1848) 127 factory inspectors 127 ‘failed states’ 69 Fannie Mae (US government-chartered mortgage institution) 4, 17, 173, 223 fascism 169, 203, 233 Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) 8 rescue of Continental Illinois Bank 261 Federal Reserve System (the Fed) 2, 17, 54, 116, 219, 236, 248 and asset values 6 cuts interest rates 5, 261 massive liquidity injections in stock markets 261 rescue of Continental Illinois Bank 261 feminists, and colonisation of urban neighbourhoods 248 fertilisers 186 feudalism 135, 138, 228 finance capitalists 40 financial institutions awash with credit 17 bankruptcies 261 control of supply and demand for housing 17 nationalisations 261 financial services 99 Financial Times 12 financialisation 30, 35, 98, 245 Finland: Nordic cris (1992) 8 Flint strike, Michigan (1936–7) 243 Florida, foreclosure wave in 1, 2 Forbes magazine 29, 223 Ford, Henry 64, 98, 160, 161, 188, 189 Ford foundation 44, 186 Fordism 136 Fordlandia 188, 189 foreclosed businesses 245 foreclosed properties 220 fossil fuels 78 Foucault, Michel 134 Fourierists 168 France acceptance of state interventions 200 financial crisis (1868) 168 French banks nationalised 198 immigration 14 Paris Commune 168 pro-natal policies 59 strikes in 38 train network 28 Franco-Prussian War (1870) 168 fraud 43, 49 Freddie Mac (US government-chartered mortgage institution) 4, 17, 173, 223 free trade 10, 33, 90, 131 agreements 42 French Communist Party 52 French Revolution 61 Friedman, Thomas L.: The World is Flat 132 futures, energy 24 futures markets 21 Certificates of Deposit 262 currency 24 Eurodollars 262 Treasury instruments 262 G G7/G8/G20 51, 200 Galileo Galilei 89 Gates, Bill 98, 173, 221 Gates foundation 44 gays, and colonisation of urban neighbourhoods 247, 248 GDP growth (1950–2030) 27 Gehry, Frank 203 Geithner, Tim 11 gender issues 104, 151 General Motors 5 General Motors Acceptance Corporation 23 genetic engineering 84, 98 genetic modification 186 genetically modified organisms (GMOs) 186 gentrification 131, 256, 257 geographical determinism 210 geopolitics 209, 210, 213, 256 Germany acceptance of state interventions 199–200 cross-border leasing 142–3 an export-dominated economy 6 falling exports 141 invasion of US auto market 15 Nazi expansionism 209 neoliberal orthodoxies 141 Turkish immigrants 14 Weimar inflation 141 Glass-Steagall act (1933) 20 Global Crossing 100 global warming 73, 77, 121, 122, 187 globalisation 157 Glyn, Andrew et al: ‘British Capitalism, Workers and the Profits Squeeze’ 65 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von 156 gold reserves 108, 112, 116 Goldman Sachs 5, 11, 20, 163, 173, 219 Google Earth 156 Gould, Stephen Jay 98, 130 governance 151, 197, 198, 199, 201, 208, 220 governmentality 134 GPS systems 156 Gramsci, Antonio 257 Grandin, Greg: Fordlandia 188, 189 grassroots organisations (GROS) 254 Great Depression (1920s) 46, 170 ‘Great Leap Forward’ 137, 138, 250 ‘Great Society’ anti-poverty programmes 32 Greater London Council 197 Greece sovereign debt 222 student unrest in 38 ‘green communes’ 130 Green Party (Germany) 256 ‘green revolution’ 185–6 Greenspan, Alan 44 Greider, William: Secrets of the Temple 54 growth balanced 71 compound 27, 28, 48, 50, 54, 70, 75, 78, 86 economic 70–71, 83, 138 negative 6 stop in 45 Guggenheim Museu, Bilbao 203 Gulf States collapse of oil-revenue based building boom 38 oil production 6 surplus petrodollars 19, 28 Gulf wars 210 gun trade 44 H habitat loss 74, 251 Haiti, and remittances 38 Hanseatic League 163 Harrison, John 91 Harrod, Roy 70–71 Harvey, David: A Brief History of Neoliberalism 130 Harvey, William vii Haushofer, Karl 209 Haussmann, Baron 49, 167–8, 169, 171, 176 Hawken, Paul: Blessed Unrest 133 Hayek, Friedrich 233 health care 28–9, 59, 63, 220, 221, 224 reneging on obligations 49 Health Care Bill 220 hedge funds 8, 21, 49, 261 managers 44 hedging 24, 36 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich 133 hegemony 35–6, 212, 213, 216 Heidegger, Martin 234 Helú, Carlos Slim 29 heterogeneity 214 Hitler, Adolf 141 HIV/AIDS pandemic 1 Holloway, John: Change the World without Taking Power 133 homogeneity 214 Hong Kong excessive urban development 8 rise of (1970s) 35 sweatshops 16 horizontal networking 254 household debt 17 housing 146–7, 149, 150, 221, 224 asset value crisis 1, 174 foreclosure crises 1–2, 166 mortgage finance 170 values 1–2 HSBC 20, 163 Hubbert, M.

The Entrepreneurial State: Debunking Public vs. Private Sector Myths by Mariana Mazzucato

Apple II, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Bretton Woods, business cycle, California gold rush, call centre, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Carmen Reinhart, circular economy, clean tech, computer age, creative destruction, credit crunch, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, demand response, deskilling, dual-use technology, endogenous growth, energy security, energy transition, eurozone crisis, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, Fairchild Semiconductor, Financial Instability Hypothesis, full employment, G4S, general purpose technology, green transition, Growth in a Time of Debt, Hyman Minsky, incomplete markets, information retrieval, intangible asset, invisible hand, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, linear model of innovation, natural language processing, new economy, offshore financial centre, Philip Mirowski, popular electronics, Post-Keynesian economics, profit maximization, Ralph Nader, renewable energy credits, rent-seeking, ride hailing / ride sharing, risk tolerance, Robert Solow, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, smart grid, Solyndra, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tim Cook: Apple, Tony Fadell, too big to fail, total factor productivity, trickle-down economics, vertical integration, Washington Consensus, William Shockley: the traitorous eight

While the classical economists (such as David Ricardo or Karl Marx) studied innovation and distribution together through, for example, the analysis of the effect of mechanization on the wage/profit ratio, for years studies of innovation and distribution have been separated. Today, they have been brought back together mainly by the de-skilling perspective and its realization that innovation has a tendency of allowing those with high skills to prosper, and those with low skills to get left behind (Acemoglu 2002). Yet skills and technology in this perspective remain exogenous, their existence taken as givens. Neither can the framework explain where innovation and better job skills come from.

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W. 85 Bush, George W. 110–11 Bush, Vannevar 75 ‘business angels’ 47, 48 Buxton, Bill 102n10 Cailliau, Robert 105 California: Apple’s avoidance of capital gains tax in 173; Apple’s R&D base in 172; competitive climate of 165, 176; ‘Internet California Gold Rush’ 95; R&D tax packages of 109–10, 111n13; wind industry participation 145, 147, 156 Cameron, David 15 Canada 61 capacitive sensing technology 100–101, 100n9, 103 capitalism: Adam Smith’s view of 30; dysfunctional modern 12; financial fragility of 32n3; image of market as engine of 167; innovative labour in 13; Keynes on 30–32; State risks in framework of 193; State’s role in 195 Capital Moves (Cowie) 172 cellular technology 109, 109 Chang, Ha-Joon 9n3, 38n5, 40 China: clean technology investment by 120, 124n6, 125, 137; Evergreen Solar lured to 152; ‘green’ 5 year plan 122–4; green revolution in 11, 115n2, 116, 120; investment banks in 2, 4, 5; Kyoto Protocol signed by 123n5; new investment in renewable energy 120, 121; policy support for wind industry 153; as solar power competitor 129–31, 130n11, 144, 150; targeted industrialization in 40; ‘trade wars’ of 122, 131; wind capacity of 143; from ‘Wind Rush’ to rise of wind power sector 144–50 China Development Bank (CDB) 5, 122, 153, 189–90 Citizens for Tax Justice 174n5 classical economists 186–7 clean technology: in China 122–4; in crisis 158–9; electric cars/vehicles 108, 123, 124, 133; Ernst & Young report on 124; historical overview of 118, 118n3; investment (by country) 120–21; investment by venture capital 161; public vs. private investment in 26, 143; R&D investment in 119; sources 117–18; US calling to end support to 157; see also green revolution; wind and solar power climate change 117, 123, 135; see also green industrial revolution Climate Works 123 Clinton administration 84–5 Coad, Alex 44 ‘Cognitive Assistant that Learns and Organizes’ (CALO) project 106 Compaq 107 competition, generating 77 computer field: DARPA’s role in 75–8; hard disk drives (HDD) 96–7; personal computers 78, 89, 94–5; research support to 99; sources of key technologies used in 94–5; in wind technology 147–8 Concorde 194; see also ‘picking winners’ Cook, Tim 171 countercyclical lending 4, 140, 190 ‘creative destruction’ 10, 10n4, 58, 165; see also Schumpeter, Joseph ‘crowd funding’ 127 ‘crowding in’ 5–6, 8 ‘crowding out’ 8, 23–4 DARPA: see Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency ‘Death Valley’ stage of innovation 47, 48, 122 DEC 107 decentralization 78, 85, 104 defence contractors 76–7, 98 Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA): ARPA-E modeled after 133; brokering role of 77, 79; clean energy funding 132n13; communications network project of 104, 104n11; creation of 76; dual-use technologies targeted by 97; funding by 76–7; model characteristics 78; organizational attributes of 133–4; role of behind SIRI 105–6; support for SPINTRONICS 97; technological contributions of 133; top talent attracted by 4 Defense Logistics Agency 132n13 demand-side policies 83, 113–15, 159 Demirel, Pelin 44 DEMOS 2 Denmark 115n2, 120n4, 121, 143, 144–5 Department of Commerce (US) 47 Department of Defense (DoD) (US): ARPANET project as Internet origin 63; energy innovation impacted by 132n13; GPS and SIRI development by 105–7; GPS costs to 105n12; solar opportunities created by 150; TRP initiated by 97 Department of Energy (DoE) (US): ARPA-E agency of 4; attracting top talent 18; clean energy research 132–3; First Solar’s link to research of 151; funding Solyndra 154; funding support of lithium-ion battery 108; loan guarantees administered by 129; SunPower’s patents link to 152; wind research funded by 147–8 Department of Energy and Climate Change (UK) 124 ‘de-risking’ of private sector 5–6, 9, 198 de-skilling perspective 186 ‘Developmental State’ 10, 37–8, 37–8n5, 40, 68; see also State development banks: see State development banks digital signal processing (DSP) 109 ‘directionality’ 2, 4–5, 32n2 ‘discursive’ battle, Judt’s 9, 58, 198 distribution and innovation 186 Domar, Evsey David 33 domestic content rules 149 Dosi, Giovanni 53 Drucker, Peter 58 drugs: classifications of new 64, 64; Gleevec 81; MRC research on 67; orphan drugs 81–3; percentages of new by types 66, 66; radical vs.

The Meritocracy Trap: How America's Foundational Myth Feeds Inequality, Dismantles the Middle Class, and Devours the Elite by Daniel Markovits

8-hour work day, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, affirmative action, algorithmic management, Amazon Robotics, Anton Chekhov, asset-backed security, assortative mating, basic income, Bernie Sanders, big-box store, business cycle, capital asset pricing model, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carl Icahn, carried interest, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, compensation consultant, computer age, corporate governance, corporate raider, crony capitalism, David Brooks, deskilling, Detroit bankruptcy, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, Emanuel Derman, equity premium, European colonialism, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, fear of failure, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, fixed income, Ford paid five dollars a day, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, gender pay gap, gentrification, George Akerlof, Gini coefficient, glass ceiling, Glass-Steagall Act, Greenspan put, helicopter parent, Herbert Marcuse, high net worth, hiring and firing, income inequality, industrial robot, interchangeable parts, invention of agriculture, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job satisfaction, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, junk bonds, Kevin Roose, Kiva Systems, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Kodak vs Instagram, labor-force participation, Larry Ellison, longitudinal study, low interest rates, low skilled workers, machine readable, manufacturing employment, Mark Zuckerberg, Martin Wolf, mass incarceration, medical residency, meritocracy, minimum wage unemployment, Myron Scholes, Nate Silver, New Economic Geography, new economy, offshore financial centre, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Paul Samuelson, payday loans, plutocrats, Plutonomy: Buying Luxury, Explaining Global Imbalances, precariat, purchasing power parity, rent-seeking, Richard Florida, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Rutger Bregman, savings glut, school choice, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, six sigma, Skype, stakhanovite, stem cell, Stephen Fry, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, supply-chain management, telemarketer, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Theory of the Leisure Class by Thorstein Veblen, Thomas Davenport, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, total factor productivity, transaction costs, traveling salesman, universal basic income, unpaid internship, Vanguard fund, War on Poverty, warehouse robotics, Winter of Discontent, women in the workforce, work culture , working poor, Yochai Benkler, young professional, zero-sum game

Home mortgage finance operates in a profoundly different fashion today. The difference has transformed work in the sector, in two ways. On the one hand, banks have sharply reduced the numbers of home mortgage loan officers required to process a given volume of loans, and the loan officers who remain have been distinctly—indeed transformatively—deskilled. Loan officers today do little more than help potential borrowers gather information and fill in forms: they are less professional bankers than collectors of machine-scorable data; they employ virtually no expertise or imagination; and their work emphasizes mechanical rote repetition rather than independent judgment.

…

Superordinate labor is essential to production given the current state of technology, which causes the labor market to fetishize elite skills. This entails that total output is much greater when elites work than when the remaining less skilled workers attempt to deploy current technologies without the elite. Deskilled loan officers, for example, could not possibly manage modern home mortgage finance without super-skilled workers to construct and trade mortgage-backed securities. And the super-skilled workers who administer securitization expect pay commensurate to the gains from securitization, which they regard as specifically their product.

…

Conventional debates about all of these reforms focus on what effects they will have on the quantity, quality, and price of goods and services. Those are reasonable concerns. But the reforms also influence whether production is divided into gloomy and glossy jobs or unified around mid-skilled ones. Health care can be delivered by a few specialist doctors who deploy high-tech machines and deskilled technicians, or by a mass of mid-skilled GPs and nurse-practitioners. Which approach is best for patients of course matters. But even where health is at stake, whether one-sixth of the economy succumbs to meritocratic inequality or promotes democratic equality through mid-skilled work matters also.

WTF?: What's the Future and Why It's Up to Us by Tim O'Reilly

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", 4chan, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, AlphaGo, Alvin Roth, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Robotics, Amazon Web Services, AOL-Time Warner, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, basic income, behavioural economics, benefit corporation, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Bill Joy: nanobots, bitcoin, Blitzscaling, blockchain, book value, Bretton Woods, Brewster Kahle, British Empire, business process, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Captain Sullenberger Hudson, carbon tax, Carl Icahn, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, computer vision, congestion pricing, corporate governance, corporate raider, creative destruction, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, Danny Hillis, data acquisition, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, Dennis Ritchie, deskilling, DevOps, Didi Chuxing, digital capitalism, disinformation, do well by doing good, Donald Davies, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, fake news, Filter Bubble, Firefox, Flash crash, Free Software Foundation, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, George Akerlof, gig economy, glass ceiling, Glass-Steagall Act, Goodhart's law, Google Glasses, Gordon Gekko, gravity well, greed is good, Greyball, Guido van Rossum, High speed trading, hiring and firing, Home mortgage interest deduction, Hyperloop, income inequality, independent contractor, index fund, informal economy, information asymmetry, Internet Archive, Internet of things, invention of movable type, invisible hand, iterative process, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, jitney, job automation, job satisfaction, John Bogle, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Kaizen: continuous improvement, Ken Thompson, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Kim Stanley Robinson, knowledge worker, Kodak vs Instagram, Lao Tzu, Larry Ellison, Larry Wall, Lean Startup, Leonard Kleinrock, Lyft, machine readable, machine translation, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, Marshall McLuhan, McMansion, microbiome, microservices, minimum viable product, mortgage tax deduction, move fast and break things, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, obamacare, Oculus Rift, OpenAI, OSI model, Overton Window, packet switching, PageRank, pattern recognition, Paul Buchheit, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer model, Ponzi scheme, post-truth, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, randomized controlled trial, RFC: Request For Comment, Richard Feynman, Richard Stallman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Gordon, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Coase, Rutger Bregman, Salesforce, Sam Altman, school choice, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, SETI@home, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, Skype, smart contracts, Snapchat, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, social web, software as a service, software patent, spectrum auction, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, stock buybacks, strong AI, synthetic biology, TaskRabbit, telepresence, the built environment, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, the map is not the territory, The Nature of the Firm, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Davenport, Tony Fadell, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, transcontinental railway, transportation-network company, Travis Kalanick, trickle-down economics, two-pizza team, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, ubercab, universal basic income, US Airways Flight 1549, VA Linux, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We are the 99%, web application, Whole Earth Catalog, winner-take-all economy, women in the workforce, Y Combinator, yellow journalism, zero-sum game, Zipcar

Looking at the history of the nineteenth-century cotton mills in Lowell, Massachusetts, as well as the introduction of modern digital technology, he comes to the conclusion that our traditional narrative about innovation is wrong. The bulk of the gains in productivity come over time, as innovations are implemented and put into practice. Bessen describes how major innovations, such as the introduction of the steam mill, involve both de-skilling and up-skilling, the replacement of one set of skills with another. It is mythology, he notes, that automation replaced skilled crafters with unskilled workers. In fact, by measuring the productivity difference between beginners and fully competent crafters and doing the same for workers in the new factories, it is possible to determine that in the 1840s, it took a full-year investment in training for either to reach full productivity.

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Yes, it’s essential to bring in new talent with the latest skills, but retraining your existing team and building new ways for people to work together is also essential. The presence of a stable, trained workforce is not something to be achieved and then taken for granted. The mill owners of Lowell invested in their workforce; the decisions in America over the past decades to ship manufacturing jobs overseas have effectively been a commitment to de-skilling without re-skilling. As new small-batch techniques now make manufacturing cost-effective in America again, the necessary skilled labor force is missing. According to a 2015 study by Deloitte and the Manufacturing Institute, more than two million manufacturing jobs will go unfilled over the next decade.

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., 250 Dvorak, John, 41 Dyson, George, 45 eBay, 39, 182–83, 294 “Economic Mechanism Design for Computerized Agents” (Varian), 261 “Economic Possibilities for Our Grandchildren” (Keynes), 298–99 economics, 271–73 assigning a value to caregiving, 310–11 efficiency wages, 197 employers’ 29-hour loophole, 194–95, 196 fundamental law of capitalism, 268 invisible hand of competition, 262–70 the “laws” of economics, 257–62 and leisure time, 308–11 machine money and people money, 306–7, 308, 309 minimum wage, 197–98, 264–68 secular stagnation, 271 Stiglitz exposes the 1%, 255 trickle down, 244, 265, 273 universal basic income, 305–6, 307–11 wealth inequality, 263–65 welfare economics, 263, 266, 307 economy, xxii and adaptations to change, xxiv–xxv creativity-based, 312–19 financial crisis of 2008, 172–73, 175, 238, 265, 275, 359 as government’s thick marketplace, 133 of Korea, 134 technology and the future of the economy scenario plan, 364–67 See also financial markets economy and Silicon Valley, 274–75 the Clothesline Paradox, 295–97 digital platforms and the real economy, 288–89 market capitalization/supermoney, 276–79, 280–84, 289 measuring value creation, 289–95 pool of qualified workers, 347–50 venture capital-backed startups, 275, 282–84 Y Combinator program for VC-funded companies, 286–87 education/training creating, sharing, and embedding into tools, 323–32, 334–36 as investment in other’s children, 320–21 for jobs, 303, 304, 321 lagging behind technology, 335–36 learning by doing, 337–41, 345–50 on-demand education, 341–45 Open Cloud Academy at Rackspace, 350 play element, 340–41 and social capital, 345–50 efficiency wages, 197 efficient market hypothesis, 259–61 “Eight Principles of Open Government Data” (Malamud, Lessig, and O’Reilly), 130–31 electric cars, safety-related load of, 66–67 Eliot, T. S., 41 Emerging Technology Conference, 27 employees continuous partial employment, 190–98 corporate investment choices vs., 246, 247–48 de-skilling without re-skilling, 349–50 full time vs. 29-hour loophole, 194–95, 196 increasing earning potential of, 243 independent contractor vs., 190–92 as job-creating customers, 250–52, 264, 271, 357 labor movement, 262–63 and living wage, 194 minimum-wage mandate vs. market-based algorithms, 197–98 new paradigm for, 196 stock-based compensation and company size, 280–81 valuing skills vs. degrees, 342–43, 345–50 See also augmented workers; jobs English, Paul, 330–31 Eno, Brian, 355–56 Entrepreneurial State (Mazzucato), 296 Etsy, 292–93 “Everything Is Amazing and Nobody’s Happy” (Louis CK), 377n Facebook, 52, 315–16 advertising, 162 building social infrastructure, 218–20 and clickbait, 224 and fake news, 201–2, 204, 205–7, 215–17 and global affairs, 43 as network of people and advertisers, 64 News Feed, 162 ownership and control of central user network, 101 and presidential election of 2016, 199–201 raising money for causes, 371 study of emotional effects of content, 227 fact checking, 210–14 Fadell, Tony, 82 fake news algorithmic whac-a-mole, 201–8 dealing with disagreement, 220–24 eliminating incentives, 224–28 fact checking, 210–14 presidential election of 2016, 199–201 and process of abstraction, 21, 211 responding to, 215–20 Farrell, Henry, 220, 223 Faurot, Eric, 128–29 Feynman, Richard, 22, 340 “Fight for 15,” 267–68 Fin AI-based personal assistant startup, 331 financial markets corporate raiders, 242–52 and crisis of 2008, 172–73, 175, 238, 265, 275, 359 and fitness function, 238–40, 242, 248, 303 focus on stock price vs. long-term investment, 242–51 fraud potential, 277, 283 high-frequency trading impact, 236–37, 272 inflation, 239–40 IPOs, 274, 277, 278–79, 293 the market as programming run amok, 231–32, 236–38 market of goods and services vs., 257 and misinformation, 210–11 and regulations, 172–73 serving itself vs. real economy, 251–52 shareholder capitalism, 240–41, 245–51, 256, 263–68, 292 social values as anathema, 240–41, 251 stock prices as a bad map, 243–45 system design leads to predictable outcomes, 238–41, 256–62 value investing, 271–72, 284–85 Fink, Larry, 242–43, 272 Firestein, Stuart, 340 fitness function, 106 of Amazon teams, 114, 118 for economy, 269, 367–68 of Facebook, 162–63, 219–20 and fake news, 225 and financial markets, 238–40, 242, 248, 303 of Google’s Search Quality team, 156–57, 173–74 making money as, 226, 239–41, 274, 352 and search engine ratings, 158 fitness landscape, xxii, 106 Flash Crash of stock market (2010), 237 Foo Camp (annual unconference), 50 Ford, Martin, 269 Foroohar, Rana, 251–52, 271 Foursquare, 84 Fox News, 208 free software, 16–19.

The Price of Inequality: How Today's Divided Society Endangers Our Future by Joseph E. Stiglitz

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, airline deregulation, Alan Greenspan, Andrei Shleifer, banking crisis, barriers to entry, Basel III, battle of ideas, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, business cycle, capital controls, Carmen Reinhart, Cass Sunstein, central bank independence, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, colonial rule, corporate governance, Credit Default Swap, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, Dava Sobel, declining real wages, deskilling, electricity market, Exxon Valdez, Fall of the Berlin Wall, financial deregulation, financial innovation, Flash crash, framing effect, full employment, George Akerlof, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, Great Leap Forward, income inequality, income per capita, indoor plumbing, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, invisible hand, jobless men, John Bogle, John Harrison: Longitude, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, London Interbank Offered Rate, lone genius, low interest rates, low skilled workers, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, market fundamentalism, mass incarceration, medical bankruptcy, microcredit, moral hazard, mortgage tax deduction, negative equity, obamacare, offshore financial centre, paper trading, Pareto efficiency, patent troll, Paul Samuelson, Paul Volcker talking about ATMs, payday loans, Phillips curve, price stability, profit maximization, profit motive, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, rent-seeking, reserve currency, Richard Thaler, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Savings and loan crisis, search costs, shareholder value, short selling, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, spectrum auction, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, subprime mortgage crisis, technology bubble, The Chicago School, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, The Myth of the Rational Market, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, trade liberalization, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, ultimatum game, uranium enrichment, very high income, We are the 99%, wealth creators, women in the workforce, zero-sum game

This increased the demand for those who mastered the technology and reduced the demand for those who did not, leading to higher relative wages for those who had mastered the skills required by the new technologies.9 Globalization compounded the effects of technology’s advances: jobs that could be routinized were sent abroad, where labor that could handle the work cost a fraction of what it cost in the United States.10 At first, the balance of supply and demand kept wages in the middle rising, but those at the bottom stagnated or even fell. Eventually, the deskilling and outsourcing effects dominated. Over the past fifteen years, wages in the middle have not fared well.11 The result has been what we described in chapter 1 as the “polarization” of America’s labor force. Low-paying jobs that cannot be easily computerized have continued to grow—including “care” and other service sectors jobs—and so have high-skilled jobs at the top. This skill-biased technological change has obviously played a role in shaping the labor market—increasing the premium on workers with skills, deskilling other jobs, eliminating still others.

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And it’s not even inevitable that technological change continues in this direction: making firms pay for the environmental consequences of their production might encourage firms to shift away from skill-biased technological change to resource-saving technological change. Low interest rates may encourage firms to robotize, replacing unskilled jobs that can easily be routinized; so alternative macroeconomic and investment policies could slow the pace of the deskilling of our economy. So too, while economists may disagree about the precise role that globalization has played in the increase in inequality, the asymmetries in globalization to which we call attention put workers at a particular disadvantage; and we can manage globalization better, in ways that might lead to less inequality.

Utopias: A Brief History From Ancient Writings to Virtual Communities by Howard P. Segal

1960s counterculture, Alvin Toffler, Apollo 11, biodiversity loss, British Empire, Buckminster Fuller, complexity theory, David Brooks, death of newspapers, dematerialisation, deskilling, energy security, European colonialism, Evgeny Morozov, Ford Model T, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, future of journalism, Future Shock, G4S, garden city movement, germ theory of disease, Golden Gate Park, Herbert Marcuse, Herman Kahn, intentional community, invention of the printing press, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, John Markoff, John von Neumann, Kim Stanley Robinson, knowledge economy, Lewis Mumford, liberation theology, Louis Pasteur, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, means of production, megaproject, Nelson Mandela, Nicholas Carr, Nikolai Kondratiev, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), out of africa, pneumatic tube, post-war consensus, public intellectual, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ray Kurzweil, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Skype, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Stewart Brand, Strategic Defense Initiative, technological determinism, technoutopianism, Thomas Malthus, Thorstein Veblen, transcontinental railway, traveling salesman, union organizing, urban planning, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, warehouse robotics, Whole Earth Catalog

As the radical union organizer whom Montgomery quotes put it so well, “The manager’s brains [were] under the workman’s cap.”49 Similarly, traditional faculty once controlled curriculum and instruction because they knew more about these than deans, provosts, and presidents and thus commanded considerable respect and deference. But most skilled workers gradually lost control as ever-larger machinery determined the pace and output of work, as “deskilling” steadily reduced the value and application of their expertise, and as manual labor became identified with mindless labor. The analogy to higher education obviously has its limitations, but the growing subservience of traditional intellectual work to high-tech mechanized work is, I believe, a striking comparison.

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West 112 Cisco Systems 206 City of the Sun, The (Campanella) 53 civil society 253 Clark University 238 Clarke, Arthur C. 9 Clinton, President Bill 115, 119 cloning 125 Cold War 9, 36, 102, 143 end of 1, 156 India and 172 and Space Program 139–140 and utopias 2 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor 112–113 Colored People’s Day 37 Columbus, Christopher 242 communist viewpoint 104 collapse of communism 156 computers, development of 160–161, 186 Comte, Auguste 52, 56, 57–58 Condorcet, Marquis de 52, 56, 61 Confucius 18 Congress, US 111, 115, 117, 118 and Superconducting Super Collider 122, 237 and the White House 99 Connick, George 208–210, 213 cooperation as a movement 31 272 Index Corruption of Improvement, The 159 corruption 23, 31 Council of Economic Advisors, US 101 counterculture 25, 84–85 Cours de philosophie positive (Comte) 58 Covey, Stephen 168 Cruelty and Utopia: Cities and Landscapes of Latin America (exhibition and text) 22 Crystal Palace Exhibition, London, 1851 34, 36 Cuba 22 Culture of Improvement: Technology and the Western Millennium, A (Friedel) 6, 158–159 Cure for Chaos: Fresh Solutions to Social Problems Through the Systems Approach (Ramo) 110 cyberspace communities 12, 24, 194, 198–199, and “real world” 198 cyberspace 1, 2, 24, 199 cyberspace relationships 192 and universities 209 Dahl, Robert 106, 108, 109, 114, 119, 122 Dator, James 250 DaVinci Institute 205 “Day of Slowing” 238 daydreams and utopias 251 Declaration of Independence, US 93 “Decline of Politics and Ideology in a Knowledgeable Society, The” (Lane) 106 Del Sesto, Stephen 146 Delano, Sterling 254–255 democracy and technology 189–190 Denmark 151 Department of Homeland Security, United States 253–254 Dertouzos, Michael 161, 164, 186 Descartes, Rene 55 deskilling 212 development studies 102 digital utopianism 154 digitization and the market 217–218 Dikotter, Frank 19 Diothas, The; Or, A Far Look Ahead (Macnie) 82, 89 “Discover the Brave New World of Online Learning” 213 Disneyland 36 Dispossessed, The (LeGuin) 92 diversity, concept of 190 Dolly the sheep 125 Donnelly, Ignatius 98 dot-com revolution 190, 201 Doublespeak 166 Douglass, Frederick 36–37 Dreyfus, Hubert 199 Dreyfuss, Henry 34 Drop City 195 Du Bois, W.

Ghost Work: How to Stop Silicon Valley From Building a New Global Underclass by Mary L. Gray, Siddharth Suri

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, AlphaGo, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Apollo 13, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, basic income, benefit corporation, Big Tech, big-box store, bitcoin, blue-collar work, business process, business process outsourcing, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, cloud computing, cognitive load, collaborative consumption, collective bargaining, computer vision, corporate social responsibility, cotton gin, crowdsourcing, data is the new oil, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, deindustrialization, deskilling, digital divide, do well by doing good, do what you love, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, employer provided health coverage, en.wikipedia.org, equal pay for equal work, Erik Brynjolfsson, fake news, financial independence, Frank Levy and Richard Murnane: The New Division of Labor, fulfillment center, future of work, gig economy, glass ceiling, global supply chain, hiring and firing, ImageNet competition, independent contractor, industrial robot, informal economy, information asymmetry, Jeff Bezos, job automation, knowledge economy, low skilled workers, low-wage service sector, machine translation, market friction, Mars Rover, natural language processing, new economy, operational security, passive income, pattern recognition, post-materialism, post-work, power law, race to the bottom, Rana Plaza, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Coase, scientific management, search costs, Second Machine Age, sentiment analysis, sharing economy, Shoshana Zuboff, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, software as a service, speech recognition, spinning jenny, Stephen Hawking, TED Talk, The Future of Employment, The Nature of the Firm, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, two-sided market, union organizing, universal basic income, Vilfredo Pareto, Wayback Machine, women in the workforce, work culture , Works Progress Administration, Y Combinator, Yochai Benkler

The contractor was treated like a hammer or mechanical pencil, there only to do an immediate task. Interns, by contrast, were being groomed to step into the corner office someday. By the early 20th century, any occupation shaped by advanced training, certification, and professional codes of conduct was valued as a skilled profession. The de-skilled worker in a factory setting became synonymous with the unionized worker able to protect their position and workplace through federal regulations. Anyone considered “non-exempt” from the Fair Labor Standards Act could expect to receive overtime for hours worked beyond the maximum workday.23 But tucked in the regulations were exceptions.

…

In short, knowledge work is the conversion of the creative expertise required to think with and massage data into consumable services delivered online by industries from tech and law to finance and entertainment. Thinkers from Karl Marx to Adam Smith imagined that machines played a critical role in “de-skilling” human labor. For Marx, automation dehumanized workers. For Smith, quickening the pace and expanding the reach of machines left a clearer picture of what was divinely unique about humans. Both men, products of their time, assumed that automation’s intrinsic capacity to conquer all routine work was inevitable.

Utopia Is Creepy: And Other Provocations by Nicholas Carr

Abraham Maslow, Air France Flight 447, Airbnb, Airbus A320, AltaVista, Amazon Mechanical Turk, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, Bernie Sanders, book scanning, Brewster Kahle, Buckminster Fuller, Burning Man, Captain Sullenberger Hudson, centralized clearinghouse, Charles Lindbergh, cloud computing, cognitive bias, collaborative consumption, computer age, corporate governance, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, Danny Hillis, data science, deskilling, digital capitalism, digital map, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, driverless car, Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Elon Musk, Evgeny Morozov, factory automation, failed state, feminist movement, Frederick Winslow Taylor, friendly fire, game design, global village, Google bus, Google Glasses, Google X / Alphabet X, Googley, hive mind, impulse control, indoor plumbing, interchangeable parts, Internet Archive, invention of movable type, invention of the steam engine, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jeff Bezos, jimmy wales, Joan Didion, job automation, John Perry Barlow, Kevin Kelly, Larry Ellison, Lewis Mumford, lifelogging, lolcat, low skilled workers, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, Max Levchin, means of production, Menlo Park, mental accounting, natural language processing, Neal Stephenson, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, Norman Mailer, off grid, oil shale / tar sands, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, profit motive, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, Republic of Letters, robot derives from the Czech word robota Czech, meaning slave, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, self-driving car, SETI@home, side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Singularitarianism, Snapchat, social graph, social web, speech recognition, Startup school, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, technoutopianism, TED Talk, the long tail, the medium is the message, theory of mind, Turing test, Tyler Cowen, Whole Earth Catalog, Y Combinator, Yochai Benkler

As analyses of the employment impacts of industrial machinery show, the use of technology to automate a job tends at first to enhance the skills of a worker, making the job more challenging and interesting, but as the machine becomes more sophisticated, as more job skills are built into its workings, a de-skilling trend takes hold. The highly skilled craftsman turns into a moderately skilled or unskilled machine operator. Even Adam Smith understood that machinery, in enhancing labor productivity, would often end up narrowing jobs, turning skilled work into routine work. At worst, he wrote, the factory worker would become “as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human creature to become.”

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Robots and software programs are still a long way from taking over all human work, but they can take over a lot more of it than factory machines could. It seems pretty clear now that that’s one of the main reasons we’re seeing persistently depressed demand for workers in many sectors of the economy. What’s perhaps less well acknowledged is the spread of the de-skilling phenomenon into so-called knowledge work. As computers become more capable of sensing the environment, performing analyses, and making judgments, they can be programmed to replicate white-collar skills. The remaining professionals and office workers start to look more and more like computer operators, tenders of machines.

B Is for Bauhaus, Y Is for YouTube: Designing the Modern World From a to Z by Deyan Sudjic

3D printing, additive manufacturing, Albert Einstein, Berlin Wall, Boeing 747, Boris Johnson, Buckminster Fuller, call centre, carbon footprint, clean water, company town, dematerialisation, deskilling, Easter island, edge city, Elon Musk, Frank Gehry, General Motors Futurama, Guggenheim Bilbao, illegal immigration, James Dyson, Jane Jacobs, Kitchen Debate, light touch regulation, market design, megastructure, moral panic, New Urbanism, place-making, QWERTY keyboard, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, the scientific method, University of East Anglia, urban renewal, urban sprawl, young professional

Chairs take us through a series of key technological episodes in the evolution of design. After carving, turning and joining wood no longer defined the parameters of chair design, the pace changed dramatically in the nineteenth century, when the Thonet family transformed furniture into a fully industrial process. Michael Thonet deskilled furniture-making by investing in machinery and inventing new techniques that could produce complex shapes without craft skills. He did for furniture what McDonald’s did for catering, though with more culturally nourishing results. After bentwood, chair designers worked with another newly invented material, tubular steel, which became emblematic of the machine age.

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Morris & Co. opened for business some four years after Morris’s polar opposite, Michael Thonet, built the first of his furniture factories, at Koritschen, on the edge of the Austro-Hungarian empire, conveniently placed for its supply of timber and unskilled but cheap labour. By the start of 1914, Thonet had made seven million examples of its Number 14 design, the armless bentwood and cane-seat café chair. Morris & Co. made its products in batches seldom more than a few dozen at a time and barely outlived its founder. Thonet depended on deskilling the making process, and reducing craftsmen to the role of machine minders on a production line assembling components. Its chairs were beautiful, elegant and affordable; and how they were made was not the issue in their appeal. Morris’s workshops produced small numbers of objects which were never affordable and were not always beautiful.

Aerotropolis by John D. Kasarda, Greg Lindsay

3D printing, air freight, airline deregulation, airport security, Akira Okazaki, Alvin Toffler, An Inconvenient Truth, Asian financial crisis, back-to-the-land, barriers to entry, Bear Stearns, Berlin Wall, big-box store, blood diamond, Boeing 747, book value, borderless world, Boris Johnson, British Empire, business cycle, call centre, carbon footprint, Cesare Marchetti: Marchetti’s constant, Charles Lindbergh, Clayton Christensen, clean tech, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, company town, conceptual framework, credit crunch, David Brooks, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, digital map, disruptive innovation, Dr. Strangelove, Dutch auction, Easter island, edge city, Edward Glaeser, Eyjafjallajökull, failed state, financial engineering, flag carrier, flying shuttle, food miles, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, Frank Gehry, fudge factor, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, Future Shock, General Motors Futurama, gentleman farmer, gentrification, Geoffrey West, Santa Fe Institute, George Gilder, global supply chain, global village, gravity well, Great Leap Forward, Haber-Bosch Process, Hernando de Soto, high-speed rail, hive mind, if you build it, they will come, illegal immigration, inflight wifi, intangible asset, interchangeable parts, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), intermodal, invention of the telephone, inventory management, invisible hand, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, Jevons paradox, Joan Didion, Kangaroo Route, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, kremlinology, land bank, Lewis Mumford, low cost airline, Marchetti’s constant, Marshall McLuhan, Masdar, mass immigration, McMansion, megacity, megaproject, Menlo Park, microcredit, military-industrial complex, Network effects, New Economic Geography, new economy, New Urbanism, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), peak oil, Pearl River Delta, Peter Calthorpe, Peter Thiel, pets.com, pink-collar, planned obsolescence, pre–internet, RFID, Richard Florida, Ronald Coase, Ronald Reagan, Rubik’s Cube, savings glut, Seaside, Florida, Shenzhen special economic zone , Shenzhen was a fishing village, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, SimCity, Skype, smart cities, smart grid, South China Sea, South Sea Bubble, sovereign wealth fund, special economic zone, spice trade, spinning jenny, starchitect, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Suez canal 1869, sunk-cost fallacy, supply-chain management, sustainable-tourism, tech worker, telepresence, the built environment, The Chicago School, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, the long tail, The Nature of the Firm, thinkpad, Thomas L Friedman, Thomas Malthus, Tony Hsieh, trade route, transcontinental railway, transit-oriented development, traveling salesman, trickle-down economics, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban renewal, urban sprawl, vertical integration, Virgin Galactic, walkable city, warehouse robotics, white flight, white picket fence, Yogi Berra, zero-sum game

The company’s term for it is “de-skilling,” a tradition that dates back to Henry Ford’s first assembly lines for the Model T. The difference now is that there is a greater fortune to be made in moving goods than in making them. It also means that while UPS employs ten thousand people nightly in the sort, most are part-time. FedEx, with fifteen thousand in Memphis and thousands more scattered across its domestic hubs, pays the same, and not even the offers of generous benefits and free tuition hide the fact that what they are looking for is a pool of loyal but unskilled labor. UPS has so thoroughly de-skilled the Worldport that even desert nomads could work there now, and they do.

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., 40, 46 Ultimus, 127 United Airlines, 48, 421; Continental merger with, 193 United Arab Emirates: oil reserves in, 294; see also Abu Dhabi; Dubai United Kingdom: coal use in, 328; home ownership in, 334; Open Skies agreement signed by, 282 United Nations, 19 United Parcel Service (UPS), 64–69; Louisville airport expansion for, 87–90; outsourcing by, 63; relations with Lousiville, 86–87 United States: China as largest trading partner to, 393, 398; floral market in, 221, 223; health care costs in, 267–68; high-speed rail plans in, 351; job loss in, 393; medical community in, 271–72; medical tourists from, 266, 276; medical tourists to, 271; national markets in, 243; number of airports in, 283; Open Skies agreement signed by, 282 United Steelworkers, medical tourism opposed by, 273–74 universal health care coverage, 268 Unnithan, Shaju, 320–21, 322, 323–24 Up in the Air (Kirn), 97–98 UPS Supply Chain Solutions, 69 UPS Worldport, 64, 65–68, 72; Bantu working at, 68; jobs deskilled at, 68; technology at, 66–68 urbanization: in Chicago, 12; of China, 5, 10, 18–19, 360, 364–65, 381, 389, 394–95; as green lifestyle, 356; as inevitable, 176; pace of, 12, 19; spending on, 10; technology and, 11–12 Ussher, Kitty, 14 Venice, as shaped by shipping, 12 Venter, Craig, biofuel development by, 349 Verenigde Bloemenveiling Aalsmeer, 211, 212–17, 218–19, 222, 322 Verni, Ron, 127–28 Vietnam, airports in, 263 Virgin Atlantic, 21; environmental efforts of, 345–48, 350 Virgin Green Fund, 345 virtual density, 293–94 Visteon, 199–201 Visteon Village, 199, 200–201, 202 von Klemperer, Jamie, 355, 357 Walmart, sustainability index of, 240–41 Walsh, Willie, 16 Wang Chuanfu, 204 Wanisubut, Suwat, 259–62, 263 Wanxiang Group, 206 Washington, D.C., 355 Washington National Airport, 38–39 Washtenaw County, Mich., 188 water, recycling of, 356 Waterfront City, 293 Wayne County, Mich., 182–83 Wayne State University, 188 Webber, Melvin, 11, 12, 115–16, 124–25 Welch, Jack, 202 Wen Jiabao, 369 Weymouth, Leanne, 124 whaling, 327–28 Whitehaven, Tenn., 83 Whitman, Walt, 23 Whyte, William H., 139 Why Your World Is About to Get a Whole Lot Smaller (Rubin), 332 Wice, Nathaniel, 367 Wilkes-Barre, Pa., 7 Williams, Adrian, 233 Williams, Fred, 89–90 Willow Run, Mich., 180, 182, 188, 425 Willow Run Airport, 180, 188; auto shipments through, 182 Wilmington, Ohio, 87–88 Wilson, Charles E., 186 Window on the World, 409–10 Wipro, 281, 283 Wongsawat, Somchai, 252, 256 World Bank, 337 World’s Fair (1939), 192 “World’s Unofficial Longest Line” video, 13–14 World Trade Organization, Seattle clashes and, 168 World War II: aviation and aerospace industry in, 27; Ford production during, 179–80, 188 Wright Brothers, 341, 349, 412, 413 Wrigley Field, 411, 413, 414 Xi’an, China, 387, 390 YouTube, 13–14 Zahavi, Yakov, 117 Zappos.com, 66, 69–77, 422; business expansion of, 72;customer service at, 70–71; as decentralized, 74; fulfillment by, 73–74; inventory management at, 73, 74; ordering from, 71–73; shipping strategy of, 70, 72 Zemcik, Marty, 142–44 Zhang Qian, 409 Zhao, Jeff, 205–207 Zheng He, 390 Zhou Tianbao, 205–206 Zhuhai, China, 378, 383 Zimbabwe, economy of, 325 Zoellick, Robert, 400 A Note About the Authors John D.

Austerity Britain: 1945-51 by David Kynaston

Alistair Cooke, anti-communist, Arthur Marwick, British Empire, Chelsea Manning, collective bargaining, continuous integration, deindustrialization, deskilling, Etonian, full employment, garden city movement, hiring and firing, industrial cluster, invisible hand, job satisfaction, labour mobility, Lewis Mumford, light touch regulation, mass immigration, moral panic, Neil Kinnock, occupational segregation, price mechanism, public intellectual, rent control, reserve currency, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, shared worldview, stakhanovite, strikebreaker, the market place, upwardly mobile, urban planning, urban renewal, very high income, wage slave, washing machines reduced drudgery, wealth creators, women in the workforce, young professional

‘By the 1950s some of the major skilled crafts, like hand tin-hammering and wooden joinery body building, had effectively vanished,’ he writes. ‘Even in the most conservative firms, moving assembly lines were now the normal practice.’ It was, in short, a deskilled world of what one former car worker described as ‘very monotonous, terribly monotonous, repetitive work’. Or, in the words of another, ‘It was just pure drudgery. You became a wage slave, nothing else – the only thing you could see at the end of the week was your wages and that was it.’ Nevertheless, Thompson contends that this potentially dispiriting, deskilled reality co-existed in Coventry – above all at Standard – with a culture that owed much to earlier craft traditions.

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Pity the child whose father’s occupation was so humble as to be ignored in the daily round of squabbles. The melter, the roller, the forgeman . . . these were the “worthy” occupations, not comparable in any way with the “wimpish” occupations found outside the factories.’ In general, such pride was unsurprising. Whatever the long-term trend towards deskilling that was undeniably taking place in British industry, the fact was that by mid-century less than 5 per cent of the overall workforce was engaged in mass-production processes, increasingly typified by the assembly line of the car plant. Nor does Zweig’s emphasis on the positive social function of the workplace seem misplaced.

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Instead, ‘they assumed a slow-growing world with an eternal taste for British goods’ while devising the gang system (providing an adequate degree of flexibility and workforce motivation) to meet pressing short-term production needs. He not only cites comparative studies with North America and Japan to show that ‘new technology need not imply personal deskilling’ but explicitly compares the Coventry experience – based essentially on negative workplace resistance – to that of Italy’s equivalent motor city, Turin, where the metalworkers’ unions made ‘constant demands on management for more intensive investment and higher-level training for the workforce’, as well as funding their own research centres on technological change.

The Blockchain Alternative: Rethinking Macroeconomic Policy and Economic Theory by Kariappa Bheemaiah

"World Economic Forum" Davos, accounting loophole / creative accounting, Ada Lovelace, Adam Curtis, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, algorithmic trading, asset allocation, autonomous vehicles, balance sheet recession, bank run, banks create money, Basel III, basic income, behavioural economics, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, bitcoin, Bletchley Park, blockchain, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, business cycle, business process, call centre, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, cashless society, cellular automata, central bank independence, Charles Babbage, Claude Shannon: information theory, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, complexity theory, constrained optimization, corporate governance, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, cross-border payments, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, David Graeber, deep learning, deskilling, Diane Coyle, discrete time, disruptive innovation, distributed ledger, diversification, double entry bookkeeping, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, fiat currency, financial engineering, financial innovation, financial intermediation, Flash crash, floating exchange rates, Fractional reserve banking, full employment, George Akerlof, Glass-Steagall Act, Higgs boson, illegal immigration, income inequality, income per capita, inflation targeting, information asymmetry, interest rate derivative, inventory management, invisible hand, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John von Neumann, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kenneth Arrow, Kenneth Rogoff, Kevin Kelly, knowledge economy, large denomination, Large Hadron Collider, Lewis Mumford, liquidity trap, London Whale, low interest rates, low skilled workers, M-Pesa, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, market bubble, market fundamentalism, Mexican peso crisis / tequila crisis, Michael Milken, MITM: man-in-the-middle, Money creation, money market fund, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, mortgage debt, natural language processing, Network effects, new economy, Nikolai Kondratiev, offshore financial centre, packet switching, Pareto efficiency, pattern recognition, peer-to-peer lending, Ponzi scheme, power law, precariat, pre–internet, price mechanism, price stability, private sector deleveraging, profit maximization, QR code, quantitative easing, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, Ray Kurzweil, Real Time Gross Settlement, rent control, rent-seeking, robo advisor, Satoshi Nakamoto, Satyajit Das, Savings and loan crisis, savings glut, seigniorage, seminal paper, Silicon Valley, Skype, smart contracts, software as a service, software is eating the world, speech recognition, statistical model, Stephen Hawking, Stuart Kauffman, supply-chain management, technology bubble, The Chicago School, The Future of Employment, The Great Moderation, the market place, The Nature of the Firm, the payments system, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Kuhn: the structure of scientific revolutions, too big to fail, trade liberalization, transaction costs, Turing machine, Turing test, universal basic income, Vitalik Buterin, Von Neumann architecture, Washington Consensus

By creating a model that emphasizes technological change, the authors found that the skills downgrading process which forces high-educated workers into accepting routine jobs is because, as technological progress has positive impacts on the productivity of cognitive tasks, it eventually leads to a decreasing path for the cognitive task employment rate. This contrasts with the evidence of an increase in demand in this sector (Autor et al, 1998). The authors coin this development as a “de-skilling” process , since it involves cognitive workers with experience and already in the job market being obliged to move down the ladder in order to stay in employment. This has serious implications for new job seekers as not only is the entry bar raised higher for new entrants, but the number of opportunities available to them is also reduced (Beaudry et al., 2013).

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Buiter The Precariat: The New Dangerous Class (2011), Guy Standing Inventing the Future: Postcapitalism and a World Without Work (2015), Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams Raising the Floor: How a Universal Basic Income Can Renew Our Economy and Rebuild the American Dream (2016), Andy Stern Index A Aadhaar program Agent Based Computational Economics (ABCE) models complexity economists developments El Farol problem and minority games Kim-Markowitz Portfolio Insurers Model Santa Fe artificial stock market model Agent based modelling (ABM) aggregate behavioural trends axiomatisation, linearization and generalization black-boxing bottom-up approach challenge computational modelling paradigm conceptualizing, individual agents EBM enacting agent interaction environmental factors environment creation individual agent parameters and modelling decisions simulation designing specifying agent behaviour Alaska Anti-Money Laundering (AML) ARPANet Artificial Neural Networks (ANN) Atlantic model Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) Autor-Levy-Murnane (ALM) B Bandits’ Club BankID system Basic Income Earth Network (BIEN) Bitnation Blockchain ARPANet break down points decentralized communication emails fiat currency functions Jiggery Pokery accounts malware protocols Satoshi skeleton keys smart contract TCP/IP protocol technological and financial innovation trade finance Blockchain-based regulatory framework (BRF) BlockVerify C Capitalism ALM hypotheses and SBTC Blockchain and CoCo canonical model cashlessenvironment See(Multiple currencies) categories classification definition of de-skilling process economic hypothesis education and training levels EMN fiat currency CBDC commercial banks debt-based money digital cash digital monetary framework fractional banking system framework ideas and methods non-bank private sector sovereign digital currency transition fiscal policy cashless environment central bank concept of control spending definition of exogenous and endogenous function fractional banking system Kelton, Stephanie near-zero interest rates policy instrument QE and QQE tendency ultra-low inflation helicopter drops business insider ceteris paribus Chatbots Chicago Plan comparative charts fractional banking keywords technology UBI higher-skilled workers ICT technology industry categories Jiggery Pokery accounts advantages bias information Blockchain CFTC digital environment Enron scandal limitations private/self-regulation public function regulatory framework tech-led firms lending and payments CAMELS evaluation consumers and SMEs cryptographic laws fundamental limitations governments ILP KYB process lending sector mobile banking payments industry regulatory pressures rehypothecation ripple protocol sectors share leveraging effect technology marketing money cashless system crime and taxation economy IRS money Seigniorage tax evasion markets and regulation market structure multiple currency mechanisms occupational categories ONET database policies economic landscape financialization monetary and fiscal policy money creation methods The Chicago Plan transformation probabilities regulation routine and non-routine routinization hypothesis Sarbanes-Oxley Act SBTC scalability issue skill-biased employment skills and technological advancement skills downgrading process trades See(Trade finance) UBI Alaska deployment Mincome, Canada Namibia Cashless system Cellular automata (CA) Central bank digital currency (CBDC) Centre for Economic Policy Research (CEPR) Chicago Plan Clearing House Interbank Payments System (CHIPS) Collateralised Debt Obligations (CDOs) Collateralized Loan Obligations (CLOs) Complexity economics agent challenges consequential decisions deterministic and axiomatized models dynamics education emergence exogenous and endogenous changes feedback loops information affects agents macroeconoic movements network science non-linearity path dependence power laws self-adapting individual agents technology andinvention See(Technology and invention) Walrasian approach Computing Congressional Research Service (CRS) Constant absolute risk aversion (CARA) Contingent convertible (CoCo) Credit Default Swaps (CDSs) CredyCo Cryptid Cryptographic law Currency mechanisms Current Account Switching System (CASS) D Data analysis techniques Debt and money broad and base money China’s productivity credit economic pressures export-led growth fractional banking See also((Fractional Reserve banking) GDP growth households junk bonds long-lasting effects private and public sectors problems pubilc and private level reaganomics real estate industry ripple effects security and ownership societal level UK DigID Digital trade documents (DOCS) Dodd-Frank Act Dynamic Stochastic General Equilibrium (DSGE) model E EBM SeeEquation based modelling (EBM) Economic entropy vs. economic equilibrium assemblages and adaptations complexity economics complexity theory DSGE based models EMH human uncertainty principle’ LHC machine-like system operating neuroscience findings reflexivity RET risk assessment scientific method technology and economy Economic flexibility Efficient markets hypothesis (EMH) eID system Electronic Discrete Variable Automatic Computer (EDVAC) Elliptical curve cryptography (ECC) EMH SeeEfficient Market Hypothesis (EMH) Equation based modelling (EBM) Equilibrium business-cycle models Equilibrium economic models contract theory contact incompleteness efficiency wages explicit contracts implicit contracts intellectual framework labor market flexibility menu cost risk sharing DSGE models Federal Reserve system implicit contracts macroeconomic models of business cycle NK models non-optimizing households principles RBC models RET ‘rigidity’ of wage and price change SIGE steady state equilibrium, economy structure Taylor rule FRB/US model Keynesian macroeconomic theory RBC models Romer’s analysis tests statistical models Estonian government European Migration Network (EMN) Exogenous and endogenous function Explicit contracts F Feedback loop Fiat currency CBDC commercial banks debt-based money digital cash digital monetary framework framework ideas and methods non-bank private sector sovereign digital currency transition Financialization de facto definition of eastern economic association enemy of my enemy is my friend FT slogans Palley, Thomas I.

New Laws of Robotics: Defending Human Expertise in the Age of AI by Frank Pasquale

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, algorithmic bias, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Anthropocene, augmented reality, Automated Insights, autonomous vehicles, basic income, battle of ideas, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Bill Joy: nanobots, bitcoin, blockchain, Brexit referendum, call centre, Cambridge Analytica, carbon tax, citizen journalism, Clayton Christensen, collective bargaining, commoditize, computer vision, conceptual framework, contact tracing, coronavirus, corporate social responsibility, correlation does not imply causation, COVID-19, critical race theory, cryptocurrency, data is the new oil, data science, decarbonisation, deep learning, deepfake, deskilling, digital divide, digital twin, disinformation, disruptive innovation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, driverless car, effective altruism, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, Filter Bubble, finite state, Flash crash, future of work, gamification, general purpose technology, Google Chrome, Google Glasses, Great Leap Forward, green new deal, guns versus butter model, Hans Moravec, high net worth, hiring and firing, holacracy, Ian Bogost, independent contractor, informal economy, information asymmetry, information retrieval, interchangeable parts, invisible hand, James Bridle, Jaron Lanier, job automation, John Markoff, Joi Ito, Khan Academy, knowledge economy, late capitalism, lockdown, machine readable, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, medical malpractice, megaproject, meta-analysis, military-industrial complex, Modern Monetary Theory, Money creation, move fast and break things, mutually assured destruction, natural language processing, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, Norbert Wiener, nuclear winter, obamacare, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), open immigration, OpenAI, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, paperclip maximiser, paradox of thrift, pattern recognition, payday loans, personalized medicine, Peter Singer: altruism, Philip Mirowski, pink-collar, plutocrats, post-truth, pre–internet, profit motive, public intellectual, QR code, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, regulatory arbitrage, Robert Shiller, Rodney Brooks, Ronald Reagan, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, Singularitarianism, smart cities, smart contracts, software is eating the world, South China Sea, Steve Bannon, Strategic Defense Initiative, surveillance capitalism, Susan Wojcicki, tacit knowledge, TaskRabbit, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, TED Talk, telepresence, telerobotics, The Future of Employment, The Turner Diaries, Therac-25, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, Turing test, universal basic income, unorthodox policies, wage slave, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, working poor, workplace surveillance , Works Progress Administration, zero day

There is an asymmetry at the heart of tax codes that “aggressively subsidize … the use of equipment (for example, via various tax credits and accelerated amortization) and tax … the employment of labor (for example, via payroll taxes).”27 We have already seen many instances where the premature or misguided application of artificial intelligence instead of intelligence augmentation has caused both direct problems (of bias and inaccuracy) and indirect ones (ranging from a loss of dignity to a de-skilling of professionals who ought to be guiding, rather than replaced by, AI and software). Yet there are also vast swaths of the economy—jobs in cleaning, infrastructure, transport, clean energy, logistics, and much more—where we desperately need more and faster application of robots and AI. So it would seem unwise to tax robotization as a whole, particularly when these sectors need to rapidly advance to give everyone some semblance of the capabilities now taken for granted by the globe’s wealthiest quintile.

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The Federal Government of Germany, Artificial Intelligence Strategy 25 (2018), https://ec.europa.eu/knowledge4policy/publication/germany-artificial-intelligence-strategy_en (“The potential for AI to serve society as a whole lies in its promise of productivity gains going hand in hand with improvements for the workforce, delegating monotonous or dangerous tasks to machines so that human beings can focus on using their creativity to resolve problems.”). 12. Lucas Mearian, “A. I. Guardian-Angel Vehicles Will Dominate Auto Industry, Says Toyota Exec,” Computerworld, June 3, 2016. 13. Some forms of autopilot tend to de-skill pilots. Nicholas Carr, The Glass Cage: How Our Computers Are Changing Us (New York: Norton, 2015). However, autopilots can also be designed to maintain or enhance the skills of pilots, preserving essential expertise. David Mindell, Our Robots, Ourselves: Robotics and the Myths of Autonomy (New York: Viking, 2015). 14.

Head, Hand, Heart: Why Intelligence Is Over-Rewarded, Manual Workers Matter, and Caregivers Deserve More Respect by David Goodhart

active measures, Airbnb, Albert Einstein, assortative mating, basic income, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, big-box store, Black Lives Matter, Boris Johnson, Branko Milanovic, Brexit referendum, British Empire, call centre, Cass Sunstein, central bank independence, centre right, computer age, corporate social responsibility, COVID-19, data science, David Attenborough, David Brooks, deglobalization, deindustrialization, delayed gratification, desegregation, deskilling, different worldview, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, emotional labour, Etonian, fail fast, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Flynn Effect, Frederick Winslow Taylor, future of work, gender pay gap, George Floyd, gig economy, glass ceiling, Glass-Steagall Act, Great Leap Forward, illegal immigration, income inequality, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, job automation, job satisfaction, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, labour market flexibility, lockdown, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, meritocracy, new economy, Nicholas Carr, oil shock, pattern recognition, Peter Thiel, pink-collar, post-industrial society, post-materialism, postindustrial economy, precariat, reshoring, Richard Florida, robotic process automation, scientific management, Scientific racism, Skype, social distancing, social intelligence, spinning jenny, Steven Pinker, superintelligent machines, TED Talk, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, Thorstein Veblen, twin studies, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, universal basic income, upwardly mobile, wages for housework, winner-take-all economy, women in the workforce, young professional

But it is also a sense that these occupations, with the partial exception of jobs like coding (which is also suffering shortages), belong to the past, not the future, and do not offer long-term security. It is true that overall demand for the skilled trades has been falling and will probably continue to fall. The jobs are either being made completely redundant by technological change or are being de-skilled; consider the switch from the old London black cab driver who has memorized the “knowledge” to the Uber driver who just follows directions from his phone. Skilled-trade jobs fell by almost 30 percent in the United Kingdom between 1990 and 2018, falling from 4.7 million to 3.2 million, despite an increase in the UK population of around 15 percent in that period.

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Brown, Lauder, and Ashton in The Global Auction call them developers, demonstrators, and drones. People in developer roles, which are no more than 10 to 15 percent of a typical organization’s workforce, are given “permission to think” and include senior researchers, managers, and professionals. People in demonstrator roles are the second-level, partially de-skilled professionals who are invariably graduates but whose main job is to execute or implement existing knowledge. Communicating well is usually their main function. People in drone roles are involved in monotonous work and are not expected to think. The swift decline of the professions has also been predicted in an influential book by father and son Richard and Daniel Susskind titled The Future of the Professions: How Technology Will Transform the Work of Human Experts.

Year 501 by Noam Chomsky

air traffic controllers' union, anti-communist, Bartolomé de las Casas, Berlin Wall, Bolshevik threat, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, capital controls, Caribbean Basin Initiative, classic study, colonial rule, corporate governance, cuban missile crisis, declining real wages, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, Dissolution of the Soviet Union, European colonialism, experimental subject, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Howard Zinn, invisible hand, land reform, land tenure, long peace, mass incarceration, means of production, Monroe Doctrine, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, non-tariff barriers, offshore financial centre, plutocrats, price stability, Ralph Nader, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Simon Kuznets, strikebreaker, structural adjustment programs, the scientific method, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade liberalization, trickle-down economics, union organizing, War on Poverty, working poor

A study of industrial productivity by MIT specialists notes further that Germany, Japan, and other countries that maintained the “craft tradition” with more “direct participation of skilled workers in production decisions” have been more successful in modern industry than the United States, with its tradition of deskilling and marginalizing workers in the “mass-production model”; lessened hierarchy, responsibility in the hands of production workers, and training in new technologies has also improved results in the US, they conclude. Economist David Felix makes a similar point in comparing Latin America and East Asia.

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“The lockout crushed the largest trade union in America, the AAISW, and it wrecked the lives of its most devoted members,” Paul Krause writes in his comprehensive history. Unionism was not revived in Homestead for 45 years. The impact was far broader. Destruction of unions was only one aspect of the general project of disciplining labor. Workers were to be deskilled, turned into pliable tools under the control of “scientific management.” Management was particularly incensed that “the men ran the mill and the foreman had little authority” in Homestead, one official later said. As discussed earlier, it has been plausibly argued that the current malaise of US industry can be traced in part to the success of the project of making working people “as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human creature to be,” in defiance of Adam Smith’s warning that government must “take pains to prevent” this fate for the “labouring poor” as the “invisible hand” does its grim work (see pp. 25, 145).

Makers and Takers: The Rise of Finance and the Fall of American Business by Rana Foroohar

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, accounting loophole / creative accounting, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, additive manufacturing, Airbnb, Alan Greenspan, algorithmic trading, Alvin Roth, Asian financial crisis, asset allocation, bank run, Basel III, Bear Stearns, behavioural economics, Big Tech, bonus culture, Bretton Woods, British Empire, business cycle, buy and hold, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carl Icahn, Carmen Reinhart, carried interest, centralized clearinghouse, clean water, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, computerized trading, corporate governance, corporate raider, corporate social responsibility, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, data science, David Graeber, deskilling, Detroit bankruptcy, diversification, Double Irish / Dutch Sandwich, electricity market, Emanuel Derman, Eugene Fama: efficient market hypothesis, financial deregulation, financial engineering, financial intermediation, Ford Model T, Frederick Winslow Taylor, George Akerlof, gig economy, Glass-Steagall Act, Goldman Sachs: Vampire Squid, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Greenspan put, guns versus butter model, High speed trading, Home mortgage interest deduction, housing crisis, Howard Rheingold, Hyman Minsky, income inequality, index fund, information asymmetry, interest rate derivative, interest rate swap, Internet of things, invisible hand, James Carville said: "I would like to be reincarnated as the bond market. You can intimidate everybody.", John Bogle, John Markoff, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, London Whale, Long Term Capital Management, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, market design, Martin Wolf, money market fund, moral hazard, mortgage debt, mortgage tax deduction, new economy, non-tariff barriers, offshore financial centre, oil shock, passive investing, Paul Samuelson, pensions crisis, Ponzi scheme, principal–agent problem, proprietary trading, quantitative easing, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, Rana Plaza, RAND corporation, random walk, rent control, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Satyajit Das, Savings and loan crisis, scientific management, Second Machine Age, shareholder value, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Snapchat, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, sovereign wealth fund, Steve Jobs, stock buybacks, subprime mortgage crisis, technology bubble, TED Talk, The Chicago School, the new new thing, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tim Cook: Apple, Tobin tax, too big to fail, Tragedy of the Commons, trickle-down economics, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Vanguard fund, vertical integration, zero-sum game

If you could measure it, you could manage it—a motto that McKinsey, the global business consulting giant, would eventually pick up and adopt as its unofficial slogan decades later. A managerial high caste was being born, one separate from owner-entrepreneurs. It was focused mainly on financial metrics and adversarial to labor, which was increasingly being de-skilled, thanks to Taylorist ideas of rigid, limited job descriptions. But if workers were being de-skilled, so were managers. As firms became more financialized, managers became less and less knowledgeable about the actual products their companies were creating, even as they knew more about their financial performance. As control of production got decentralized, financial decision making, the most important power node in the company, was being ever more centralized and crucial to corporate strategy.

On the Move: Mobility in the Modern Western World by Timothy Cresswell

"Hurricane Katrina" Superdome, Alvin Toffler, Boeing 747, British Empire, desegregation, deskilling, Frederick Winslow Taylor, Future Shock, global village, illegal immigration, Lewis Mumford, mass immigration, moral panic, post-Fordism, Rosa Parks, scientific management, technoutopianism, The Chicago School, transcontinental railway, traveling salesman, urban planning

I believe in treating workmen as though they were human beings, and not as though they were mere machines.” Stopwatches, he declared, were for horseraces.18 What might be appropriate for animals, in other words, would not be appropriate for people. Braverman has famously described Taylorism as a sophisticated form of de-skilling whereby the labor process is dissociated from the skills of worker. The management presume to act as the brain while the workers are mere bodies. “Thus, in the setting of antagonistic social relations, of alienated labor, hand and brain become not just separated, but divided and hostile, and the human unity of hand and brain turns into its opposite, something less than human.”19 This “less-than-human” worker is the machine or cogs in a larger machine.

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., 263 C CAPPS II (Computer Assisted Passenger Prescreening System), 238 Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, 151 car chase, 197 cardiology, 73 carnivalesque, the, 48–49 cars, 196–197, 214–218, 259–260 Castells, Manuel, 225, 255 categorization, 184–185, 223, 263 Chambers, Iain, 43, 221 Charleston, the, 132–133 Chicago School of Sociology, 18, 36–37 Chinese-Americans, 176, 182–184 Chinese Exclusion Act, 159–160, 175, 177, 180–186, 190–192 Chouinard, Vera, 165 circular workplace, 118 circulation, 7–8 citizen, the, 15, 20, 150–152, 174, 184, 186, 189, 193, 223 and aliens, 164 European, 236 and slaves, 161 citizenship, 149, 151, 190, 237, 241 RT52565_Index.indd 322 and mobility, 159–162, 173 rights of, 151–153, 156, 264 stretched, 167 city, the, 12, 50 city planning, 7–8 Civil Rights Act, 168 class, 127, 173, 181 and race, 172 Clifford, James, 43–44 closed circuit television, 240 code, 238 code space, 238 commerce, 149, 156 Communist Party (US), 153–154 Corbin, Alain, 8 Corfield v Coryell, 158 corporeality, 223 cosmopolitanism, 255 Crandall v Nevada, 149, 152–156, 158 Crang, Mike, 220, 222, 223 Crary, Jonathan, 61–62 Critical Path Analysis, 239 Crow, Jim, 261 culture, 43–44 mass, 35 and sedentarism, 32–36 working class, 34–35 Curaçao, 250, 257 cyclograph, 99, 101, 108 D Dalcroze, Emile-Jacques, 125 dance, 9–10, 53 African-American, 124, 131–132, 135, 141 ballroom, 123–7 as cultural knowledge, 128 history of, 123–124 Latin-American, 124 and race, 127 dance charts, 137–138 dance teachers, 129–130; 134 Daniels, Roger, 182 De Certeau, Michel, 46–47, 213 Deben, Leon, 251 Delaney, David, 4 Delsarte, Francois, 124–125 Delueze, Gilles, 46, 49–50, 54 4/18/06 7:52:11 AM Index • 323 Demeny, Georges, 79–80, 82, 87 denizen, 185 Dercum, Francis, X., 69–70 de-skilling, 92 Desmond, Jane, 127 Deutsche, Sarah, 203 Dewsbury, J.D., 55 difference, 178–180, 183, 186 politics of, 178–180 disability, 165–166, 173 disease, 150 dishwashing, 115 diversity, 188 Dodge, Martin, 238 driving, 216 Durkheim, Emile, 82 E Edwards v California, 147–151, 156, 158 efficiency, 120 Eliot, T.S., 32–33 Ellis Island, New York, 180, 188 Enloe, Cynthia, 207 entropy, 72 ethnicity, 173 European Charter of Rights, 162 European Commission, 236 European Union, 233 and right to mobility, 233 evacuees, 263–264 exclusion, logic of, 160–161 F Farm Security Administration, 39–42 feudalism, 10–12, 163 Fing Yue Ting v United States, 184–185 flâneur, the, 18–19, 48, 211 Foley, Margaret, 195–218 foreigner, the, 189–190 Forer, Pip, 30 Foster, Sue, 127 Foucault, Michel, 16 Franco, Mark, 127 freak steps, 128–136, 143 fugitives, 150 Fuller, Gillian, 244 RT52565_Index.indd 323 G Galileo, Galilei, 13–14 gender, 54, 64–69, 127, 165, 173, 197–198 geographical imagination, 177 geography, 27–32, 45–46 geosophy, 21–22 Gilbreth, Frank, 85, 89, 93, 95–115, 125, 144, 237, 239 Gilbreth, Lillian, 95–96, 98, 113–121, 237, 239 Gilpin, Heidi, 57 Gilroy, Paul, 204, 206 globalization, 221, 224 Graham, Laurel, 114, 121 Grosz, Elizabeth, 247 Guattari, Félix, 46, 49–50, 54 guerrilla warfare, 39 gypsy-travelers, 41–42 H habit, 86, 92, 106–109, 121, 134 Hacking, Ian, 177, 183 Hägerstrand, Torsten, 30 Haggett, Peter, 27–28, 30 Harrington, Ralph, 6, 20 Harvey, David, 44, 95 Harvey, William, 7, 14 Heathrow Airport (London), 222, 223, 242, 246 Heidegger, Martin, 42 heritage, 176, 186–192, 194 Hobbes, Thomas, 14–15, 218 Hoelscher, Steven, 188 Hoggart, Richard, 34–36 Holzer, Jenny, 219, 223 home 114–15 homelessness, 27, 53 in Amsterdam, 251 in Schiphol Airport, 248–251 Honig, Bonnie, 189–190 Hopper, Kim, 251 hotels, 210, 225 horses, and photography, 59–60 humanistic geography, 30–32 Hurricane Katrina, 259–65 4/18/06 7:52:11 AM 324 • Index I Iberlings, Hans, 221 ideal movements, 29 ideology, of mobility, 123, 199 Illich, Ivan, 165 immigrants as taxi drivers, 253–254 Chinese, 176–177, 182, 184 illegal, 233 Turkish, 254 immigration, 176–177, 189, 193 remote control of, 185 Imperial Society of Teachers of Dancing, 132–134, 136–142 indigence, 150 information technology, 238–241 instruction chart, 103 Iyer, Pico, 222 J Jackson, J.B., 31 Jackson, Rev.

Learn Descriptive Cataloging Second North American Edition by Mary Mortimer

California gold rush, clean water, corporate governance, deskilling, illegal immigration, machine readable, Norman Mailer

• • • • • cheaper and quicker—cataloging is only done once per title, however many copies are bought consistency and high standards—fewer specialist cataloging staff cataloging staff builds up more expertise fewer sets of cataloging tools needed (they are expensive) end processing can also be centralized g. • • • de-skilling of other library staff local branches have no control over the subject headings, etc.—more difficult to relate cataloging to needs of users other staff have fewer tasks to share around—risk of professional staff being bored h. • • • • • • sharing ideas, skills, work consistency among members of the network knowledge of what other libraries in the network collect possibility of sharing professional expertise awareness of scrutiny of other professionals may help keep standards high savings of time and effort i

The Tyranny of Metrics by Jerry Z. Muller

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Atul Gawande, behavioural economics, Cass Sunstein, Checklist Manifesto, Chelsea Manning, collapse of Lehman Brothers, corporate governance, Credit Default Swap, crowdsourcing, delayed gratification, deskilling, Edward Snowden, Erik Brynjolfsson, financial engineering, Frederick Winslow Taylor, George Akerlof, Goodhart's law, Hyman Minsky, intangible asset, Jean Tirole, job satisfaction, joint-stock company, joint-stock limited liability company, Minsky moment, Moneyball by Michael Lewis explains big data, performance metric, price mechanism, RAND corporation, Salesforce, school choice, scientific management, Second Machine Age, selection bias, Steven Levy, tacit knowledge, TED Talk, total factor productivity, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen, WikiLeaks

From Britain, the fashion spread to Australia and New Zealand, and to other OECD countries, carried beyond national borders by management gurus, consultants, and academics peddling tools and models of “best practice.”15 6 PHILOSOPHICAL CRITIQUES Just as the culture of metrics has its boosters on both the political right and left, it also has critics from both sides of the ideological spectrum. From the perspective of the Marxist left, it can be seen, with some justification, as promoting de-skilling, in which changes in the organization of production brought about by those at the top have the effect of devaluing the skills and experience of those subordinate in the system.1 And work that is more circumscribed, and from which discretion has been excised by having to meet narrowly defined goals dictated by others, is more alienating.

Snakes and Ladders: The Great British Social Mobility Myth by Selina Todd

assortative mating, Bletchley Park, Boris Johnson, collective bargaining, conceptual framework, coronavirus, COVID-19, deindustrialization, deskilling, DIY culture, emotional labour, Etonian, fear of failure, feminist movement, financial independence, full employment, Gini coefficient, greed is good, housing crisis, income inequality, Jeremy Corbyn, Kickstarter, Mahatma Gandhi, manufacturing employment, meritocracy, Nick Leeson, offshore financial centre, old-boy network, profit motive, rent control, Right to Buy, school choice, social distancing, statistical model, The Home Computer Revolution, The Spirit Level, traveling salesman, unpaid internship, upwardly mobile, urban sprawl, women in the workforce, Yom Kippur War, young professional

Yet not all of them experienced their work as a step up from manual labour. Employers, emboldened by high unemployment and successive interwar governments’ disdain for trade unionism, cut wages and invested little in working conditions. Mass production, which had become popular in wartime industry, was used in peacetime to deskill workers. In factories, assembly-line workers undertook repetitive tasks and were paid by how much they produced each hour. While this method was particularly popular in the manufacture of domestic appliances, food and clothing, many large shops and some clerical employers adapted it to cut costs.

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In 1986 Margaret Thatcher announced plans to privatise water, electricity, gas and the railways, declaring that this would enable ‘millions of people to own shares for the first time in their lives’.25 This was a very different version of the social ladder compared to what the golden generation had grown up with. It was quickly embedded into the political and social fabric, helped by the media. In 1984 Rupert Murdoch, one of the world’s richest men, removed his News International newspapers from Fleet Street to a new plant at Wapping in order to deskill printers, and later journalists, by placing severe constraints on trade unionism and slashing job security. The government, which refused to countenance support for the declining industries or the workers laid off, authorised the deployment of huge numbers of police to crush the picket lines of printers, journalists and their supporters.

Blood in the Machine: The Origins of the Rebellion Against Big Tech by Brian Merchant

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Ada Lovelace, algorithmic management, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, big-box store, Black Lives Matter, Cambridge Analytica, Charles Babbage, ChatGPT, collective bargaining, colonial rule, commoditize, company town, computer age, computer vision, coronavirus, cotton gin, COVID-19, cryptocurrency, DALL-E, decarbonisation, deskilling, digital rights, Donald Trump, Edward Jenner, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, factory automation, flying shuttle, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, George Floyd, gig economy, gigafactory, hiring and firing, hockey-stick growth, independent contractor, industrial robot, information asymmetry, Internet Archive, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, James Hargreaves, James Watt: steam engine, Jeff Bezos, Jessica Bruder, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, military-industrial complex, move fast and break things, Naomi Klein, New Journalism, On the Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, OpenAI, precariat, profit motive, ride hailing / ride sharing, Sam Bankman-Fried, scientific management, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, sharing economy, Silicon Valley, sovereign wealth fund, spinning jenny, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, super pumped, TaskRabbit, tech billionaire, tech bro, tech worker, techlash, technological determinism, Ted Kaczynski, The Future of Employment, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Malthus, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, union organizing, universal basic income, W. E. B. Du Bois, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, working poor, workplace surveillance

Even two centuries later, the most sophisticated “dark” factories require large teams of workers to oversee operations, perform basic functions, and to provide maintenance and support. Still, propelled by entrepreneurs like Richard Arkwright, embracing Dr. A Smith’s division of labor, the factory standardized and accelerated the production process. It wrested control from small owners, deskilled workers, and concentrated wealth into fewer hands. This reorganization of work upset longstanding balances in a community whether or not automation technology had arrived yet: “Even before the use of power, the handloom ‘factories’ offended deep-rooted moral prejudices.” A hymn in the pre-Luddite times powerfully captures this resentment: So come all you cotton-weavers, you must rise up very soon For you must work in factories from morning until noon: You mustn’t walk in your garden for two or three hours a-day, For you must stand at their command, and keep your shuttles in play.

…

These visions of robots taking our jobs make us uneasy, but they also encourage us to stay fixated on the brighter and distant tomorrow, past the precarity, injustices, and the unpleasantries of now—while giving the elites who produce those very visions a smokescreen to obscure their decisionmaking and more leverage over their workforces. Bosses may not be able to automate away all of their workers, even if they’d like to, but they can deskill them, slash their benefits and protections, and reduce their wages. Some professions may be more vulnerable to the entrepreneurs and executives who move to disrupt them—the weavers, the factory line worker, the taxi driver, the travel agents—but those displaced workers are not victim of the robots.

Marx at the Arcade: Consoles, Controllers, and Class Struggle by Jamie Woodcock

4chan, Alexey Pajitnov wrote Tetris, anti-work, antiwork, augmented reality, barriers to entry, battle of ideas, Boris Johnson, Build a better mousetrap, butterfly effect, call centre, capitalist realism, collective bargaining, Columbine, conceptual framework, cuban missile crisis, David Graeber, deindustrialization, deskilling, Donald Trump, emotional labour, game design, gamification, gentrification, gig economy, glass ceiling, global supply chain, global value chain, Hacker Ethic, Howard Zinn, Ian Bogost, independent contractor, Jeremy Corbyn, John Conway, Kickstarter, Landlord’s Game, late capitalism, Marshall McLuhan, means of production, microaggression, military-industrial complex, Minecraft, mutually assured destruction, Naomi Klein, Oculus Rift, pink-collar, planned obsolescence, scientific management, sexual politics, Silicon Valley, SimCity, Steve Bannon, systems thinking, tech worker, union organizing, unpaid internship, V2 rocket, WarGames: Global Thermonuclear War

By using the standard packages, there is “a, perhaps imperceptible, effect of inhibiting” programmers’ “own ideas about the direction a game might go in, the kinds of event it might include, even its central concept.”61 The second is the use of SDKs to rationalize the labor process, breaking it down into clearer component parts. The use of standardized software components means that the labor process becomes more easily measurable and comparable, opening it up to greater focus and specialization. The third is that SDKs result in a general de-skilling. No longer does a worker need to understand the entire game project; they need to know just one aspect “specified by components with the SDK.” This makes it easier to outsource aspects of the game development process too.62 The experience of working at these large development studios shows how the production process becomes increasingly complex—mirroring the experiences of workers in many other industries as they have developed.

The Third Pillar: How Markets and the State Leave the Community Behind by Raghuram Rajan

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air traffic controllers' union, airline deregulation, Albert Einstein, Andrei Shleifer, banking crisis, barriers to entry, basic income, battle of ideas, Bernie Sanders, blockchain, borderless world, Bretton Woods, British Empire, Build a better mousetrap, business cycle, business process, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Carl Icahn, central bank independence, computer vision, conceptual framework, corporate governance, corporate raider, corporate social responsibility, creative destruction, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, currency manipulation / currency intervention, data acquisition, David Brooks, Deng Xiaoping, desegregation, deskilling, disinformation, disruptive innovation, Donald Trump, driverless car, Edward Glaeser, facts on the ground, financial innovation, financial repression, full employment, future of work, Glass-Steagall Act, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, high net worth, household responsibility system, housing crisis, Ida Tarbell, illegal immigration, income inequality, industrial cluster, intangible asset, invention of the steam engine, invisible hand, Jaron Lanier, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, labor-force participation, Les Trente Glorieuses, low interest rates, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, market fundamentalism, Martin Wolf, means of production, Money creation, moral hazard, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, obamacare, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Productivity paradox, profit maximization, race to the bottom, Richard Thaler, Robert Bork, Robert Gordon, Ronald Reagan, Sam Peltzman, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, social distancing, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, SoftBank, South China Sea, South Sea Bubble, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steve Jobs, superstar cities, The Future of Employment, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trade liberalization, trade route, transaction costs, transfer pricing, Travis Kalanick, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, universal basic income, Upton Sinclair, Walter Mischel, War on Poverty, women in the workforce, working-age population, World Values Survey, Yom Kippur War, zero-sum game

Interchangeability, coupled with the breaking down of tasks, allowed Ford to dispense with craftsmen and hire modestly skilled workers for his assembly lines, thus creating the mass-market car. We see similar de-skilling with tax software, with the middle-class tax accountant replaced by a lower-paid computer-literate assistant with only a few weeks’ training. The assistant, aided by software, is probably more competent than most accountants, but less creative. Most people don’t want their tax accounting to be creative. De-skilling makes ordinary craftsmen or accountants largely redundant, but making the car or tax service cheaper increases demand and may increase jobs overall.

Ours to Hack and to Own: The Rise of Platform Cooperativism, a New Vision for the Future of Work and a Fairer Internet by Trebor Scholz, Nathan Schneider

1960s counterculture, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Anthropocene, barriers to entry, basic income, benefit corporation, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, Build a better mousetrap, Burning Man, business logic, capital controls, circular economy, citizen journalism, collaborative economy, collaborative editing, collective bargaining, commoditize, commons-based peer production, conceptual framework, content marketing, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, Debian, decentralized internet, deskilling, disintermediation, distributed ledger, driverless car, emotional labour, end-to-end encryption, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, food desert, future of work, gig economy, Google bus, hiring and firing, holacracy, income inequality, independent contractor, information asymmetry, Internet of things, Jacob Appelbaum, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, lake wobegon effect, low skilled workers, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, minimum viable product, moral hazard, Network effects, new economy, offshore financial centre, openstreetmap, peer-to-peer, planned obsolescence, post-work, profit maximization, race to the bottom, radical decentralization, remunicipalization, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rochdale Principles, SETI@home, shareholder value, sharing economy, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, smart cities, smart contracts, Snapchat, surveillance capitalism, TaskRabbit, technological solutionism, technoutopianism, transaction costs, Travis Kalanick, Tyler Cowen, Uber for X, uber lyft, union organizing, universal basic income, Vitalik Buterin, W. E. B. Du Bois, Whole Earth Catalog, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, workplace surveillance , Yochai Benkler, Zipcar

CHERRY To date, the dominant economic narrative for the gig economy has been one in which platform owners extract a share of the income generated from the workers who use their platforms. This is troubling, since many forms of crowd-work are situated at the crossroads of precarious work, automatic management, deskilling, and low wages. Recent lawsuits by workers in the gig economy claiming employee status contain the demand for better pay, hours, benefits, and working conditions. However, these misclassification lawsuits do not seek to change the ways in which the underlying business relationship between workers and platforms are structured.

What About Me?: The Struggle for Identity in a Market-Based Society by Paul Verhaeghe

"there is no alternative" (TINA), Alan Greenspan, autism spectrum disorder, Berlin Wall, call centre, capitalist realism, cognitive dissonance, deskilling, epigenetics, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Gregor Mendel, income inequality, invisible hand, jimmy wales, job satisfaction, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, Louis Pasteur, market fundamentalism, meritocracy, Milgram experiment, mirror neurons, new economy, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, post-industrial society, Richard Feynman, Silicon Valley, Stanford prison experiment, stem cell, The Spirit Level, ultimatum game, working poor

Despite the stress on competencies, this doesn’t just mean that pupils are less well-equipped in terms of cultural baggage. Basic skills such as reading, writing, and arithmetic have suffered equally. In today’s economy this hardly constitutes a problem, because most professionals, from doctors to carpenters, need less knowledge than formerly. The process of de-skilling, to use an ugly word, is happening everywhere. Human skills have been replaced by technology and computers, and even medical specialists must toe the line and follow treatment protocols. At present, there is a growing demand for moderately educated but not overly critical individuals as job fodder.

Power and Progress: Our Thousand-Year Struggle Over Technology and Prosperity by Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, 4chan, agricultural Revolution, AI winter, Airbnb, airline deregulation, algorithmic bias, algorithmic management, Alignment Problem, AlphaGo, An Inconvenient Truth, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, basic income, Bellingcat, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Bletchley Park, blue-collar work, British Empire, carbon footprint, carbon tax, carried interest, centre right, Charles Babbage, ChatGPT, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, computer age, Computer Lib, Computing Machinery and Intelligence, conceptual framework, contact tracing, Corn Laws, Cornelius Vanderbilt, coronavirus, corporate social responsibility, correlation does not imply causation, cotton gin, COVID-19, creative destruction, declining real wages, deep learning, DeepMind, deindustrialization, Demis Hassabis, Deng Xiaoping, deskilling, discovery of the americas, disinformation, Donald Trump, Douglas Engelbart, Douglas Engelbart, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, energy transition, Erik Brynjolfsson, European colonialism, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, factory automation, facts on the ground, fake news, Filter Bubble, financial innovation, Ford Model T, Ford paid five dollars a day, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, gender pay gap, general purpose technology, Geoffrey Hinton, global supply chain, Gordon Gekko, GPT-3, Grace Hopper, Hacker Ethic, Ida Tarbell, illegal immigration, income inequality, indoor plumbing, industrial robot, interchangeable parts, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, Jacques de Vaucanson, James Watt: steam engine, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, job automation, Johannes Kepler, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph-Marie Jacquard, Kenneth Arrow, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, land reform, land tenure, Les Trente Glorieuses, low skilled workers, low-wage service sector, M-Pesa, manufacturing employment, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, megacity, mobile money, Mother of all demos, move fast and break things, natural language processing, Neolithic agricultural revolution, Norbert Wiener, NSO Group, offshore financial centre, OpenAI, PageRank, Panopticon Jeremy Bentham, paperclip maximiser, pattern recognition, Paul Graham, Peter Thiel, Productivity paradox, profit maximization, profit motive, QAnon, Ralph Nader, Ray Kurzweil, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Bork, Robert Gordon, Robert Solow, robotic process automation, Ronald Reagan, scientific management, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, seminal paper, shareholder value, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Silicon Valley, social intelligence, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, social web, South Sea Bubble, speech recognition, spice trade, statistical model, stem cell, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, strikebreaker, subscription business, Suez canal 1869, Suez crisis 1956, supply-chain management, surveillance capitalism, tacit knowledge, tech billionaire, technoutopianism, Ted Nelson, TED Talk, The Future of Employment, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, theory of mind, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, total factor productivity, trade route, transatlantic slave trade, trickle-down economics, Turing machine, Turing test, Twitter Arab Spring, Two Sigma, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, union organizing, universal basic income, Unsafe at Any Speed, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, WikiLeaks, wikimedia commons, working poor, working-age population

The gains were evident to the British Parliamentary Committee inspecting American arms factories using interchangeable parts: “The workman whose business it is to ‘assemble’ or set up the arms, takes the different parts promiscuously from a row of boxes, and uses nothing but the turnscrew to put the musket together, excepting on the slott, which contains the bandsprings, which have to be squared out at one end with a small chisel.” This was not a deskilling technology, however. A former superintendent at Samuel Colt’s armory noted that interchangeable parts reduced labor requirements by “about 50 per cent” but required “first-class labour and the highest price is paid for it.” In fact, quality output could not be produced without the involvement of well-trained labor.

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Harold Ickes, “You are on your way…,” is from Brinkley (1989, 123). “[T]he most concentrated period…” refers to the first six months of 1946 and is from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, “Work Stoppages Caused by Labor-Management Disputes in 1946” (1947, Bulletin no. 918, 9). The UAW-GM arbitration and the discussion of skilling/deskilling caused by machinery are from Noble (1984, 253, 255). The UAW statement, “We offer our cooperation…,” is from Noble (1984, 253), which also discusses the UAW’s general approach. This resolution, which was issued at its 1955 convention, began with “The UAW-CIO welcomes automation, technological progress.…” The arbitrator’s statement, “This is not a case…,” is from Noble (1984, 254).

The Great Reset: How the Post-Crash Economy Will Change the Way We Live and Work by Richard Florida

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, banking crisis, big-box store, bike sharing, blue-collar work, business cycle, car-free, carbon footprint, collapse of Lehman Brothers, company town, congestion charging, congestion pricing, creative destruction, deskilling, edge city, Edward Glaeser, falling living standards, financial engineering, financial innovation, Ford paid five dollars a day, high net worth, high-speed rail, Home mortgage interest deduction, housing crisis, if you build it, they will come, income inequality, indoor plumbing, interchangeable parts, invention of the telephone, Jane Jacobs, Joseph Schumpeter, knowledge economy, Lewis Mumford, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, McMansion, megaproject, Menlo Park, Nate Silver, New Economic Geography, new economy, New Urbanism, oil shock, Own Your Own Home, pattern recognition, peak oil, Ponzi scheme, post-industrial society, postindustrial economy, reserve currency, Richard Florida, Robert Shiller, scientific management, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, social intelligence, sovereign wealth fund, starchitect, the built environment, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, total factor productivity, urban decay, urban planning, urban renewal, white flight, young professional, Zipcar

He has nearly complete control over how his own work is done, and the flexibility to do it how and when he likes—he’s his own boss, after all. For these reasons, his work is a source of great pride and obvious joy. Most manufacturing and production work isn’t like this. Much of it remains mind-numbing work in which, as countless studies have shown, the content of work has been de-skilled and the pace of work is controlled by machines—a modern version of Charlie Chaplin flailing away as he tries to keep up with the assembly line. The motorcycle repair jobs that Crawford extols are great, and we would do well to create more of them. But the fact of the matter is that they cannot fill the gaping hole in today’s labor market.

Chomsky on Mis-Education by Noam Chomsky

Alan Greenspan, American ideology, classic study, deindustrialization, deskilling, disinformation, dual-use technology, Howard Zinn, invisible hand, Korean Air Lines Flight 007, means of production, military-industrial complex, public intellectual, Ronald Reagan, strikebreaker, union organizing, W. E. B. Du Bois, Washington Consensus

Far from the democratic education we claim to have, what we really have in place is a sophisticated colonial model of education designed primarily to train teachers in ways in which the intellectual dimension of teaching is often devalued. The major objective of a colonial education is to further de-skill teachers and students to walk unreflectively through a labyrinth of procedures and techniques. It follows, then, that what we have in place in the United States is not a system that encourages independent thought and critical thinking. On the contrary, our so-called democratic schools are based on an instrumental skills–banking approach that often prevents the development of the kind of thinking that enables one to “read the world” critically and to understand the reasons and linkages behind facts.

After the New Economy: The Binge . . . And the Hangover That Won't Go Away by Doug Henwood

"World Economic Forum" Davos, accounting loophole / creative accounting, affirmative action, Alan Greenspan, AOL-Time Warner, Asian financial crisis, barriers to entry, Benchmark Capital, book value, borderless world, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, business cycle, California energy crisis, capital controls, corporate governance, corporate raider, correlation coefficient, credit crunch, deindustrialization, dematerialisation, deskilling, digital divide, electricity market, emotional labour, ending welfare as we know it, feminist movement, fulfillment center, full employment, gender pay gap, George Gilder, glass ceiling, Glass-Steagall Act, Gordon Gekko, government statistician, greed is good, half of the world's population has never made a phone call, income inequality, indoor plumbing, intangible asset, Internet Archive, job satisfaction, joint-stock company, Kevin Kelly, labor-force participation, Larry Ellison, liquidationism / Banker’s doctrine / the Treasury view, low interest rates, manufacturing employment, Mary Meeker, means of production, Michael Milken, minimum wage unemployment, Naomi Klein, new economy, occupational segregation, PalmPilot, pets.com, post-work, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, rewilding, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, rolling blackouts, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Simon Kuznets, statistical model, stock buybacks, structural adjustment programs, tech worker, Telecommunications Act of 1996, telemarketer, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, total factor productivity, union organizing, War on Poverty, warehouse automation, women in the workforce, working poor, zero-sum game

It's hard to argue that it is; there are a lot of ancient holdovers persisting into the present. As later chapters in this book will show, the labor market produced plenty of snazzy jobs, like image consultants and systems analysts, but it also produced lots of mundane ones, like security guards and home health aides. Technology may be making some jobs more interesting, but it's de-skilling lots of others—and it's increasing employers' powers of measurement and surveillance over workers. In the late 1990s, income-distribution measures were at their most unequal in sixty years, and world income gaps were chasmically wide. Yes, financial markets and production have been inter-nationahzed, but "globalization" has been a feature of capitaHsm firom its earHest days.

In Stitches by Nick Edwards

deskilling, job satisfaction, McDonald's hot coffee lawsuit, old-boy network

Heart attacks and major trauma would do better in large centres where there is expertise and experience. The ambulance could take these patients directly to the most appropriate place. Consultants could work in regional teams rotating around the major centre and so those working at smaller A&E, would not become deskilled. For it to work, we would need to overcome the problem of how we are going to look after these sick patients on their long journey to regional centres, especially when our roads are so clogged up…and, remember, traffic jams are often worse when the roads have had an accident on it. The government hasn’t yet got the answers in place.

Wars, Guns, and Votes: Democracy in Dangerous Places by Paul Collier

business cycle, carbon tax, dark matter, deskilling, failed state, information security, military-industrial complex, moral hazard, Nelson Mandela, out of africa, price stability, structural adjustment programs, Suez crisis 1956, zero-sum game

Although to an extent these firms had bounced back once the fighting was over, it had left a significant legacy: it had sharply reduced worker productivity. Responding to the problem of low productivity, firms in the previously violent districts were more likely to be undertaking basic training of their workers. Evidently, violence had deskilled the workforce. The overall picture was of a flexible private economy that had been ravaged: firms reestablished and workers could find jobs at some pitiful wage, but the skills that would have justified higher wages had been destroyed. More than forty years ago Nobel laureate Ken Arrow had the key insight into the process of skill accumulation in a society.

With Liberty and Justice for Some: How the Law Is Used to Destroy Equality and Protect the Powerful by Glenn Greenwald

Alan Greenspan, Ayatollah Khomeini, banking crisis, Bear Stearns, Bernie Madoff, Clive Stafford Smith, collateralized debt obligation, Corrections Corporation of America, crack epidemic, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, David Brooks, deskilling, financial deregulation, full employment, high net worth, income inequality, Julian Assange, mandatory minimum, nuremberg principles, Ponzi scheme, Project for a New American Century, rolodex, Ronald Reagan, Seymour Hersh, too big to fail, Washington Consensus, WikiLeaks

People who are out of the workforce for even a few months suffer severe erosion of self-esteem, great stress, and dramatic changes to their lives. People who are out for a year or more are at risk of becoming permanently unemployable. Brian Bethune, chief financial economist at IHS Global Insight, warned in Daily Finance in March 2010: “People who are unemployed tend to get de-skilled. Anytime you go through a recession and there is an extended time of unemployment, there is a dead-weight loss of skills.” The unemployment crisis not only led to suffering and lost opportunity in its own right, but further entrenched and exacerbated America’s already-shocking inequality. The hardest-hit, by far, were those in the lower income brackets.

Humans Are Underrated: What High Achievers Know That Brilliant Machines Never Will by Geoff Colvin

Ada Lovelace, autonomous vehicles, Baxter: Rethink Robotics, behavioural economics, Black Swan, call centre, capital asset pricing model, commoditize, computer age, corporate governance, creative destruction, deskilling, driverless car, en.wikipedia.org, flying shuttle, Freestyle chess, future of work, Google Glasses, Grace Hopper, Hans Moravec, industrial cluster, industrial robot, interchangeable parts, job automation, knowledge worker, low skilled workers, Marc Andreessen, meta-analysis, Narrative Science, new economy, rising living standards, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, Silicon Valley, Skype, social intelligence, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, Steven Levy, Steven Pinker, theory of mind, Tim Cook: Apple, transaction costs, Tyler Cowen

The researchers show what every young job seeker of recent years already knows, that “in response to this demand reversal, high-skilled workers have moved down the occupational ladder and have begun to perform jobs traditionally performed by lower-skilled workers”—thus the widely noted upsurge in file clerks and receptionists with bachelor’s degrees, for example. The next step: “This de-skilling process, in turn, results in high-skilled workers pushing low-skilled workers even further down the occupational ladder and, to some degree, out of the labor force altogether.” That finding not only makes intuitive sense, it also helps explain America’s unusually low overall employment rate and the stagnation of wages.

Plenitude: The New Economics of True Wealth by Juliet B. Schor

Asian financial crisis, behavioural economics, big-box store, business climate, business cycle, carbon footprint, carbon tax, clean tech, Community Supported Agriculture, creative destruction, credit crunch, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, decarbonisation, degrowth, dematerialisation, demographic transition, deskilling, Edward Glaeser, en.wikipedia.org, Gini coefficient, global village, Herman Kahn, IKEA effect, income inequality, income per capita, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Isaac Newton, Jevons paradox, Joseph Schumpeter, Kenneth Arrow, knowledge economy, life extension, McMansion, new economy, ocean acidification, off-the-grid, peak oil, pink-collar, post-industrial society, prediction markets, purchasing power parity, radical decentralization, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Shiller, sharing economy, Simon Kuznets, single-payer health, smart grid, systematic bias, systems thinking, The Chicago School, Thomas L Friedman, Thomas Malthus, too big to fail, transaction costs, Yochai Benkler, Zipcar

It incorporates desirable consumer features such as the ability to customize. Small-scale and sufficiency production also match the emergent skill set of the population. In the old mass production system, advanced numeracy and literacy were concentrated in managers and designers, and blue- and pink-collar work was deskilled. By contrast, high levels of numeracy and literacy are required more broadly in a technologically advanced economy, and equally so for the high-productivity, low-impact systems of agriculture and manufacture I have been discussing. As these skills are diffused through the population, the efficient scale of production falls.

The Global Auction: The Broken Promises of Education, Jobs, and Incomes by Phillip Brown, Hugh Lauder, David Ashton

active measures, affirmative action, An Inconvenient Truth, barriers to entry, Branko Milanovic, BRICs, business process, business process outsourcing, call centre, classic study, collective bargaining, corporate governance, creative destruction, credit crunch, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, deindustrialization, deskilling, disruptive innovation, Dutch auction, Ford Model T, Frederick Winslow Taylor, full employment, future of work, glass ceiling, global supply chain, Great Leap Forward, immigration reform, income inequality, industrial cluster, industrial robot, intangible asset, job automation, Jon Ronson, Joseph Schumpeter, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, market bubble, market design, meritocracy, neoliberal agenda, new economy, Paul Samuelson, pensions crisis, post-industrial society, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, QWERTY keyboard, race to the bottom, Richard Florida, Ronald Reagan, shared worldview, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, sovereign wealth fund, stem cell, tacit knowledge, tech worker, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas L Friedman, trade liberalization, transaction costs, trickle-down economics, vertical integration, winner-take-all economy, working poor, zero-sum game

The men who once applied Taylor to the proletariat would themselves be Taylorized.”40 80 The Global Auction The distinction between thinking and doing in a period of mechanical Taylorism also helped shape class relations between blue-collar and white-collar workers. Digital Taylorism is not only deskilling many white-collar workers, but it also incites a power struggle within the middle classes, as corporate reengineering reduces the autonomy and discretion of some but not all managers and professionals. It encourages the segmentation of talent in ways that reserve permission to think to a small proportion of elite employees responsible for driving the business forward, functioning cheek by jowl with equally wellqualified workers in more Taylorized jobs.

The Smartphone Society by Nicole Aschoff

"Susan Fowler" uber, 4chan, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, Airbnb, algorithmic bias, algorithmic management, Amazon Web Services, artificial general intelligence, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, Bay Area Rapid Transit, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, carbon footprint, Carl Icahn, Cass Sunstein, citizen journalism, cloud computing, correlation does not imply causation, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, degrowth, Demis Hassabis, deplatforming, deskilling, digital capitalism, digital divide, do what you love, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Downton Abbey, Edward Snowden, Elon Musk, Evgeny Morozov, fake news, feminist movement, Ferguson, Missouri, Filter Bubble, financial independence, future of work, gamification, gig economy, global value chain, Google Chrome, Google Earth, Googley, green new deal, housing crisis, income inequality, independent contractor, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, Jessica Bruder, job automation, John Perry Barlow, knowledge economy, late capitalism, low interest rates, Lyft, M-Pesa, Mark Zuckerberg, minimum wage unemployment, mobile money, moral panic, move fast and break things, Naomi Klein, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Nomadland, occupational segregation, Occupy movement, off-the-grid, offshore financial centre, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, PageRank, Patri Friedman, peer-to-peer, Peter Thiel, pets.com, planned obsolescence, quantitative easing, Ralph Waldo Emerson, RAND corporation, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, Richard Stallman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Rodney Brooks, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Second Machine Age, self-driving car, shareholder value, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, Shoshana Zuboff, Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, Skype, Snapchat, SoftBank, statistical model, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, surveillance capitalism, TaskRabbit, tech worker, technological determinism, TED Talk, the scientific method, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, TikTok, transcontinental railway, transportation-network company, Travis Kalanick, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, upwardly mobile, Vision Fund, W. E. B. Du Bois, wages for housework, warehouse robotics, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce, yottabyte