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posted by CoolHand on Tuesday April 21 2015, @04:07AM   Printer-friendly
from the luddites-r-us dept.

Zeynep Tufekci writes in an op-ed at the NYT that machines can now process regular spoken language and not only recognize human faces, but also read their expressions. Machines can classify personality types, and have started being able to carry out conversations with appropriate emotional tenor. Machines are getting better than humans at figuring out who to hire, who’s in a mood to pay a little more for that sweater, and who needs a coupon to nudge them toward a sale. It turns out that most of what we think of as expertise, knowledge and intuition is being de-constructed and recreated as an algorithmic competency, fueled by big data. "Machines aren’t used because they perform some tasks that much better than humans, but because, in many cases, they do a “good enough” job while also being cheaper, more predictable and easier to control than quirky, pesky humans," writes Tufekci. "Technology in the workplace is as much about power and control as it is about productivity and efficiency."

According to Tufekci technology is being used in many workplaces: to reduce the power of humans, and employers’ dependency on them, whether by replacing, displacing or surveilling them. Optimists insist that we’ve been here before, during the Industrial Revolution, when machinery replaced manual labor, and all we need is a little more education and better skills but Tufekci says that one historical example is no guarantee of future events. "Confronting the threat posed by machines, and the way in which the great data harvest has made them ever more able to compete with human workers, must be about our priorities," concludes Tufekci. "This problem is not us versus the machines, but between us, as humans, and how we value one another."

 
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  • (Score: 5, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 21 2015, @09:46AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 21 2015, @09:46AM (#173459)

    The problem is not the lost jobs. The problem is an economy which is based on people having jobs. That is a good model when labour is a scarce good, because it gives a good motivcation for everyone to contribute to that scarce good. But as machines get better and humans are replaced by machines, the scarcity is gradually removed (an indicator of this is wages going down, and unemployment going up) and an economy based on the scarcity of that good is not sustainable any more.

    With other goods, the system gets by by artificially making the supply scarce even if it naturally isn't. However there is no even remotely ethical way to make the workforce scarce, so the only reasonable solution is to find a new model of economy which is no longer based on people having a job.

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  • (Score: 1) by gmrath on Tuesday April 21 2015, @11:09AM

    by gmrath (4181) on Tuesday April 21 2015, @11:09AM (#173472)

    Good luck with that.

  • (Score: 3, Insightful) by Bot on Tuesday April 21 2015, @11:33AM

    by Bot (3902) on Tuesday April 21 2015, @11:33AM (#173476) Journal

    Yes, basically we have machines doing the work for us when it's more efficient to do so, therefore we should work less. Population growth can be kept in place, as the western society of last 50 years proved by example. But since the system is not about well being as much as control, the population is split between overworked employed people plus unemployed people looking for work who have no time to question anything, and depressed unemployed people who have no will to question anything. The few rebels are skillfully oriented towards futile reactions which are basically the same since Marx and Hitler hit the scene: "the problems are caused by *your peers* from a different race/religion/social status, destroy them".

    What you are correctly suggesting is to stop this madness.

    --
    Account abandoned.
  • (Score: 2) by acid andy on Tuesday April 21 2015, @11:35AM

    by acid andy (1683) on Tuesday April 21 2015, @11:35AM (#173480) Homepage Journal

    I've said it before and I'll say it again (Does that make this post doubly Redundant?); employment is a scaled down, sanitized, fight between individuals over territory and resources. The higher the world population, the greater the need to fight for things. Your new model needs a much lower population as well as some extremely altruistic leaders.

    --
    If a cat has kittens, does a rat have rittens, a bat bittens and a mat mittens?
    • (Score: 4, Interesting) by VLM on Tuesday April 21 2015, @11:53AM

      by VLM (445) Subscriber Badge on Tuesday April 21 2015, @11:53AM (#173489)

      WRT fighting, its neo-feudalism with stratified social classes and all the wealth at the top. At mega corporations like where I work we're all gladiators, all we do is fight other teams and other divisions for the amusement of the higher up social classes, almost no labor goes into customer focused stuff or fighting our competitors or even being generally productive. Its going to be a world of a couple giant corporations holding virtual internal gladiatorial combat all the time. We're already there in many ways.

      WRT the quote:

      "Technology in the workplace is as much about power and control as it is about productivity and efficiency."

      for sociopath / psychopath types which we select for positions of power, executing primate dominance rituals against an iPad is not as emotionally satisfying as making living breathing humans suffer. Aside from the lunatics who lead us, having humans do work is ALREADY a 1%er form of conspicuous consumption. Donno if we can "keep the economy rollin" on handmade food and clothes for the hyperrich but its at least something, and extending that idea to the office for white collar ditch digging isn't too unrealistic. So rich dude wants to show off how rich he is and Quicken would do the job cheaper than the human accountant, well, trying to show off your wealth by not spending it is like fighting for peace or having sex for virginity.

      • (Score: 2) by Yog-Yogguth on Thursday April 23 2015, @07:21PM

        by Yog-Yogguth (1862) Subscriber Badge on Thursday April 23 2015, @07:21PM (#174403) Journal

        Things is despite all the insightful comments in this thread and elsewhere there's no shortage of work that could or should be done, only a shortage of jobs. Infrastructure is one glaring example.

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  • (Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 21 2015, @11:46AM

    by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday April 21 2015, @11:46AM (#173485)

    Unfortunately it is a self-correcting system. If enough people can't afford to eat then Bad Things™ will happen until they have jobs to afford food again. The time between those events has been increasing for centuries (remember the ox, the plow, and even the lowly hoe put some labor out of work) and the only way to break out of the cycle is to become enlightened. Just so long as that enlightenment means the same quality of life with shorter work weeks and more vacation time :)