#de-skilling

A somewhat alarming conjuncture: AI is de-skilling the population, lifting the burden of thought by handing out easy answers.

And, billionaire tech bros who aren't enamored of democracy or human rights, and who aren't particularly astute when it comes to grappling with social complexities, hope that AI supplants human decision making.

“In a paper released last week, David Autor, a pioneering labor economist at MIT, said the geography of jobs has changed. Cities, once the hope of people seeking a middle-class life, are now a symbol of the disappearance of well-paid, middle-skill work.”

“The culprits — automation and the shift of jobs abroad. And people know that it's the same story everywhere, so they are "acting rationally," Autor tells Axios, and staying home.”

“The internet is a key unspoken actor in this dynamic of motionlessness. According to the Minneapolis Fed report, people know much more what they are getting into, and are seeing little romance in experiencing it for themselves.?”

Economists [on] why Americans no longer move:

Joan Williams, UC Hastings: "A more important factor is the Two Body problem, as it's called in academia. Families now need two better jobs, not just one. And they have to be so much better that the family will all be better off even after paying for services they get a home for free, notably child and elder care."

Anthony Carnevale, Georgetown University: "From 1946 through the 1970s, you could be pretty fancy free. If you were able-bodied and had a good attitude, there was something for you out there. Even without a high school education, you could get a job. Then the boom was over, and everything changed. In the 1970s, automation across industries began, and starting in the early 1980s, a double-dip recession. Computing skills began to be required, and better education. We are just a mature post-industrial society. The Tom Joads are in trouble."

Mark Zandi, chief economist, Moody's Analytics: "Because people don’t need to move to the job, they can do the job where they already live. The creation and use of information can be done almost anywhere. This even applies to those with lesser skills, who are increasingly part of the information economy."

Daniel Shoag, Case-Western University: "The big action is on where people move, not so much a general decline in overall mobility. I know that's a controversial point, but my read of the data is more in line with this. In terms of where people move, I think it's mostly about out of control housing markets more than the internet."

Axios, March 5, 2019: “For struggling Americans, nowhere to go,” by Steve LeVine

Work of the Past, Work of the Future

“This deskilling reflects the joint effects of automation and international trade, which have eliminated the bulk of non-college production, administrative support, and clerical jobs, yielding a disproportionate polarization of urban labor markets.  The unwinding of the urban non-college occupational skill  gradient  has,  I  argue,  abetted  a  secular  fall  in  real  non-college  wages  by:   (1)shunting non-college workers out of specialized middle-skill occupations into low-wage occupations that require only generic skills; (2) diminishing the set of non-college workers that hold middle-skill jobs in high-wage cities; and (3) attenuating, to a startling degree, the steep urban wage premium for non-college workers that prevailed in earlier decades.  Changes in the nature of work—many of which are technological in origin—have been more disruptive and less beneficial for non-college than college workers.”

Today we were given the lecture ‘Immaterial labour and de-skilling, or, what is the work of the work of art and when does the work of the work of art work?’ by Dr. Matthew Bowman. At first, the long title completely threw me off - I didn’t exactly understand why it was so long as we were previously told it was just called ‘What is the work of the work of art?’ which is just as confusing. A few of us had formerly done some research into the lecture as we were given the brief as a small group to design a poster advertising it - our tutor Sean O’Dell gave us a few subjects and keywords to look at which included Russian Constructivism and the phrase ‘labour + skill = work’. Below on the left is our inspiration for the poster design which we found online at ‘Oh Yeah Studio’ and then on the right is our design. We decided to use similar colours to the colours used by the Russian Constructivists and wanted it to look as if it was printed on off-white or sepia toned paper.

The Globe and Mail, April 9, 2013: "Fries with that BA? The declining value of a degree," by Margaret Wente 

"Prof. Beaudry is quick to stress that having a BA is still a lot better than not having one. After all, he says, “it’s better to be at the top of the cascade than at the bottom.” But it’s unlikely that the return on investment for a degree will ever be as good as it was 15 years ago."

The great reversal in the demand for skill and cognitive tasks, by Paul Beaudry, David A. Green, Ben Sand, January 2013 (71 pages, PDF)

"...we go on to show 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."

"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 all together."

De-skilling - consciously taking out the skill of painting and reducing it down to the level to someone at that skill, because the institution of culture has failed.

How about, then, de-skilling process in digital art?

Robinson, R., and P. Barron. "Developing a Framework for Understanding the Impact of Deskilling and Standardisation on the Turnover and Attrition of Chefs." International Journal of Hospitality Management 26.4 (2007): 913-26. Print.

This article is about chefs in Australia and the framework for figuring out why there is mobility is the hospitality sector. The author argues that, "occupational culture differs across hospitality industry sectors". His main point of the paper is that there is mobility in the cooking industry due to deskilling and standardization. This deskilling and standardization is because of poor working conditions such as bad hours, low wages, etc. The authors point out that occupational culture might be the key to this solution. Occupational culture in cooking would be where you focus on one area of cooking, either the preparation process or the type of food itself. If people learn this way then there would be no deskilling across the board. They then begin the next paragraph by saying, "despite the century or longer of industrialization that preceded it, it is generally accepted that the principles of scientific management, as articulated by F.W. Taylor in The Principle of Scientific Management, became the catalyst for the reshaping of traditional occupational communities (in Kramar et al., 1998), and the deskilling and standardization of the workforce". The chapter later explains for standardization is caused by recipes and menus, and how this stops chefs from being creative and artistic. In chapter 5 they talk about, what they call, "labor turnover theory" which is how people are initially satisfied with their jobs and then begin to hate it followed by that person quitting that particular job. The goal of the article was to inspire chefs and workers to fight against standardization in the kitchen.