Nice Doggy

Walter Trumbull | AI Eating Its Tail | Hello? | Will Graeber’s ‘Bullshit Jobs’ Never Die?

Photo by Alexey Kolbekhin on Unsplash

Diplomacy consists in saying “nice doggie,” until you can pick up a rock.

| Walter Trumbull

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This quote was intended, I believe, for political diplomacy, but I am employing it relative to the rise of AI and the response of most working people to the threats it poses; a sort of numb fatalism, in general, ardent adoption by many, while a handful are looking for a rock.

Shouldn’t we be bonding together in opposition to the elimination of work, which is the espoused aim of many of AI’s proponents?

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AI Eating Its Own Tail

I got a metakick from an article about the CEO of Japan-based Recruit Holdings, Hisayuki "Deko" Idekoba, which owns both Glassdoor and Indeed, announcing layoffs. Those web properties are dedicated to helping people find jobs, in somewhat different ways. According to Anna Washenko,

About 1,300 jobs from the companies will be eliminated, mostly in two departments: research and development, and people and sustainability. There will also be some executive shuffles, including the exit of Glassdoor CEO Christian Sutherland-Wong.

It doesn't appear that any specific reasons were given for the consolidation. However, Idekoba did enthuse about the importance of AI in the missive, which likely didn't make any of the impacted employees feel any better. "AI is changing the world, and we must adapt by ensuring our product delivers truly great experiences," he wrote. "Delivering on this ambition requires us to move faster, try new things, and fix what's broken."

Idekoba is already on the books as a proponent of AI use in job searching and hiring. "Hiring is still too slow and too hard, and we’re using AI to make it simpler and more personal — for both job seekers and employers," he said when taking over as CEO of Indeed last month. Ironically, he assumed leadership of Indeed when former CEO Chris Hyams left in order to help tackle the "urgent issues" in developing responsible AI tools.

One exec flees to save the world from irresponsible AI, and the new CEO is advocating the use of AI to make hiring ‘simpler and more personal’, while laying off 1,500.

Pretty soon, AI will be hiring based on a resume written by AI, and the person-in-the-loop will use AI to evaluate various job offers and negotiate the package. Which 10 years ago would have sounded like science fiction.

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Hello?

I long ago gave up saying hello when picking up a phone call; instead, I adopted ‘Stowe Boyd’ which seemed to speed things up.

Speed doesn’t seem to be the motivation of young people today. A viral tweet surfaced a shift: Gen Zers are waiting for the caller to say hello, instead of speaking first when picking up, as @jorilextera relates:

i’m a recruiter so i do a TON of phone interviews and something i’ve noticed about gen z specifically is that a lot of them answer the phone and don’t say anything. like i can hear their breathing and the background noise, but they wait for you to say hello first.

A lot of commenters suggest that people are avoiding the spam call trap: spam software will wait for the prey to speak, and then spring the trap.

jorilextera goes on to say she is not judging, although some in the thread think it’s rude.

My protocol is to text someone before calling as courtesy, and I hope others will do the same for me.

I wonder if this trend is seeping into the workplace. A great many people use their personal cell phone for business. I expect that this will show up generally in the workplace.

What’s your pattern? Do you wait for the caller to go first?

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Will Graeber’s ‘Bullshit Jobs’ Never Die?

A discussion on Substack resurrected the permaquestion of ‘bullshit jobs’, David Graber’s assertion that a great many jobs are useless. I offered up a refutation of this zombie idea, based on the work of a group of researchers published in 2021:

Alienation Is Not ‘Bullshit’: An Empirical Critique of Graeber’s Theory of BS Jobs | Magdalena Soffia, Alex J Wood, Brendan Burchell

[An excerpt:emphasis mine.]

The BS jobs theory suggests that many workers experience their jobs as being comprised of meaningless tasks in which they have to appear productive. As a result some academics writing on the future of work, and the post-work and anti-work traditions, have suggested that if, as Graeber claims, 30–60% of work is ‘bullshit’, radical reductions in the length of the working week could be easily achieved (e.g. Frayne, 2019; Susskind, 2020). It is important to recognise that Graeber is not simply stating that some people have useless jobs but is instead proposing a theory that seeks to explain why these jobs exist. This theory is premised on the existence of an economic system, that Graeber (2018) terms ‘managerial feudalism', that produces a large and increasing number of workers with BS jobs, especially those with student debt in the finance, law and administration professions.^[1]

However, the evidence presented by Graeber (2018) in support of his ‘bullshit jobs’ thesis is largely based on qualitative data from employees who approached the author to praise him for his earlier speculative essay on the subject and to share anecdotes with him. Not only does reliance on this data source provide little empirical support for Graeber’s generalisations but it is also likely plagued by self-selection bias. Fortunately, Graeber’s book offers several clear predictions that are straightforward to test quantitatively. This article, therefore, seeks to empirically test several of Graeber’s (2018) main propositions:

1. that the number of employees doing useless jobs is high (i.e. 20–50%);

2. that useless jobs have been increasing rapidly over time;

3. that some occupations have very high rates of BS jobs (e.g. financial services, marketing, administration) and others very low (e.g. refuse collectors, cleaners, farmers);

4. that young workers with higher education qualifications are more likely to be doing BS jobs due to student debts;

5. that useless jobs cause ‘spiritual violence’ and poor mental health.

Our findings demonstrate that while Graeber’s (2018) specific account of BS jobs and managerial feudalism cannot be empirically sustained, his work has uncovered an important and largely unresearched social ill. The scale of the problem is far from that predicted by Graeber’s theory. Nevertheless, millions of European workers suffer from work which they feel is not useful. Moreover, this experience is strongly associated with poor wellbeing. We, therefore, finish our analyses with our own tentative explanation, inspired by Marx’s writings on alienation, for why people think their job is useless.

The skinny: Graeber’s assertions don’t hold up — like ‘the 20-50% of jobs are bullshit’ — but the authors don’t want to throw away one element of the argument, namely that many workers do, in fact, feel that their jobs aren’t useful. But that seems linked to jobs that limit skills acquisition and personal agency. And they write,

In particular, the proportion of workers who believe their paid work is not useful is declining rather than growing rapidly, and workers in professions connected to finance and with university degrees are less likely to feel their work is useless than many manual workers.

This research is from 2020, and I will search to see what else has been done since. But the zombie theory of bullshit jobs just won’t die.

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My annotated (still way too long) version of the paper. [Generally shared with paid subscribers, only.]

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Becoming a Multi-Contributor Publication

I have been considering the question: should workfutures.io transition to being a multi-contributor publication. There are many reasons to consider that course:

1. Other Substacks — like Work3 — are adopting this approach, because they are reading the same tea leaves as me.

2. There is continued growth in Substack pubs, who are contending for the subscription dollars of a slower-growing reading population.

3. More readers are expressing ‘subscription fatigue’: too many subs, too many alternatives.

What to do?

I am beginning to approach other writers, thinkers, and analysts who publish independent Substack newsletters, to assess their thoughts on turning workfutures.io in a collective activity. This could mean higher payouts for all involved, given the following premises:

• A publication with, say, 10 contributors each writing once or twice a week, would be able to attract considerably more readers¹. This would start by the combination of the readers from the individual newsletters, and would continue by attracting new readers at a faster pace.

• Even if the ten-contributor publication could not charge ten times as much as today’s newsletter does, with a greater base of readers, increasing subscription to a low multiple of todays’ $5/mo could potentially lead to more revenue.

I would like to get your participation in a survey to gather the workfutures.io ‘community’ to weigh in on these questions, to assess the interest and ideas of the group. Click on the image below or this link to fill out the survey. Thanks for your time.

1. Given consistent high quality, of course.