Musings from Liza Loop

My grandson will inherit the future.

I keep searching for out-of-the-box thinkers who are addressing what I believe is a looming catastrophe around the future of work as we know it. Here’s my response to a recent discussion of the issue by Yi-huah Jiang, the former premier of the Republic of China, Taiwan and currently a research fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences at Stanford University. Who am I to question someone with such sterling credentials? Well, somebody has to do it. I can’t see sitting around and waiting for Armageddon.

https://www.psmag.com/business-economics/the-future-of-work-what-politicians-should-know

I applaud the courage shown by Dr. YI-HUAH JIANG in addressing the Future of Work. However I’m afraid his approach does not go far enough in challenging underlying cultural assumptions about the role of work and employment in a world that anticipates ubiquitous automation and AI.

“The combination of business commitment and social ideal attracts many young people. Its challenge lies in the ambiguity of its positioning and the lack of necessary game rules.”

This is more than a game. The very fabric of industrialized society is woven from merit derived from work and the specific reciprocity of market economics. At present we have no mechanisms for distribution of the wealth we are capable of producing outside of a monetary system and we are seeing a rapid rise in populations with little access to money. If we continue to focus our thinking on business, jobs and work as we have known them, I fear we are failing to notice that the proverbial train has already left the station.

“Will job opportunities become better or worse with the advance of an innovation-driven economy and freelancing?”

Worse. Freelancers do not have jobs in the sense of employment. They have gigs — short-term and highly competitive, punctuated by increasing periods of searching for new clients during which they have ongoing expenses but no income. Today I spoke with the Executive Director of an organization that deploys resources for disaster recovery. He mentioned that he has a surfeit of volunteers and not enough money. Those highly-skilled volunteers come from the ranks of the underemployed. The money is sitting in the hands of the very wealthy who cannot consume enough to keep our current economic engine running and, correctly, don’t believe philanthropy is an adequate vehicle to solve the world’s distribution problems. We’ve got to think outside the box of paid work.

“Not everyone can adapt to jobs that demand a higher level of technology knowhow.”

You said it. Human beings evolved first as hunter-gatherers and then farmers.

Even craftspeople, artisans and traders can begin their practice around age 12 and become experts by their 20s. Actually, it’s not “technology” (which means “knowhow”) that is the problem because there is knowhow associated with every occupation. It’s the high levels of creative innovation and intellectual problem solving to which “average” minds have difficulty adapting. Most of us are creatures of repetition and habit. With robots and artificial intelligence programs doing the routine work, only the exceptional humans are employable. What does this mean for the masses in a world where self-esteem is intimately connected with having a job?

“The crisis of mid-career unemployment will therefore grow, and can be only temporarily alleviated by a decrease in population due to the global trend of falling birth rates, especially among advanced economies.”

Uh huh.

“To face a changing world of work, all the components of a society need to prepare, be it family, school, corporation, labor union, or social enterprise.”

To face a changing world, perhaps all these components need to find meaning in human activity that goes beyond “work” as we define today. In medieval times large quantities of society’s wealth went into building cathedrals, conspicuous consumption by royals and nobles and waging local wars. We’re already recreating the wars. Is Burning Man the new cathedral?

“The government should take the initiative to envision reasonable working conditions.”

No. Governments need to envision and support new ways of distributing real wealth before the masses, in their frustration over being kept from that wealth, revolt and tear down their governments with no idea what to put in their place.

I’m sitting in my house next to a tinder-dry forest staring in horror at my computer screen, watching the Valley Fire devastate the communities of Cobb and Middletown less than an hour’s drive away. In vain I tweet: What should I be doing to help my neighbors?

Where should I take food, blankets, tents? Does a family need a place to stay? Do you need in-person volunteers? But, with all this wonderful interactive media, all I’m getting back are more sensational pictures narrated by ernest newscasters bent on causing my heart to race while my muscles remain limp.

We’re missing an important opportunity here. We have the technology to communicate about local emergencies within minutes of a fire, explosion or other catastrophic event. All of us can contribute either physical labor, intellectual problem solving, or money — but we shouldn’t descend, en masse, on a chaotic scene and demand to be told how to help. Instead we should have buckets ready to receive donated goods to be deployed to the disaster location. (Yes, there’s always the Red Cross but did you hear about their fiasco over funds given for Haiti relief?) We could have a “job bank” set up, ready to be activated immediately to direct volunteers to places where their skills can be best used. And any organization that wants to funnel money for relief should have its nonprofit status and other bona fides in place and available so people can give money with confidence that it will actually reach the intended beneficiaries. These conduits for good deeds need to be in place before the devastating event, not after when authorities are overwhelmed protecting life and limb.

Maybe the disaster relief infrastructure I’m looking for already exists but it certainly isn’t easy to find on this sunny, Sunday afternoon. And if it does exist, why isn’t the media telling me about it? I don’t need a gazillion photographs of burning buildings, Facebook posts about praying for victims, or frantic tweets asking whether a particular house is still standing. I need a constructive channel for my energy and my sympathy. It’s a resource allocation problem. If Uber and AirBNB can mobilize the “sharing economy” we can use the same technology to help our neighbors in distress.