#de-skilling

[redshift-13]

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.

What could go wrong?

[worklabournewsresearch]

The Disappearance of Well Paid Middle Skilled Work

“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.”

Economics MIT, February 27, 2019: Work of the Past, Work of the Future, by David H. Autor ( 48 pages, PDF)

[amberlaurendesign-blog]

Immaterial Labour & De-Skilling

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.

Although they look similar, I am very happy with the outcome of our poster and think it is better than the original as it contains a lot more information and looks more professional in my opinion with the ‘Colchester School of Art’ logo and well considered layout. The lecturer Dr. Matthew Bowman was really pleased with our poster design also.

The lecture itself was really interesting - Dr. Matthew Bowman spoke of a term I’d never heard of before called ‘Fordism’ which is generally labour-based, physical and industrial work along with ‘Post-Fordism’ which is how we work today as graphic designers, usually sitting down at a desk to produce work. Although other disciplines of art and design would also work at a desk to create their artwork (for example, fine artists), designers are more like workers as they are commissioned to produce specific work as opposed to fine artists who generally design what they like and are working essentially for themselves rather than the consumer. Before the early 1900’s, the graphic designer as such didn’t exist and were more known as graphic or commercial artists. When advertising became present, the graphic designer materialised. A good example of a graphic designer at that time is Alphonse Mucha who worked for companies producing art nouveau style advertisements.

As a graphic designer it was important to inform and communicate which obviously helps to sell a product - this is a main factor to how we are different from other disciplines in art and design. It is also very important for the designer to be responsible for the client whom they are working for and obviously design to their needs.

After 1945, there was an increase in the working class meaning more people were in work and could buy things due to the rising wages. Around this time, advertising became a bad thing as a lot of companies embraced consumerism. Not only were people buying the necessities and decencies but they were also spending all their wages on luxury objects - this is where capitalism came into play as people were creating businesses privately to make profit on the things in which they sell to earn money to buy new things themselves and there is a correlation between consumer goods and art as an object.

Another style of graphic design that we still use in some aspects today is the Russian constructivist way of designing using primary colours, geometric shapes and simple singular words. Below is an example of constructivist design by Alexander Rodchenko:

I think the constructivist style is very minimal so is brilliant when being used in advertising and was used a lot in propaganda posters to communicate with the masses. This style of design was also used in the album cover more recently for the band Franz Ferdinand’s ‘You Could Have It So Much Better’. Because of how minimal the designs were, the Russian constructivists were most definitely more conceptual as they wanted to simply communicate an idea in a 'low maintenance' style. Marcel Duchamp was also a conceptual artist, but he introduced us to the ready-made style of art where for example he signed a urinal and called it 'art', which is such an elastic category and we still have to question whether an idea or object is in actual fact art or not:

As graphic designers, we need a good balance of both conceptual/intellectual skills and craft skills as these work well together - we don't necessarily need to be a really skilled artist who can draw like a fine artist or have more intellectual than skill as we would have no way to apply the idea we are trying to communicate. De-skilling or skills changing? This is one of the questions that we were asked post lecture, and to the honest I think that we don’t need as many skills as we used to need as graphic designers as the machine can do a lot of things for us. It’s not necessary for a designer to be brilliant at drawing these days as there is digital programs which can be used to create exactly the same outcome.

[rematerializationchamber]

Ideally, the dialectic of de- and re-skilling should allow artists, directors, and choreographers to creatively rethink their output, and in ways that go beyond a mere swapping of context.

Somehow I missed this casually, characteristically brilliant essay by Claire Bishop from 2011. I think this might be a secretly essential piece of her total body of published work.

[indizombie]

Call centre work 'leads to a wastage of human resources and de-skilling of workers' which will have a high impact on Indian industry in the long-term.

Report conducted by the V.V. Giri National Labour Institute, a body funded by the Indian Labour Ministry

[worklabournewsresearch]

The Great Reversal in the Demand for Skill and Cognitive Tasks

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."

"In order to understand these patterns, we oer a simple extension to the standard skill biased technical change model that views cognitive tasks as a stock rather than a flow. We show how such a model can explain the trends in the data that we present, and offers a novel interpretation of the current employment situation in the US."

[jongdalsae-blog]

De-skilling

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?

"Base materialism"

[smagdefrau-blog]

RL #2

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.

I thought this article was a perfect example of deskilling. Chefs are supposed to be creative with their food, that is what people want in restaurants and in their food and by having set recipes and menus it takes the chefs privileges of being creative away. If I continue to do this topic for my paper this would be a perfect example for the topic of deskilling and standardization.