#technological change

[blogdemocratesjr]

The Fighting Temeraire tugged to her last berth to be broken up by J.M.W. Turner

Additional text from The Life and Masterworks of J.M.W. Turner by Eric Shanes

[worklabournewsresearch]

MIT Report: The Work of the Future

“Decades of technological change have polarized the earnings of the American workforce, helping highly educated white-collar workers thrive, while hollowing out the middle class. Yet present-day advances like robots and artificial intelligence do not spell doom for middle-tier or lower-wage workers, since innovations create jobs as well. With better policies in place, more people could enjoy good careers even as new technology transforms workplaces.”

“As technology takes jobs away, it provides new opportunities; about 63 percent of jobs performed in 2018 did not exist in 1940. Rather than a robot revolution in the workplace, we are witnessing a gradual tech evolution. At issue is how to improve the quality of jobs, particularly for middle- and lower-wage workers, and ensure there is greater shared prosperity than the U.S. has seen in recent decades.”

Major Conclusions

1. “Technological change is simultaneously replacing existing work and creating new work. It is not eliminating work altogether.”

2. “Momentous impacts of technological change are unfolding gradually.”

3. “Rising labor productivity has not translated into broad increases in incomes because societal institutions and labor market policies have fallen into disrepair.”

4. “Improving the quality of jobs requires innovation in labor market institutions.”

5.  “Fostering opportunity and economic mobility necessitates cultivating and refreshing worker skills.”

6. “Investing in innovation will drive new job creation, speed growth, and meet rising competitive challenges.”

MIT News, November 17, 2020: “Report outlines route toward better jobs, wider prosperity,” by Peter Dizikes (links in article broken use link below for report)

MIT, 2020: The Work of the Future: Building Better Jobs in an Age of Intelligent Machines (100 pages, PDF)

Click here to learn more about this year’s AI and Work of the Future Congress hosted virtually by MIT. 

[worklabournewsresearch]

Ageism in the Tech Industry

“Compared to the underrepresentation of women and minorities in tech, the scarcity of programmers in their forties and beyond has mostly escaped notice. ... The software industry is overwhelmingly young. The median age of Google and Amazon employees is 30, whereas the median age of American workers is 42. A 2018 Stack Overflow survey of 100,000 programmers around the world found that three-quarters of them were under 35. ... Anxious developers in their late thirties chime in and identify themselves as among the ‘older.’”

“Lifelong programmers must keep their skills up to date, but they are in a race against time in a constantly transforming industry. According to a 2018 research paper, skills change faster in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) jobs than in other industries, and the headlong rate of change for programmers is especially severe. Kadeem L. Noray, one of the paper’s authors, says that ‘STEM is more skills-oriented that other fields,’ valuing short-lived competencies over durable wisdom. For each skill a STEM professional learns, another becomes obsolete, leaving little chance for accumulating skills and increasing salary.”

“Making the software industry more welcoming to coders past their thirties and creating roles suited for very experienced programmers will make companies more effective and more fair. These changes will also benefit the rest of us — in a society increasingly governed by software and algorithms, programmers must gain some wisdom to match their power. They must learn from recent incidents of hacking, biased algorithms, and online incitement of genocide. The only way to do that is for older coders to stay in the industry long enough to pass their knowledge to their successors. Cultivating lifelong coders will ensure that the lessons learned today are still remembered 50 years from now.”

Medium, March 8, 2019: “Ctrl-Alt-Delete: The Planned Obsolescence of Old Coders,” by A. Jesse Jiryu Davis

MIT Sloane Management Review, March 29, 2019:  “The Plight of the Graying Tech Worker,” William R. Kerr

Stack Overflow, 2018: “Developer Survey Results 2018″

TechTalks, March 29, 2019: “Ageism in tech: the not-so-invisible age limit developers face,” by Howard Williams

NBER, September 2018: “STEM Careers and Technological Change,” by David J. Deming and Kadeem L. Noray (56 pages, PDF)

[worklabournewsresearch]

Cheating Workers Out of Wages

“‘Wage theft’ ... refers to situations in which someone isn’t paid for [their] work. In its simplest form, it might consist of a manager instructing employees to work off the clock. Or a company refusing to pay for overtime hours. ...  When an employee clocks in for the day – using a computer login, ID badge or phone – that employee’s time log becomes a form of data.”

“Rounding – the functionality used to nickel and dime workers ... – is a convenient way for companies to consistently reclaim employee hours. Even though the software can precisely record the time an employee clocks in and out, the ‘rounding’ functionality changes that time according to a preset increment. ... The preferred rounding increment ... appeared to be to the quarter hour. So arriving to work at 8:53 a.m. would be rounded to 9, while 8:52 would become 8:45. ... But companies have two extra weapons to corral employee punches to work in their favor: policies and discipline. Yes, you could show up late or leave early, but then you’d be flagged for discipline under the attendance policy. Employers also reclaim time through what is known as ‘automatic break deductions.’ ... The software assumes that you took your full meal break, even if you didn’t.” 

“So how did this problem come about in the first place? These types of employer abuses are made possible by half-century-old rules that permitted rounding because at the time companies had to calculate hours by hand. The outdated regulations assume that rounding will ‘average out’ in the long term, essentially forcing workers to prove that they don’t. ... What’s more, the outdated regulations don’t even mention automatic break deductions. This problem is not going away. As long as these regulatory loopholes exist, employers and software makers will find ways to exploit them. That means if you’re paid an hourly wage, you may very well be losing out.”

The Conversation, May 22, 2018: “Cheating workers out of wages is easier than ever,” by Elizabeth C. Tippett

Yale Journal of Law & Technology, 2017: “When Timekeeping Software Undermines Compliance,” by Elizabeth Tippett, Charlotte S. Alexander, & Zev J. Eigen (76 pages, PDF)

The Guardian, May 19, 2018: “'There's no excuse for wage theft': on the frontline of worker exploitation,” by Melissa Davey

[aiandsociety]

Why didn't electricity immediately change manufacturing?

The internet shows, as with electricity, that real technological change takes time and imagination.

[athoughtfullyautomaticcollection]

Solutions

Way back in the day, when I was in grad school, I had an advisor that studied early 19th-century technological disrupters, individuals that took the existing economic order and turned it on the collective ear. Not too dissimilar in effect to our modern-day disrupters of the world order through things like social media. He argued that they affected technological and social paradigm shifts in…

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