Metal Heads

LinkedIn has a newsfeed, which, I suspect, is mainly there to drive "engagement." Mainly because it feels less informative that rage-baiting. News that would help the LinkedIn community navigate the current business environment tends to take a very distant back seat to the sorts of splashy stories that people are likely to respond to... and have those responses responded to.

So this morning on LinkedIn News was this: Amazon sees robots eliminating need for 600,000 future jobs. Which, to be sure, overstates things a bit. The Verge has a headline that I think is a bit more in line with the aspirational nature of the supposed goal: Amazon hopes to replace 600,000 US workers with robots, according to leaked documents.

In any event, the response on LinkedIn was about what one would expect. The "Top Perspectives" they selected to present to people were more pessimistic than optimistic about what this change would mean with a few posts simply breaking the story down for the benefit of those who lacked a subscription to The New York Times.

One "Top Perspective," however, stood out to me for its use of illustration... namely this one:

Not only does it treat Amazon's goal for automation as a foregone conclusion, it's just pretty poor-quality generative system artwork. "We want are taking our jobs?" Really? Guy couldn't spend three minutes to put better text on the signs? It's ironic in that this really illustrates the threat that automation will likely pose to a lot of people: As long as something is fast and cheap, low levels of quality are acceptable. So there's no incentive to turn to people for better outputs.

I understand the need to turn a picture around quickly in order to be one of the first responses to a breaking story; LinkedIn often selects its "Top Perspectives" from commentary that was on the site prior to a story actually showing up in the newsfeed. But this tends to become a case of raindrops blaming the downpour for the flood; if society at large, out of a sense of its own poverty, tends to begrudge people their salaries. Take this story from LinkedIn News, about the rise of job seekers turning to generative automation to create high-quality headshots. Okay, so "a photographer may charge hundreds of dollars for a photoshoot and digital prints" (as an aside, that "may" is doing some Olympic-level lifting here). A lot of people charge hundreds of dollars for specialist work... it's how they support themselves. Price-sensitivity on the part of Americans is creating a situation in which people are looking to automate away other people's livelihoods while hoping that their own will be spared.

That's unlikely to work out in the way people hope it might. According to the piece in The Verge, Amazon hopes to use automation to cut hiring by 160,000 people by 2027. Which would save about 30¢ per item sold. For Amazon, that adds up to a lot: $12.6 billion. But here's the rub... in order to realize those savings (which Amazon's shareholders are going want paid out them in some form or another), they can't pass them on to customers in the form of lower prices. So 160,000 are left looking for another way to support themselves, and the only people likely to see any tangible benefit are big investors. And the job market always rots from the tail... the people who are being paid handsome salaries to make the important decisions aren't going to willingly greenlight technology that would render them unemployed.

The thing about a race to the bottom is that the only prize is being the first one to hit bottom. Still, sometimes even stupid prizes are better than losing, and the costs that come with that. As people feel more and more precarious in their economic lives, doing unto others before it is done unto them starts to feel like a form of security. But there's never any real security once things get to everyone for themselves. Being faster to turn to automation in an attempt to preserve what one has becomes simply a trigger for the Paradox of Thrift. It's a game where the only winning move is for everyone not to play. But a crappy computer-generate picture is seen as better than paying someone for a quality one, while people wonder why no-one seems to value anyone else.