
The future is emotional - waqasaday
https://aeon.co/essays/the-key-to-jobs-in-the-future-is-not-college-but-compassion
======
EGreg
If anything, we will see people preferring a lot less human interaction.

People used to gather in salons to hear live music. Today we put earphones on
a train to listen to music instead of socializing.

If we socialize, we do it with other consumers, not producers.

Compare photos of the 50s and now. Everyone was socializing outside. Today
they are on fb with the phones mediating.

The milkman doesn't come around anymore. The gas station attendant doesn't
fill up your car in many states. The Uber driver drops food off and leaves
right away. Amazon delivers.

We want it globally accessible, accurate, and now.

Already you prefer to ask Google than your parents or teachers, and so do
they.

In the future as AI gets better how do you know people will still want that
smiling McDonalds cashier instead of a kiosk? Or the personal touch of a chef
instead of a machine that gets the same result every time?

~~~
Apocryphon
The use of earphones and iPods is for personal mobile convenience. Live music
is still in hot demand as an activity, and in fact one way artists have
adapted to loss of revenue from the end of album sales, has been to focus on
touring and other events.

People socialize with producers all of the time. Twitch streamers, Instagram
influencers, YouTube stars- there is hot demand from fans to interact with
their internet celebrities. Traditional creators get huge attention from
Reddit AMA's.

It is true that smartphones have become a massive attention drainer. And
automation has created a culture of seeking convenience and availability from
machines instead of people whom you know. But your post conflates two
different types of human activity- creative, intellectual, entertaining
pursuit and logistics-heavy, service work. People will always prefer real
people doing the former, until Holodecks really are a thing.

~~~
EGreg
Demand to interact with a celebrity is not the same thing as demand to
interact with a milkman, a paperboy or a waiter. And it is rarely satisfied in
any meaningful way since the celebrity is a human being with limited
attention. Whereas the delivery man can gladly interact with his customers but
how often do you do that? In short - demand for the local interactions has
been dropping.

Concerts today do take place, of course, but they are not the same as 20
people getting together in a salon for interaction and a musical soiree.

~~~
Apocryphon
Sure it is. People normally go to concerts with friends. Demand for music
festivals have also increased:

[http://www.billboard.com/articles/columns/music-
festivals/77...](http://www.billboard.com/articles/columns/music-
festivals/7760268/coachella-2017-stubhub-attendance)

~~~
EGreg
Yes, with friends! As I said, consumers want to interact _with each other_ ,
not with producers.

~~~
Apocryphon
Well, open mic nights are still available. Meetups are a way for producers to
interact together with interested consumers. Conventions have surely become
huge. There are still plenty of avenues for non-celebrity producers to meet
consumers.

~~~
EGreg
My point is simply that future consumers may not necessarily be looking for
those interactions as the article suggests.

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Mz
I really, really, really hate it when they refer to things like taking
physical care of the elderly as "emotional labor." Caretaking can have a huge
emotional component, but this framing has serious inherent problems.

Furthermore, art, fiction and music are things that can do a lot for people
emotionally and psychologically, both the makers of such and the consumers.
Yet no one ever seems to include those in these ridiculous articles about so-
called _emotional labor_ which perhaps should more accurately be termed
_traditional women 's work._

~~~
skybrian
What are the "serious inherent problems" in calling it emotional labor?

~~~
Mz
For one thing, it simultaneously glamorizes and discounts the hard physical
labor involved in doing things like cleaning up someone who is playing with
their own feces and throwing them at you. For another, it discounts the actual
education and intelligence involved in doing a good job of taking proper care
of people. For a third, it just reinforces the pink collar ghetto mentality
surrounding this kind of work.

Perhaps most importantly, it frames it like this is about the laborer having
emotional discipline or something. The reality is that feelings come from
somewhere and we routinely mix up "love" the noun that describes a feeling and
"love" the verb that describes care-taking that meets a high standard. That
feeling in one person typically grows out of the hard labor done by another.
The person that inspires the feelings is very often treated pretty abusively.
They exist to make other people feel good and to hell with their needs or
wants, kind of like the recent story titled "My Family's Slave."

~~~
ewjordan
All of that seems to argue pretty strongly in favor of calling it "emotional
labor" \- caretaking involves a serious trade-off where the caretaker is
expending a lot of emotional energy to do work for someone else. Much like
physical labor involves expending a lot of physical energy to get stuff done.

I don't see anything either overly demeaning or glamorous about that
descriptive term, it seems to describe exactly the value proposition that is
on the table with that sort of work.

~~~
Mz
From the article:

 _For men and women, paid and unpaid, waking at 3am to care for a crying baby
or bathing a distressed Alzheimer’s patient can be gruelling and
transcendentally life-affirming all at once._

Lots of people take satisfaction in a job well done. This is pretty
universally true, regardless of what kind of work you do. The above framing
describes cleaning up other people's literal shit in near religious ecstasy
type terms. If that isn't overblown, I don't know what is.

I did the full time mom thing for a lot of years. I raised and homeschooled
two special needs kids and was a military wife. Finding good solutions that
supposedly did not exist is something that I feel very proud of. But cleaning
up literal shit never felt like some sort of joyous nigh religious thing. It
was grueling, yes. Transcendental, big fat nope.

I am appalled by this article. You should go look up the recent article called
"My Family's Slave."

------
skybrian
I wonder how this relates to what economists call "cost disease?" As the cost
goes down in some industries (through automation or other efficiency
improvements), this increases wages in those industries, which spills over
into other, traditionally lower-wage industries due to competition for
workers, not through efficiency improvements.

But despite calling it a "disease," this doesn't necessarily seem like a bad
thing. Often they're difficult jobs (high emotional labor), so they maybe they
should pay more?

~~~
cstross
That's not exactly correct; the real issue with Baumol's Cost Disease isn't
that it leads to wages in "traditionally lower-wage industries" — it's that
wage competition leads to wage increases in sectors that don't undergo
productivity gains.

To give an example: medical doctors aren't a low-skill/low-wage profession,
but their productivity in crude terms of patients examined per hour appears
stagnant — medicine is inherently labour-intensive (although the _outcomes_ of
care provided can improve over time as new and better treatments become
available). If wages rise in other professionalized sectors that require huge
amounts of training due to productivity gains (e.g. among engineers), wages
will consequently rise for doctors because doctors and engineers are loosely
coupled at source through the training/labour market.

TLDR: cost disease isn't about low-wage occupations, it's about pay in
occupations that are refractory to performance improvement being coupled to
pay in sectors where performance gains are possible via the labour market.

~~~
dredmorbius
Charlie: the concept is highly analogous to Amdahl's Law, in some regards. The
limit to performance increases in parallelisation is limited by the non-
parallelisible portion of a process. The limits to productivity increases are
limited by the irreducible labour component of a productive process.

The other element is that _wages represent the provisioning costs of labour_ ,
or as Adam Smith puts it, "A man must always live by his work, and his wages
must _at least_ be sufficient to maintain him." (Further qualified upwards in
subsequent text.) _WoN_ , Book 1, Ch. 8.

[http://www.gutenberg.org/files/3300/3300-h/3300-h.htm#link2H...](http://www.gutenberg.org/files/3300/3300-h/3300-h.htm#link2HCH0008)

Which is to say: wages are _not_ defined by _productivity_ , but _by the
general wage level_. What is defined by productivity is instead the quantity
demanded of a good.

If _some_ quantity of a high-labour good is demanded, then that quantity will
pay wages based on the minimum prevailing wage (and if that's a sustainable
level: the minimum _living_ wage), plus additional premia for various other
factors elevating wages above that floor, as described by Smith in chapter 10
of book 1.

------
emersonrsantos
Any sociopath/psychopath can game the emotional intelligence system by
appearing to be whatever they feel they need to be, to get what they want, and
it's not pretty.

~~~
chongli
No, not _any_ socio/psychopath. Only highly intelligent ones. Average or lower
intelligence individuals usually end up in prison. They aren't deterred by
threats of punishment so they tend to have serious behavioural problems
growing up. It takes a special sort of psychopath to defer rewards in favour
of long term success in the absence of the usual punishments associated with
child rearing.

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kerkeslager
Is there a job that doesn't require some emotional intelligence?

~~~
skybrian
Factory worker? (Though for any job, it still helps to get along with people.)

~~~
trendia
Factory worker? Maybe... but there are a whole lot of conplex social
interactions and relationships in the breakroom, far more than people expect.

------
aub3bhat
Yet another article filled with feel-goodery truthiness that cannot be
debunked.

------
infinity0
I'm a bit annoyed at the constant background snide and subtle implication of
these vague literary articles, that programmers are bad empathetically or
emotionally. They use facts such as western programming culture being very
male-dominated, and then twist this to imply that males are bad at being
empathetic.

Firstly the gender ratio of engineers in e.g. Russia is more even, so let's
just shoot that one down before continuing. There's a lot of gender imbalance
in Western culture as a whole and to imply that most of it is the "fault" of
unemotional males is pretty insulting.

Often this also accompanied by some implicit value judgement assumption, that
they attempt to force onto the programmer. "My values are better than yours".
Er, no sorry. If you think a programmer is being unemotional, perhaps you
should take a step back and examine whether it is _you_ who are being
unempathetic, brushing away someone else's engineering concerns as being less
important than your own personal feelings about a topic that you don't have a
good knowledge of?

~~~
wsinks
Totally side question - are you Russian by nature and language?

If you are, I'm wondering if you ever feel limited by English as a language.
Do you feel like you have bigger, better ideas in Russian?

~~~
prodmerc
I'm not Russian, but it feels like emotional responses are more... emotional
in Russian. Like thinking about something or swearing.

English is a more rational language, and my "native" (I don't use it much)
language is a bit restrictive when expressing anything, whether logical or
emotional.

~~~
ams6110
Strikes me as more of a cultural difference than language. There are certainly
English-speaking people who swear a lot, and creatively, and others who rarely
utter a profane word.

~~~
prodmerc
Swearing in English just doesn't have the same effect for me.

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raspasov
Non-falsifiable predictions.

~~~
SamUK96
[https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophical_burden_of_proo...](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philosophical_burden_of_proof)

~~~
raspasov
Is this towards me, or towards the article? : )

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prodmerc
Well, of course it is. You don't go rioting in the streets while thinking
rationally.

~~~
majewsky
Not necessarily. There is sufficient precedent to establish that violence is
an effective tool for that purpose, when applied in the right way under the
right circumstances. Therefore, it can be rational to is violence for
political means.

(Not advocating for violence here in any way. Just disputing your "while
thinking rationally" point. There's actually a longrunning dispute among
leftist theorists and philosophers whether violence is an acceptable means of
bringing about political change. But the dispute is only about whether it's
morally acceptable.)

