
The Pink Collar Future - ph0rque
http://www.openthefuture.com/2012/05/the_pink_collar_future.html
======
debacle
The sexist undercurrent of the article was thick, but it didn't ripple the
surface until about half way though.

The mere idea of the 'pink collar' is silly. Hair cuts are a highly elastic
service, and nursing and teaching are seeing a huge downward pressure in wages
are are only being protected by unions.

> Nurses may be more valued than surgeons; kindergarten teachers paid better
> than university professors.

Dogs and cats living together, human sacrifice, mass hysteria!

This article completely misses the point - 2000 years ago, machines did the
work of 1000 men through pulleys and levers. 500 years ago, machines did the
work of 1000 men through gears and belts. 100 years ago, machines did the work
of 1000 men through steam and rail. 50 years ago, machines did the work of
1000 men through internal combustion. Ten years go, machines did the work of
1000 men through the transistor, and today machines do the work of 1000 men
through advanced heuristic systems, statistical analysis, etc.

We will continue to automate processes so that we can all, collectively, lead
better lives.

~~~
_delirium
I'm not quite as sanguine on what technological change will do to employment,
though I'm not sure what precisely it will do, either. I don't think the
smooth progression you paint is quite accurate; there have been really major
upheavals that had significant social impacts, not a slow transition with a
constant ratio. The industrial revolution led to a large proportion of the
population rushing to cities, and a whole host of urban problems (tenement
housing, large-scale homelessness, urban crime, hygiene problems) that
produced backlashes such as, at one extreme, Marxism, and at the moderate
middle-ground, the modern welfare state and trade unionism.

In particular, there was a large, relatively short-term shift in employment,
from "almost everyone" working in agriculture to a majority of people working
in factories. It's not 100% clear to me what today's version of "factories"
will be in that analogy, the mass employment sink that people can migrate to,
the way they migrated agriculture->factories. I guess "the service industry"
is as good a guess as any, which is roughly what this article is proposing a
more specific version of (essentially, the high-touch, hard-to-automate subset
of the service industry).

~~~
debacle
I think it's pretty clear that the shift from agri->factories will be mirrored
by the shift from factories->unemployment.

There's simply nothing left for uneducated people to do. The service economy
is a myth.

~~~
_delirium
In that case, it's not clear to me how we'll "all, collectively, lead better
lives", unless we transition to a much stronger welfare state, like in one of
those sci-fi utopias where everyone's basic needs (food/shelter/healthcare)
are taken care of by robots, and you only need to work if you want luxuries or
feel a particular inner drive to do so.

If, on the other hand, we have a proportion of people doing quite well, and a
large number of people unemployed in slums, that seems not too good as a
collective outcome.

~~~
debacle
I think we're seeing option #2 right now. Unfortunately we'll probably be here
for a while before we get to see option #1.

~~~
reinhardt
What makes you optimistic that we _will_ get to see #1 at some point?

------
fleitz
The idea that men can't be empathetic and perform empathy based jobs such as
nursing and teaching kindergarten is as silly as the idea that women don't
have the logical aptitude for computer programming.

I can pretty much guarantee you that men have as much to bring to nursing and
teaching as women do to the tech sector.

~~~
aamar
I don't think the OP--or anyone--is saying that men can't do these jobs. Very
nearly the opposite. The article says that these jobs are currently "largely
performed by women" and suggests that the barriers to men performing these
jobs are contingent cultural factors, which may reverse.

~~~
_delirium
That's slowly starting to happen in some areas, notably nursing. There are
even starting to be a mirror-image of organizations like Society of Women
Engineers (which advocate for women, who are under-represented in engineering)
in growing areas where men are under-represented, such as the American
Assembly for Men in Nursing (<http://aamn.org/>).

------
Tossrock
This article seems heavy on vague predictions and light on data? And also
phrasing everything as a question? Which alleviates them of the responsibility
actual assertions?

That aside, it ignores the obvious other domain which is largely immune to
mechanized replacement – designing the machines themselves (or
software/algorithms/etc). A domain which, as we all lament here weekly, is
still a heavily male dominated one.

~~~
wizzard
Exactly. As blue-collar jobs are mechanized (or outsourced), the workforce
gradually shifts towards knowledge work, which is inherently higher-paying.

Also, perhaps I am not forward-thinking enough, but I hope we never see the
day where we have AI Kindergarten teachers. This is a pretty depressing future
the author envisions, where cutting hair is among the most valued jobs but we
leave the task of hacking at our insides to robots.

------
GrahamL
>This raises some big questions, of course, and not the least of which is how
this will affect the social and economic status of these professions. Nurses
may be more valued than surgeons; kindergarten teachers paid better than
university professors.

If we maintain a capitalist economy and a large number of jobs do become
mechanized (and not replaced with new jobs) it stands to reason that
competition for the remaining jobs will increase. Competition results in
driving the market price for jobs down, not up. While human nurses WOULD be
paid better than robot surgeons, I don't think wages would increase--they'd
decrease.

------
JumpCrisscross
The assumption that given "jobs where empathy and 'emotional intelligence' can
be considered requirements" have been "immune to the creeping mechanization of
the workplace" in the past we can expect them to exhibit such immunity in the
future deserves more scrutiny.

A recent article on HN, "Do Kids Care If Their Robot Friend Gets Stuffed Into
a Closet?" [1], showed that at least children will "attribute moral
accountability and emotions" to relatively simple robots. I'm not sure I can
say I'd definitely prefer a human kindergarten teacher in a hypothetical
future where the alternative is a robot that objectively integrates the
consensus scientific opinion on the ideal behaviour of a young child's
developmental mentor tailored to the attributes of my child.

[1] [http://spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/robotics/artificial-
intel...](http://spectrum.ieee.org/automaton/robotics/artificial-
intelligence/do-kids-care-if-their-robot-friend-gets-stuffed-into-a-
closet#.T56lSyNVoKY.hackernews)

------
guard-of-terra
Off: I'm slowly starting to hate the whole "Google Self Driving Cars" thing.

Usually it is a product first, a hype later. Hype without product is a
vaporware. Google is a vaporware maker officially by forcing the "Google Self
Driving Cars" meme on us. It's not much more real than praising Russian Giant
Humanoid Combat Robots, for the in-joke.

I would bet some money to predict that there would not be any feasible
automatic cars from Google, and ones that would actually enter your life are
rather to be a product of some startup.

~~~
jiggy2011
I disagree, they have already made significant progress on this and have done
hundreds of thousands of miles with actual self driving cars.

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cdgQpa1pUUE>

I think with something like this, if it isn't Google then it will be one of
the large car manufacturers first. I just don't see a random company popping
out of nowhere and bringing something like this to the market as the costs
involved in the production are going to be huge.

------
RedwoodCity
Many creative processes are unlikely to get outsourced to machines: writing
songs, drawing pictures, and composing poetry. Not that people haven't
experimented with software that writes poetry or draws pictures, these
projects tend to involve so much human oversight that they hardly represent a
departure from business as usual.

Hopefully we will live in a world in which robots do all of the dangerous and
boring tasks leaving us to compose ballads and knit sweaters.

------
roc
As far as I can tell, most consumers will happily jettison the 'personal
touch' in pursuit of lower prices. (See: Walmart)

The coldly efficient robot nurse who can handle all the mechanical tasks but
doesn't have human compassion will be cheaper and thus wildly preferred by
anyone paying for health care. And that goes double when
government/corporate/payment indirection leads to a lack of real choice by the
direct consumer of health care.

Similarly as soon as robots can match an $8 haircut (and those are nothing
special), they'll destroy the low-end of grooming.

Teaching has a fair shot; it's not generally acceptable to pursue reduced
education costs in a vacuum. But I wouldn't underestimate the for-profit
schooling industry's ability to selectively report and lobby their way into
pitching robot teachers as the key to more _effective_ education.

~~~
roguecoder
We've already got robot teachers in many states as they move to online
education. Which so far has cost a huge amount of money, made massive profits
for private companies and failed to produce decent test results.

------
tomkin
This is a conversation that I think we all need to have. _In the future..._
creeps up faster and faster. Our mind's eye vision of how fast technology
evolves is fixed. Looking back only a few generations, people will conflate
that this can describe our inherit humanity for the foreseeable future. I
don't think it does.

As an example, I often read opinion pieces by local well-to-do progressives; a
topic that comes up often is our transportation infrastructure and how we
should start buying, living, working _local_. For a variety of reasons, all of
which I agree with for the most part. I can't help but ask myself – will it
matter when every car drives itself and is propelled by emission-less energy?
Far off, right? Maybe. Or maybe it's 10-15 years away.

~~~
evincarofautumn
Local food is one thing—it seems absurd to ship a cucumber thousands of miles
when I can just grow some in my garden. But a global society is absolutely
essential to the continued well-being of our species. Globalisation is a
powerful force against misinformation and propaganda—and in turn xenophobia
and war.

And our global transportation infrastructure isn’t _perfect_ , but it _is_ the
best it’s ever been in all of human history. So I would argue that buying
locally is far less important than, say, buying handcrafted goods from small
businesses, regardless of location.

~~~
mc32
It seems to me that the availability of local food in sufficient quantities to
feed tens of millions is a luxury of places which have the conditions
necessary to produce such bounty. What does eat local mean for Canadians or
people in Arizona? Greenhouses? It's a nice thing to have but a bit
impractical for most, unless we would prescribe them a limited diet.

------
derleth
My dad's been a nurse for just about three decades now. The twist is that he's
been an APRN for most (or all) of that time, in specific a CRNA. He has also
practiced in places where he's run the anesthesia department along with a
small group (two-three others usually) of other CRNAs. Also men, in my
experience.

Now, my first response to this is that his whole job requires preventing
people from feeling pain, dealing with people who are in pain, and generally
making pain go away. If that isn't empathy you've mis-defined the term.

My second response is to wonder whether APRNs in general are mostly male. If
they are, that kind of blows this 'pink collar' stuff out of the water on a
more factual basis.

Even if they aren't, though, it's still a dumb idea: Men do that kind of work.
Men don't need to worry about being replaced by women in the medical field
unless some idiot mandates that their jobs go to women simply because they're
women.

(APRN: Advanced Practice Registered Nurse. A nurse who has training above and
beyond what the average RN possesses, and has often specialized in a given
sub-field.

CRNA: Certified Registered Nurse Anesthetist. A CRNA handles anesthesia, which
is all about minimizing pain. A CRNA may or may not operate under the
supervision of an Anesthesiologist, who is an MD who specializes in
anesthesia. Typically, CRNAs in rural areas work alone and are therefore among
the few nurses allowed by law to prescribe drugs (the drugs that control pain
are strictly controlled by law, as you may well imagine).)

