Regarding the last post on antiwork.

Most of us would like far more leisure – we dream of it. But we believe it comes with a price. And so we resent the unemployed for (supposedly) “sitting around all day”, while we identify with our jobs and righteously grumble, or boast, about our hard work, like demented subjects in a behaviourist’s divide-and-rule experiment.

Leisure, like happiness, tends to be seen as something that’s earned through work. The underlying idea is that you’re endlessly undeserving – that reward, ie happiness, will always be contingent on the endurance of some unpleasant activity (eg “hard work”). Again, we could trace this notion to early moral ideas – eg original sin and redemption through suffering – but the important point is that we seem to have a nasty, and very persistent, cultural neurosis in the form of an archaic cognitive frame for work and leisure.

So what the fuck is “antiwork”?

Antiwork is what we do out of love, fun, interest, talent, enthusiasm, inspiration, etc. Only a lucky few get paid enough from it to live on, yet it probably enriches our lives and benefits society more than most jobs do.

—Antiwork – a radical shift in how we view “jobs”

The case against extending unemployment benefits essentially boils down to two arguments. First, the economy has improved, so the unemployed should no longer need extra time to find a new job. Second, extended benefits could lead job seekers either to not search as hard or to become choosier about the kind of job they will accept, ultimately delaying their return to the workforce.2

But the evidence doesn’t support either of those arguments. The economy has indeed improved, but not for the long-term unemployed, whose odds of finding a job are barely higher today than when the recession ended nearly five years ago. And the end of extended benefits hasn’t spurred the unemployed back to work; if anything, it has pushed them out of the labor force altogether.
—Cutting Off Emergency Unemployment Benefits Hasn’t Pushed People Back to Work, FiveThirtyEight

Paul Boag on how our day-to-day jobs are soon going to be very different:

This means that those of us working in high-end agencies need to think about our long term position. The chances are we will see a growing number of agencies close their doors over the coming years. Those of us who work for those agencies may well find ourselves joining in-house teams. That or becoming much more specialised in our role.
I worked at design studios/agencies for 12 years. Last year I moved in-house as a creative director. Boag is spot-on in his predictions. I have a handful of friends who also moved from studios to companies like Facebook and Fidelity Investments. It’s happening.
On the rise as software as a service (SaaS):
Unfortunately for some, web design is no exception. There was a time when self employed web designers could produce cheap websites from home and make a reasonable income. Today that is becoming hard with services like Squarespace allowing people to build their own website.
I’m a web designer and when people come to me with freelance opportunities to make website, I constantly refer them to Squarespace. Why? It’s just too damn good (I use Squarespace for my own portfolio site).
Boag’s post is short, but it’s a must-read if you’re in the tech/design world.

A new American dream has gradually replaced the old one. Instead of leisure, or thrift, consumption has become a patriotic duty. Corporations can justify anything–from environmental destruction to prison construction–for the sake of inventing more work to do. A liberal arts education, originally meant to prepare people to use their free time wisely, has been repackaged as an expensive and inefficient job-training program. We have stopped imagining, as Keynes thought it so reasonable to do, that our grandchildren might have it easier than ourselves. We hope that they’ll have jobs, maybe even jobs that they like.

The new dream of overwork has taken hold with remarkable tenacity. Hardly anyone talks about expecting or even deserving shorter workdays anymore; the best we can hope for is the perfect job, one that also happens to be our passion. In the dogged, lonely pursuit of it, we don’t bother organizing with our co-workers. We’re made to think so badly of ourselves as to assume that if we had more free time, we’d squander it.
—Nathan Schneider, Who Stole the Four-Hour Workday?

Over the past year or so, I’ve grown more and more obsessed on the topic of robots replacing humans in the workforce.
I found a handful of links recently.
From Marcus Wohlsen at Wired:

The redefinition of work itself is one of the most intriguing possibilities imagined in a recent Pew Research report on the future of robots and jobs. Certainly, the prospect of a robot-powered, post-scarcity future of mandatory mass leisure feels like a far-off scenario, and an edge case even then. In the present, ensuring that everyone has enough often seems harder for humans to accomplish than producing enough in the first place. But assuming a future that looks more like Star Trek than Blade Runner, a lot of people could end up with a lot more time on their hands. In that case, robots won’t just be taking our jobs; they’ll be forcing us to confront a major existential dilemma: if we didn’t have to work anymore, what would we do?
The New York Times also has an article reporting on the Pew Research Report.
Tyler Cowen also has a good, short post on his views:
1. The law of comparative advantage has not been repealed. Machines take away some jobs and create others, while producing more output overall.
2. That said, some particular kinds of machines increase the relative return to skilled labor. If the new jobs require working with computers, and working with computers effectively is hard, reemploying lower-skilled workers at good wages may be difficult.
If you think robots can’t replace creative jobs, you’re being short-sighted.
It’s all just a matter of time.

—Mike Monteiro

via Tim Ferriss

Foxconn has recently confirmed that it plans to deploy a fleet of robots in some of its factories to work on products for Apple, but the “Foxbots” will not be able to replace its human workforce just yet. Quoting a report from Chinese site UDN, G for Games says that robots will only play a supporting role in building devices such as the iPhone 6, as they won’t be able to perform certain tasks that require more subtle assembly or manufacturing procedures.
—Chris Smith, BGR.com

“The pace of technological progress is decoupled from the economy,” Jurvetson noted. And the gap between the rich and the poor, he warned, may not grow and shrink in cycles as it has been in the past–it could just continue growing larger. Assuming that every industry will essentially become part of the IT industry, and that robots will take all the unwanted jobs in the world, there will be much less work for humans to do. A small slice of the population could control the information technology that makes it possible for the rest of the world’s work to be automated, he believes.

The venture capitalist invoked the prospect of a future with 80% unemployment–a terrifying, but not entirely unreasonable, thought. What would the future look like if the majority of humanity didn’t need to work because their potential jobs had all been automated? How could that transition happen without leaving humans fearing for their lives?
via Co.Exist

Shaunacy Ferro at Co.Design:

The industrial designer of the future might just be a computer. The traditional design process can be a laborious one, full of iterations and tweaks to make a product just so. For years, design software maker Autodesk has been working on an alternative: a program that sorts through all the ways to make a product of specific measurements and then spits out the best option.
I’ve used computers since I was 4-years-old so saying this article frustrates me makes me sound hypocritical. I’m ok with that. But it does.
Our view of how good or bad things are in life is all about degree. It’s not nice to punch a random person in the face, but punching 40 people in the face randomly is worse. It might be enough to land you two minutes on the local evening news.
Similarly, having computers make our lives easier is great, until they start making our lives too easy and take over too many tasks. It’s too late to try and fight this; it’s only a matter of time before we end up like the fat, idle humans in Wall-E.
I made a poster series a few years ago inspired by the Steve Jobs quote, “The computer is like a bicycle for our minds.”
At some point the computers aren’t going to need our minds. They’ll be able to ride their own bikes.
[Also on Daily Exhaust: We Ain’t See Nothing Yet, Manpower Demand, We Are Redundant, I don’t see designers on there… yet.]

—Aristotle
In related news, only 13 percent of people worldwide actually like going to work.

Patrick Thibodeau:

A study of New York City’s tech workforce found that 44% of jobs in the city’s “tech ecosystem,” or 128,000 jobs, “are accessible” to people without a Bachelor’s degree. The category covers any job that is enabled by, produced or facilitated by technology.

For instance, a technology specific job that doesn’t require a Bachelor’s degree might be a computer user support specialist, earning $28.80 an hour, according to this study. That job requires an Associate’s degree.
People who gravitate towards tech jobs tend to be the types who tinker and try to learn stuff on their own anyway.
Then when you factor in sites like SkillShare and Codeacademy where you’re learning tech in it’s ‘natural habitat’, this report makes a lot of sense.
via SlashDot