Facebook

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Remote Working Pay Cut?

When a large corporation goes on the hunt for a lower cost base of operations I doubt whether it thinks it will be penalized for what is a rational and frequently made decision.  After all if you can make the same revenue and reduce your costs your profit goes up. Yeah.  Capitalism 101.  If we all go about life in this way, and if we believe Adam Smith, all this pursuit of self-interest will shower society with the glories of social benefits previously unheard of.

I know, that’s twisting things a bit.  But self-interest in a corporation is most often expressed in the endless search for that extra little bit of profit.  So re-locating to a low cost base is a classic move in the well-read CEO playbook.  And who cares if your employees have to uproot themselves and take their families to a less desirable part of the country?  Tough on them.  They need to suck it up and take one for the shareholders.  Or that can quit.

Loyalty, though, is a one way street in corporate life.  Beware the foolish soul who settles in and falls for the human resource department jargon.

The halting departure from the pandemic is showing just how one-way that loyalty is.

I read recently that Facebook is quite happy for its employees to stay and work remotely, although it is trying to limit just how much time people stay away from those expensive offices.  The popular word — presumably more consulting-world jargon — is “guidance”.  Corporations nowadays are issuing guidance.  This seems to be a velvet gloved-yet-firm policy much like herding sheep.  There’s room for some individual expression, but just be sure to end up in the right place.  Zuckerberg doesn’t want to be seen as the dictator he really is, so he issues guidance rather than instructions.  The message is clear though.  Going full-on remote is not acceptable.

Especially, it turns out, if you decide to take your high Silicon Valley wage and re-locate to a low cost of living area.  How dastardly can an employee get?  The outrage!  Moving to a low cost area just to eke out a little extra income.  How gauche.

Yes, it’s true.  Facebook has warned its employees that their pay might get reduced if they have the temerity to move, along with their high-cost area pay, to a low cost area.  Poor Facebook doesn’t want its employees playing fancy life-style games or gaming the system.  Can you imagine the terrible example that would set?  Whatever next?

Facebook, naturally, is not alone.  Apparently there is an epidemic of rational employees.  So many of them have discovered the pleasantries of living away from the cramped and overly expensive districts in which their employers park them, that they have decamped and taken their big wages with them.  They are spreading the wealth into cheaper neighborhoods, living quiet lives, enjoying being home, and generally performing exactly how any sensible person would.

Obviously this won’t do.

Facebook doesn’t want sensible or happy employees.  So all those employees who pursue this horrible strategy of maximizing their income need to be punished.  It’s Zuckerberg’s income they should be maximizing not their own!

Those extra bits of profit rightfully belong to to corporation so it can pay big CEO bonuses and reward its ever-suffering shareholders.  The CEO of Morgan Stanley is quoted in today’s Financial Times as agreeing.  He’s clear: maximize your income at Morgan’s expense and you can expect a pay cut.  There is a rash of impoverished Silicon Valley corporations lining up to do the same thing.  The problem with employees nowadays is that they seem to have paid attention too much to what the big people do.  Only the wealthy and the corporations are allowed to cheat, squeeze, and connive.  Employees are employees for a reason: they are the squeezees not the squeezers.  They are a cost to be managed down wherever possible.  This idea that they might get a real wage increase simply by re-locating is plainly wrong.  It sounds almost socialist.  And that’s as bad as it gets.

Really.  This pandemic just can’t be over soon enough.  Employees moving to maximize income?

You can’t get good help anymore.  You just can’t.

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AI and Democracy

Just a quick thought prompted by my reading of a talk given by Allison Stanger during the Santa Fe Institute’s 2019 Fall symposium.  First she gives us a nice quote from Hannah Arendt’s “The Human Condition” who says the question is not …

“whether we are the masters or slaves of our machines, but whether machines still serve the world and its things or if, on the contrary, they and the automatic motion of their processes have begun to rule and even destroy the world and its things.”

This quote obviously resonates with fundamental interest to those of us struggling to understand the economy as we hurtle into the digital age.

The central issue as Stanger describes it is that all the algorithms based on big data, those that increasingly drive chunks of how we deal with each other, are based on a sort of collectivism.  They rely on groups.  They rely on large-scale analysis and the identification of structures detected in seas of data.  They abstract away the individual.

Contrast that with the underlying assumption of western liberal democracy which is intensely individual.  The people who gave us the intellectual tradition upon which liberal democracy is based tried to recapture from the ancient past the notion of an individual, a citizen, from which to construct the political realm.  This was in order to overturn the prior existing oppression — or what was perceived as oppression — exerted by the traditional aristocratic, religious, and military elites.  That oppression was a consequence of notions of group privileges.  So the reaction had to bring the individual to the fore.

So the rights of the individual became paramount.

Let’s set aside that this is a decidedly truncated version of history.  The principle is what matters: there is a clash between the underlying values of big data and of liberal democracy.

Perhaps this is why people like those who run Facebook have such a hard time dealing with privacy.  It is simply something that doesn’t, cannot, exist in their realm.  They have had to abolish it in order to establish their business model.  Their machines trample over us as a consequence.

And we have no way to resist because our value system is protected by the institutions we designed for that purpose.  In particular the nation state and its panoply of laws etc.  The rule of law and the rule of big data have very different foundational principles.  Facebook thinks of itself as apart from the rule of law established in our republic.  They are separate from any law in any state.  They are a global organization answerable to no one.  All that matters is their profitability.  And to produce profits they have to ignore the tenets of liberal democracy.  They, necessarily, have an illiberal worldview.

Our sometimes ambiguous relationship with machinery has always been based on a conflict of values.  Machines embody past information in order to preserve it and make it useful into the future.  They do this reliably and repetitively.  They replace and improve the human element in production by so doing.  This magnifies our productivity and, ultimately, our prosperity.  But the intelligence embodied in the older machines was always extant before the machine.

This is not quite true with artificial intelligence.  Nowadays our machines seek to create intelligence.  They have a realm of their own.  And that realm is based on a worldview at odds with democracy and its basic individual values.

As Stanger pints out, this is why authoritarian regimes have taken to big data like fish to water.  They begin unencumbered by concerns for the individual.  So the Chinese are quite content building all sorts of surveillance machines.  Whereas we in the West are much more ambivalent.

Yet because of the degradation of our pubic sphere and our decades long surrender of socio-economic decision making to the corporate world we find ourselves under surveillance with our institutions unable to protect us.

I don’t want us to get bogged down in a pedantic discussion with this observation.  The basic principle as expressed by Stanger seems to have great importance.  The individualistic basis of liberal democracy appears to be in conflict with the group/big data basis of artificial intelligence.

How do we deal with this?

Addendum:

The Stanger talk can be found in:

Complexity Economics.  Dialogues of the Applied Complexity Network.  Proceedings of the Santa Fe Institute’s 2019 Fall Symposium.  Edited by Brian Arthur, Eric Beinhocker, and Allison Stanger.

Hannah Arendt’s “The Human Condition” was published in 1958 so it predates the arrival of big data and its disruption of the privacy of the individual.  Her discussion of the emergence and separation of the public and private spheres of life, however, seems remarkably contemporary given that arrival.

 

 

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Watch The Boulder

There’s a boulder rolling down the hill.

We are watching it carefully. It is accelerating. It is enormous. It will mow us down. Lives will be lost. Or at least livelihoods will be lost. People will suffer. The boulder is terrifying.

But, hey, let’s keep watching.

That’s about the attitude of the people who keep on talking about the imminent tsunami of automation, AI, and other so-called disruptive technologies. Let’s keep watching because it’s bad — really, really, bad.

The good folks at Axios distribute a regular synopsis of all the hyperbole surrounding the future of work and today’s edition caught my eye. Buried deep in the summary is a short item headed: “A long disruption is ahead, with low-paying jobs“.

The contents are grim reading.

Here’s a taste:

“Their big picture: There may be a long, deep economic disruption lasting decades and taking millions of jobs. The economy will eventually come out of it. But wages for most jobs may be too low to sustain a middle-class lifestyle.

Important background: In the 19th century, it took about six decades for U.S. wages to recover after the first industrial age automation of the 1810s. And the agriculture-to-industrial shift of the 20th century lasted four decades.”

This is hardly something to ignore.

And the picture being painted is becoming commonplace amongst those who profess to have insight into the likely outcome of the storm moving in from Silicon Valley.

The banality of the analysis that gets us to this sort of commentary is beginning to annoy me. I think what irks me most is the matter-of-fact manner in which the apocalypse is announced. It’s as if we have no choice. It’s as if the democratic process was entirely incidental to the inevitability of capitalist development.

Perhaps I ought not get so vexed. After all the technocrats delivering their doom laden prognostications are trying to be informative. In this case a person called Karen Harris, who is something to do with what the Bain consulting firm calls its ‘Macro trends Group’, tells us that the “coming disruption may be the most disruptive to the work force in a hundred years”. In her opinion this means the displacement of about 2.5 million jobs a year, which is twice the amount of chaos caused by the last great shift, which was from agriculture to industry, and which rocked America to its core.

Let me register my objection to the word “disruption”. Chaos is chaos. The displacement of workers by machinery is just that. Disruption is an anodyne substitute for the reality and is designed to allow the disruptors to avoid facing up to the human consequences of their actions. Disruption sounds vaguely progressive because we all know change is upsetting but usually comes with benefits. And those benefits, as the right wing economists constantly lecture us, have accumulated into lashings of prosperity for even the lowest of workers. How many times are we told that even the worst paid contemporary employee is swimming in a sea of riches that the kings of yore could only dream of?

This is supposed to make us all feel good. It is supposed to stiffen our spines against evils of collective angst about poverty. The right wingers hector us with sermons about the current cornucopia, and that it is all a result of the magic of markets and the power of disruption. To heck, they say, with deploying the government in aid of those affected. Let them get educated. That’s the future of work. Getting educated.

Except, naturally, they haven’t yet explained how a midlife worker writhing under the benefits of disruptive displacement would actually afford to get educated. Presumably the market magic will figure that out.

Possibly.

Sometime.

Disruption has seeped so deeply into the lexicon of the libertarian technology freaks that they throw it about happily. They wear it as a badge. They seek to throw people out of work in the name of disruption. Why? Because the business school and right wing economic elite have declared it a good thing. The management consultants are giddy over disruption. Entire sub-industries have emerged to measure, account for, and glorify disruption. The only thing missing, to my limited knowledge, is a futures market in disruption. Can it be far off?

That boulder rumbling down towards us is a hugely good thing.

Seriously.

Don’t be a Luddite and resist. Embrace the heady air of disruption instead.

Our Karen Harris of Bain drones on:

“We can stipulate that given human history and adaptability, we can have a phenomenal future, but transitions are always challenging. Given where we are starting today, given inequality, changes in geopolitics, it’s hard to see a turbulent-free transition to this brighter future.” 

Stipulate?

Hang on. This means that the good folk at Bain are telling us that everything’s going to be just dandy. They are certain. How come? Because it was in the past. The future, you see, is a replica of the past when it suits the preferred narrative. Apparently we aren’t disrupting that. Prior epochal changes settled down eventually. So this will too. There will be, apparently, a “phenomenal future”.

That’s if you didn’t get flattened by the boulder.

And if you did? Well, that’s your fault for not getting an education. Smarten up is the message. Smarten up. Or get crushed.

The key in this choice is that you have no choice. What the disruptors desperately want to avoid is that we realize we do have a choice. There’s this thing called democracy. And we can use it to fight back.

For starters we should slap a great big tax on disruptive technologies to finance mass education.

Listen to the howls of opposition. No! A tax would penalize progress. It would stop civilization in its tracks. Heck it might even slow down the down-pouring of all that disruptive technology.

You know, like the Uber cars that are choking our cities, ruining public transportation, and raising pollution. Or the Facebook advertising frenzy based on the insinuation of technologic oversight of our every move.

You know. That kind of disruptive progress.

Mind the boulder!

Yes, I mind the boulder.