No shitty work

Ethan Marcotte writes about the Hollywood strikes and what lessons they have for the tech industry. In particular, he notes that “there’s no such thing as ‘automation-proof’ labor.” What I notice in the protests of the writers and actors isn’t so much the movie-myth of robots taking jobs as it is something several orders of magnitude more frightening: jobs deskilled until the people doing them are tasked with cleaning up after sloppy and incoherent robots, whose abilities tap out at remixing the workers’ prior efforts. I think the fight here isn’t so much about less work as it is about preventing shitty work from becoming the norm. In that vein, every tech worker should be aligned with not only the actors and writers, but the folks who have already been tasked with the horrendous work of trying to make chatbots seem like they aren’t psychopaths. This is, as Marcotte notes, an existential moment for all of us. His book, You Deserve a Tech Union is out now and highly recommended.