An odd friend of mine told me several years as we were discussing about labor marketplaces - and whether the future holds a work-supply or work-demand challenge - that the problem is actually quite different.
He gave me a challenge :
I can give you as much money as you want (he meant it) to create jobs for them in the OD marketplace - but with one simple condition. The workers that get hired should get the impression that these are real jobs. You will soon realize that solving that problem in a scalable way is at least as hard as finding money in a scalable way.
The discussion continued with me saying things like
- I will create jobs to translate every single wikipedia page in every other language
- I will hire people to write ficticious jobs and then hire people to do them
- I would post all generated issues in github as projects
etc..
He had a (possibly questionable) way to dismiss all of them based on the following logic :
- the jobs produce no actual value in which case - people soon or later figure out that their jobs are pointless - at which point he would either say I violate the assumption above or he would say that the effort that would need to be added to confirm that a pointless job is actually well done is impossible or not scalable
- the jobs produce actual value - in that case he would try to prove that the amount of value would decline over time - after million tasks/million people the value is too small - so he would use the prior argument (pointless jobs) or that I have no scalable model to expand the solution for the society as a whole.
I think at the background of my odd-friend mind lied the idea that we are moving towards a matrix-like dystopia - where necessary resources (food,shelter,entertainment,health) are available for all - practically for free - as a result of the work of a tiny% of the earth's population (the "smarter" 1-10% of us) - still the only way to keep the planet in balance is to make the vast majority of people maintain the illusion that what they do for living is an important/necessary part of the value generation and attempt to attribute some reward <-> effort model to keep them do whatever they do - otherwise everybody wakes up and realizes that they are in a sham world build by others and placed in front of their own eyes - and the system/society unfolds.
What brought that chain of thought - reading the title Why we should give free money to everyone of this HN article... The article is on a different topic - but is still relevant - welfare / workfare are incarnations of the same problem as the one that my friend talks about.
He gave me a challenge :
I can give you as much money as you want (he meant it) to create jobs for them in the OD marketplace - but with one simple condition. The workers that get hired should get the impression that these are real jobs. You will soon realize that solving that problem in a scalable way is at least as hard as finding money in a scalable way.
The discussion continued with me saying things like
- I will create jobs to translate every single wikipedia page in every other language
- I will hire people to write ficticious jobs and then hire people to do them
- I would post all generated issues in github as projects
etc..
He had a (possibly questionable) way to dismiss all of them based on the following logic :
- the jobs produce no actual value in which case - people soon or later figure out that their jobs are pointless - at which point he would either say I violate the assumption above or he would say that the effort that would need to be added to confirm that a pointless job is actually well done is impossible or not scalable
- the jobs produce actual value - in that case he would try to prove that the amount of value would decline over time - after million tasks/million people the value is too small - so he would use the prior argument (pointless jobs) or that I have no scalable model to expand the solution for the society as a whole.
I think at the background of my odd-friend mind lied the idea that we are moving towards a matrix-like dystopia - where necessary resources (food,shelter,entertainment,health) are available for all - practically for free - as a result of the work of a tiny% of the earth's population (the "smarter" 1-10% of us) - still the only way to keep the planet in balance is to make the vast majority of people maintain the illusion that what they do for living is an important/necessary part of the value generation and attempt to attribute some reward <-> effort model to keep them do whatever they do - otherwise everybody wakes up and realizes that they are in a sham world build by others and placed in front of their own eyes - and the system/society unfolds.
What brought that chain of thought - reading the title Why we should give free money to everyone of this HN article... The article is on a different topic - but is still relevant - welfare / workfare are incarnations of the same problem as the one that my friend talks about.
I think your "odd friend" might have made a few mistakes there.
ReplyDelete1. In the "challenge" part he overestimated the human tendency to question the value of their work. All the evidence suggests the contrary - that humans are more likely to come up with justifications for whatever they do, even it may seem meaningless to someone else. This, of course, extends to the "smartest 1-10%" as well.
2. The whole notion of certain work having intrinsic value and other work being "just noise" may be a reflection of a one-dimensional, utilitarian view of the human society. In that view, once everyone has certain basic requirements met due to the technological progress, little value remains to be generated. But this neglects such rich, potentially boundless and relatively unexplored venues for added value as entertainment (in the broadest sense), personal growth, profound societal changes etc. It also largely ignores the local and physical aspects (i.e. in the global world where everybody has cheap/free food, is the work of a local baker really meaningless?..)
1. nice point... you are right
ReplyDelete2. Answering to this argument... is worth a post on its own..