An Ill and Gilded Wind

I was on my way back from picking up groceries when it caught my eye.

It was a golden car, a little stumpy and awkwardly proportioned, as if an otherwise sleek sedan had been compressed front to back.  The golden wheel covers gave it a cartoonish appearance, as if the wheels were wildly outsided.   As I sat stopped at a traffic light, this peculiar car crossed in front of me, turning left.  The driver, a young casually dressed Black man, was sitting in the driver's seat, looking down at a tablet.  Not once did he bother to look up.

His inattention to his driving didn't matter or alarm me, because I recognized the car.  It was a self-driving Cybercab, the latest product from Tesla.  They're being beta-tested now in a number of metropolitan areas, and might be on our streets by next year.  The final version will lack a couple of things we generally expect in a car:  1) A steering wheel and 2) Pedals.  They'll be hailable through a Tesla Robotaxi app, which will send a robot car to your house to drive you wherever you wish to go.  Or perhaps they'll just be your car, given that the regulatory environment now is a little spotty.

Full Self Driving is actually fairly sophisticated, and given the startling incompetence of many human drivers, I'm not quite as alarmed about the prospect of machine mind driver safety as some.  With that said, the reason I love driving is the act of driving, and the idea of cars that require no meaningful engagement or input from me just feels drab and joyless.  Yay.  More time to stare at our phones.

More on my mind is this: there are roughly two million Americans who rely on ridesharing or taxi-driving for their livelihoods.  Tesla's stated goal is to produce two million of these gleaming bot-taxis every single year, doing to ride sharing what ride sharing did to cab-driving.

Back in the day, I drove a Falls Church Yellow Cab for a while, having gone through the relatively demanding process of getting my golden Fairfax county "hacker's" license.  Note:  this was before GPS, before cell phones, back when you found your way to pick up a fare by reading a map.  Was it the best job ever?  It was not.  But it paid the bills for a season.

Normally, I'm psyched when I encounter a new car, particularly one that's...for now...rare.  It's like seeing your first Model T, or your first VW Bug.  

But as the quants, tech-bros, and equity-class come up with more and more ways to take work away from us, while their faux-moralist political enablers hypocritically curse the unemployed for their laziness, this brazen AI chariot arrives like an ill and gilded wind.

Innovation and Jobs

One of the core themes in this last week's State of the Union address was the call to innovate and create our way out of the sinkhole into which City-On-A-Hill-America is slowly sliding.  The idea, I think, is pretty classically American.  We grow by seeking the new frontier, chasing our Manifest Destiny right up until we prang into the Pacific.  We improve our lives through new products and pharmaceuticals that suddenly make everything better. 

But I just don't buy it.  Not any more.  Innovation is no longer the engine by which American jobs are created.

Nifty new electronic gizmos and doodads to clutter our rec room?  Sure.  Remedies for ailments we never knew we had?  Absosmurfly.  But jobs?  No.  I don't see it, not in the context of our globalized capitalistic economy.

Let me offer up three examples from innovative, successful American firms.  If you had to think about what American company would be consistently described as cutting edge, profitable, and successful, Apple would be at or near the top of every list.  While not without flaws, the company has created products that are aesthetically pleasing, boundary shifting, and that people want to buy.  My own home has a rather large number of iPods and iPhones and iPads, and I'm composing this on an iMac.

Apple is an innovator.  But jobs?  Yeah, his name may be Jobs, but they mostly ain't American.  Apple maintains a stable of about 25,000 American employees, in design, engineering, retail, and corporate.  But when it comes to actually making the iPods and iPhones and iPads and iMacs, that gets done by  Chinese subsidiary Foxconn, which employs 250,000 workers to make products for Apple.  A generation ago, those would have been a quarter-million American wage-earners, enough to fully fuel the economy of a mid-sized city.  Now?  Nope.

Globalized industry is a game changer.

That painfully neglected reality was reinforced recently by an announcement from Evergreen Solar.  That company, in the event you haven't heard of it, is the third largest manufacturer of solar panels in the United States.  Or rather, it was.  After many millions of dollars of public funds and tax breaks were given to it's leadership to develop renewable energy production, the suits did what suits are obligated to do.  They chose to remain competitive in a global economy.  Evergreen Solar is folding up shop in the U.S., and will now produce solar panels only in it's new Chinese factory.

In a globalized economy, where production chases the region with the lowest possible wages, innovation does not mean jobs.  Not here, anyway.

But innovation poses another threat.  It takes jobs away, particularly as more efficiencies are discovered in production.  Take, for instance, Amazon, another successful innovator.  I buy stuff from Amazon plenty, and the success of their Kindle ebook platform has surprised me...I still like paper for my bookish moments...but I'm apparently now in the minority.  Amazon recently announced that sales of books on the Kindle now exceeded their sales of paperback books.  That's good for the trees, but it's an ill wind if you work in retail.  Virtualized products, be they books or videos or games, well, they don't require bricks and mortar or paper.  If the people who read are increasingly content to read electronically (as you are, dear reader), then there's no need for book stores.  The scores of I.T. jobs that are required to maintain that business model don't counterbalance the tens of thousands of jobs that will be lost as Borders and Barnes and Nobles start to fold.

I wish I could share Obama's optimism about innovation and jobs.  But I think that industrial-era horse has left the stable.

Workin' Hard, Or Hardly Workin'

Today, I spent most of my day not working. The majority of the hours I put in had nothing to do with work at all. Yeah, it started recognizably enough. I wrote up the weekly email newsletter for the church, edited it, and sent it out to our little circulation list. I then edited the circulation list. Then, I pulled together our bulletin. And updated the church sign. And did some prep work for VBS. And ordered some emergency lights that a recent visit from the fire marshal made necessary. I met with our building manager and my clerk of session. That was all very workey. But it only carried me through noon.

At noon, I got on my motorcycle and rode north. It was hot, but so long as I was moving, things were fine. Pleasant, even. At 1:45 pm, I arrived at the state psychiatric hospital where the young man who was arrested outside our church two weeks ago is being treated. He was pleased to see me, which one can't always say about folks who you've gotten arrested and detained in an institution. But then, he gets few visitors, so I did break the monotony. I spent the next hour with him, listening as he described his...um...esoteric worldview. He's a bright guy, and our conversation veered wildly from some fairly mundane stuff to long talks that reflected his fractured mental state.

At 2:45 pm, I begged his leave, got back on my bike, and motored homeward through the afternoon haze. The Beltway, she was not kind to me this evening.

Pretty much all of my afternoon was spent doing something that, from an organizational standpoint, was no more constructive than playing Bloons. Go, Dart Monkey, Go!

I wasn't attending to membership, or to the needs of the facility. I wasn't doing development...sorry...stewardship work. I wasn't developing a prospective new member. I wasn't getting new pledge units...sorry...members. By the baseline standards of measuring the organizational health of a church as a human institution, what I was doing served no conceivable purpose.

And yet it was what needed to be done, in an Imitatio Christi, dubyadubyajaydee sorta way. From conversations I've had about it with members and leaders of the church, it was what everyone eagerly wanted me to do. Even though it served no organizational purpose, it was the thing the pastor of my church...meaning me... needed to be doing. Which is how it should be. How it must be, for church to be church and not just another institution.

It reminded me again of how when I sometimes say to my kids "I'm going to work," that isn't really what I'm doing at all.

Productivity and Progress

This morning, as I chatted with a couple of moms at my youngest son's bus stop, they were talking about the struggles that one of them was having with the whole "going back to work" thing. With a kindergardener and a preschooler, there was a job opening that she was struggling with. Should she take it? Should she schlep across the metro area for hours every day to go to a part-time job...one that might sprawl out into a full time job? Her life was already full of kids and household and pets, and the prospect of cramming work into it as well seemed intimidating. Yet it felt almost compulsory.

I'd actually been thinking about that over the last few weeks, particularly as more reports have come out describing the job market as the equivalent of a stagnant, algae covered economic pool. As workers are driven to be more and more productive in order to hold on to jobs, and businesses streamline their processes to make themselves more efficient and competitive, those pressures would seem to lend themselves to...well...fewer jobs. Or fewer total hours worked, rather. Yet we continue to scramble to produce more so that we can buy more.

Back when my parents were in the workforce, the vision of the American workplace of the future was rather different. Increased productivity would result in...more leisure. More taking it easy. If advances in technology allow you to produce in four hours of work what used to take eight hours, then you don't put in twelve hours of work to produce three times as much. The sane thing to do would be to take the remaining four hours and go for a nice walk in the woods. Or play with your kids. Or find some unmet need in the community and volunteer your time to help meet it.

We haven't done that.

Instead, particularly in my area, not only do we work longer, we now are ALL expected to work longer. Looking up and down my street of humble ramblers, I see households that used to only require one full time income to maintain. In those houses, there are now families that struggle to make ends meet on two full time salaries. The stressors that this produces are considerable. They take considerable toll on relationships, on parenting, and on marriages. Heck, on our happiness as human beings. We fret, and we struggle, and we worry, and things come apart.

So...why are we going backwards here? Why, if we are so much more productive, are we so incapable of living lives in balance? It all depends on how you define progress, I guess.