Employees work at the Pony.ai Inc. office in the Nansha district of Guangzhou, Guangdong Province, China. Domestic and foreign testers are putting cars, buses, trucks and delivery vans through self-driving trials to teach them how to navigate the notoriously congested streets of the world's biggest auto market. Photographer: Qilai Shen/Bloomberg Photo credit: © 2019 Bloomberg Finance LP
© 2019 Bloomberg Finance LPIn reading a recent article on high technology and farming, I began considering how technology has penetrated virtually every aspect of our work culture today changing not only how tasks are accomplished but also the human worker’s role within the larger framework of work. No longer is farming considered a lower-class and unskilled domain, but it is often imbued with as much high tech as the virtual classroom or online baking. Even the way we come into the workforce has become an all-penetrating virtuality of online job searches, data banks and online adverts where little is done through print media as was largely the case even at the end of the 20th century.
The fact is that almost every aspect of most jobs today involve new technology from online job searches to client-acquisition coaches who operate primarily online, our labor has shifted towards the technological no matter the domain. AI (artificial intelligence) has even entered into the medical arena where treatments and diagnosis can be greatly improved through technological intervention. Yet, on the other side of AI are the many humans who make this technology work as their labor often goes unrecognized. Where human labor used to be divided between those who had to wash their hands every night and those who merely had to remove a waistcoat, today these distinctions are becoming more and more indistinguishable.
Italian intellectual, Antonio Gramsci analyzed this division of intellectual labor from that of physical work over a century ago whereby he advocated for the education of workers in order to encourage the development of intellectuals from the working class. Gramsci was fundamentally critical of the ruling capitalist class and of bourgeois hegemony that wielded power over the working class. In short, Gramsci viewed that social norms and cultural values were formulated to the benefit the elite with the working-class reflecting this elevation of bourgeois values and power contingent to their survival.
We are currently witnessing a teasing out of class politics within new technology and labor which mirrors much of the critique that Gramsci leveled a hundred years ago. Now technology is beginning to create a zero-level playing field for human labor across the classes replete with myriad technological interfaces and contributions that have woven together a work culture where labor is assisted by AI, ML (machine learning) and the IoT (internet of things). In short, technology offers the possibility to critique and shift the power that bourgeois hegemony has effected upon the labor processes for all and the links between the political left and this overwhelming political hegemony.
Where job banks are thriving, there are still issues of political hegemony within high tech such that Google is facing an antitrust probe over what many deem to be its “unfair” job search tool and similarly an anti-trust lawsuit launched by PharmacyChecker in response to its having been the focus of a campaign launched by a network of U.S. pharmaceutical companies which are attempting to shutdown Pharmacy Checker among others down from online trading. Where business and employment meet in a burgeoning market of trade and communications, we are witnessing how the very basis of labor is changing today to include even legal challenges to what newer types of labor and technological business models bring to the table.
The reality is that not only have millions of business engaged in online sales, but many have shifted their business model to an online format where many companies today have employed workers to take care of online sales questions from the comfort of their homes. Where some products like document management software used to be unique purchases of a product to be downloaded, today there are more and more companies using the IoT interface where many products are now accessible through the cloud. Even the sales of material products have shifted from the unique format of a one-size-fits-all model to that of a customizable product such that companies like Vivipins and Baladona whereby the potential for hiring employees to do more interesting and unique work instead of the repetitive work of cycling through the exact same product is the direct result of new technology.
Additionally, in today’s workforce, there are many companies which constantly stay in tune with their workers’ and clients’ political and ethical concerns. Edvin Berggren and Sara Le are founders of Finesse Marketing, a Scandinavian marketing agency that helps ethical business owners connect with the right audience using different marketing programs. Berggren and Le tell me, “We endeavor to bring together business savvy with contemporary political and ethical practices and this means working with marketing specialists who have an eye for ethical businesses and practices.” In today’s political climate, the concerns about what materials are bought and sold are as elementary to any business as are the social and political climates in which products are produced or harvested. Such experiments necessarily inflect both the consumer-business model as much as they do the current labor practices. How people are working now incorporates numerous questions about social, economic, and ethical factors, to include working conditions overseas.
As technology is inflecting different types of labor engagement, this is having a knock-on effect in many domains whereby the products being offered are more in sync with political issues like fair trade and #MeToo de-emphasizing the older model of economic gains and labor exploitation. Today we are witnessing the leveling of the playing fields for everything from job contracts to freelance work thanks to new technology. Even beyond this, we are seeing a revolution of how labor is done today largely thanks to technology is making it a reality that blue-collar workers, with the help of exoskeletons being used extensively in construction, are entirely changing the definition of physical labor just as farming is more and more looking like an IT laboratory. The future of tech and labor is right around the corner.
2019-09-12 06:09:39Z
https://www.forbes.com/sites/julianvigo/2019/09/12/the-technology-of-labor-today/
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