8 ms·
The future is emotional
- raspasov 9y agoNon-falsifiable predictions.
- kerkeslager 9y agoIs there a job that doesn't require some emotional intelligence?
- MichaelBurge 9y agoMechanical Turk?
- tomjen3 9y agoSure. Most manufacturing jobs, warehouse stocking jobs, plenty of farm jobs (consistently underrated in terms of salary vs skills).
- skybrian 9y agoFactory worker? (Though for any job, it still helps to get along with people.)
- trendia 9y agoFactory worker? Maybe... but there are a whole lot of conplex social interactions and relationships in the breakroom, far more than people expect.
- dajohnson89 9y agoGiven the number of bosses I've had with near 0 emotional intelligence, software development is one of them.
- kerkeslager 9y agoI've experienced managers like that, but both their careers and their organizations were harmed by their lack of emotional intelligence. I don't think that it is accurate to say software development doesn't require emotional intelligence. It's worth noting that emotional intelligence doesn't mean someone is kind and good. Emotional intelligence can also allow people to be manipulative too. That can be perhaps even more harmful to employees than an emotionally unintelligent manager, but usually such a manager can be very successful and effective for their organization.
- infinity0 9y agoI'm a bit annoyed at the constant background snide and subtle implication of these vague literary articles, that programmers are bad empathetically or emotionally. They use facts such as western programming culture being very male-dominated, and then twist this to imply that males are bad at being empathetic. Firstly the gender ratio of engineers in e.g. Russia is more even, so let's just shoot that one down before continuing. There's a lot of gender imbalance in Western culture as a whole and to imply that most of it is the "fault" of unemotional males is pretty insulting. Often this also accompanied by some implicit value judgement assumption, that they attempt to force onto the programmer. "My values are better than yours". Er, no sorry. If you think a programmer is being unemotional, perhaps you should take a step back and examine whether it is you who are being unempathetic, brushing away someone else's engineering concerns as being less important than your own personal feelings about a topic that you don't have a good knowledge of?
- amelius 9y agoThe problem is that empathy and analytical thinking are to an extent mutually exclusive. See e.g. [1]. [1] https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/10/121030161416.htm https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2012/10/121030161416.h...
- infinity0 9y agoI can't program and play music at the same time either, doesn't mean I'm bad at music.
- symstym 9y agoDid you read the whole article? I don't think it was implying anything negative about tech workers or making value judgements. I am frustrated by some of the same things you are, but I don't think they were present in the article. To me it was saying something pragmatic like "Now that advances in technology are taking care of more and more of our material needs while requiring less labor, there is a relative need/opportunity for workers in roles requiring especially-high emotional skills and endurance". Would you disagree with that?
- EGreg 9y agoIf anything, we will see people preferring a lot less human interaction. People used to gather in salons to hear live music. Today we put earphones on a train to listen to music instead of socializing. If we socialize, we do it with other consumers, not producers. Compare photos of the 50s and now. Everyone was socializing outside. Today they are on fb with the phones mediating. The milkman doesn't come around anymore. The gas station attendant doesn't fill up your car in many states. The Uber driver drops food off and leaves right away. Amazon delivers. We want it globally accessible, accurate, and now. Already you prefer to ask Google than your parents or teachers, and so do they. In the future as AI gets better how do you know people will still want that smiling McDonalds cashier instead of a kiosk? Or the personal touch of a chef instead of a machine that gets the same result every time?
- Apocryphon 9y agoThe use of earphones and iPods is for personal mobile convenience. Live music is still in hot demand as an activity, and in fact one way artists have adapted to loss of revenue from the end of album sales, has been to focus on touring and other events. People socialize with producers all of the time. Twitch streamers, Instagram influencers, YouTube stars- there is hot demand from fans to interact with their internet celebrities. Traditional creators get huge attention from Reddit AMA's. It is true that smartphones have become a massive attention drainer. And automation has created a culture of seeking convenience and availability from machines instead of people whom you know. But your post conflates two different types of human activity- creative, intellectual, entertaining pursuit and logistics-heavy, service work. People will always prefer real people doing the former, until Holodecks really are a thing.
- monksy 9y ago> People socialize with producers all of the time When it's a one-way conversation, that's consuming.
- Apocryphon 9y agoIt's less one-way when live-streamed Q&A's and AMAs are now possible.
- emersonrsantos 9y agoAny sociopath/psychopath can game the emotional intelligence system by appearing to be whatever they feel they need to be, to get what they want, and it's not pretty.
- axhue 9y agoThere is a show called Psycho Pass that directly addresses what you are talking about. It's definitely worth checking out
- chongli 9y agoNo, not any socio/psychopath. Only highly intelligent ones. Average or lower intelligence individuals usually end up in prison. They aren't deterred by threats of punishment so they tend to have serious behavioural problems growing up. It takes a special sort of psychopath to defer rewards in favour of long term success in the absence of the usual punishments associated with child rearing.
- giggles_giggles 9y ago"EQ is not a psychometrically valid concept. Insofar as it is anything (which it isn't) it's the Big Five trait agreeableness, although this depends, as it shouldn't, on which EQ measure is being used (they should all measure THE SAME THING). Agreeable people are compassionate and polite, but they can also be pushovers. Disagreeable people, on average (if they aren't too disagreeable) make better managers, because they are straightforward, don't avoid conflict and cannot be easily manipulated." https://www.quora.com/What-is-more-beneficial-in-life-a-high-EQ-or-IQ https://www.quora.com/What-is-more-beneficial-in-life-a-high...
- rhizome 9y agoStay tuned for the next employment-related thread where multiple people relay advice to "fake it 'til you make it."
- aub3bhat 9y agoYet another article filled with feel-goodery truthiness that cannot be debunked.
- skybrian 9y agoI wonder how this relates to what economists call "cost disease?" As the cost goes down in some industries (through automation or other efficiency improvements), this increases wages in those industries, which spills over into other, traditionally lower-wage industries due to competition for workers, not through efficiency improvements. But despite calling it a "disease," this doesn't necessarily seem like a bad thing. Often they're difficult jobs (high emotional labor), so they maybe they should pay more?
- cstross 9y agoThat's not exactly correct; the real issue with Baumol's Cost Disease isn't that it leads to wages in "traditionally lower-wage industries" — it's that wage competition leads to wage increases in sectors that don't undergo productivity gains. To give an example: medical doctors aren't a low-skill/low-wage profession, but their productivity in crude terms of patients examined per hour appears stagnant — medicine is inherently labour-intensive (although the outcomes of care provided can improve over time as new and better treatments become available). If wages rise in other professionalized sectors that require huge amounts of training due to productivity gains (e.g. among engineers), wages will consequently rise for doctors because doctors and engineers are loosely coupled at source through the training/labour market. TLDR: cost disease isn't about low-wage occupations, it's about pay in occupations that are refractory to performance improvement being coupled to pay in sectors where performance gains are possible via the labour market.
- dredmorbius 9y agoCharlie: the concept is highly analogous to Amdahl's Law, in some regards. The limit to performance increases in parallelisation is limited by the non-parallelisible portion of a process. The limits to productivity increases are limited by the irreducible labour component of a productive process. The other element is that wages represent the provisioning costs of labour, or as Adam Smith puts it, "A man must always live by his work, and his wages must at least be sufficient to maintain him." (Further qualified upwards in subsequent text.) WoN, Book 1, Ch. 8. http://www.gutenberg.org/files/3300/3300-h/3300-h.htm#link2HCH0008 http://www.gutenberg.org/files/3300/3300-h/3300-h.htm#link2H... Which is to say: wages are not defined by productivity, but by the general wage level. What is defined by productivity is instead the quantity demanded of a good. If some quantity of a high-labour good is demanded, then that quantity will pay wages based on the minimum prevailing wage (and if that's a sustainable level: the minimum living wage), plus additional premia for various other factors elevating wages above that floor, as described by Smith in chapter 10 of book 1.
- prodmerc 9y agoWell, of course it is. You don't go rioting in the streets while thinking rationally.
- majewsky 9y agoNot necessarily. There is sufficient precedent to establish that violence is an effective tool for that purpose, when applied in the right way under the right circumstances. Therefore, it can be rational to is violence for political means. (Not advocating for violence here in any way. Just disputing your "while thinking rationally" point. There's actually a longrunning dispute among leftist theorists and philosophers whether violence is an acceptable means of bringing about political change. But the dispute is only about whether it's morally acceptable.)
- Mz 9y agoI really, really, really hate it when they refer to things like taking physical care of the elderly as "emotional labor." Caretaking can have a huge emotional component, but this framing has serious inherent problems. Furthermore, art, fiction and music are things that can do a lot for people emotionally and psychologically, both the makers of such and the consumers. Yet no one ever seems to include those in these ridiculous articles about so-called emotional labor which perhaps should more accurately be termed traditional women's work.
- prairiedogg 9y agoClarifying question: are you referring to emotional labor as labor which is emotionally taxing for the producer, or labor which produces a positive emotional effect on the consumer / receiver?
- skybrian 9y agoWhat are the "serious inherent problems" in calling it emotional labor?
- Mz 9y agoFor one thing, it simultaneously glamorizes and discounts the hard physical labor involved in doing things like cleaning up someone who is playing with their own feces and throwing them at you. For another, it discounts the actual education and intelligence involved in doing a good job of taking proper care of people. For a third, it just reinforces the pink collar ghetto mentality surrounding this kind of work. Perhaps most importantly, it frames it like this is about the laborer having emotional discipline or something. The reality is that feelings come from somewhere and we routinely mix up "love" the noun that describes a feeling and "love" the verb that describes care-taking that meets a high standard. That feeling in one person typically grows out of the hard labor done by another. The person that inspires the feelings is very often treated pretty abusively. They exist to make other people feel good and to hell with their needs or wants, kind of like the recent story titled "My Family's Slave."
- 9y ago