9 ms·

"many of our more tedious jobs won't need humans to do them" We live in such a warped society here in North America. Whatever happened to pride in craftsmansh

by plg 12y ago

"many of our more tedious jobs won't need humans to do them" We live in such a warped society here in North America. Whatever happened to pride in craftsmanship, pride in an honest day's work, pride in contributing to the community? I bet there will be (perhaps google will lead with this) driverless taxis soon, because after all "who wants to drive a taxi around all day?". Go to Japan. Get in a Japanese taxi. You will see someone who takes the utmost pride in their appearance, their interaction with the customer, the state of the car, the ride, etc etc. It is an experience, to say the least. I believe there is value in that... both to the community and to the individual. Somehow in North America we have convinced ourselves that some jobs are "beneath us" (and I'm not just talking about taxi driving here). It's puzzling to me and it doesn't have to be that way.

rosser 12y ago
Somehow in North America we have convinced ourselves that some jobs are "beneath us"... I'm sorry, but there are kinds of labor that are "beneath" human beings. We don't yet live in a world where people don't have to do those things, but that doesn't change one whit the fact that some basic, minimum level of human dignity, and some of the kinds of work humans have to do are fundamentally incompatible.
- plg 12y ago
  sure I agree with you there... but I guess my point is that our threshold for being "beneath" us is presently way too high (at least in north america)
- sciguy77 12y ago
  I think the OP was talking more about woodworkers and other craftsmen than poop-shovelers and toilet cleaners.
unicornporn 12y ago
> Whatever happened to pride in craftsmanship, pride in an honest day's work, pride in contributing to the community? I'd say there's often better ways to contribute to a community than by selling something. Help your sick neighbor walk the dog or start a study circle and learn how to grow vegetables and take care hens. I'd like to see a society where we pursue our dreams, even if the dream life isn't an accelerating career. Since 1930 productivity in my home country Sweden has increased fivefold, mainly due to technical achievements. Does that mean that we work 20% of the time we did then? No it does not. Wealth has increased of course since the 1930s, and perhaps we want a higher material standard. But also consider than since the 1970s productivity in Sweden has doubled. Does that mean we work 4 hour days instead of 8 hour days now? No, of course not. Instead, since the 1970s we work 100 hours more each year. As a society i feel that we should be using the technical achievements to give us more time for the things and the people that we love. Is that too much to ask for?
eli_gottlieb 12y ago
>Go to Japan. Get in a Japanese taxi. You will see someone who takes the utmost pride in their appearance, their interaction with the customer, the state of the car, the ride, etc etc. No, what you will see is someone who faces extreme social and economic pressure to conform to the image of taking the utmost pride in his appearance, his car's cleanliness, good customer service, etc. I have almost no doubts that he never wanted to be a taxi-driver when he was growing up. It's not for nothing that Japan is one of the world's capitals of clinical depression: the nail that sticks up gets hammered down.
- pliny 12y ago
  Why does it matter what he wanted to do growing up? Since when do we value the judgement of children? People can be passionate about work that seems menial or degrading, he might not have dreamed of being a taxi driver as a child but he's capable of appreciating his current employment as a taxi driver.
  - EdwardDiego 12y ago
    > Why does it matter what he wanted to do growing up? Since when do we value the judgement of children? I wanted to be a scientist when I was growing up, a biochemist. I'm not, but a few friends are, and they all sing from the same song-sheet - "There's so few science jobs in our country, and they're all underpaid, and academia is not much fun either". An example, my brother has a chemistry degree, the only job he could find with it was processing film badge dosimeters - which involved taking the film out of a box, putting it in a machine, and writing down the batch number. It could've been easily automated, except it was cheaper to hire two science grads to do it. Shows what an eight year old knows about career paths.
  - eli_gottlieb 12y ago
    > Why does it matter what he wanted to do growing up? Since when do we value the judgement of children? People are children at age 18 now? I find interesting the dichotomy between how we treat 17-year-old "children" and how we treat 19-year-old "adults". The 17-year-old gets told: work hard for your dreams, and never be ashamed. The 19-year-old gets told: shut the fuck up and get back to work if you want to make rent this month. What separates them? Two years.
dlp211 12y ago
But you can't just compare Japanese taxi drivers to say NYC taxi drivers. Not without justifying the comparison. Now I have never taken a taxi in either city, so I can't even compare the experience myself, but, what does it take to be a taxi driver in NYC vs Japan? What do the companies that hire said taxi drivers pay in comparison to purchasing power? What is the difference in the city layouts that the drivers are working in, not just the physical roads, but congestion, road work, etc? Let's also consider that Japan has for all intents and purposes, no immigration, while the US has massive amounts of immigration. This lack of immigration, combined with normal customs surrounding Japanese culture, eg: work ethic, honor, etc, all contribute to the experience.
coderzach 12y ago
I bet there will be farms and domesticated animals soon, because after all "who wants to hunt and forage all day?". Go to any small tribe. Follow a hunting party. You will see someone who takes the utmost pride in their hunting skill, their ability to track animals, the sharpness of their spear, etc etc. It is an experience, to say the least. I believe there is value in that... both to the community and to the individual. It's called progress. If you want to do these things you absolutely can. People today hunt for sport, should we destroy all farms because hunting is "an honest day's work"? No. If people in the future want to drive taxis for enjoyment, great. But that doesn't mean that we should try to halt progress, so taxi drivers feel better about the objective usefulness of their work.
learc83 12y ago
>Somehow in North America we have convinced ourselves that some jobs are "beneath us" (and I'm not just talking about taxi driving here). It's puzzling to me and it doesn't have to be that way. Some jobs are beneath humans. It doesn't mean that you shouldn't try to take pride in your work, but when your company does their best to make you function like a robot, taking pride in your work is difficult. Think about it this way: I run my own burger shop I get up every day and think: "Today I'm going to make the best hamburger that every was!" I proceed to make the best hamburger I can, and I take pride in my work. Now imagine I work at McDonald's/Wendy's/Burger King. I wake up thinking the same thing but then I remember: "Oh yeah my job isn't to make the best damn hamburger that every was. My job is to make the exact same hamburger as every other employee at every other store in the country with no creative input whatsoever." The problem is that in many modern jobs the goal is for the employee to function like a robot. No creativity or autonomy allowed. These kind of jobs are inherently unfulfilling. Humans need creative outlets and autonomy to be happy.
- EdwardDiego 12y ago
  You're spot on. Work is so much more meaningful when you are allowed to influence your workplace. I work in online advertising, hardly the most glamorous market, I'm not exactly sequencing genomes to cure diseases - but my work is meaningful to me because we have so much control over how we work, and how we treat our employees.
  - noname123 12y ago
    Sequencing genome like AdTech can be just as mindless and soul-sucking. The internal politics of a pharma/academia is brutal because the average timeline of a drug from inception to market is about 15 years, lack of feedback leads people bickering over the least important things. Once you get past the initial rush of using the tools and understanding the theory of Bioinformatics, the work is eerily similar to data mining for marketing profiles and writing copies for unnecessary consumer products. People and work environment trumps what you actually do.
    - 12y ago
sciguy77 12y ago
To add to your (very good) point, a friend in Copenhagen told me about a German restaurant without waiters (possibly this one: http://www.flixxy.com/high-tech-restaurant.htm http://www.flixxy.com/high-tech-restaurant.htm). Food is ordered on iPads and served through some sort of automated rail system. The owner anticipated starting a chain, but was surprised to find that business wasn't doing as well as anticipated. It turns out people like interacting with waiters, perhaps in the way people in Japan get like the taxi experience there. Factory workers may be replaced by robots, but service jobs? I'm not so sure.
platz 12y ago
Some of us have realized that the puritan heritage has not always been the most beneficial in the modern world.
_random_ 12y ago
Who cares about taxi drivers' pride, when the journey could be much cheaper and safer? I bet robo-taxi would stop for pedestrians to cross as well. And of course it will be a while before robots could rape or rob someone. Also they don't strike.

by plg 12y ago

rosser 12y ago

Somehow in North America we have convinced ourselves that some jobs are "beneath us"... I'm sorry, but there are kinds of labor that are "beneath" human beings. We don't yet live in a world where people don't have to do those things, but that doesn't change one whit the fact that some basic, minimum level of human dignity, and some of the kinds of work humans have to do are fundamentally incompatible.

plg 12y ago
sure I agree with you there... but I guess my point is that our threshold for being "beneath" us is presently way too high (at least in north america)
sciguy77 12y ago
I think the OP was talking more about woodworkers and other craftsmen than poop-shovelers and toilet cleaners.

unicornporn 12y ago

> Whatever happened to pride in craftsmanship, pride in an honest day's work, pride in contributing to the community? I'd say there's often better ways to contribute to a community than by selling something. Help your sick neighbor walk the dog or start a study circle and learn how to grow vegetables and take care hens. I'd like to see a society where we pursue our dreams, even if the dream life isn't an accelerating career. Since 1930 productivity in my home country Sweden has increased fivefold, mainly due to technical achievements. Does that mean that we work 20% of the time we did then? No it does not. Wealth has increased of course since the 1930s, and perhaps we want a higher material standard. But also consider than since the 1970s productivity in Sweden has doubled. Does that mean we work 4 hour days instead of 8 hour days now? No, of course not. Instead, since the 1970s we work 100 hours more each year. As a society i feel that we should be using the technical achievements to give us more time for the things and the people that we love. Is that too much to ask for?

eli_gottlieb 12y ago

>Go to Japan. Get in a Japanese taxi. You will see someone who takes the utmost pride in their appearance, their interaction with the customer, the state of the car, the ride, etc etc. No, what you will see is someone who faces extreme social and economic pressure to conform to the image of taking the utmost pride in his appearance, his car's cleanliness, good customer service, etc. I have almost no doubts that he never wanted to be a taxi-driver when he was growing up. It's not for nothing that Japan is one of the world's capitals of clinical depression: the nail that sticks up gets hammered down.

pliny 12y ago
Why does it matter what he wanted to do growing up? Since when do we value the judgement of children? People can be passionate about work that seems menial or degrading, he might not have dreamed of being a taxi driver as a child but he's capable of appreciating his current employment as a taxi driver.
- EdwardDiego 12y ago
  > Why does it matter what he wanted to do growing up? Since when do we value the judgement of children? I wanted to be a scientist when I was growing up, a biochemist. I'm not, but a few friends are, and they all sing from the same song-sheet - "There's so few science jobs in our country, and they're all underpaid, and academia is not much fun either". An example, my brother has a chemistry degree, the only job he could find with it was processing film badge dosimeters - which involved taking the film out of a box, putting it in a machine, and writing down the batch number. It could've been easily automated, except it was cheaper to hire two science grads to do it. Shows what an eight year old knows about career paths.
- eli_gottlieb 12y ago
  > Why does it matter what he wanted to do growing up? Since when do we value the judgement of children? People are children at age 18 now? I find interesting the dichotomy between how we treat 17-year-old "children" and how we treat 19-year-old "adults". The 17-year-old gets told: work hard for your dreams, and never be ashamed. The 19-year-old gets told: shut the fuck up and get back to work if you want to make rent this month. What separates them? Two years.

dlp211 12y ago

But you can't just compare Japanese taxi drivers to say NYC taxi drivers. Not without justifying the comparison. Now I have never taken a taxi in either city, so I can't even compare the experience myself, but, what does it take to be a taxi driver in NYC vs Japan? What do the companies that hire said taxi drivers pay in comparison to purchasing power? What is the difference in the city layouts that the drivers are working in, not just the physical roads, but congestion, road work, etc? Let's also consider that Japan has for all intents and purposes, no immigration, while the US has massive amounts of immigration. This lack of immigration, combined with normal customs surrounding Japanese culture, eg: work ethic, honor, etc, all contribute to the experience.

coderzach 12y ago

I bet there will be farms and domesticated animals soon, because after all "who wants to hunt and forage all day?". Go to any small tribe. Follow a hunting party. You will see someone who takes the utmost pride in their hunting skill, their ability to track animals, the sharpness of their spear, etc etc. It is an experience, to say the least. I believe there is value in that... both to the community and to the individual. It's called progress. If you want to do these things you absolutely can. People today hunt for sport, should we destroy all farms because hunting is "an honest day's work"? No. If people in the future want to drive taxis for enjoyment, great. But that doesn't mean that we should try to halt progress, so taxi drivers feel better about the objective usefulness of their work.

learc83 12y ago

>Somehow in North America we have convinced ourselves that some jobs are "beneath us" (and I'm not just talking about taxi driving here). It's puzzling to me and it doesn't have to be that way. Some jobs are beneath humans. It doesn't mean that you shouldn't try to take pride in your work, but when your company does their best to make you function like a robot, taking pride in your work is difficult. Think about it this way: I run my own burger shop I get up every day and think: "Today I'm going to make the best hamburger that every was!" I proceed to make the best hamburger I can, and I take pride in my work. Now imagine I work at McDonald's/Wendy's/Burger King. I wake up thinking the same thing but then I remember: "Oh yeah my job isn't to make the best damn hamburger that every was. My job is to make the exact same hamburger as every other employee at every other store in the country with no creative input whatsoever." The problem is that in many modern jobs the goal is for the employee to function like a robot. No creativity or autonomy allowed. These kind of jobs are inherently unfulfilling. Humans need creative outlets and autonomy to be happy.

EdwardDiego 12y ago
You're spot on. Work is so much more meaningful when you are allowed to influence your workplace. I work in online advertising, hardly the most glamorous market, I'm not exactly sequencing genomes to cure diseases - but my work is meaningful to me because we have so much control over how we work, and how we treat our employees.
- noname123 12y ago
  Sequencing genome like AdTech can be just as mindless and soul-sucking. The internal politics of a pharma/academia is brutal because the average timeline of a drug from inception to market is about 15 years, lack of feedback leads people bickering over the least important things. Once you get past the initial rush of using the tools and understanding the theory of Bioinformatics, the work is eerily similar to data mining for marketing profiles and writing copies for unnecessary consumer products. People and work environment trumps what you actually do.
  - 12y ago

sciguy77 12y ago

To add to your (very good) point, a friend in Copenhagen told me about a German restaurant without waiters (possibly this one: http://www.flixxy.com/high-tech-restaurant.htm http://www.flixxy.com/high-tech-restaurant.htm). Food is ordered on iPads and served through some sort of automated rail system. The owner anticipated starting a chain, but was surprised to find that business wasn't doing as well as anticipated. It turns out people like interacting with waiters, perhaps in the way people in Japan get like the taxi experience there. Factory workers may be replaced by robots, but service jobs? I'm not so sure.

platz 12y ago

Some of us have realized that the puritan heritage has not always been the most beneficial in the modern world.

_random_ 12y ago

Who cares about taxi drivers' pride, when the journey could be much cheaper and safer? I bet robo-taxi would stop for pedestrians to cross as well. And of course it will be a while before robots could rape or rob someone. Also they don't strike.