23 March 2017
Slaves of the Machine
Robots don’t take our work – they just ensure we don’t get paid for it.
by Neil Tidmarsh
It’s even worse than we thought. Machines are out to destroy our jobs, but that isn’t all. Once they succeed, we aren’t even free to romp in a brave new time-rich world of leisure. Because they’re still making us do the work. But unpaid. As customers, not workers.
Think about it. Once upon a time you’d go to a supermarket, fill up your basket, and take it to a human being at check-out. He or she would unload your basket, ring up each item and pack it in a bag for you, while you enjoyed a few idle moments of pleasant anticipation dreaming about the chocolate/cake/beer you were going to attack as soon as you got it home from the shop. But these days you take your basket to an automated check-out. And who does the check-out work now? Who unpacks the basket? Who rings up each item? Who packs everything in bags? Not a check-out boy or girl any longer. But not the machine, either, that’s for sure. Then who? YOU, dear reader! And ME! The customer! The machine hasn’t replaced the paid employee – the unpaid customer has replaced the paid employee. That’s the cunning, sinister brilliance of today’s automated world. Much of the work is still being done by human beings, but the work is no longer paid.
Even my local library has been automated. Librarians no longer check books in and out. But neither do the machines, strictly speaking – the borrower does, by going through the processes which a librarian would otherwise follow; the machine merely enables the borrower to do it for himself or herself. Is this liberating? No. The time and effort hasn’t been removed from a human being and undertaken by a machine – a machine has simply passed the time and effort on to another human being. The machine merely records and stores information.
As the world becomes more and more automated, I find that it’s consuming more and more of my time and energy, not less. This paradox puzzled me for some time, until one day I found myself sitting at my computer, half-way through a transaction which was mysteriously taking much longer than it would have done if I’d been face-to-face with a fully trained human employee, and snarling at the front-end of whatever business or organisation I was trying to pay money to. “I’m a customer, not an employee. So why do I appear to be doing your work for you? Shouldn’t you be paying me?” And the penny dropped.
A few random examples just from this last week. I bought cinema tickets on-line at the weekend. Sure, it’s more convenient doing this in the comfort of your own home than in the actual cinema, there are no queues and no danger of turning up at the cinema to find that the screening you want has sold out. But it’s not necessarily easier or quicker (indeed it can be considerably slower if you have to open an on-line ‘account’, which many theatres and cinemas encourage you to do these days, so they can harvest the personal details so valuable to them for marketing purposes), because you are to all intents and purposes doing the work which the employee at the box office would otherwise have to do; processing the order, choosing the seats, taking payment, even printing out the tickets, etc. It’s not as if they pay you to do the work – on the contrary, you have to pay them – I was charged a booking-fee.
A day or two later I took a parcel to the post office. As ever, the queues for human service were long, so I went to a self-service machine and did the post office work myself. But I was surprised when the machine asked me to type in the full address. I was worried that I might have pressed a button asking for recorded delivery or something by mistake. No, a human employee assured me, no mistake; the machine demands that the customer types in the full address so it can be printed out on the stamp as one of those machine-readable chequer-board label things. So the mail can be sorted by machine, not man. Once again, an efficient (or do I mean economical) employee-light system demands that the customer takes on unpaid labour.
The next day I had a letter from Congestion Charging London telling me that my account as a resident needed renewing, and I could now do it on-line. Ok. I logged on, resigned to doing their in-put work for them. But I then encountered another factor which I now realise we will all have to resign ourselves to as well. Machines, being only as good or clever or efficient as the human beings who build them or program them or input data into them, will inevitably make mistakes from time to time – and the more automated the system, the more difficult it is for the customer to find someone to correct the mistake, the more time and energy the customer will have to spend chasing a solution. The letter (which was standard, and thus presumably machine-generated) suggested that up to two types of document might have to be attached to the application, one of which was obligatory, the other optional. But the web-site itself insisted that both were obligatory. A contradiction, an impasse. What to do? I won’t bore you with the answer to that question, but those of you who have wrestled with Congestion Charging’s many-levelled, many-optioned automated phone menus will know that that was the least of it.
And the day after that, I received another automatically-generated letter, this time from the Inland Revenue, telling me that I was going to be fined because I hadn’t filed my self-assessment tax return on time. But I had. And I had an automatically-generated e-mail from the inland revenue to confirm it, thanking me as warmly as a machine could for inputting my data directly into their data-base and thus saving them the expense of employing a clerk to do it for them. So, another contradiction, another impasse; once again I was caught between two different machines; once again I was faced with a long trek across a desert of many-levelled, many optioned automated phone menus. (But significantly, and to be fair to the inland revenue, when I did get through to a human being, she tackled the problem as efficiently and swiftly and pleasantly as you could wish).
I’m going away next week, flying to the other side of the Atlantic (which is why I’m writing this piece early, and why it’s a Feature this week and not a Comment). And I’m terrified. Do you know why? I got used to checking in on-line some time ago (though the idea and the purpose of it still mystifies me). But the last time I flew, the automated process had been taken one step further; having checked-in on-line some days before, I then completed the whole check-in process at the airport without any paid employee taking part – machines enabled me to do the rest of the work myself, i.e. weigh my luggage, print off destination stickers, stick them on my bags, dump them on the conveyor belt, print off a boarding pass. So, what is the next logical step, automation-wise?
I’m having nightmares about it already.
I check-in online, I turn up at the airport, I do the check-in staff’s work for them, and who then does a machine demand I replace?
The pilot.
“Come on, Mr Tidmarsh” the machine insists. “After all, the whole process has been pretty well automated for some years now. Digital flight management systems – computers – fly the plane for most of the trip. The pilot only has to handle the basic controls for take off and landing. And that’s easy. See that stick there? Pull it up for take-off, push it down for landing. That’s all there is to it. Simple. Come on, you can do it…”
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