jobs below the API

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You've Been Played: How Corporations, Governments, and Schools Use Games to Control Us All by Adrian Hon

"hyperreality Baudrillard"~20 OR "Baudrillard hyperreality", 4chan, Adam Curtis, Adrian Hon, Airbnb, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Web Services, Astronomia nova, augmented reality, barriers to entry, Bellingcat, Big Tech, bitcoin, bread and circuses, British Empire, buy and hold, call centre, computer vision, conceptual framework, contact tracing, coronavirus, corporate governance, COVID-19, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, David Graeber, David Sedaris, deep learning, delayed gratification, democratizing finance, deplatforming, disinformation, disintermediation, Dogecoin, electronic logging device, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Ethereum, fake news, fiat currency, Filter Bubble, Frederick Winslow Taylor, fulfillment center, Galaxy Zoo, game design, gamification, George Floyd, gig economy, GitHub removed activity streaks, Google Glasses, Hacker News, Hans Moravec, Ian Bogost, independent contractor, index fund, informal economy, Jeff Bezos, job automation, jobs below the API, Johannes Kepler, Kevin Kelly, Kevin Roose, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, knowledge worker, Lewis Mumford, lifelogging, linked data, lockdown, longitudinal study, loss aversion, LuLaRoe, Lyft, Marshall McLuhan, megaproject, meme stock, meta-analysis, Minecraft, moral panic, multilevel marketing, non-fungible token, Ocado, Oculus Rift, One Laptop per Child (OLPC), orbital mechanics / astrodynamics, Parler "social media", passive income, payment for order flow, prisoner's dilemma, QAnon, QR code, quantitative trading / quantitative finance, r/findbostonbombers, replication crisis, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, Ronald Coase, Rubik’s Cube, Salesforce, Satoshi Nakamoto, scientific management, shareholder value, sharing economy, short selling, short squeeze, Silicon Valley, SimCity, Skinner box, spinning jenny, Stanford marshmallow experiment, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, TED Talk, The Nature of the Firm, the scientific method, TikTok, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, Twitter Arab Spring, Tyler Cowen, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, urban planning, warehouse robotics, Whole Earth Catalog, why are manhole covers round?, workplace surveillance

The ultimate cause of any request would be another human, but now the distance to that human could be very, very long. This has led to the notion that jobs exist either above or below the API.87 If you’re an Uber driver, a flight booking agent, or an Amazon warehouse worker, you exist below the API. You might still meet clients and customers in person, but your lasting relationship is not with them. Instead, it’s with the machine that brings those customers to you, tracks your tasks, pays your salary, and ultimately fires you.88 If you have a job above the API, life is very different. You control humans by issuing commands—not face to face, but via APIs that give you unprecedented scale.

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And because APIs necessarily flatten all tasks into a stream of data, you can motivate these humans to work harder and faster via gamification, which helpfully reduces both your management burden and your labour costs. Put simply: if you live above the API, you’re playing the game, and if you live below it, you’re being played. You’re an NPC—a non-player character. Few people live fully above the API. Even though I run my own company, part of my job exists below the API because I’ve answered literally thousands of Zombies, Run! customer emails via our API-enabled online support system, Zendesk. Zendesk doesn’t have any features labelled explicitly as gamification, although a panoply of leaderboards make it impossible to miss which agents have answered the most tickets and garnered the highest “customer satisfaction” ratings.89 When I set up the system, I stopped it from asking customers to rate their experiences with our support team.

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Only startups that claim to become the next Amazon or Uber, by means of APIs and gamification, can attract that capital. Their ability to undercut companies without investment means their impact is far wider than just themselves, even if most of them flame out in a few years. Today, it feels like there are murky forces pushing the entire economy below the API with only a few superexecutives remaining above to pull workers’ strings with gamified control panels. Some argue this all began in the 1960s, long before APIs were a twinkle in the internet’s eye, when management consultancy firms like McKinsey became obsessed with corporate “reengineering.”99 This process inevitably resulted in downsizing (or in their words, “overhead value analysis”), with middle managers bearing the brunt of the pain, being cut at twice the rate of nonmanagerial workers.

Radical Technologies: The Design of Everyday Life by Adam Greenfield

3D printing, Airbnb, algorithmic bias, algorithmic management, AlphaGo, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, bank run, barriers to entry, basic income, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, Boston Dynamics, business intelligence, business process, Californian Ideology, call centre, cellular automata, centralized clearinghouse, centre right, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, circular economy, cloud computing, Cody Wilson, collective bargaining, combinatorial explosion, Computer Numeric Control, computer vision, Conway's Game of Life, CRISPR, cryptocurrency, David Graeber, deep learning, DeepMind, dematerialisation, digital map, disruptive innovation, distributed ledger, driverless car, drone strike, Elon Musk, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, facts on the ground, fiat currency, fulfillment center, gentrification, global supply chain, global village, Goodhart's law, Google Glasses, Herman Kahn, Ian Bogost, IBM and the Holocaust, industrial robot, informal economy, information retrieval, Internet of things, Jacob Silverman, James Watt: steam engine, Jane Jacobs, Jeff Bezos, Jeff Hawkins, job automation, jobs below the API, John Conway, John Markoff, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John Perry Barlow, John von Neumann, joint-stock company, Kevin Kelly, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, late capitalism, Leo Hollis, license plate recognition, lifelogging, M-Pesa, Mark Zuckerberg, means of production, megacity, megastructure, minimum viable product, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, natural language processing, Network effects, New Urbanism, Nick Bostrom, Occupy movement, Oculus Rift, off-the-grid, PalmPilot, Pareto efficiency, pattern recognition, Pearl River Delta, performance metric, Peter Eisenman, Peter Thiel, planetary scale, Ponzi scheme, post scarcity, post-work, printed gun, proprietary trading, RAND corporation, recommendation engine, RFID, rolodex, Rutger Bregman, Satoshi Nakamoto, self-driving car, sentiment analysis, shareholder value, sharing economy, Shenzhen special economic zone , Sidewalk Labs, Silicon Valley, smart cities, smart contracts, social intelligence, sorting algorithm, special economic zone, speech recognition, stakhanovite, statistical model, stem cell, technoutopianism, Tesla Model S, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Future of Employment, Tony Fadell, transaction costs, Uber for X, undersea cable, universal basic income, urban planning, urban sprawl, vertical integration, Vitalik Buterin, warehouse robotics, When a measure becomes a target, Whole Earth Review, WikiLeaks, women in the workforce

We barely have words for what happens when an algorithm breaks down jobs into tasks that are simple enough that they don’t call for any particular expertise—just about anybody will suffice to perform them—and outsources them to a global network of individuals made precarious and therefore willing to work for very little. Naturally, this newly intensified Fordist production regime sees its workers paid by the minute, without security of tenure, a guaranteed weekly minimum or any other form of benefit, and this too is automation. Most of the blue-collar workers that do manage to retain employment will find themselves “below the API”—that is, subject to having their shifts scheduled by optimization algorithm, on little or no notice, for periods potentially incommensurate with their needs for sleep and restoration, their family life, or their other obligations.29 (In the UK and elsewhere the practice is tolerated, the terms of such employment may be specified by so-called zero-hour contracts, which offer no guaranteed minimum of shifts.)

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For a comparable and equally disturbing look at the conditions Amazon’s white-collar workers contend with, see Kantor, Jodi and David Streitfeld, “Inside Amazon: Wrestling Big Ideas in a Bruising Workplace,” New York Times, August 25, 2015. 29.Anthony Wing Kosner, “Google Cabs and Uber Bots Will Challenge Jobs ‘Below The API,’ ” Forbes, February 4, 2015. 30.Stuart Silverman, “Target’s Cashier Game—Is It Really a Game?,” LevelsPro, November 29, 2011. 31.Adam Frucci, “Target Makes Cashiering More Tolerable by Turning It into a Game,” Gizmodo, December 8, 2009. 32.Theatro. “The Container Store Enhances Customer Experience and Operational Productivity with Nationwide Rollout of Theatro’s Voice-Controlled Wearable,” June 14, 2016, theatro.com. 33.Kazuo Yano et al., “Measurement of Human Behavior: Creating a Society for Discovering Opportunities,” Hitachi Review, Volume 58, Number 4, 2009, p. 139. 34.Hitachi Ltd.

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Osborne of the University of Oxford found that 47 percent of them were vulnerable to near-term advances in machine learning and mobile robotics.23 Among developing countries, this rises to 69 percent in India, 77 percent in China and an astonishing 85 percent in Ethiopia.24 (Again, these figures refer to the percentage of job categories that are susceptible to replacement, not of workers in employment.) Meanwhile, against the oft-cited hope that technology would generate more jobs than it eliminated, Frey found that fewer than 0.5 percent of the US workforce have found employment in the high-technology industries that have emerged since the turn of the century. A World Economic Forum estimate that some five million jobs would be lost to automation by 2020 has to be regarded as a stark outlier, if not a gross error, especially since Bank of England Chief Economist Andy Haldane reckons that 15 million jobs would disappear over the same timeframe in the United Kingdom alone.25 I’m not qualified to discuss, in any but the broadest terms, what will happen to the shape and structure of national economies in the aftermath of pervasive automation.