2: Typing, clicking, tapping and scrolling
and the continued journey into whatever it is that I do now
Part 1:
Part 2:
When I worked at the art college, we sent a lot of mail. Every week, I printed out label after label and letter after letter. We employed a small team of work study students, and for the most part it was their job to stick labels on things and letters in envelopes. The problem is, they were mostly bad at it. And so, when the circumstances called for it, I took it upon myself to fold letters, carefully match documents, tuck them into envelopes.
It was a nice reprieve from the screen. I could put on music or an audiobook and space out and fold and stuff, fold and stuff.
When our postal department got a folding machine, this part of my job went away, and I missed it. Employers want to maximize the value of your time, even though we know this is impossible. The decompression time I once spent folding letters surely made its way, in a less satisfying way, into other parts of my day, slowing me down, distracting me, decreasing my satisfaction.
This is why, when I automate things for people, I make sure to ask if they actually WANT the tasks to be automated. Maybe the mindless data entry is enjoyable to you, I don’t know!
It turns out that most people don’t know themselves. We don’t think about it. Or we maybe think about the theoretical insult to our intelligence and worth, to be doing something so mundane and repetitive. But who determines that worth? The people who write the checks.
My colleagues often bristled at change because it was forced upon us unilaterally from above, often with presumptuous promises about saving us time, but all too often exchanging our duties for less satisfying ones.
I’m old enough to have started working on computers before a mouse was a ubiquitous necessity. I think that typing is inherently more satisfying than clicking. Long ago, the industrial revolution changed the pace of work from something determined by human rhythms to something determined by machines. Despite the havoc this has caused on the human psyche, we have never reversed course or slowed down even a little. Typing gave way to clicking, which gave way to tapping and scrolling - an act infamously associated with malaise.
These questions are more important than ever. Employers are goading and forcing employees to adopt AI, and again the assumption is that their valuation of time and effort is objective truth. As for the pace and rhythm of work, there are no assumptions made because no thought is given to it at all.
Again, we are being asked to adopt and train tools that are meant to replace us. As with all the prior tools, there are major shortcomings that won’t be resolved. However, this wave of progress is couched in a lowering of expectations that sweeps away job security. That phenomenon is another essay in itself.
So far, this series is a rambling mess touching on why I automate, who I do it for, with self-indulgent digressions into my history of being underestimated and dismissed. But I think these things are inter-related, and they even tie into the research data processes I hope to later elaborate on.
Even in the face of the encroaching tidal wave, I continue to focus on automation that values humanity and individuality, even as I’m sure this work will one day seem as quaint as a typewriter.
With all this philosophical groundwork, I will next get into my lifelong love of data and what I have done with recipe data and what is left to do (that I know of.)