6 Features of the Social Economy in the Digital Age
Societies of the Digital Age should center on two distinct economies defined by the values that they exemplify. The digital economy will center on the value of efficiency. It gives priority to means that better produce valued outcomes. Advances in digital technologies are ending the era of human supremacy in the domain of efficiency. We are no longer the world’s best chess players. Soon we won’t be the world’s best accountants or truck drivers. The Digital Revolution will redirect human workers out of many vocations, but it need not end human work. Truck drivers can use their redundancy payments to reinvent themselves as social workers. The guiding value of the social economy is humanness. We care about efficiency in the social economy, but we often permit trade-offs that reduce efficiency in order to increase human participation and expression. You value the fleeting pleasures you get from a brief interaction with the barista who makes your coffee. It may not matter so much that, on rare occasions, she puts cow’s milk in your coffee instead of the requested soy. We remember days ruined by unpleasant interactions with baristas and waiters.
This chapter explores differences between the goods of the digital economy and those of the social economy. One of the great challenges of the Digital Age will be to demarcate work that should be passed over to machines and work that should be reserved for humans. The boundary between the social and the digital economies is not fixed. Tasks do not present coded “digital” or “social.” Rather, we must collectively reflect on what we value about a job. The decision that a job belongs in the social economy is founded on the value we place on interaction with other human minds. The decision that a job belongs in the digital economy draws support from a perceived dispensability of such interactions. As things are now, humans may be the most efficient means of achieving the ends that define these jobs, but reflection reveals that we don’t lose much from the elimination of human minds. We want the mind work done but we don’t care if it’s not done by beings with minds.
If we decide that a job belongs in the digital economy, then we should seek reduced human contributions to increase efficiency. We should displace remaining humans with more efficient digital technologies. The defining value of the social economy is humanness. We value other humans in our personal lives, but also in our working lives. Efficiency matters here too, but we are often willing to accept reduced efficiency in exchange for more meaningful human interaction. Where declines in efficiency are a concern, we supplement human workers with technologies that correct errors. But we view it as imperative to retain human contributions. When we listen to a Yo Yo Ma recital we judge his contributions to be more important than the indispensable contributions of Petunia—his primary performance cello. We should make the same assessments of other digitally assisted social jobs. We should often look to socially enhance these jobs by increasing human contributions and making them more meaningful. Some roles present both the options of being made more efficient by the addition of digital technologies or being socially enhanced by amplifying human contributions. A single job in the pre-Digital Age could give rise to a very efficiently performed digital economy version and a resolutely human social economy version.
Two Economies for the Digital Age
The social-digital economy comprises two streams of economic activity centered on different values. The value that characterizes the digital economy is efficiency. The value that characterizes the social economy is humanness. These goods of the digital and social economies have different properties. In deciding where to locate a role we must decide what we value about it. Some jobs involve no or minimal interaction with human beings. It seems appropriate to locate these in the digital economy. We will want to choose the most efficient means of production. Human social talents are wasted here. Humans who perform these jobs should expect replacement by more efficient machines.
When we think about social jobs, interaction with other human beings is central. The social workers of the Digital Age will be aided by powerful digital technologies. But when we award credit and remuneration for the performance of jobs in the social economy we rightly grant these essential technological contributions a lesser significance. Today’s poets need electric illumination if they are to keep writing into the evening. But they reject suggestions that electricity is a defining contributor to how they make their livings. The writing of poetry today is, in essence, no different from the way it was for the ancient Roman poet Ovid.
The drive for greater efficiency can be a spoiler in the social economy. It tends often to purge the joy from social jobs. Many teachers and nurses enter their professions in their twenties with excitement about the contributions they can make to children and patients. Attempts to increase the numbers of students taught and patients treated leave them and other social workers emotionally depleted. Teachers find themselves burned out by their forties and seeking new careers in real estate.
We should beware of illusory savings achieved by applying measures well suited to the goods of the digital economy, but ill-suited to the social economy. We do not adequately account for the goods of the social economy by counting customers served and medicines distributed. Applying the rules of efficiency to the social economy is as misguided as applying the rules of social economy to digital machines. If you are looking for empathy from your car’s GPS when you get lost, then you are making a mistake. When you respond to your Fitbit’s command to get up and take 250 steps by sinking deeper into your couch, your hyperactive agency detector may lead you to credit the device with feelings of frustration and disappointment. But there are no such things. Participants in the social economy enjoy interacting with beings who genuinely experience these feelings.
The suggestion of a social-digital economy has the disadvantage of going against an established trend in respect of work in the Digital Revolution. Many workers who deal most directly with human beings face replacement by digital technologies. People who work in customer service find their work automated. Machines are taking orders for food and serving it. This trend should be reversed. The first task of this chapter is to describe some of the features of the goods of the social economy and to contrast them with the goods of the digital economy. The Digital Revolution has ambiguous effects on work done by humans. Digital enhancement will tend to replace work done by humans with work done by machines. Social enhancement can expand the roles of humans in the economies of the Digital Age.
I should be clear about what is being claimed here. I am identifying humanness as something that we value in addition to efficiency. No comparative claim is being made. I am certainly not saying that humanness is more important than efficiency. If you’re sick, the main thing you want from a medical professional is an effective therapy. If given a choice between a machine that spontaneously emits a cure for your cancer and an impressively empathetic human doctor who lovingly writes out a prescription for some homeopathic remedies, then you should choose the former. But that is to oversimplify the choice. The fact that efficiency matters more here does not show that humanness does not matter at all.
Suppose that we decide that, these points notwithstanding, we believe that some roles in Digital Age medicine belong in the social domain. When we learn of the inefficiencies of human medics—including misdiagnoses and prescription errors—we don’t sigh and accept this as part of the price of dealing with doctors who have mental lives like ours. But we don’t respond by passing all their tasks over to machines. To the extent that we value the humanness of our medical professionals, we seek to preserve the human contribution while seeking to use technology to remedy human inefficiencies.
Perhaps the human element of Digital Age medicine means that no matter how powerful are the technologies that pick up and correct the errors of human doctors, human error will always involve a rate of misdiagnosis that exceeds that of a purely digital counterpart. Whether we accept this miniscule increase in risk depends on how much we value the human contribution. We prefer to deal with beings who have minds like ours. We value it to the point that we are prepared to pay for it. There is an analogy between the goods produced by the social economy and those offered by the Fairtrade movement. “Fairtrade advocates for better working conditions and improved terms of trade for farmers and workers in developing countries.”1 The global success of the Fairtrade movement has shown that we are prepared, to some extent, to put our money where our moral-platitude-expressing mouths are. Those who pay for Fairtrade chocolate want the actual chocolate. When they hand over their cash they aren’t satisfied with an expression of gratitude for the contribution to the cause unless it is accompanied by actual chocolate. They accept that they should pay a bit more so poor people who harvest cocoa beans receive more than their disadvantaged position in the global market suggests that they otherwise would. This is not straightforward charity. I suggest that we are prepared to pay more to preserve human contributors. We choose to spend more money on things done by humans when presented with the alternative of having those things done more cheaply by machines. We build technologies that compensate for the cognitive glitches and oversights of human teachers and doctors.
Some Noteworthy Differences between Social and Digital Goods
Costs
Jeremy Rifkin makes much of the zero marginal costs of the digital economy.2 It costs a great deal to produce the first copy of a word processing software package. But once made it can be copied and spread at a cost that, if not zero, is close to it. The millionth copy of Microsoft Office works just as well as the first. The efforts of companies in the digital economy can scale. This propensity to scale is a celebrated feature of digital platform businesses. Those who start these businesses spend a great deal of money setting up a website and an app for minimal financial returns.3 Suppose a ride-sharing business recruits sufficiently many drivers and passengers to dominate the Wellington market. It can, without much additional cost, expand into the more lucrative Auckland market. The goods of the social economy do not scale in this way. They have high marginal costs. We see difficulties in trying to scale social goods both in those who produce these goods and those who receive them.
The low marginal cost of digital goods can lead to enormous profits. We saw this in chapter 3 with Antonio Garcia Martinez’s suggestion that Facebook’s approach to advertising is guided by the “billion times anything” principle.4 The goods of the social economy tend, by contrast, to resist multiplication. The person who records the words “We at Acme Inc. truly value your call” may manage to feel real gratitude as she records it. Since that recording is digital Acme Inc. can produce many copies of it. But the magnitude of the emotional load does not get multiplied by the number of people who hear the message. Rather it dissipates to zero, or close to it. When you hear the message, you have no sense of a feeling human being responding in some, admittedly fleeting way, to your specific plight.
The need for contact with humans when dealing with a company owned and run by humans seems part of the explanation for the popularity of the strategy of repeatedly pressing “0” as soon as the automated message begins. You know that humans run the business. You have the feeling that these humans are in some way responsible for the problem you are now experiencing. You want to express your complaint to a human. When you are forced to deal with a machine you feel you are being brushed off. You know that when you get to talk to a human there is the possibility of eliciting some feeling of regret for the shortcomings of the product you purchased or service you received. This need for human contact should not be interpreted as a fear of technology. It reflects something more primal—a desire to connect with other humans. It just feels better to complain to a human. It can be nice sometimes to hear “I know how you must feel” from a stranger over a telephone line even if it’s not immediately followed by a plan to rectify the problem. If that line is expressed with sincerity you can feel some confidence that your woes elicited a brief feeling of empathy.
A company that wishes to convey genuine sorrow for a product glitch must employ sufficiently many human beings to meet the expected emotional needs of large numbers of disgruntled customers. Expressions of sorrow have high marginal costs. Writing “sorry” on a website or tweeting a 140-character version of “sorry” are less effective ways of sending the message that the humans at the company recognize that they were at fault and owe effective expressions of regret to human customers. Effective expressions of regret require actual human beings who present themselves as employees of the company that produced the faulty product. It’s true that a CEO who pays employees to express regret for a faulty product need not actually feel regret. But he does pay the high price of many human expressions of regret that should ideally present as authentic to those who receive them. The US military understands that when soldiers are killed, that information must be conveyed to families in ways that emphasize humanness at the cost of efficiency. Human beings must be sent to the homes even if that delays the sending of the information. There is rightly little interest in signing up all families of soldiers to an app that will inform them the instant a loved one’s death is confirmed.
The goods of the social economy take time to produce. Their production cannot be rushed. Many companies offer to address your problems with online text exchanges. When you engage in these conversations you wonder whether there is a human being typing the responses. Automation achieves the end of conveying information but often detracts from the human significance of the conversation. Amazon’s side of the text conversations you have with it contains many statements of the type “It was a pleasure helping you!” and “Thank you for getting in touch with Amazon.” The pleasantries that we use to express emotions turn out to be the most predictable elements of conversations. They are, consequently, easy to program as short cuts. When you type “thanks,” a keystroke can promptly send the reply “You are most welcome!” When the pleasantry arrives much faster than the time it would take to type it, you know that it results from a preprogrammed shortcut. Amazon’s expression of gratitude is obviously ersatz. It is associated with none of the emotions human recipients of the message feel should accompany the typing of those words. This is not to say that your relationship with an Amazon employee responsible for dealing with a complaint is of utmost importance to you. Learning that Amazon’s side of the conversation was entirely automated would not be like discovering that your lover’s head was filled with silicon chips and circuit boards. But that doesn’t prevent it from feeling a bit off.
We see some effects of an overemphasis on efficiency on the producers of social goods. Jobs that require some emotional engagement can be exhausting. Overworked nurses burn out. If you ask an exhausted nurse in his early 50s contemplating becoming an Uber driver “Is this how you expected nursing to be when you entered the profession?” you are quite likely to be told “No!” It is wrong to seek the kinds of efficiencies possible for the digital economy in the social job of nursing. Digital technologies make a difference here. But they do not change the tasks which we should recognize as part of the essence of nursing.
Current working conditions that overburden workers give them little opportunity to participate in the human relationships that should be essential features of their jobs. Today, companies make these roles redundant because they have too shallow an understanding of the benefits brought by direct human contact. Sustained social contact can be exhausting. It’s a sad fact that many people drawn to the professions of teaching or nursing by an excitement about teaching or helping those in need find themselves so burdened that they enter their forties in a state of exhaustion. If they stay in their professions, they aspire to ascend bureaucratic hierarchies to be able to do less teaching or nursing, the activities that inspired their twenty-year-old selves. The social work of teachers and nurses should be acknowledged for its true worth. It is emotionally taxing to enter and sustain relationships that generate social goods. An economic system that places little value on these goods forces those who provide them to overtax themselves.
Ease of Quantification
There is a bias in our evaluation of benefits for society toward those that are easy to quantify. We can count the numbers of copies of digital products. The benefits of social goods are harder to quantify. That is because many of their effects occur inside human heads. The success of an apology for a faulty product given by an employee to a customer depends on how the apology is delivered. The differences between successful and unsuccessful apologies are difficult to measure. The result that is sought, a feeling by an aggrieved customer that her complaint has been understood and responded to, occurs inside a human head. You can easily count the number of roses you give to your beloved. What is less easy to quantify is the emotional impact of those gifts. Sometimes a single rose says what ten roses fail to say. But the emotional message is what you are aiming at. The messiness of these emotional outcomes means that they are ill suited for corporate balance sheets. We should resist a bias toward outcomes that are easy to measure and quantify and away from those that are difficult to measure and quantify. A preference for easily quantified goods with straightforward measures is, in effect, an unwarranted preference for the digital over the human.
Benefits
Loyalty is a valued feature of human relationships. It is also valued by companies that seek to sell us stuff. There’s money in the prompting of emotions that have their proper place in interpersonal relationships. Consider business loyalty programmes. Companies encourage us to be loyal to them and to their products. If you are loyal to your spouse, then you reject offers from objectively superior potential partners. You cite your marriage vows. Businesses see profit in loyalty because they see in it a willingness to pay more for objectively inferior products. The business view of customer loyalty achieves its apotheosis in the pricing algorithms of online vendors. Here loyalty can come with a price. A loyal customer has a proven track record of buying. She is predictably willing to pay more. A new visitor to the site has no established record and must be enticed with lower prices.
This exploitation of loyalty is very different from expressions of loyalty that are fit and proper in the interpersonal domain. It is analogous to a case in which you treat your spouse’s past record of forgiving infidelities as encouragement to cheat more. If you are loyal to your spouse, then you can expect similar in return. Your spouse should reject offers from potential partners who may, in objective terms, be preferable to you. This reciprocity is not a feature of corporate loyalty programmes. Here it’s less “loyalty brings its rewards” and more “loyalty gets penalized.” Casinos benefit when loyal customers prefer their less generous slot machines to the more generous machines of competitors. But don’t expect Caesars Entertainment Corporation to start measuring the success of its casino loyalty program in terms of how much money it awards to problem gamblers.
In 1970, Milton Friedman famously argued, “The Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits.”5 Friedman rejected the idea that businesses should promote social ends even if those ends seem just. When they do so corporate executives pretend to be public servants. Friedman granted that businesses see profit in encouraging us to think differently. He allowed that it could be in the interests of a business to “cloak” its actions in terms of social responsibility. There’s money in products advertised as environmentally friendly. There’s money in Google’s former motto “Don’t be evil.” There’s money in casinos feigning loyalty to gamblers.
It would be naïve to think that we can change these basic facts about the behavior of corporations in capitalist economies. But we can respond differently to businesses when they pay people to represent them. A human worker is a more appropriate recipient of loyalty than an algorithm. A salesperson who sells many products to you may benefit financially from your loyalty. If she is a very good salesperson she may use her humanity to, in Friedman’s terms, “cloak” her real purpose, which is to get you go buy more. But she is at least capable of reciprocating expressions of loyalty from customers. When corporations dispense with human front people and seek to direct us toward the more efficient option of purchasing or complaining online, they make no pretense at humanity. There are restricted opportunities to appeal to individuals who understand the human meaning of loyalty.
The presence of human employees should reassure customers. It’s harder for human employees to exploit loyalty in the way that algorithms do. Human employees have the same basic understanding as customers of what it really means to be loyal. Imagine: “I want you to entice people to become our customers with low prices. Once you have made your first sale you should bond with customers and speak the language of loyalty and commitment. To the degree that you judge that this language is working you should take the opportunity to raise prices. Reduce prices only when you suspect that the language of loyalty is wearing off.” Human salespeople who successfully implement this strategy might be expected to test high for the trait of psychopathy. But it’s a lucrative sales strategy for machines. The humans who program these strategies into computers stand at some distance from customers who receive their market-directed punishment for their loyalty.
Human employees can act badly. They can lie to and cheat customers. The scams of Enron Corporation are examples. But there is an upside to human employees. A human employee of a misbehaving corporation can become a whistle blower. Algorithms don’t blow whistles on themselves. They comply with the Milton Friedman business ethic that directed their creation. If you are worried about corporate malfeasance in this digitally empowered age, then you should celebrate the presence of each human employee. Their Friedman-esque indoctrination may run deep, but there’s always the hope that your moral appeals can penetrate it.
Consistency
Consistency is a noteworthy feature of the goods of the digital economy. The millionth copy of a software program should be the same as the first. Consistency is also an important feature of the social economy, but often we value departures from it.
The replacement of the handloom by the power loom is sometimes presented as a simple replacement of worse by better—a more efficient way to produce textiles replaced a less efficient way. But this is an oversimplification. There are differences between handloom- and power loom–produced textiles. There is no uniform way to value these differences. Power looms are better at producing a uniform weave. Handlooms produce variation in the weave that may reflect lapses of attention or deliberate interventions to make a repetitive task more interesting. For many of the purposes of the emerging industrial economy a uniform weave was an asset. An interest in the human aspects of weaving suggests a different approach to these inconsistencies. Writing about an Indian government initiative to promote the handloom weaving industry, Lalithaa Krishnan says of textiles produced by handlooms “Variations and uneven finish are part of the charm.”6 Inconsistencies suggest a human connection. You could look at an item of clothing, notice the variation in weave, and enjoy feeling some connection with the human being who produced it. Was the human weaver just sloppy or wanting to relieve tedium by making some changes? To say that for many purposes these inconsistencies have no economic value, and indeed reduce a product’s economic value, should not be taken to deny that variations and uneven finish cannot sometimes be economically valuable. In the social economy, we value a degree of inconsistency. If you order a flat white coffee, you want what you are given to be similar enough to other flat whites you have consumed. But you value variation in the way it is presented to you and in the patterns in its milk froth.
The copies of digital economy goods tend to be consistent. You are unlikely to be happy to discover that your version of Microsoft Word always italicizes footnotes possibly because your copy’s coder was sloppy or possibly because she held the view that material relegated to the footnotes sometimes gets insufficient attention. One copy of a specific digital good should not differ from another copy. The goods of the social economy tend to be consistent up to a point. When you go out to a favorite restaurant you want items on the menu to be as you remember them. But you don’t want to have exactly the same dining experience. Sometimes you sit near the window. Other times you sit near the aquarium. Sometimes you get a waiter who’s keen to banter. Other times not. Sometimes there’s an intriguing special on the menu that the chef thought she would try out. Sometimes there isn’t.
An overemphasis on consistency is often the first step in the preparation of a job for automation. When an employer devalues the distinctively human aspects of a job, it can be a sign that she is preparing to farewell her human staff. Discouraging the distinctively human aspects of jobs compares humans for competitions against machines that they cannot win. The McDonald’s fast food chain prides itself on offering a uniform experience to diners the world over. This elimination of latitude for its human employees to interact differently with customers makes McDonald’s interest in replacing human servers with self-service kiosks unsurprising.7
Spatial and Temporal Range
The range of the goods of the digital economy reaches as far as the reach of the Internet. If you have taken an enormously cute picture of your puppy, a button-press or two suffices to distribute it to Facebook friends scattered across the globe. The cuteness of the puppy picture will be as apparent to someone on the other side of the globe as it is to a colleague sitting in the next office. A new Facebook friend who stumbles across the photo a year after your original posting can enjoy the photo in the same way as someone who looks at it a second after you first post it. Many of the most important goods of the social economy have limited spatial and temporal ranges. It’s good to use Skype or FaceTime to connect with a loved one. But the connection you get tends to fall short of that which you would have were they in the same room as you. There are valued features of face-to-face connection that these spatially and temporally distant interactions fail to replicate. The mediation of technology makes a Facebook friend different from a real friend. There is certainly overlap between the categories. But there are many Facebook friends who are not real friends. Your Facebook frenemies are probably just your enemies. There’s a big difference between a Facebook friend’s disposition to like pictures you post and a demonstrated willingness to make sacrifices that we have long recognized as part of friendship.8
Sherry Turkle points to the pernicious effects of technologies’ invasion of the realm of human interaction. She focuses on the threat posed by digital technologies to relationships. Social-networking technologies promise more connectedness and enhanced intimacy. They instead leave us more isolated. We find ourselves, in the words of the title of one of Turkle’s books, “alone together.” According to Turkle, in the age of Facebook and Twitter “we find ways around conversation. We hide from each other even as we’re constantly connected to each other.”9 Digital technologies turn out to be imperfect substitutes for face-to-face conversation, conversation that “is open-ended and spontaneous, conversation in which we play with ideas, in which we allow ourselves to be fully present and vulnerable.”10
Turkle documents many ways in which digital communication is a poor substitute for face-to-face communication. It purports to offer what we get out of face-to-face communication in a more efficient and compact form. But it seems not to. Turkle notes the spoiling effect of digital technologies on these most prized of interactions. The omnipresence of an attention-hogging smartphone means we tend not to be fully present in our conversations. We become accustomed to “continuous partial attention” as we await the next message alert and stand ready to temporarily exit whatever conversation we find ourselves in. We are learning the hard way about the inadequacy of digital interactions as substitutes for the traditional ways of communicating or responding to romantic intent. Turkle suggests that we reclaim conversation as “a step toward reclaiming our most fundamental human values.”
Turkle’s principal focus is on the effects of the digital technologies on our most important relationships. We should see the same spoiling effects on relationships that occur in the context of work. The social goods of many of our multiple work relationships are best delivered face-to-face.
The Ambiguous Digital Futures of Sales Assistants
The distinction between jobs that belong in the social economy and those that belong in the digital economy seems straightforward. The former jobs involve interactions between human beings in which we place value on connections between human minds. In the latter, relationships with other humans are not essential. When we replace humans with more efficient digital technologies we come out ahead.
This makes our choice seem easier than it is. The tasks in Digital Age economies will not come coded “social” or “digital.” Often there will be human contributions and digital contributions. We have two paths of improvement available to us. We can increase efficiency by introducing new or superior digital technologies. We can socially enhance by expanding the scope for human contributions. In some cases, we may see the simultaneous pursuit of both avenues of enhancement. The direct effects of digital technologies will eliminate some human workers. As human labor is freed up from parts of the economy best suited to digital technologies, it can be put to new uses in the social economy. In some cases, redundant workers might be re-employed in socially enhanced versions of their former jobs.
One of the jobs whose anticipated extinction few people seem to lament is that of sales assistant. We look to digital enhancements as sparing people from the mind-numbingly boring task of long days seated at cash registers endlessly scanning barcodes. The next step is the Amazon Go grocery store. It features “Just Walk Out” technology that permits customers to simply walk out with whatever they want without ever having to queue at a checkout.11 Shoppers at Amazon Go download an app to their smartphones and present its customer-specific barcode to a scanner as they enter the store. Various sensors track the movements of shoppers, correlating them with the removal of items from the shelves. The store registers their departure and charges their account. This seems like an exciting possibility. Few supermarket shoppers will mourn the demise of checkout queues. But before we send sales assistant to the same vocational trash heap as the handloom weaver we should consider the possibility of socially enhancing sales assistance. There could be two Digital Age destinies for sales assistants. Some will be replaced by “Just Walk Out” technology. But others will find themselves liberated from their checkouts and empowered to become socially enhanced sales assistants.
An example of a socially enhanced sales assistant is a personal shopper. A personal shopper is someone who comes to know the person he or she assists and helps them to find products that are good matches for them. Rich people pay for personal shoppers to assist them to make the right purchases. They expect personalized service from people trying to sell them things. In a memorable depiction of high-end shopping in the 1990 movie Pretty Woman, a rich businessman played by Richard Gere takes his prostitute date, played by Julia Roberts, into a snooty Los Angeles boutique. Gere’s character is clear about what he expects—“You know what we’re gonna need here? We’re going to need a few more people helping us out. I’ll tell you why. We are going to be spending an obscene amount of money in here. So we’re going to need a lot more help sucking up to us, ’cause that’s what we really like.” Fortunately, the sales assistant responds in the affirmative “Sir, if I may say so, you’re in the right store, and the right city, for that matter!”12 We can suppose that Gere’s character would reject the suggestion that his and his date’s tours of elite Rodeo Drive boutiques be made entirely nonsocial by the introduction of “Just Walk Out” technology. Don’t expect the technologies behind Amazon Go to be coming to Balenciaga, Bulgari, Burberry, and the like anytime soon. The social side of the social-digital economy could create many opportunities for personal shoppers to provide these benefits to people whose means are more modest. A personal shopper would acquaint him- or herself with your preferences. He or she will combine this information with knowledge about a district’s shopping opportunities. High fashion need not be the exclusive focus of the personal shoppers of the Digital Age. They might advise us on our culinary options. Personal shoppers with a culinary focus won’t do this by implementing an algorithm that draws on large amounts of data about food and drink matchings but because they remember enjoying the combination of root beer and sushi.
In some cases, digital enhancement seems a much more likely outcome than social enhancement. Human pilots cannot hope to match the efficiencies offered by the fully automated cockpit of the future. The safety statistics of computer-controlled planes will predictably be superior to those of planes flown by humans. This does not settle the question of whether it is better to be flown by a machine or by a human. People frequently act in ways that increase their likelihood of death and feel right to do so. They go mountain biking on poorly marked hill tracks and then return home on heavily trafficked roads. For it to be worth incurring the additional risk of being piloted by a human, passengers need to get something out of interacting with that pilot. There were times when passengers had some direct experience of the human face of piloting. But the security measures since 9/11 have isolated pilots from passengers. Contact between pilots and passengers is less a social opportunity than a potential security breach. The days when a pilot might wander down the aisle asking “Which lucky child wants to come and help me fly the plane today?” are long gone. Those of us who are paying attention might cease watching a downloaded movie to listen to what the captain says over the intercom just after takeoff. If pilots had a long-term interest in protecting their jobs against automation, then they ought to have resisted some of the security measures that isolated them from passengers. When humans are decisively shunted out of the cockpit, we will barely notice their departure when they are replaced by more efficient autopilots. We accept the costs of humanness in some lines of work but not in others. We are more likely to forgive a misheard coffee order because our human barista was distracted than we are to forgive a fatal crash that occurred because a human pilot, distracted by a malfunctioning dial, failed to notice an abrupt descent in altitude.
The Different Digital Age Futures of Uber and Airbnb
Uber and Airbnb manifest a degree of divergence in approaches to digital and social enhancement.13 The journalist Brad Stone presents both as helmed by extroverts with training in design who differ from the geeky introverts who built Google and Facebook. There are similarities between Uber and Airbnb. Both are San Francisco-based platform businesses that have, to use the preferred verb of digital entrepreneurs, “disrupted” entrenched incumbents, Uber the taxi industry and Airbnb the hotel industry. Airbnb became the world’s most profitable hotel business without even having to acquire or build a hotel. As we saw in chapter 3, the principal value of a platform business is in its network. The successes of Uber and Airbnb come from two-sided markets that bring together people who need lifts or rooms and people prepared to accept payment for offering lifts or rooms. The interactions between passenger and driver or between host and guest happen on Uber’s or Airbnb’s platforms. They match sellers with buyers and take their cut. Both businesses understand the PR value of gestures of support for people whose experiences of these two-sided markets don’t quite match the Uber or Airbnb ideals. But the whole idea of Uber and Airbnb as facilitators of two-sided markets is that people who choose to participate in these markets accept responsibility for any misfortunes they suffer. Anger and legal action should be directed at the offending parties on the other side of the exchange and not at the platform business which aspires to know as little as possible about the specifics of each transaction.
There are many similarities between Uber and Airbnb. But they may have different attitudes toward social work in the Digital Age. Chapter 1 discussed the emerging technology of driverless cars. Stone describes Travis Kalanick’s excited reaction to Google’s demonstration of a driverless car prototype: “The minute your car becomes real, I can take the dude out of the front seat … I call that margin expansion.”14 Uber’s drivers protest the fact that it retains a fifth of the money paid by passengers. We’ve seen how the “billion times anything” principle turns small payments by Facebook’s advertisers into a lot of money for Facebook. By July 2016, Uber had completed 2 billion rides.15 Suppose it did not have to pay the dude in the front seat. Currently, Uber’s drivers pocket 80 percent of the money paid by passengers. Two billion times 80 percent is an impressive expansion of Uber’s margin.
Airbnb’s reaction seems to be the opposite. In 2016, it enhanced its offerings by adding new “Experiences” and “Places” tabs to its website. Brad Stone describes Experiences as follows.
With Experiences, travelers would be able to buy unique excursions, like hunting for truffles in Florence and visiting literary landmarks in Havana. Local entrepreneurs and celebrities would create and conduct these tours themselves.16
Airbnb Experiences would vary in price. Stone describes a US $800 Sumo experience with the retired champion Konishiki Yasokichi. It featured attendance at a training session, tournament seats, and a sumptuous meal. Airbnb Places would connect visitors with local hosts who would be able to direct them away from a narrow list of stereotyped tourist activities—think of the hordes of tourists who arrive in Rome or Paris and upon arrival can think of no alternative to joining massive lines for the Coliseum or the Louvre. Visitors connected with authentic Romans and Parisians would be able to spend their brief stay having experiences normally available only to those in the know. They might ask “Can you show me the ‘real’ Rome? I want to eat lunch where the Romans eat, not at a tourist trap within sight of the Coliseum.” If they ask “Can you take me to the galleries that display the works of Paris’s artistic avant garde?,” a good host won’t take them to the Louvre, a museum that she probably spent much of her adolescence visiting. Brian Chesky, the company co-founder, places emphasis on the social side of Airbnb’s new offerings. He says “So can only people drive cars? I don’t know. But only people can host other people. Only people can provide care. If you want something handmade, only a person can do that.”17
Chesky certainly seems more alert to what humans can offer each other than does someone excited about getting the “dude out of the front seat.” This does seem to be a vision of hospitality in the Digital Age in which humans direct their agency away from jobs that machines may do better than them—driving cars—and into areas that demand their social talents—enjoying helping a clueless stranger to experience the truly distinctive sights, tastes, sounds, and smells of your neighborhood. Chesky doesn’t want to get rid of the dude who’s showing you around Osaka.
If we are to fault Chesky it would be his jarringly technological presentation of these pleasures. Human experiences are being repackaged and marketed as Airbnb “Experiences.” He says of this latest enhancement of Airbnb’s services “I want to do for travel what Apple did to the phone.”18 For the time being, if you are about to fly to Madrid, a city that you do not know, Airbnb’s website may be the best way to find someone to take you out to the city’s best places for cider from Asturias. But when you return from Madrid Chesky wants you to grant Airbnb much of the credit for the fun times you had. I hope for a future in which we make use of the services offered by Chesky but feel less beholden to him and his inheritors.
As the shock and awe of a website capable of near-instantaneously connecting people who want to drink authentic Asturian cider in Madrid with strangers who would accept a modest fee to take them to the best cider joints wears off, we will be able to reassess the value of the contributions made to this experience. The Internet is today’s wonder technology. We know from the case of electricity that yesterday’s wonder technologies can become today’s boring enablers. Today we can barely imagine the excitement that people must have felt when electricity brought artificial illumination to their living rooms. It’s hard to think of places that you might visit that aren’t artificially lit. You might investigate whether a hotel you are considering booking has a Wi-Fi router, but you just assume that, unless you’ve chosen a place that celebrates its remoteness, you’ll be connected to the electrical grid. To say that electricity has become boring is not to say that it has been dispensable—quite the opposite. Our lives are more dependent on electricity than were the lives of people who viewed it as a wonder technology. Few of the digital technologies that are this book’s focus would be possible without it. We expect cheap, reliable supplies of electricity and resent threats to this supply. We shouldn’t forget the anger directed at Enron Corporation when it sought to profit by playing games with people’s electrical supplies.19
The way we share out credit for a service has consequences for how we allocate its economic rewards. Today’s platform businesses claim a significant share of these rewards. Uber retains a fifth of the money paid by passengers. It can because drivers and riders understand the power of its network. Airbnb does well out of its network. As soon as a guest makes a booking on the Airbnb site a “guest service fee” is displayed. This is charged until the host has confirmed the booking. According to the Airbnb site, “Guest service fees are typically 6–12% but can be higher or lower depending on the specifics of the reservation.”20 In addition to this, hosts are charged a “host service fee” of 3 percent calculated before the application of local taxes. I am not suggesting that we should intervene now to overturn these arrangements. Rather I am suggesting that a focus on the long view suggests a future in which people reject this way of giving credit for the services they receive. It would be hard to imagine today’s cardiac surgeons tolerating an arrangement in which between 10 and 20 percent of the value of their procedures went to the company providing what they would view as platform services even if they were grateful for the additional business brought by the cardiac surgery platform business. We can hope for a future in which those who use the Internet, or whatever technology has replaced it, to offer their services to tourists will judge Airbnb’s 6–12 percent plus 3 percent to be extortionate. We have no way to insist on these assessments today. Access to Airbnb is required to access the financial rewards and social pleasures of taking a foreigner to your favorite cafés. Currently Airbnb is indispensable. Perhaps the relationship between future social networking companies and people who enjoy Airbnb-style “Experiences” will be like those that obtain between the pleasures that we get from electricity and the companies that supply it. If a consortium of power companies were to credibly threaten to disconnect us from the grid many of us would probably consent to pay a lot more than we currently pay to avoid this eventuality. We look to elected government to prevent this eventuality. There is hope for socialized control and access to increasingly essential digital services.
We can expect people of the Digital Age to use the Internet or its successor to find strangers willing to show them around for a modest fee. But we should accept that almost all the value of these lies in the people who provide them. Today’s poets need to pay their power bills if they are to keep writing into the evening. But they tend to dedicate the poetry collections to their loved ones rather than to the company that provided their power. A readjustment of attitude could make Internet services tomorrow’s boring enabler. You pay for the services of a boring enabler, but not too much.
Space Exploration as Social Work
In some cases, we will need to think carefully about what we find valuable about a role. Consider the role of space explorer. We rightly celebrate the achievements of human space explorers. We venerate the first human in space—Yuri Gagarin—and the first human on the moon—Neil Armstrong. Currently, skilled humans are essential to space exploration. But the Digital Revolution should force us to think carefully about the value we place on human space exploration.
There is a way to understand what space exploration is about that emphasizes efficiency and suggests the imminent extinction of the human space explorer. This view presents the acquisition of data as the purpose of space exploration. The growth of our understanding of the universe and our place in it grows as we gather and analyze more data. We dispatch missions into space to gather data that cannot be procured by telescopes or other Earth-based technologies. We then analyze this data to reveal new truths about the Universe and our place in it.
This perspective finds the ongoing interest in sending humans into space or to other planets somewhat perplexing. Consider the interest in sending humans to Mars. The conditions humans will encounter during the flight to Mars and on the planet itself are very unlike those for which of minds and bodies evolved. There are doubts about the capacities of human psychologies and physiologies to withstand the voyage to and from Mars. Human participation comes with a very high cost for planners of space exploration missions. Much of the equipment that will need to be packed into a mission to Mars will have the purpose of keeping the humans alive and happy. Human astronauts will need the company of other humans to avoid going insane on the several months’ trip to Mars. Each additional crewmember enlarges the technological infrastructure required to keep humans breathing, hydrated, fed, and happy. These hassles should be placed in a context that includes the many successes in sending uncrewed missions to Mars.
It’s true that there have been mishaps that might have been corrected by human crewmembers. In 1999 NASA’s Mars Climate Orbiter burned up in the planet’s atmosphere as the result of a failure to convert nonmetric pounds into metric newtons. It’s possible that a human crew could have corrected the error. But this expectation placed on that human crew member pushes faith in human exceptionalism too far. The inclusion of humans comes with costs. The failure of the Mars Climate Orbiter was a setback. It would have been a tragedy had a human crew been on board but failed to notice the error.
An interest in efficiency directs that mission planners accept the burden of sending humans to Mars when humans offer benefits that more than compensate for the handicaps they impose on the mission. Here’s one suggestion about how we might work out when it’s appropriate to send humans. “Robots … are very beneficial for missions that require precise and repetitive measurements or maneuvers, as well as missions that last a considerable amount of time. Humans, on the other hand, are much better suited to tasks involving decision-making, or those that require constant adjustments and intervention from scientists.”21 The value of human decision-making is well illustrated in the story of Apollo 13, a failed 1970 mission to the moon. Human ingenuity saved a craft that seemed doomed when there was an explosion in its oxygen tank, venting the indispensable gas into space. It’s hard to imagine that NASA could have designed technologies with the general problem-solving capacity of Apollo 13’s three human astronauts. They applied their flexible human minds to solve problems that could not have been anticipated by the humans who planned the mission.
We can be impressed by the heroics of the Apollo 13 astronauts. But we should also beware of the influences of the twin distortions of present bias about machines and the belief in human exceptionalism. We should expect exponential advances in the technologies that we send to Mars and use to gather data about it. Tomorrow’s exploration technologies will not be handicapped by the limitations of today’s machines. The same basic technologies that are piloting driverless cars and drones can easily be placed into space ships.
The making of Ron Howard’s 1995 movie Apollo 13 suggests a different, social interest in human space exploration. As the digital technologies that surround human space explorers improve we may seem sadly out of place. But we should acknowledge that that assessment is grounded in the value of efficiency. The inefficiencies of human space explorers will increasingly distinguish them from the technologies that surround them.
When we view space exploration as a social job then humans are the one truly indispensable element of the mission. When we hear Neil Armstrong’s “One small step for man” line we are licensed to imaginatively place our feet into his oversized astronaut boots. We wonder what was going through Neil Armstrong’s head when TV watchers on Earth heard him say “That’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.” Did he mean to say “That’s one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind”? We vicariously experience the excitement of the first human being to step onto a different world. An estimated 600 million TV watchers got to vicariously experience stepping onto an alien world.22 We imagined Armstrong’s excitement and wondered whether the second man on the moon, Buzz Aldrin, experienced disappointment at his relegation. Some may be tempted to empathize with an abandoned Mars rover. After many years of heroic service, the Spirit, or MER-A (Mars Exploration Rover-A), lies abandoned on Mars. No one is contemplating the kinds of measures that brought the fictional human astronaut Mark Watney back to Earth in the novel and movie The Martian. It’s tempting to try to empathize with Spirit. But it harbors no feelings for us to connect with. The rover comes as close to feelings of abandonment as a jettisoned toaster.
Human astronauts are important because our experiences are important. It’s important for us to send humans to Mars so all the rest of us can vicariously go there. We get a vicarious pleasure from watching Garry Kasparov that we don’t get from Deep Blue even if the latter plays better chess than the former. We want to know what it’s like to be on Mars. When we send humans to Mars we make going to Mars social. We look forward to the explorers telling us about what it’s like to walk the surface of the red planet. Those who present space exploration as a social job care about the inefficiencies of human space explorers. They seek technologies that rectify our inefficiencies and to accommodate our awkward needs. This focus is appropriate if we accept that humans are an indispensable part of the enterprise of space exploration.
When Sally Ride went up into space on board the space shuttle Challenger she became the first American woman in space. She performed her tasks on board the space shuttle Challenger with great efficiency. But she performed an additional social role. She went into space as a woman. Before she went into space, Ride confronted denigrating questions about whether space flight would damage her reproductive organs and whether she was inclined to weep when things went wrong.23 Her step on board the space shuttle was a giant leap for womankind. We have many stories about young boys inspired by Neil Armstrong’s first moon walk. Young girls could more easily identify with Sally Ride and vicariously travel into space.
Suppose we were to permit the value of efficiency to completely dominate space exploration. Developments of the digital package promise a future in which humans have no role to play. Probes will be launched into space. They will gather data some of which will be analyzed by on-board machine learners and some of which will be transmitted to Earth to be analyzed by more powerful machine intelligences. This is a future that doesn’t differ greatly from Hollywood dystopias in which machines rebel against their human creators. There’s some sense in which the machines will be exploring space on our behalf. But human choices will have little ongoing relevance to their explorations. The mission controls filled with jostling, sweating, chain-smoking humans depicted in iconic movies about the first Apollo missions will have been replaced by machine intelligences that seek out patterns in incoming data with great efficiency.
Concluding Comments
Chapter 5 grounds the social economy in interactions between human minds. This chapter explores differences between the goods of the digital economy and the goods of the social economy. Many goods of the digital economy have zero marginal cost, or close to it. The businesses of the digital economy tend to scale. An app that well serves a town can scale to cover a continent. These properties tend not to be features of the social economy. The goods of the social economy are emotionally costly. It’s easy to upload a film of an emotionally wrenching stage performance onto YouTube, but its emotional impact is significantly diminished. Seeing a YouTube clip of Chiwetel Ejiofor as Othello just isn’t the same as being there. The efficiencies of the digital economy can transfer human labor out of areas for which it is ill suited. Some of today’s jobs could face an ambiguous future. We could see digitally enhanced versions of them in which machines completely displace human workers. We could also see socially enhanced versions of them that grant greater scope and importance to human contributions.
Some of this might seem all well and good. But what chance is there that we will realize a social economy with a diverse collection of socially enhanced jobs? In the next chapter I explore how we should respond to this question. I suggest that we refrain from interpreting it as a prediction. We should instead interpret it as an ideal worth struggling for.