Baker/No-Baker, Thinker/No-Thinker

by Mark R. DeLong

An English baker in 1944 pours dough from a very large metal bowl. The bowl is about 2 meters in diameter and is tilting on a rack designed to make moving the bowl and pouring its contents easier.
A Modern Bakery – the Work of Wonder Bakery, Wood Green, London, England, UK, 1944.

“Computerized baking has profoundly changed the balletic physical activities of the shop floor,” Richard Sennett wrote about a Boston bakery he had visited and much later revisited. The old days (in the early 1970s) featured “balletic” ethnic Greek bakers who thrusted their hands into dough and water and baked by sight and smell. But in the 1990s, Sennett’s Boston bakers “baked” bread with the click of a mouse.1Richard Sennett reported about visits he made to the bakery about 25 years apart. The first visits took place when he and Jonathan Cobb were working on The Hidden Injuries of Class (Knopf, 1972), though Sennett and Cobb do not specifically recount the visits in their book. The second visits took place when Sennett was working on The Corrosion of Character: The Personal Consequences of Work in the New Capitalism (W.W. Norton, 1998). “Now the bakers make no physical contact with the materials or the loaves of bread, monitoring the entire process via on-screen icons which depict, for instance, images of bread color derived from data about the temperature and baking time of the ovens; few bakers actually see the loaves of bread they make.” He concludes: “As a result of working in this way, the bakers now no longer actually know how to bake bread.” [My emphasis.]

The stark contrast of Sennett’s visits, which I do not think he anticipated when he first visited in the 1970s, are stunning, and at the center of the changes are automation, changes in ownership of the bakery, and the organization of work that resulted. Technological change and organizational change—interlocked and mutually supportive, if not co-determined—reconfigured the meaning of work and the human skills that “baking” required, making the work itself stupifyingly illegible to the workers even though their tasks were less physically demanding than they had been 25 years before.

Sennett’s account of the work of baking focuses on the “personal consequences” of work in the then-new circumstances of the “new capitalism.” But I find the role of technology in the 1990s, when Microsoft Windows was remaking worklife, a particularly important feature of the story. Along with relentless consolidation of business ownership, computer technologies reset the rules of labor processes and re-centered skills. Of course, the story is not even new; the interplay of technology and work has long pressed human labor into new forms and configurations, allowing certain freedoms and delights along with new oppressions and horrors. One hopes providing more delight than horror.

Artificial intelligence will be no different, except that the panorama of action will shift. The shop floor will certainly see changes, but other changes, less focused on place, will also come about. For the Boston bakers, if they’re still at it, it may mean fewer, if any, clicks on icons, though those who “bake” may still have to empty trash cans of discarded burnt loaves (which Sennett, in the 1990s, considered “apt symbols of what has happened to the art of baking”).

In the past few weeks, researchers at Microsoft and Carnegie Mellon University reported results of a study that laid out some markers of how the use of AI influences “critical thinking” or, as I wish the authors had phrased it, how AI influences those whose job requires thinking critically. Other recent studies have received less attention, though they, too, have zeroed in on the relationship of AI use and people’s critical thinking. This study, coming from a leader of AI, drew special attention. Read more »

Footnotes

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    Richard Sennett reported about visits he made to the bakery about 25 years apart. The first visits took place when he and Jonathan Cobb were working on The Hidden Injuries of Class (Knopf, 1972), though Sennett and Cobb do not specifically recount the visits in their book. The second visits took place when Sennett was working on The Corrosion of Character: The Personal Consequences of Work in the New Capitalism (W.W. Norton, 1998).

Monday, August 20, 2018

Between the Lines

by Andrea Scrima

Try it: try talking about the subject of reading without drifting off into how the Internet has changed the way we absorb information. I, along with the majority of people I know whose reading habits were formed long before the advent of digital magazines and newspapers, Google Books, blogs, RSS feeds, social media, and Kindle, usually feel I’m only really reading when it’s printed matter, under a reading lamp, with the screen and phone turned off. But the reality is that I do a vast amount of reading online.

Unsurprisingly, my attention span has gotten jumpy: I click from one article to another, suddenly remember a mail I need to write, consult the online dictionary on a browser that has at least thirty-five open tabs, and before I reach my destination, I see that I have several new Facebook notifications and check these first. By the time I click on the dictionary, a half hour has been lost and I can no longer remember the word I intended to look up. The result of all this is the humbling admission to a new handicap: the need for an Internet access-blocker with a Black List.

For my seventeen-year-old son and his growing brain, the potential for relentless distraction is far more pernicious. This is a kid who was read to every night of the first thirteen years of his life for at least an hour at bedtime, more often than not longer, and yet the dominance of smart-phone technology in his young life means that the greater part of his access to the world of ideas now takes place online.

I’m not going to explore the anxiety of parenthood in the digital age or argue the pros and cons of the Internet here; I myself am far too entrenched to ponder a life without it. But what strikes me is the profound change we’ve undergone in our collective ability to think critically. In an era of fake news and AI technology sophisticated enough to produce video footage that looks like the real thing, the conclusion I’ve come to is this: the ability to read is not the only thing we have to salvage for the next generation; we have to save, from oblivion, our ability to read between the lines. Read more »