“We are already well into the “end of work.”
The more accurate title would be “The Python (Script) That Ate Your Job.” Python is a computer language whose core philosophy is summarized by “PEP 20 (The Zen of Python)”, which includes aphorisms such as:
- Beautiful is better than ugly.
- Explicit is better than implicit.
- Simple is better than complex.
- Complex is better than complicated.
- Readability counts.
(source: Wikipedia)
As I understand it (from a non-programmer POV), Python enables rapid development of scripts that may not be optimized by some metrics but which work perfectly well in terms of solving a problem in a cost-effective manner.
(Programmers can be highly partisan, i.e. emotionally attached to their preferred language, so I am trying to be as non-partisan and careful as possible here to avoid arousing the ire of either Pythoneers or Python detractors. I am just an ignorant bystander; please don’t shoot the piano player, etc.)
A senior manager at a small tech company recently related a story that illustrates 1) the power of Python (and other scripting languages) and 2) the changing nature of work:
The company had some time-consuming data analysis that needed to get done on a regular basis, and the manager was considering recruiting a (paid) intern to do the work. Instead, he spent four hours writing a Python script which did the work in a few minutes. He named the program “Intern.”
This story is repeated thousands of times a day across millions of tasks. Virtually all of my self-employed friends use technology to enable one person to produce output that would have taken three people in the 1980s.
As management guru Peter Drucker noted, enterprises don’t have profits, they only have expenses. If you are self-employed or own/manage a business, you will immediately grasp the profound truth of this insight.
If you can replace an expensive worker (and every employee is expensive nowadays, due to the high cost of labor and general overhead) with a Python script that can be crafted in a few hours, financial fact compels you to do so: your business has no profit, it only has expenses.
This dynamic is scale-invariant, meaning it is true of all organizations, from one-person businesses up to global corporations and entire nations. A non-profit group only has expenses, and so do churches, cities and nations. Once expenses exceed income, the organization goes bust.
Could I be replaced with a Python script? In some ways, yes: a script could be written that mined the thousands of entries and essays I’ve written for repeating words, phrases and themes, and the script would rehash the material into “new” entries.
But since the script isn’t logging “experience” in the same way as a human does, the script would not be able to replicate dynamics such as changing one’s mind or taking a new direction, although it could randomly generate such behaviors to mimic human development.
Would the script be “good enough” to attract readers? Perhaps; but attracting and keeping readers is not necessarily a problem-state that can be solved with data-mining and pattern matching, as readers seek not just novelty and expressive writing but insight. Any script that rehashed existing material would not be generating new insight; it would simply be repackaging previous insights.
For highly partisan blogs, this might well be “good enough,” since partisan readers actually want to read the same rehashed material again and again: in effect, a script that repackaged “it’s the Demopublican’s fault” with new headlines and slightly different content would closely match the human content generator’s output.
I have no doubt some clever programmers have already played around with generating rehashed content and posting it as a blog written by a human being….”
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