deskilling

Hacking Capitalism

by Söderberg, Johan; Söderberg, Johan;

of post-industrial ideology along with the many unwarranted hopes attached to information technology and the Internet. Progressive academics are concerned about electronic surveillance, intensified deskilling of workers due to microprocessors, big business lobbying for global enforcement of intellectual property monopolies, and the Goliath-scale acquisitions by media corporations, all trends

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schemes. A paradoxical series of events have brought about user empowerment. We trace it to the termination of craft skills inside the capitalist production process. Deskilling of employees has come full circle with the reskilling of non-employees. Tools and skills are cheapened and spread from the capitalist production site to

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software sector, which is providing exciting new jobs for computer programmers, rests in no small part on the usefulness of software as a means for deskilling the workforce in other sectors. This connection is laid bare when we consider the role of the first computer engineers employed by the industry. These

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believe, thanks to the passing of Fordism. Labour theoreticians, on the other hand, insist that Fordism from the beginning was a strategy to control and deskill workers and make them expendable. They argue that it was not the advancement of science and technology, but the resistance of workers, that spelled the

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we know, can be transmitted by an interstate telegraph line or by the wall separating two prison cells. These examples highlight why a strategy of deskilling is essential to capital. But here capitalism encounters a difficulty of its own making. On the one hand, capital needs to suppress the skills of

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expands the consumer market of the product. Rather than dumbing down each and every computer user, social Taylorism is a strategy of ‘combined and uneven’ deskilling. Indeed, at a closer look, it is evident that Taylorism never was so much about removing skills as stratifying knowledge between different groups, separating white

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revolts against machinery because it embodies the material foundation of the capitalist mode of production. It is a hostile force that confronts the worker as deskilling, layoffs, and management control, and he responds to it by rejection and sabotage. The same technology reveals itself to hackers as a stimulus. It might

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the worker’s skill than to the perfection of tools.26 The lessons from the computer underground bring into relief a debate on capitalism and deskilling that raged in the 1970s and 1980s. The controversy took place against the backdrop of the post-industrial vision that capitalism had advanced beyond class

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of workers had automatically been upgraded when blue-collar jobs were replaced by white-collar jobs. He insisted that the logic of capital is to deskill the workforce, irrespectively if they are employed in a factory or in an office: ”By far the most important in modern production is the breakdown

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influential. In hindsight, however, the rise of new professions, in computer programming for instance, seems to have proven his critics right. They replied that though deskilling of work is present in mature industries, this trend is counterpoised by the establishment of new job positions with higher qualifications elsewhere in the economy

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modern society.28 His comment is intriguing since it brings our attention to a subtlety that was lost in the heated exchange. It is not deskilling per se that is the object of capital, but to make workers exchangeable. When tasks and qualifications are standardised, labour will be in cheap supply

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current, much talked about, empowerment of consumers and computer users. Displacement of organised labour from strongholds within the capitalist production apparatus, through a combination of deskilling and reskilling, has prepared the ground for computer-aided, user-centred innovation schemes. As was expected in the debate in the 1970s, computerisation has spear

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, hitherto most apparent in the capitalist labor process, is now entering a new and more pervasive stage. […] We are talking of a process of social deskilling, the depredation of knowledge and skills, which are then sold back in the form of commodities […].” Robins and Webster “Cybernetic Capitalism: Information, Technology, Everyday Life

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” Marcus Gibson, “Can Software Replace Hardware”, Ericsson Connexion (June 1999), 36 and 38. The advantage with reprogrammable hardware is, in other words, its expediency in deskilling and cheapening labour. 57. Jason Scott, BBS the Documentary, 2004. 58. Ellen Goodman, “Spectrum Rights in the Telecosm to Come”, San Diego Law Review (February

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and Monopoly Capital (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1998), 318, hereafter cited in text. 28. ed. Stephen Wood, “Introduction”, in The Degradation of Work?—Skill, Deskilling and the Labour Process (London: Hutchinson, 1982). 29. ed. Andrew Zimbalist, “Technology and the Labour Process in the Printing Industry”, in Case Studies on the

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Against Women, London: Vintage, 1991. Wolpert, Samuel. Economics of Information, New York: Van Nostrand Reinhold Company, 1986. ed. Wood, Stephen. The Degradation of Work?—Skill, Deskilling and the Labour Process, London: Hutchinson, 1982. ed. Woodmansee, Martha, and Peter Jaszi. The Construction of Authorship—Textual Appropriation in Law and Literature, London: Duke

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1, 193 n.3 Derrida, Jacques 57, 149, 153, 216 n.24 Desire 18, 27, 48, 105, 109, 136, 155–156, 161, 174, 185–186 Deskilling 5, 9, 45, 97, 111, 130–131, 209 n.44, 210 n.56 Desktop factory 186 Developing countries and FOSS 30, 87, 96, 210 n

The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling

by Arlie Russell Hochschild  · 1 Nov 1983

craftsman used to take pride are divided into simpler, more repetitive segments, each more boring and less well paid than the original job. Work is deskilled and the worker belittled. But celebrants and critics alike have not inspected at close hand or with a social-psychological eye what it is that

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workers. They have not inquired into the actual nature of this labor. Some do not know exactly what, in the case of emotional labor, becomes deskilled. A second discourse, closer to the person and more remote from the overall organization of work, concerns the display of feeling. The works of Erving

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Braverman argues that this has been a general trend in the twentieth century. The "mind" of the work process moves up the company hierarchy, leavingjobs deskilled and workers devalued. 3 Braverman applies this thesis to physical and mental labor, but it applies to emotional labor as well. At Delta Airlines, for

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acting-acting "as if the cabin is your home" and "as if this unruly passenger has a traumatic past" -are themselves a new development in deskilling. The "mind" of the emotion worker, the source of the ideas about what mental moves are needed to settle down an "irate;' has moved upstairs

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the hierarchy so that the worker is restricted to implementing standard procedures. In the course of offering skills, trainers unwittingly contribute to a system of deskilling. The skills they offer do not subtract from the worker's autonomous control over when and how to apply them; as the point is made

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smile? The fact that trainers work hard at making a tough job easier and at making travel generally more pleasant only makes this element of deskilling harder to see. The fact that their training manuals are prepared for them and that they are not themselves entirely free to "tell it like

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it is" only illustrates again how deskilling is the outcome of specialization and standardization. Sensing this, most of the flight attendants I observed were concerned to establish that theirs was an honorable

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, but these burdens may have little to do with the performance of emotional labor. Among the 154 Public Life lower classes, where work is often deskilled and boring and the work process beyond the worker's control, the emotional task is often to suppress feelings of frustration, anger, or fear-and

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-136,155,181, 183 -184, 187 -188, 196, 245n.8. See also Estrangement Sennett, Richard, 171, 250n.1 Service jobs, 8,9 -1 0, 9n; deskilling of 119-120, 256n.3 (Ch. 6); display required by, 137 -138, 150; and emotional labor, 8 - 9, 10, 11,21, 57,90-91,120

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, and emotional labor, 11,150,153 Specialization, 10, 119 -120, 256n.3 (Ch. 6); of emotional labor, by gender, 20,163-164,177. See also Deskilling Speed-up: in airline industry, 8n, 90, 94-95,121-126,127,131;and emotional labor, 21,90 - 91, 121-122,125-126,127,128

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Standardization, 153, 171; of emotional exchanges, 13, 19, 119, 153,160,186,194; ofjob procedures, 119 -120; of personal appearance, 102 -I 03. See also Deskilling Stanislavsk~ Constantin, 44, 54, 90, 194, 195n, 224; on deep acting, 35 -36,38,40- 41,42, 159; on Method acting, 37, 38, 40 - 42

Theory and Practice of Group Psychotherapy

by Irvin D. Yalom and Molyn Leszcz  · 1 Jan 1967

revived and angrily discussed. With his comment, the therapist placed the kiss of death on Stewart’s brow, since thereafter the group systematically challenged and deskilled him. It is to be expected that the therapist’s positive evaluation of one member will evoke feelings of sibling rivalry among the others. The

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as well as the individual members. It is not an easy undertaking. It is anxiety-provoking to buck the entire group, and therapists may feel deskilled in such meetings. The group may also avoid work by more literal flight—absence or tardiness. Whatever the form, however, the result is the same

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all-knowing, all-caring leader, the meetings take on a characteristic flavor. The group seems helpless and dependent. The members deskill themselves and seem unable to help themselves or others. Deskilling is particularly dramatic in a group composed of professional therapists who suddenly seem unable to ask even the simplest questions of

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were against my role rather than against my person—still, the attacks were difficult to tolerate. I began to dread each meeting and felt anxious, deskilled, and incompetent. The transference was not just being felt or spoken, it was being enacted powerfully.25 Not only was I attacked as a representative

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to us, and toward the end of one meeting, we both openly discussed our experience in the group. I revealed that I felt demoralized and deskilled, that everything I tried in the group had failed to be helpful, and furthermore that I felt anxious and confused in the group. My co

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in the beneficial effect each group had on its members. In the short run, however, the members of the first group felt more tense, more deskilled, and more restricted. Had it been a therapy group, some members might have felt so dissatisfied that they would have dropped out of the group

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structured, leader-centered group begin to feel that help (all help) emanates from the leader; they await their turn to work with the leader; they deskill themselves; they cease to avail themselves of the help and resources available in the group. They divest themselves of responsibility. I do not wish to

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, and Status in Group Therapy and Group Therapy Training,” International Journal of Group Psychotherapy 54 (2004): 389–400. 13 A. Alonso, “On Being Skilled and Deskilled as a Psychotherapy Supervisor,” Journal of Psychotherapy Practice and Research 9 (2000): 55–61. 14 M. Leszcz and L. Murphy, “Supervision of Group Psychotherapy,” in

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, setting norms for Denial Dependency Depression; “cause and effect” and; heart attack and; prevention of, relapse groups; research on Depue, R. Derepression Deselection; of clients Deskilling Determinism Devaluation Developmental tasks Deviancy Diagnostic label Didactic instruction; employment of Diluted therapy Direct advice Direct suggestions, with behavior-shaping groups Discharge planning groups, therapeutic

Against the Machine: On the Unmaking of Humanity

by Paul Kingsnorth  · 23 Sep 2025  · 388pp  · 110,920 words

his legions were fighting the monster from the desert, and their struggle was existential. If they could see us today, transfixed by our glowing screens, deskilled and dependent on oligarchs for permission to earn, eat and speak, with the factory system gone global and the Earth heating up from its exhaust

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the city is that we go there to individuate—to ‘find ourselves’. It might be more accurate to say that the city removes our agency, deskills us, and toys with us at its leisure. A city’s inhabitants are dependents: they have neither the space, the skills, the time nor the

The Glass Cage: Automation and Us

by Nicholas Carr  · 28 Sep 2014  · 308pp  · 84,713 words

’ expertise, dull their reflexes, and diminish their attentiveness, leading to what Jan Noyes, a human-factors expert at Britain’s University of Bristol, calls “a deskilling of the crew.”19 Concerns about the unintended side effects of flight automation aren’t new. They date back at least to the early days

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adopted electronic records, conducted by Timothy Hoff, a professor at SUNY’s University at Albany School of Public Health, reveals evidence of what Hoff terms “deskilling outcomes,” including “decreased clinical knowledge” and “increased stereotyping of patients.” In 2007 and 2008, Hoff interviewed seventy-eight physicians from primary-care practices of various

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those who operated the equipment. Skilled craftwork became unskilled factory labor. Adam Smith had recognized how the specialization of factory jobs would lead to the deskilling of workers. “The man whose whole life is spent in performing a few simple operations, of which the effects too are, perhaps, always the same

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operation. The division of labor within a factory provided a set of specifications for its machinery. By the early years of the twentieth century, the deskilling of factory workers had become an explicit goal of industry, thanks to Frederick Winslow Taylor’s philosophy of “scientific management.” Believing, in line with Smith

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enforcer and emancipator. As the uses of automation multiplied and spread from factory to office, the strength of the connection between technological progress and the deskilling of labor became a topic of fierce debate among sociologists and economists. In 1974, the controversy came to a head when Harry Braverman, a social

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up or down the skill ladder? The criteria necessary to provide good answers to such questions elude us. As a result, debates about trends in deskilling, not to mention upskilling, reskilling, and other varieties of skilling, often bog down in bickering over value judgments. But if the broad skill-shift theories

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wrote in his 1958 book Automation and Management, “that the more automatic the machine, the less the operator has to do.”34 To illustrate how deskilling proceeds, Bright used the example of a metalworker. When the worker uses simple manual tools, such as files and shears, the main skill requirements are

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rapid deployment of mainframe computers in business and industry. The early evidence suggested that the broad adoption of computers would continue rather than reverse the deskilling trend. “The lesson,” he wrote, “should be increasingly clear—it is not necessarily true that highly complex equipment requires skilled operators. The ‘skill’ can be

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the steady escalation of computer automation through Bright’s hierarchy, physicians seem destined to experience, at least in some areas of their practice, the same deskilling effect that was once restricted to factory hands. They will not be alone. The incursion of computers into elite professional work is happening everywhere. We

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., “Impact of an Electronic Medical Record on Diabetes Quality of Care,” Annals of Family Medicine 3, no. 4 (July 2005): 300–306. 13.Timothy Hoff, “Deskilling and Adaptation among Primary Care Physicians Using Two Work Innovations,” Health Care Management Review 36, no. 4 (2011): 338–348. 14.Schulte, “Growth of Electronic

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Medical Records.” 15.Hoff, “Deskilling and Adaptation.” 16.Danielle Ofri, “The Doctor vs. the Computer,” New York Times, December 30, 2010. 17.Thomas H. Payne et al., “Transition from Paper

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for, 178–82 Designerly Ways of Knowing (Cross), 143–44 desire, 15, 17, 20, 83, 161, 206–7, 210 to understand the world, 123–24 deskilling, 55, 100, 106–12, 115 Dewey, John, 148, 149, 220 diabetes, 245n–46n diagnostic testing, 70–71, 99, 102 DiFazio, William, 27–28 Digital Apollo

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–31 Krugman, Paul, 32–33 Kurzweil, Ray, 181, 200 labor, 227 abridging of, 23–25, 28–31, 37, 96 costs of, 18, 20, 31, 175 deskilling of, 106–12 division of, 106–7, 165 intellectualization of, 118 in “Mowing,” 211–14 strife, 37, 175 see also jobs; work Labor and Monopoly

In the Age of the Smart Machine

by Shoshana Zuboff  · 14 Apr 1988

possible a new set of competencies that I 76 KNOWLEDGE AND COMPUTER-MEDIATED WORK call intellective skills. As long as the new technology signals only deskil- ling-the diminished importance of action-centered skills-there will be little probability of developing critical judgment at the data inter- face. To rekindle such

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before rational analysis would decompose managerial work and "reprogram" that work more efficiently. In this Mintzberg concurs with other schol- ars who have used the deskilling of craft work as the paradigmatic illustration of the rationalization of work. 29 My own interpretation of the relationship between top management work and the

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the origin of clerical employment. The ratio- nalization of office work during the course of this century has been viewed as another version of the deskilling process that transformed industrial work. Instead, the routinization of clerical work can be viewed as the result of a continual extrusion of middle-management activities

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opportunities for the exercise of already acquired know-how, then these cases would indeed conform to the typical pattern of craft deskilling as a result of automation. This component of deskilling does indeed appear to be amply accounted for both in the observations of the clerks and in the explicit intentions of

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by Robert Howard concludes that information systems are indeed being used to reproduce the logic of scientific management-top-down control, cen- tralization of knowledge, deskilling-more comprehensively than ever before. 10 284 AUTHORITY: THE SPIRITUAL DIMENSION OF POWER Earlier in this chapter, we asked the question, what drives managers toward

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of controlling, limiting, and ultimately weakening their work force. 5 The data I have presented sug- gest a more complicated reality. Even where control or deskilling has been the intent of managerial choices with respect to new information technology, managers themselves are also captive to a wide range of impulses and

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dimen- sion of power, 221-23; see also Hierarchical authority Automated teller machines, 440n6 Automatic behavior, 190 Automation, 446n6; in continuous- process industries, 59-60; deskilling process and, 57,107,113,215,283; future of, 422; human resources im- pact of, 283; and informating power of computer technology, 9-11; logic

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-25 Cottage industries, 31, 227 Counterculture values, 241 Court society, 29-30, III Craft work: automation and, 51, 53- 54, 59; autonomy associated with, 41; deskilling of, 107, 113, 136, 215,283; effort as organized by, 45- 46; executive work as, 99-107; in- dustrialization and, 37-42; shared action necessary

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, 228 Data access policy, 356-61,385,392 Davis, James J., 40, 53 Decision-making role, 104-5 Deductive reasoning, 93 Defense Department studies, 415 Deskilling, 57, 215, 283; as paradigm of rationalization of work, 107; ra- tionalization of office work as ver- sion of, 113 Differential wage schemes, 43, 45

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and, 50; production work and, 36-42, 51- 53, 98; sentient involvement and, 60; worker control and, 45; see also Action-centered skills; Craft work; Deskilling; Intellective skills Slavery, labor associated with, 25 Slichter, Sumner, 36 Smith, Adam, 221, 225-26 Smith, Jonathan Z., 247-48 Social Darwinism, 228-29, 231

Work Won't Love You Back: How Devotion to Our Jobs Keeps Us Exploited, Exhausted, and Alone

by Sarah Jaffe  · 26 Jan 2021  · 490pp  · 153,455 words

saints, they had become hell-raisers. School officials began to look to the new “science” of management, Frederick Winslow Taylor’s ideas about compartmentalizing and deskilling work, to control their troublesome workers. Teachers’ interpersonal skills had never been recognized as such, and now those skills were being defined out of existence

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-caring teachers. Whether it was bringing in short-term outsider teachers, from programs like Teach for America, or imposing weeks of standardized testing, the reformers deskilled teachers while denying they were doing so. After all, teachers’ concern and care had never been recognized as skills to begin with. They were just

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scanning efficiency meant sore wrists, certainly, but more importantly, more data for Walmart’s distribution system and just-in-time stocking practices. It also meant deskilling the workers and devaluing the very emotional labor it had learned to pay lip service to. 19 In the 1960s, John F. Kennedy made a

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upon it (Amazon). Other companies—like Toys “R” Us—applied it to their specific sector, coming to ruthless dominance. Self-service and the barcode scanner deskilled the formerly skilled sales jobs in department stores, clothing retail, and grocery stores. Higher-end retailers did invest to a degree in service, even while

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deserving of higher wages. 40 And now even emotional labor, rarely recognized as requiring skill in the first place, is undergoing its own process of deskilling. Big-box stores like Walmart and Target give workers scripts to follow when they interact with customers, foreclosing their own ability to make decisions, and

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secret shoppers might also check to see how closely workers follow such a script. Such deskilling itself seems once again to point toward full automation, but in the moment, it’s just another tactic of control. 41 The coronavirus pandemic accelerated

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not be guaranteed. 20 Just as the vaunted “knowledge economy” was making headlines, in other words, the labor of knowledge workers was being devalued and deskilled. Doctors became more likely to work for large institutions, lawyers in massive firms or to work in-house at corporations. We started to hear more

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called “Austerity U” is, he wrote, about “teaching disentitlement,” not only to students, but also to faculty. 36 Perhaps the best example of the simultaneous deskilling and deprofessionalization of higher education and its corporate takeover is the for-profit college. In her book Lower Ed , sociologist Tressie McMillan Cottom dissected the

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big employer pocketing the profits. After all, the original Luddites didn’t break machines because they opposed technology, but because the technology was designed to deskill them and make them obsolete. The fun-loving tech workplace, already beginning to be stocked with foosball tables and other games to play, made the

Only Humans Need Apply: Winners and Losers in the Age of Smart Machines

by Thomas H. Davenport and Julia Kirby  · 23 May 2016  · 347pp  · 97,721 words

, but it’s probably not something anyone explicitly trained for, let alone did a residency in. We should pause here to mention the threat of “deskilling,” since the physician advisor’s evolution is such a prime example of it. The term, first coined by the Marxist sociologist Harry Braverman, is commonly

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used to describe both what automation does to jobs and what it does to the labor force. The jobs are deskilled when technologies are introduced that no longer require workers to have formerly necessary skills—meaning that semiskilled or unskilled workers can now hold those jobs

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. In turn, the labor force is deskilled when, enough machines having taken over a particular task, the skill becomes a “lost art” to people. A simple example courtesy of a 2014 survey

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would “panic.” Yet 90 percent say it is still “absolutely crucial” for children to learn to spell properly.3 For Braverman, and many thinkers since, deskilling is a very dangerous phenomenon. As early as 1974, he was already predicting its inevitable creep into knowledge work, and worrying about the emergence of

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a “white collar proletariat.” We do expect deskilling to accelerate as computers take on more knowledge work tasks. Imagine the art of teaching, for example. Today a teacher in an elementary grade performs

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problem. Looking ahead, as the prices of imaging devices continue to fall, the day will come when every family doctor’s office has one—thoroughly deskilling the interpretation of radiologic findings. Aunt Minnie is rolling over in her grave. Not surprisingly, the number of medical students applying for radiology internships in

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, 39–41, 42, 66, 250 Stepping up and, 91–95 Deloitte Consulting, 187–89, 194, 220 den Haring, Marten, 196 D. E. Shaw & Co., 95 deskilling, 15–16 Diebold, John, 191 Digital Reasoning, 44, 45, 185–87, 194–95, 196, 198 Disney/Pixar, 123 disruption (by technology), 4, 5–6, 79

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–13, 14, 16–18, 19, 27–28, 30, 70, 139, 156, 167, 191, 204, 216, 246 creativity and, 120–21 defined, 5 demand peak, 6 deskilling and, 16 five options for, 76–77, 218, 232 (see also specific steps) how job loss happens, 23–24 information retrieval and, 65–66 lack

Riding for Deliveroo: Resistance in the New Economy

by Callum Cant  · 11 Nov 2019  · 196pp  · 55,862 words

same bike shops, and been part of a common social scene. But that wasn’t the case for us. We were an undifferentiated mass of deskilled labour. Small groups of workers did have things in common, but it was rare you found something apart from bikes and working conditions you could

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be improved.2 Harry Braverman, a Marxist intellectual, identified Taylor’s system of scientific management as having two processes at its core: ‘work intensification’ and ‘deskilling’3 – that is to say, making workers work harder, and reducing workers’ control over their own work. These two processes remain the fundamental strategies of

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focuses on explaining and analysing the ways in which indeterminate labour-power is managed by Deliveroo’s system of control in order to intensify work, deskill labour, and cut costs. Algorithmic Management One thing was obvious to me, as soon as I started working for Deliveroo: it was great not having

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Force because of its elimination of ‘human error’. Later, as Harry Braverman argued, it became preferred across manufacturing because of the potential it offered to deskill and disempower the shop-floor machinist. Once deprived of skill, machinists could then be forced to work faster and faster. The machines themselves could have

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this same general pattern of technological development for the good of bosses not workers, despite the dramatically different circumstances. Algorithmic management, like a system of deskilled factory labour, is designed to further the exploitation of labour-power to provide a competitive advantage to the bosses who invest in it. There are

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to understand their labour removed and their social cooperation becomes the substance of a faceless system of control, intense alienation is the inevitable result. As deskilled workers with no control over the labour process, who are forced to follow instructions again and again, we became demotivated and uncommitted to the platform

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programmer, and the coder all cooperated in a complex process, but all of them were artificially divided from one another. As a result, workers were deskilled, lost control of their work, and had their jobs intensified. In this sense, the black box at Deliveroo is comparable to numerical control. In place

Architects of Intelligence

by Martin Ford  · 16 Nov 2018  · 586pp  · 186,548 words

anything in the past. These tools will replace cognitive and intellectual tasks, and not just manual work. Is there potential for lots of job losses, deskilling of jobs, depressed wages, and so forth? FEI-FEI LI: I don’t pretend to be an economist, but capitalism is one form of human

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about the potential for economic and job market disruption. I personally do think there’s a lot of potential for jobs to be lost or deskilled and for greatly increasing inequality. I actually think it could be something that will be disruptive on the scale of a new Industrial Revolution. RAY

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the work, but the machine is doing all the value-added portion of that work—then what’s left over for the human being is deskilled or less complex. That can lead to lower wages because now many more people can do those tasks that previously required specialized skills, or required

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range of potential outcomes, and we tend just to celebrate the one end of the result spectrum, and not talk as much about the other, deskilled, end of the spectrum. This by the way also increases the challenge of reskilling on an ongoing basis as people work alongside ever evolving and

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is just the driving, and many more people can drive and get you from A to B. Another example here, in an old form of deskilling, is to think about call center operators. It used to be that your call center person actually had to know what they were talking about

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the call center, or even people physically showing up to done on-site repairs, where some portions of that work are going through this massive deskilling—because the knowledge is embedded in either technology, or scripts, or some other way to encapsulate the knowledge required to solve the problem. In the

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end, what’s left over is something much more deskilled. MARTIN FORD: So, it sounds like overall, you’re more concerned about the impact on wages than outright unemployment? JAMES MANYIKA: Of course you always

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be a significant impact on jobs. That doesn’t require AGI, just narrow AI systems that do specialized things well enough to displace workers or deskill jobs. Where do you fall on the spectrum of concern about the potential economic impact? How worried should we be? BARBARA GROSZ: So yes, I

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. Do you think there is the potential for a big economic disruption in the near future, where a lot of jobs are going to be deskilled or to disappear? DAVID FERRUCCI: I think it’s definitely something that we need to pay attention to. I don’t know if it’ll

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possible that we’re on the leading edge of a new industrial revolution, which might really have a transformative impact, and maybe will destroy or deskill a lot of jobs. What do you think about that? OREN ETZIONI: I very much agree with you, in the sense that I have tried

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