Technology

When I think of crappy jobs I think of a number of different sets.

Busywork for the extra hands in the clerical pool. This is the stuff that defines the careers of a lot of people in developed countries, in which they're hired and trained, may even work on projects for a while, and then are dropped into a holding cubical and tasked with sometime benign but probably useless (say entering archived paper files from decades ago into the new data system in case we need them someday -- I did that.) Here in the states (and according to anecdotes, the UK) we have a lot of this kind of work, and while it should only be a temporary measure between company projects, entire department clerical pools have been stuck in such holding patterns for years at a time.

It happens for two reasons I've seen: One, the economy tanks such as during the subprime mortgage crisis of 2008, in which lower management in a grand effort of humanitarian desperation, tell the upper management that no, my crew are working hard and very necessary in hopes that theirs is not a department that gets eliminated during the downsizing. (These managers in question are covering their own butts too, but ones I talked with recognized that anyone they dismissed would be eating ramen in a month). And two, the mismanagement of responsibility in linking tasks that need to be done with worker pools capable of doing them. Either the managers tasked to making such links are overwhelmed, or the process of connecting pools to duties is distributed so broadly that it's de-prioritized by everyone. If those tasks are particularly odious (say they involve interacting with a toxic upper manager) then the lower management will find reasons that their own pool is not able to help, and so the company has simultaneous worker shortages and surpluses. For large, multinational conglomerates, this sort of thing is routine.

Jobs that are facades to cover for social or moral obligations that are expected of the company, but (from the perspective of shareholders) are too expensive to actually do, such as the faux tech-support services the US exported to phone banks in India that are limited to some very short troubleshooting trees rather than someone actually familiar with the technical aspects of the product. This is (I think) what the business owner of the article is talking about replacing.

Now what he should be doing is hiring a tech service and including the troubleshooting tree in the manual, what is typically done with household appliances. The workers on that phone bank are being set up with pressure by angry customers to offer some productive solutions, while also getting pressure from management to placate the angry customers, for which they have insufficient facilities. I'm reminded of my own experience being told by upper management I should be spending only fifteen minutes explaining to customers how to install CD-ROM drives (to MS DOS, mind you), which it usually took forty-five minutes to an hour to walk a non-geek through the process.

Such jobs shouldn't exist, rather the company should actually hire real departments to deal with social responsibilities, rather than front veneers and marketing campaigns, but that's a problem intrinsic to the system and not one that will be solved with LLMs given the same short troubleshooting trees. (An LLM with a big troubleshooting tree developed by a serious tech team might work, but would require ongoing development and maintenance, and the occasional tech-support call with a human being. Also a better LLM than we have.)

Jobs that are odious because they're labor intensive, hazardous, tedious, frustrating or otherwise taxing on the worker, and yes there are a lot of necessary tasks that need to be done that fall into these categories. So when you say We have crappy jobs because jobs need doing, I assume you're talking about these.

Because we're in a capitalist system that mandates shareholder primacy, our companies first seek out a labor pool they can exploit since they don't have any other choice. This is classified as bonded servitude, id est slavery but we don't like to call it that when an enterprise uses human beings like interchangeable, disposable parts. Historically, we've hired children, exploited prison populations, immigrants, invoked a truck system, a culture of obligatory productivity, whatever, anything to force our fellow human beings to toil under cruel conditions.

Without an exploitable population enterprises face labor unrest (unions are the least violent version of this we know) in order to improve conditions and compensation, leaving industries to either capitulate and pay extra and provide proper gear or to automate wherever they can.

I imagine in collectives, everyone eventually gets pissed off from drawing straws and start working on ways to make odious tasks less odious, either through automation or improving the conditions of the task that it's no longer odious, e.g. making actual cleaning as close to Power Wash Simulator as possible.