Ground Bogo

In Soviet Russia, blog reads you

All jobs are the same. Your instinct would and should be to challenge that statement, but if you think about it, everything and nothing is the same depending on how basic or detailed comparison you would like to make. Since I will obviously try to make a grossly overstated generalization here, it should be evident that this post will be devoted to the basics. The foundation of every job is judgement: this is your purpose and main task. Coincidentally, this is also what guarantees that your workplace will not be taken by a machine for the next 1/5/10/20/50 years (depending on what you do).

You can ask, if all jobs have the same basics, then how come one person is better suited for something and another for something else? The answer lies in the fact that judgement is not always a hard-cut decision; if it were black and white, then let us be honest, you would be useless. Therefore, judgements are hazy, and their outcomes are not so trivial to predict with an untrained eye. Thus a better judgement can be made by a person who is better qualified to make it. It is qualification and capacity that separates different people on different jobs: the qualification and capacity not to do the job itself, but to make the judgements that it requires. All your hard work in education and later on in work training is oriented towards arming you with the capability of making better judgements.

For the ones that still don’t see it, let’s play a little game of examples. Let’s take a random job, any job: a cashier in a grocery store. This is a very basic example and also one that is very easy to analyze since the task is already more than 50% taken over by machines. The store is a place of trade where you purchase goods and in return leave the correct amount of trading currency equivalent to the value of the chosen goods. The cashier may help you by scanning your products and maybe bagging them, but that is not their main purpose. Their main purpose is to make the final judgement whether the transaction can occur or not. Say you owe 12.50, and you give only 12. The cashier’s judgement is that you have not given enough, and therefore you cannot proceed with the purchase. Now, if you give 15, the cashier’s judgement is that everything is in order and the transaction is finalized. This may sound complicated and even crazy, but I assure you that it’s no more complicated than buying a bottle of coke from the store .

What about a non-clerical job? Let’s look into an entire different area: the branches where people actually produce something material. These jobs have always been considered low-level, and the presence of a higher-level concept such as judgement in them seems ludicrous at first. However, I urge you to clear your head from the prejudice and to think what actually happens. To create something, you need raw materials. A craftsman takes this raw material and shapes it into something that can be considered useful to others, i.e. the craftsman uses his skill to add value to the pile of raw materials. What is skill? Is it not the ability to make better judgements in your field acquired through years and years of practice and experience? I’d say it is, and I will leave you dazed and confused at this point.

What about working with people? One of the more complicated examples would be education, because education itself is, as mentioned, one of the basis of forming later judgements. The way of teaching, the strategies involved, the approach, all of these require the judgement of the teacher. Sometimes a teacher may not be even involved: there are people who study by themselves from books or other methods. In the end, though, the proof of education comes from examination, and examination is the ultimate form of judgement. As subjective as it is, an examiner judges your ability based on a number, or even better, based on his/her own judgement.

So far we’ve mentioned machines a couple of times, and I will use this theme to conclude the topic at hand. Machines are not capable of judgement, yet they are taking out many jobs from people. However, don’t forget that it was a person that created those machines and a person that pre-made all the judgements that the machine would have to make on its job were it a human being. Therefore, the machine is nothing more than an imprint of judgements for different situations. It is given a matrix of possible problems that it can face and the “correct” judgements that would be taken by a human in that same situations. While this matrix of problems contains the most probable challenges that a certain job presents, it cannot encapsulate everything. The more difficult your job is in terms of judgement requirements, the harder it would be to construct the template of problems, and the later the point is when a machine will be sitting in your chair doing your work. But don’t worry. Go back to the beginning of the post now, read the first sentence, and know that standardization ensures the existence of a framework, which in turn is the basis of artificial intelligence. May you get your dream job while it still exists .