Potato Salad and the Future of Work

At the beginning of July a man posted a project on Kickstarter: Making Potato Salad. He asked for $10 for supplies, and since this was his first potato salad, he said it might not be any good, but he’d send samples to anyone who funded him for $3. This is what he’d do if you pledged $20:

Receive a potato-salad themed haiku written by me, your name carved into a potato that will be used in the potato salad, a signed jar of mayonnaise, the potato salad recipe, hang out in the kitchen with me while I make the potato salad, choose a potato-salad-appropriate ingredient to add to the potato salad, receive a bite of the potato salad, a photo of me making the potato salad, a 'thank you' posted to our website and I will say your name out loud while making the potato salad.

Within a week he had over $40,000 pledged.

I first heard about this from uber-liberal cartoonist Ted Rall, who found it outrageous that such a frivolous “project” could generate so much in donations. His cartoon, “Potato Salad Society,” includes these comments:

Meanwhile, worthier Kickstarter projects—and charities—go unfunded. It’s safe to assume that few of the potato salad supporters would give anything to save refugees in South Sudan…Finding donors online requires the deadpan, mildly amusing tone that has become the official vibe of the Web.” Rall’s conclusion: “We.Are.Doomed (Internet-friendly neo-Bob Newhart tone).

First off that is quite condescending and presumptuous to assume these people wouldn’t give to refugees, but this is in-your-face Ted Rall; he loves being confrontational.

But more importantly, I think Rall and other critics are missing something important here. I think this potato salad project could signal the future of how many of us earn a living.

I envision a future where some people make their living online, with sponsors contributing small amounts a month or year to support their creative output —a crowdsourced version of the wealthy patronage system that supported great Renaissance artists like Michelangelo. Instead of depending on one wealthy person, these people could live off thousands or millions of tiny contributions.

It’s becoming common today to see paypal “donate” buttons on websites. Ted Rall has one on his website, and I have contributed as a way of showing my support for his work (perhaps he’s bitter because he’s not generated the same level of support as the potato salad maker).

We could support people because we think his or her work is important, or because we want to be part of it. We could show our appreciation for something that makes us laugh, or think, or cry, by contributing a small sum. The Huffington Post interviewed 18 of the potato salad donors, and they said they had contributed because they thought it was “funny,” “charming,” and “genuine.”

Through the wonder of the worldwide reach of the Internet, those small sums could potentially add up to a decent living.

There are predictions that we are not far from a revolution in work, due to the roboticization of the workplace. This will throw a large percentage of people out of work, and we’re not talking about factory workers only, this includes doctors and lawyers (see my blog post). If this is true we’re going to need to find entirely new ways to earn a living. Supporting each other’s creative endeavors seems to me a very positive solution. 

Our Robot Future

I was a child in the 1960’s, and one of my favorite cartoons was “The Jetsons.” 

I expected that my future would look like the world portrayed in the show—I particularly wanted to jet around in my personal rocket ship. (I didn’t play too much attention to how boringly conventional the family structure was—dad goes to a dull job while mom goes shopping.)

In the 1950s and 60s the technological advances of the twentieth century inspired dreams of a future of leisure. “Design for Dreaming” wonderfully illustrates these dreams  (This is the MST3K version and well worth watching!), including technology that liberates women from the drudgery of housework. And that has come true: I can remember my mother laboriously defrosting our refrigerator on a regular basis. Now my refrigerator does the work for me.

But as the century wore on it seemed like the grandiose dreams of the future were just a fantasy. What happened to our personal rocket ships? We did get lots of new technologies, like computers and smartphones that have made life more interesting and productive, but they have also made our lives more complex and caused us to work more, not less.

What happened to that dream of leisure?

Kevin Drum warns in a recent Mother Jones magazine article (May/June 2013, “Welcome Robot Overlords. Please Don't Fire Us?”), that most of us will soon be living lives of leisure, but it’s not going to be pleasant.

He provides a fascinating analogy to describe how the foundation for this future has been building so slowly that we are mostly oblivious to it; but we are just a decade or so away from seeing it transform our world (see the bottom of the article for a description of this analogy).

The essence is that artificial intelligence (AI) and robots have been steadily increasing in computational ability and numbers, and they are about to put almost everyone out of work. In fact, Drum suggests that this is already happening: this is why the unemployment rate has stayed so stubbornly high in the last few years.

When is the last time someone pumped your gas for you? Think of how many service station attendant jobs have been eliminated. Grocery store cashiers are soon to be obsolete. How many receptionists have been put out of work by businesses using interactive phone answering software?

Some new products coming that will reduce the need for humans in other jobs: driverless cars mean we’ll no longer need taxi drivers; implants that sense an impending heart attack and call 911 via your smartphone will reduce the need for all kinds of medical services; computers that grade student’s papers and scan legal documents eliminate the need for teacher’s assistants and lawyers.