A Lot of 'Unskilled' Workers Aren't

&gt; an AI program can likely do that, too<p>Hahaha. Yesterday I spent a half hour with Comcast&#x27;s AI phone chatbot. No matter how I tried, it could not understand &quot;cancel Hulu subscription.&quot; Finally, it connected me with a human who I said &quot;cancel Hulu subscription&quot; to, and he cancelled it. Mission Accomplished! But the AI chatbot was a total failure.<p>I am preparing my presentation for DConf, and thought I&#x27;d try some relevant pictures. I asked it to &quot;draw a square wheel&quot;. It drew a round one. I tried many variations, never got a square wheel, although grok insisted it was a square wheel.<p>I now and then ask AI to write a function for me. The generated code always looks plausible, but there are always catastrophic bugs in them. The function will include tests (hooray!) but does not include answers to check the results against (boo!).<p>It doesn&#x27;t take long to realize that AI has no idea what you&#x27;re asking for.<p>AI has a loooong way to go.

&gt; A person’s worth is never determined by their potential market wage.<p>There are different meanings to the word &quot;worth&quot;. In the market place, your &quot;worth&quot; is how much value you can create for the person who pays you. Your worth to your family is something entirely different.<p>It&#x27;s like the innumerable definitions of the word &quot;free&quot;. I&#x27;ve seen many people try to make points by conflating multiple such definitions. The article does this with &quot;worth&quot;. It&#x27;s a worthless(!) argument.

This feels like a victim in search of a problem. It’s an economic term used to refer to people who are in easily-replaceable positions. You can drop someone in, give them on the job training, and they’ll have it mostly figured out in a couple weeks.<p>This is not a judgement of the people working those jobs, and never has been really.<p>Besides, call them literally whatever you want - that will become the new slur on the treadmill of euphemisms.

My understanding is that an “unskilled” job has always meant a job that doesn’t require previous experience. It has nothing to do with how hard the job is or how valuable the work is, just whether or not it requires prior training or not.

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“Easily replacable” labor then

Why, skilled workers belong to an American Federation of Labor craft union, and unskilled workers belong to a Congress of Industrial Organizations union, of course. Skilled workers are trained by the union through apprenticeships. Unskilled workers are trained, minimally, by their foremen. And the CIO is a Communist front, say the bosses.<p>That&#x27;s the US classic labor history view.

&quot;Unskilled labour&quot; isn&#x27;t the same as &quot;unskilled worker&quot;<p>IMHO more appropriate would be &quot;low skilled labour&quot;.<p>We should use the correct term when describing jobs that require little specialised skill and separate them from the persons performing it (who may be very skillful in other non-related areas).<p>If there is cultural stigma in using this term, should we sacrifice accuracy and succinctness in technical&#x2F;professional discussions on related topics by dancing around with terminologies? If we &quot;evolve&quot; and use a new term that is not currently associated with the same stigma, will this neutral term eventually still be associated with the same stigma? If so, is it worth the effort and penalties (e.g. interim confusion) as a whole?<p>I am genuinely curious about this, I think there are many good points on &quot;both sides of the coin&quot;.

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No such thing as unskilled labor.

Amazing how often &quot;unskilled&quot; is used to describe those whose skills are merely low on the social prestige scale, or who are ill-positioned to ensure that they &amp; their peers get an oversized slice of the economic pie...