The Last Human Job: The Work of Connecting in a Disconnected World ★★★★☆

Useful, but more scholarly and longer than I like for casual reading.

One warning first: this book is not about AI. It mentions the subject briefly, so skip it if you want a critique of the technology. Allison Pugh’s argument is narrower. Technology shouldn’t be used for tasks humans do better, and she studies the specifics of human interaction in jobs that machines now perform. Her name for it is connective labor. “Connective labor is how we see the other, and how we convey to the other that they are seen.” Therapists, teachers, chaplains, and managers do it daily, and it is rarely recognized or paid for. She also stresses that it is collaboration, not one person’s skill. Whatever people make in these encounters, they make together.

The book rests on interviews and observation, and it leans on narrative description. Some stories work well. Others repeat. I wish Pugh had stopped to explain what she learned from the interviews and how the results backed her main argument. Read it as a collection of case studies on a single theme, and it holds up as a resource.

My main takeaway: purposeful jobs often carry heavy workloads because few people choose those positions, and burnout follows. Transactional jobs, run on metrics and targets, are emotionally exhausting in a different way. The only remedy on offer is to work independently and set your own conditions. Most people can’t do that without existing social capital.

That left me with little optimism. Global systems need technology to run at scale, so I doubt we can keep human connection in most areas of life. AI makes the goal harder, though the crisis isn’t new. In 1589, Queen Elizabeth I apparently refused a patent for a knitting machine, worried about what it would do to her poor subjects. Pugh’s warning is a new divide between those with access to other people’s attention and those without: “the stratification of human contact.”

One UK study Pugh cites found that people who chatted with their barista got more well-being benefit than those who breezed past. Small talk is doing real work.

Edition Read

• Edition Type: Hardcover
• Number of Pages: 384 pages
• Date First Published: June 4, 2024
• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• ISBN10: 0691240817
• ASIN: 0691240817
• Language: English

Description

A timely and urgent argument for preserving the work that connects us in the age of automation

With the rapid development of artificial intelligence and labor-saving technologies like self-checkouts and automated factories, the future of work has never been more uncertain, and even jobs requiring high levels of human interaction are no longer safe. The Last Human Job explores the human connections that underlie our work, arguing that what people do for each other in these settings is valuable and worth preserving.

Drawing on in-depth interviews and observations with people in a broad range of professions—from physicians, teachers, and coaches to chaplains, therapists, caregivers, and hairdressers—Allison Pugh develops the concept of “connective labor,” a kind of work that relies on empathy, the spontaneity of human contact, and a mutual recognition of each other’s humanity. The threats to connective labor are not only those posed by advances in AI or apps; Pugh demonstrates how profit-driven campaigns imposing industrial logic shrink the time for workers to connect, enforce new priorities of data and metrics, and introduce standardized practices that hinder our ability to truly see each other. She concludes with profiles of organizations where connective labor thrives, offering practical steps for building a social architecture that works.

Vividly illustrating how connective labor enriches the lives of individuals and binds our communities together, The Last Human Job is a compelling argument for us to recognize, value, and protect humane work in an increasingly automated and disconnected world.

Source: GoodReads

Notable Highlights

The work of connective labor may require knowing and reflecting what someone thinks and desires, but it does not always involve holding that knowledge tenderly.

Over the course of my research for this project, I listened to scores of doctors lamenting how the electronic health record (EHR) was optimized for billing rather than medical care, which made watching Erin’s struggles with the computer even more striking. The hospital did not bill anybody for her “units of service,” so why were the chaplains charting in triplicate?

Research finds that checklists and manuals can confer greater legitimacy upon many kinds of service work, and hedge our bets against incompetence and discrimination, while also protecting practitioners from demanding or chaotic situations and clients. Transparency and predictability can allow for greater coordination, mobility, and efficacy, studies have shown

Researchers have found that paperwork and repetitive tasks performed with little autonomy contribute to burnout and job dissatisfaction

in 1589, Queen Elizabeth I once apparently rejected the application for a patent for a knitting machine, the first attempt to mechanize textile production. “Thou aimest high, Master Lee,” she told the inventor. “Consider thou what the invention could do to my poor subjects. It would assuredly bring to them ruin by depriving them of employment, thus making them beggars.”

Loneliness has weighty negative effects on health and well-being—akin to smoking fifteen cigarettes a day, according to researchers—and a 2023 review of ninety studies with more than two million people found that being or feeling socially isolated are each linked to a higher risk of mortality. Belongingness is crucial to human thriving, psychologists say, “almost as compelling a need as food.”

Furthermore, contrary to the notion that money necessarily corrupts relations, this sense of closer-than-expected applies even to those service people with whom we exchange conversation throughout the day. One study in the United Kingdom found that people who talked to their barista derived well-being benefits more than those who breezed right by them.

But what if the root of the depersonalization crisis is not only that people feel unseen, but that they do not feel seen by another human being? What if we have misunderstood what is lacking: the human connection that people make together, in interactive moments not reducible to just one person’s skills or temperament? More data or technology is likely not the treatment for this kind of lack. What might be called for instead is a renewed infusion of human contact, a commitment to connection, even a re-personalization.

by “connective labor” I mean something quite specific: the forging of an emotional understanding with another person to create valuable outcomes

Before the early twentieth century, we did not even have a word for empathy. As empathy historian Susan Lanzoni tells us, the concept traveled from German artists and psychologists—who used the term Einfuhlung to describe “feeling-into objects”—to American psychologists who coined the word “empathy” in 1908.

Connective labor, even that which is warm and competent, can burrow into the private emotional terrain that people may want to keep from others. Some people regard interpersonal recognition as an invasion

In German, the word Herzensbildung means “training one’s heart to see the humanity of another.”

Particular ideas resonate, or reverberate in a deep way, when they pluck at the strings of belief and knowledge within us. For an idea to reverberate, recognizer and recognized must have some strings in common, a shared vocabulary of meaning. And the meaning they make is emotional: when resonant ideas make new sense out of old ideas, people can feel a sense of relief, peace, or joy, paradoxically even when the sense they make is daunting or tragic.

Children who demonstrate an ability to decode nonverbal meanings do better in academic settings. Managers whose subordinates report feeling understood by them contribute to improved workplace climates.

The more people feel understood, the more they feel satisfied with life. It enhances their relationships with others, deepening closeness and intimacy with friends and partners as well as practitioners like therapists and physicians.

Researchers have also found that sharing truths generates belongingness; people feel more socially connected when they have had deeper conversations and divulge more during their interactions.

When circumstances permit, an encounter of seeing and being seen spins threads that define and bind the people involved. These threads generate dignity, purpose, and understanding, moral identities that reverberate, that create a reflective resonance. In such small moments is our social intimacy woven.

The capacity to see another person, to understand their perspective, allows these workers to offer a bespoke service whose tailoring makes them more effective at their given tasks.

“The whole goal of AI is to take the physicians’ cognitive skills and offload them to machines that don’t get tired,” she said. “The humans will have to do the interpersonal stuff that no machine will do.” The end result could be to reinject meaning into the physicians’ work, she said. If robots take on the diagnostics, physicians could become more about being present with the patient.

Truly, if a kid is going to learn, they need to have an internal barometer of whether they know the information or don’t know the information,” Burt Jester, who founded a school in the East Bay, told me in an interview. “And they need to have an internal barometer for what an aha moment is. And that, I think, takes an intimate relationship with another human being to be able to develop those barometers.

When we integrate automation into our connective labor, much depends on whether we rely upon it to do technologically what we refuse to do ourselves politically: redress inequality of access to caring, supportive reflecting work.

what happens when people encounter each other “is not entirely reducible to knowledge ‘inside’ any two individual[s] but exists ‘between’ them.”

From therapists to teachers to physicians to a host of others, people describe a human endeavor that largely coalesces around five distinct practices: (1) using the body, (2) reading and deploying emotions, (3) collaborating, (4) managing spontaneity, and (5) making (and reacting to) mistakes.

Nowadays with computers you see a lot of physicians typing in front of a computer. I’m like, that time would be better spent if you sat, not typing in front of a computer and just reading their nonverbal cues. A lot of the diagnosis comes right there. You can tell, you can sense it.”

Everywhere, committed professionals inspired to work with underserved people confront this kind of overload: overwhelming demand, strained schedules, and little support, with stories equal parts inspiring and daunting.

Public school teachers, public defenders, social workers—people who worked in a mission-driven social architecture all faced the same combination: the needy populations, the negligible resources, the patchwork support. It came with anguish and a sense of the absurd.

the good feelings (“positive affect”) that workers get from witnessing vulnerability and connecting to individuals, their sense of having an impact, and the recognition, gratitude, and status that can contribute to self-affirmation.

Burnout may instead be caused by the experience of impeded relationship, as what happens when factors—organizational, structural, personal—make it impossible for relationships to serve as sources of purpose or dignity.

“I think a lot of the time people who are doing gig work are viewed as disposable,” she said. “So it’s like you’re used to a high turnover, and so then it’s, you know, there’s less likelihood to be interacting with them at that deeper level or to want to connect, because you’re like, ‘It’s just going to be somebody different next time, so why should we even form that?’"

As a “company of one,” however, workers individualized by the gig economy are missing the apparatus of people who can sustain and support their connective labor.

The organization of connective labor can make overload acute, and burnout a common outcome.

Studies have found that while all students benefit from better relationships with teachers, less-advantaged students who have a good relationship with their teachers benefit even more than their advantaged peers.

medical research documents that although disadvantaged patients are less likely to have strong relationships with their physicians, such relationships can have a bigger impact on those patients than upon more-advantaged patients, attenuating health disparities.

It is not that introducing systems necessarily amplifies disparities. We know that women and people of color can benefit from bureaucracies, which tend to elevate rules over traditions that sometimes involved backroom deals or rewarded old hierarchies. The efficiencies of big-box optometry or chain hairdressers bring service to far more people who would not be able to afford it otherwise. Accountability pressures can sometimes have a democratizing effect.

the personal relationships of yore—the small-town GP, the community police officer—reflected and enforced an old social order of race, class, and gender inequities.

One study demonstrated that time constraints led doctors to be more aggressive in their diagnoses of white patients, and less so when it came to Black patients, for example. Time pressure, patient load, and overcrowding exacerbated “implicit racial bias,” making it more consequential in physician decision-making.

By selling shame-free services, technologists are taking aim at one of the core dilemmas of interpersonal work: the risk of judgment by another human being. Yet by offering recognition without human judgment, the cases in this chapter suggest, engineers are also ignoring something about human value. It is not at all clear that you can have one without the other, because even as the risk of judgment is daunting, it also appears to be part of what makes connective labor powerful.

For these particularly difficult cases, clinic founders argued, the key catalyst for change was their relationship to their doctors. “If you look at the 5 percent of the patients who cause 50 percent of the money [healthcare spending] in any given year, almost always relational stuff matters and health care has blown it.”

Research tells us that those who need the most help are often those who feel least entitled to ask, in part because they have often been mistreated by institutions in ways that undermine trust.

If we continue to prioritize efficiency over relationship, we create a new kind of haves and have-nots: those divided by access to other people’s attention. Without addressing the conditions of connective labor, we foster the stratification of human contact.

Through connective labor, we enact respect for the other; across our differences, witnessing conveys that someone is a fellow human being who deserves to be known.

A deep sense of belonging rests on not just shared sameness but the purposeful integration across difference. We can be helped to connect across difference through seeing each other, and organizations, clinics, schools, and neighborhoods can cultivate the social architecture that enables us to see each other better.