Spare a thought for the demise of the “prompt whisperer”. Two years ago, companies were reportedly offering annual salaries of over $200,000 (£150,000) to candidates who possessed this mysterious new elusive skill, which was also called “prompt engineering”.
Not any more, though – demand for the whisperers has crashed.
Look closer, and this anecdote reveals a lot more under the surface. For a start, it shows how obscurity can be lucrative. Prompt engineering turned out to be just a fancy name for the simplest task in the world: expressing a few words to a chatbot clearly in plain English.
But by obfuscating this in jargon, consultants could then profit from all the confusion they had created.
The hucksters then popped up in your LinkedIn feed, either offering companies advice on how to hire whisperers, or how to acquire whispering skills yourself. In reality, it was a non-story.
“Maybe they talked about the value of prompt engineers, but they weren’t then actually hiring for that,” one consultant reflected earlier this year.
So fads come and go, and people profit from them. Nothing new here, you may argue. In the 19th century gold rush, Mark Twain is said to have observed that the smart people sold shovels, while the fools looked for gold – an observation much repeated during the dotcom boom. But today, the boom is all shovels, and there’s no gold in sight.
The story also illustrates on of the biggest mysteries of our time: the productivity puzzle. Huge amounts have been invested in new technology, but the output per employee stubbornly refuses to go up very much, if at all.
“You can see the computer age everywhere but in the productivity statistics,” lamented economist Robert Solow in 1987. But with growth now so torpid, we need to ask it again, and get some answers this time.
Could it be that digital technology creates more bureaucracy than it destroys, and the creation of new and unproductive labour cancels out any real productivity gains? Is it all being splurged on silly tech fads?
Many economists find this acutely painful to discuss, as they overestimate the importance of technology in human progress, while downplaying the brilliant human creations that contribute to our advancement – things like markets and new instruments that pool risk, like the invention of the joint stock company and insurance.
For whatever reason, once digital technology is embedded into the workplace, into a 21st century firm or organisation, the transformative potential just seems to vanish.
And where did all the new white-collar non-jobs come from? This taboo was explored by the late anthropologist and anarchist provocateur David Graeber, in his book Bulls–it Jobs: A Theory. These are jobs so pointless that the employees doing them don’t think they should exist, but that employee and employer must both pretend are vitally important.
Graeber devised five categories of non-job, such as “duct tapers”, who fix things that don’t need fixing, and “taskmasters”, who supervise people who don’t need supervision. There were also ornamental “flunkies” and what he called “goons”, who could be found in public relations.
Corporate prestige depends on the size of your department, Graeber explained, so the more people you can hire, the more important you are. In a market which isn’t really competitive, but pretends to be, this is not a game to play.
Another proposition comes from the Nobel Prize-winning economist Daron Acemoglu, who argues we have “excessive automation”. Technology is used to cut costs, he argues, but doesn’t improve productivity, and results in a huge societal cost, particularly to the working class.
Young, low-educated men have experienced a 15pc real wage decline since 1980. Customers are another loser here – few of us can come away from the self-checkout, or after spending hours on the phone to a utility or bank, and think we’re getting better service.
Then there are the legions of non-jobs that thrive on LinkedIn, the petri dish of the modern hustler, where people style themselves as influencers, engagement farmers, growth hackers and brand whisperers. And of course, the vast hordes of compliance apparatchiks to be found in human resources departments, and specifically diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI).
Note how mystification and jargon is evident here too – the policing of workplace behaviour is conducted through intimidation. Chris Bayliss, an energy infrastructure consultant, recently described the powerful authority of DEI in the public sector for The Critic magazine.
“Progressive theories get such a strong foothold in local government, because off-the-shelf answers and convoluted terminology convey authority on the part of people who don’t possess it naturally,” he says. Just like the prompt whisperers, who nimbly jump from fad to fad.
In reality, it seems, we have two welfare states. The public one we already know, and it’s increasingly expensive to maintain, with over 9m economically inactive adults, according to the recent figures. This is funded through ever-rising taxes.
But another welfare state can be found in the private sector, and we all pay for it through higher prices and worse service. Perhaps this welfare system is a way of hiding surplus graduate labour – by paying people to do not very much in an office. But we need to recognise that there are costs.
In 1942, William Beveridge identified idleness as one of the five scourges of society. Who’s going to peer into the modern organisation and tackle it there? We should have a thought shower and find out.
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