Rating Laziness

Richard Bradbury: I’m quickly coming to the conclusion that introducing these shows is essentially irrelevant. Instead I’m going to default to: Matt, have you learned anything this week?

Matt Armitage:

• Yes. I did a really deep dive into AI this week.

• I watched a new documentary about the development of AGI and its ability to spread throughout information networks.

• To be honest, I think the research was borrowing a little bit from the whole Skynet premise.

• But this time the idea wasn’t so much outright genocide and replacing humanity with bots.

• But more to sow chaos and destabilise.

• But it’s a solid piece of work. I’ve respected the host and research lead for a long time.

• He’s a Prof Thomas C Mapother of Paramount University, California.

• He’s in his early 60s, but he’s very spry and energetic. Often this kind of film is very dry.

• Endless shots of blinking lights and server farms, but Professor Tom as he’s known.

• Really has a way of bringing the subject to life.

Richard Bradbury: Does the film come to any conclusions?

Matt Armitage:

• It looks at various possible scenarios for AI to become sentient.

• And outlines some of the possible means we have to defeat it.

• Unfortunately, it’s a part one. So we have to wait a little while before we get a conclusion.

• But mostly what I’ve gathered is that you have to do a lot of running.

• I’ll be honest, I don’t truly understand why. But it seems that running is central to our fight against AI overreach.

• And for some reason in Venice. Which, given that

• Maybe it’s a metaphor for the dangers of treading water?

• That’s it urgent that we find the right path and act – or move along it – quickly.

• That was my takeaway.

Richard Bradbury: By any chance is this Mission Impossible: Dead Reckoning?

Matt Armitage:

• You’ve heard of it, too?

• Prof Tom has done quite a few of these docus.

• There was the one about being stuck in a time loop and defeating earth plundering aliens. While saving humanity.

• There was the one about clones and defeating earth plundering aliens. And saving humanity.

• He’s done a couple where he flies airplanes. With no aliens. And saves humanity. But I think that’s just a hobby.

• Oh yeah. And the one about Vanilla no one understood.

• He also went undercover by dyeing his hair blonde to do expose on cab drivers.

• He’s very good. Always well researched.

Richard Bradbury: That’s 3 minutes of our lives we’ll never see again.

Matt Armitage:

• Unless you reboot it like that Edge of Tomorrow documentary.

• Ok. I’m being lazy and there’s a reason for that. Which we’ll get to after the break.

• But feel free to give me some feedback on my overview of Prof Thom’s career.

• Preferably on Threads – to @kulturmatt – because there’s still an unofficial be nice policy in place.

• In fact, if you want to write something negative, please do it on Twitter, cos I don’t look at that.

• You’ll get it off your chest and I’ll never even be aware of it, so we all come out winners.

Richard Bradbury: Why are you asking for feedback?

Matt Armitage:

• Because that’s what everyone does. Everyone and everything is constantly rated.

• And I’m wondering if we’re reaching peak feedback.

• How many times a day does an app ask you for a rating or feedback?

Richard Bradbury: replies

Matt Armitage:

• And how often are you honest? I mean really honest?

• For example, what was the last food rating or review you gave on an app?

• You don’t have to name the place.

Richard Bradbury:

Matt Armitage:

• And have you given any similar ratings to other places?

• Maybe, more expensive, maybe cheaper?

Richard Bradbury:

Matt Armitage:

• So what does it all mean?

• If I give a nasi kandar place the same rating as a Michelin place?

• That’s fine as long as the app organises restaurants according to where in the food chain they exist.

• But if it mixes them all up, it’s pretty meaningless.

• Are you going to get better food at a nasi kandar place with five stars versus a Michelin standard place that only gets an average of 4.8?

• It’s subjective anyway – some people don’t like high falutin, atas food anyway.

• But you get what I mean.

• If I buy a 25 cent washer on Shopee, the app bugs me to rate it.

• What can I say about a washer?

• I had a problem with a leaky bunghole and it fixed it?

• That’s not a euphemism by the way – I have a 50-gallon water butt for those occasional water cuts and it was leaking.

Richard Bradbury: At what point does the rating of things become irrelevant?

Matt Armitage:

• That’s the point, isn’t it?

• On the surface, it’s a discovery tool. The power of the crowd letting you know what’s good and what isn’t.

• In theory, lets you find the diamonds in the extremely rough ground that is most aggregated marketplaces.

• It wasn’t easy narrowing that washer down. I mean that literally. The first one I bought was too wide.

• I had to buy a narrower one.

• But yeah, dishonest players lurk on some of the platforms.

• Sometimes stealing photos from genuine retailers and setting up a similar username and offering unbelievable offers to snare the unwary.

• Scammers lurk everywhere. But the crowd was supposed to liberate us.

• But those same sites also benefit from having positive reviews.

• There’s a fine line for them in being a trusted marketplace but also encouraging positive comments.

• And you see that in a lot of the prompts that default to the maximum stars – whether it’s 3 or 5.

• Because most of us are lazy. There’ll be a lot of laziness today.

• So we just go through and hit submit at whatever the default is.

• Another question for you. When you look at ratings, what do you go for first?

Richard Bradbury: replies [I might ask why]

Matt Armitage:

• I look negative first. Because most of the 5 star reviews are irrelevant, right?

• Just people who hit default.

• But when you get into the one star reviews, it gets nuts.

• People who leave one star reviews because the delivery driver left the package outside and it got wet.

• Or the package got damaged in transport.

• Nothing wrong with the item – how often have you seen:

• “item works perfectly but item packaging scratched. One star.

• Not so much here, but you hear of independent retailers and service providers living in fear of negative reviews on sites like

• Trustpilot, Yelp, Tripadvisor.

• You might rent someone a room or an apartment. They have a great time but trash you because the toilet paper was scratchier than they’re used to.

• Or because they wanted 8 teabags instead of 6.

• We’ve built a system of trust that’s irrelevant at best and in thrall to trolls at its worst.

• Often both at the same time.

Richard Bradbury: And, of course, now we carry that philosophy over into people…

Matt Armitage:

• Yeah. So one of the pet shop chains I used to go requires you to rate your interaction with staff before your payment is processed.

• Great idea if the staff is helping you. But why rate an interaction when I picked up a bag of cat litter at the door.

• Took it to the till where it was scanned.

• And took out my card to pay. Sure, the cashier was friendly and polite.

• But is that an interaction that needed a rating?

• And why should the cashier feel the pressure of that interaction?

• There was pretty much nothing he or she could have done to improve it.

• And probably very little they could have done to ruin it, short of leaning over the counter and slapping me in the face,.

• Similarly, a story we featured last week was about a trend for Gen Z rating dates.

• Sure, the power of the crowd extends to dating apps.

• But this was different – asking people to rate you as a date. Or sending out a questionnaire to find out their expectations for a date.

• The gig economy has normalised this ranking of people to the point where we extend it to relationships as well.

• I know it’s not a novel point – there’s enough episodes of Black Mirror that veer into this territory.

Richard Bradbury: Are we creating a society where the expectation of perfection is the norm?

Matt Armitage:

• Yes. And part of what we’ll get to after the break are all these movements that are pushing back against this.

• Again – said this so many times on the show.

• If you have a five-star rating system. 3 is going to be average, right?

• When I was a music obsessed kid, most album reviews were 2 or 3 star.

• 3 for good. 2 for disappointing. 1 for awful. And four for excellent.

• And a lot of magazines and papers prided themselves on never giving out more than a couple of five star reviews a year.

• If at all.

• Music. Books. Restaurants. TV & Movies. Fashion.

Richard Bradbury: Like school reports. Matt was an adequate student. Cs all round.

Matt Armitage:

• That was the norm. Not my norm, of course. Although you should have seen what I got for subjects like art and technical drawing.

• I’d have done better using my feet.

• I don’t have kids – but from what I’ve seen, school reports now tend to accentuate the positives.

• I get that. No one wants to read – Richard has all the social skills and talent of a carnival barker -

• When they’re only 10 years old.

• If everything is five stars. Five stars is the average.

• But you’ve got nowhere to go. You can’t be better than perfect.

• But perfection is average.

• Much better and more meaningful when 2-3 stars was the average.

• Firstly, that’s impossible and also meaningless.

• If I take a Grab or Uber, I know that I have to give the driver a five star rating or they can potentially be kicked off the platform by a machine.

Richard Bradbury: Which is the ultimate ‘computer says no’.

Matt Armitage:

• Precisely. So even if the ride wasn’t perfect – I’m guilted into saying it was.

• Which is the opposite of what the system was designed for.

• If someone is terminated because their average rating is 4.3 say.

• That’s 86% by the way. How many of us in white collar jobs where we get a performance review once or twice a year can say that our performance is 86%?

• As I said – it’s both impossible and meaningless.

• We’ve essentially inverted the system.

• What does that say about society?

• Do you still rate for rides and food, or do you find yourself bothering less?

Richard Bradbury: replies

Matt Armitage:

• I do it far less now. Because it’s meaningless.

• I’d rather do something that has a real impact. And give the driver or rider a tip.

• These are people who not earning Elon Musk money.

• One person adding a tip to a delivery won’t make a lot of difference.

• But everyone adding tips will.

• But I don’t think it’s the norm. At least not in Malaysia.

• Recently I had a Lalamove guy drop something off for me.

• When I handed him some extra cash for a tip he looked incredulous.

• And when I checked his profile. A perfect five.

• What does that tell you?

Richard Bradbury: When we come back. Matt’s kicking back and getting lazy.

BREAK

Richard Bradbury: Before the break we were talking about the impact on humans of being constantly rated. Are we seeing this have any impact on the kind of work people are willing to do?

Matt Armitage:

• Yeah. So, I was watching a show called You’re the worst again recently.

• It’s a few years old now, but there are quite a few little nods in it to these kinds of trends we’re seeing.

• There’s one episode where the leads force their roommate to give them a ride.

• And then rate him one star.

• In a subsequent episode, we find out that the roommate, edgar, was in the middle of a mental health crisis.

• And that the rating hits him just as he’s about to hit rock bottom.

• And that’s the thing: when we hit one star because someone didn’t wait at the door while we got out of the shower, got dressed and came down to receive a package.

• What is the impact on that person? We mentioned the workplace consequences.

• Those ratings could cause you to be fired.

• And the emotional stress and pressure that brings, for jobs, that frankly shouldn’t be subject to that kind of pressure.

Richard Bradbury: How about the impact of automated productivity measurement tools?

Matt Armitage:

• Yeah, so again, workers, usually in these lower paid positions, are increasingly being assessed by machines as if they were also machines.

• Say in distribution hubs. Did you pick the order fast enough?

• And alerts being sent in real time to managers that a member of staff is underperforming.

• We’ve heard the stories of staff and drivers wearing adult diapers because they can’t take bathroom breaks and meet the needs of the systems monitoring them.

• Software that measures keystrokes on a keyboard. Software that tracks your eye movements.

• Couple that with the trends we’re seeing in AI – by the way check out the episode of EBB where I talked to Richard and Roshan about the recent UN security council meeting on AI.

• That one’s real – no Prof Tom Cruise nonsense.

• So we have AI coming in and essentially taking on some of the tasks that juniors or interns would often be hired to do.

• We’re seeing all these massive and explosively fast changes to working culture.

Richard Bradbury: Like remote work?

Matt Armitage:

• Yeah, so here’s the thing that people like me tend to overlook.

• Remote and flexible working can be hugely valuable.

• No commute. Less office politics drama.

• Control over your time.

• But we don’t think about the impact on people entering the workforce.

• Companies talk about values and culture.

• How do you experience those values and culture if you leave university and you’re hired to sit in you bedroom on a video link all day?

• What’s the impact of never meeting your colleagues and bosses in person?

• How do you fit into the team, if the team is only virtual?

• It’s not instinctive. We learn how to contribute to teams in companies.

• That’s much harder for people coming in from school or education when those colleagues are all remote.

• So, given all these changes. Companies that hire you and don’t want to see you.

• But want machines to monitor your performance.

• AI and other systems that might make your job irrelevant in a month, a year, a decade.

• What would you do?

Richard Bradbury: replies

Matt Armitage:

• You might decide not to bother.

• Certainly across developed economies we’re looking at the re-emergence of generational wealth and downward mobility.

• Kids are no longer guaranteed a better life than their parents.

• Financial freedom, property ownership, comes when they inherit, not when they earn.

• That inheritance culture as defined by economist Thomas Piketty.

• Knowing that, you might look at the constantly hustling Gen Y and think: what’s the point?

• If technology is going to force you out of a job or a career path every few years;

• Why bother putting in the time and the effort?

Richard Bradbury: So this is quiet quitting again?

Matt Armitage:

• No, it’s kind of an evolution of quiet quitting and the great resignation, I think.

• And again, it’s a Gen Z trend we’re seeing through platforms like TT.

• With hashtags like lazy girl jobs.

• And it’s a continuation of this idea of being paid to do your job.

• Rather than what has been the expectation: doing more than your job because you’re building a career.

• Technology is turning these ideas upside down –

• check out the recent episode of EBB on the UN security council meeting on AI with me and Rich and Roshan.

• This technology is evolving so fast that we don’t know which careers will still be standing in ten years time.

Richard Bradbury: One of the things that you mentioned on EBB was that change in our relationship with work. Can you expand on that a little?

Matt Armitage:

• Yes. We’ve seen these change over a relatively short period.

• I’m talking a few hundred years – which is short in evolutionary and behavioural terms.

• The industrial revolution changed what we did into jobs and concentrated them in cities.

• Before that most people were craftspeople, farmers, fisherfolk, that type of thing.

• Suddenly people were hired hands working in towns and cities to tend or feed machines.

• 19th century we saw growing entrepreneurialism, a move from rent based wealth or generated wealth.

• An emerging middle class and professialisation of white collar positions.

• So for the 20th century we thought of all these things as always having been like that.

• When actually this is a relatively new idea. Multinational companies.

• Just in time supply chains.

• And that status quo became settled for a few generations.

• Long enough for people to think it’s the proper way to do things.

• Technology over the last decade has exploded that myth.

• It’s changing jobs and changing our relationships with jobs.

Richard Bradbury: How does that link back to the idea of lazy girl jobs? And how would you define a lazy girl job?

Matt Armitage:

• One of the pieces I read indicated that there’s no real male equivalent of a lazy girl job.

• Possibly because men are still favoured by the working conditions and cultures of many companies.

• But that’s another topic. A lazy girl job is a job that pays you enough to live well and doesn’t require you to commit emotionally.

• Ideally something white collar, but something that’s largely undemanding.

• You clock in and clock out. Work isn’t your life.

• Your life is your life.

s a nine to five up until the: 1990

• Which is one of the reasons I say that Gens X and Z are more closely linked to each other than either is to Gen Y, the millennial generation.

• Gen X kinda bought into that career thing but now we’re getting old, we want lazy girl jobs too.

• WE understand that our passion doesn’t pay the bills. So we want to pay the bills and not let it get in the way of that passion.

• Whether it’s playing golf or winning a D&D championship.

• Neither of those are examples from my life by the way.

• You won’t see me on a golf course.

• You have a generation with very different expectations.

Richard Bradbury: Rather than let you go off on a golf rant – essentially we’re looking at a generation of people with a different expectation of work?

Matt Armitage:

• Why define yourself by a career that may not exist in a few years?

• Especially when your passion isn’t something you can easily commercialise.

• Like social activism. Or a podcast or YT channel for middle aged guitar obsessives.

• You will not be surprised to know that there are a lot of those. And I mean a lot.

• Downsizing is pushing one generation out of careers while technology limits the opportunities for another generation to develop them.

• Funnelling everyone towards the gig economy.

• The gig economy is a very millennial construct – you get out what you put in.

• More hours more money.

• But how many people want to expose themselves to that stress for that kind of pay?

• Sure, you pay the bills just about but are you living?

• Which is why the idea of lazy girl jobs is aspirational from both sides.

• If you’re on a career path with a demanding job and bosses.

• A lazy girl job is a great way to downgrade. Rid yourself of the stress and maintain your lifestyle.

• Or if you’re in the gig economy, it’s a great upgrade. Rid yourself of the stress.

• You can see the theme here.

• Rid yourself of the stress and gain more stability. You know your hours, your pay and your working conditions.

Richard Bradbury: There’s a difference between a trend and a change. Trends generally being less permanent. While change indicates more of a long term movement.

Matt Armitage:

• Again, without wanting to go back over those elements I talked about on EBB yesterday.

l in our working models since: 2020

• Remote working and the pandemic being a major driver of those changes.

• And the emergence of business AI as a force is really only 6 months old and it’s having an enormous impact.

• Technological and social driven change is happening faster than trends can emerge.

• Lazy girl jobs is a reaction to those changes. The changes are driving the trends.

• There’s a fascinating article on the Unherd website about the emergence of bohemian peasants.

• A generation that doesn’t own property but is still largely middle class in its outlook.

• And is moving away from the idea of being a city based creative.

• It’s a niche.

• We can’t all go and live in forests or on beaches. Or forage for food.

• There isn’t enough space.

• But it is an indication of change. Change in the way we want to work.

• And more importantly in the way we want to live.