“These days, people become cooks instead of becoming lawyers or doctors.” That’s Wolfgang Puck, from a 2016 interview with the Wall Street Journal’s Alexandra Wolfe. In Wolfe’s words from the same interview, Puck “has seen the job of a chef change from a last-resort career to a ‘rock-star profession.’” Yes, precisely.
Individuals we formerly described as cooks are now chefs. This evolution springs from the genius of work divided. As opposed to more workers existing as wage suppressants, or jobs “taken,” the reality is quite the opposite. The more that work is divided the more that individuals can specialize on the path to better work, married to greater pay and prestige.
As wealth has soared in the United States thanks to a globalized division of labor, growing numbers have outsourced cooking to others. And so, the chef was born. Not even a professional designation in the 1980s, in the 21st century restaurants compete with law offices and hospitals for human capital.
Chefs are presently white collar. Watch as countless other professions long viewed as “blue collar” escape this patronizing descriptor.
It’s useful to think about as wise proponents of data centers deaden their advocacy with commentary about all the blue collar jobs the data centers will create. As has been previously written here, commentary like this is evidence of the worst kind of pandering. That’s because Americans want better. And blue collar isn’t better.
Implied in the description is hard, sometimes thoughtless work.
Which speaks to the genius of artificial intelligence (AI) that data centers will aid in the proliferation of. Data centers and AI represent automated work and thought on a herculean scale.
What this signals is that enormous amounts of what some would refer to as “blue collar jobs” are on the doorstep of being automated. The imagery is beautiful. And that’s not because “blue collar” workers will see their work opportunities disappear.
Implicit in the viewpoint that soaring automation will send blue collar types to the breadlines is the puzzling suggestion that they’re others, that somehow those who work with their hands aren’t improved by the same division of labor that has elevated every other human in every aspect of work throughout history. The viewpoint is wrongheaded.
Thanks to the automation of so many tasks formerly completed by “blue collar” workers, those same workers are on the verge of seeing their skills substantially upsized. With machines sparing them of the most mundane and back-breaking aspects of their toil, they’ll similarly get to specialize in ways that we all do when production is spread across growing numbers of hands and machines.
Much as restaurant kitchens increasingly resemble labs as specialized individuals pursue all manner of tasks meant to bring artistic notions to the plates of eager diners, watch as individuals formerly rendered exhausted by their daily grinds escape the grind part. And much as cooks have become chefs alongside the growing professionalization of kitchens, watch as the “dirty jobs” ennobled by Mike Rowe and others become less dirty, take on new names, and increasingly attract human capital that would have looked askance at it in the past.
It can’t be said enough that the perception of work is historical in nature, and the historical part implies not enough hands and machines to elevate the unique genius of the individuals performing the “dirty work.” Data centers represent an erasure of the dirtiest kinds of work, and with it the rapid disappearance of blue-collar jobs rendered white collar by the labor division and automation that bats 1.000 when it comes to boosting the pay and prestige of professions automated.
