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| {{essay|work|jobsworthism|}}We complain a lot about the obsession the modern world has with technologising everything and reducing everything to data. It is historical, blind to the unfolding possibilities of an infinite universe, lazy, [[premium mediocre]] — it depends on [[scale]] to deliver ''average'' solutions which fit a majority of cases, and cares less about outliers and edge cases (sorry, all you people at the margins, there is just not enough to be made out of you), it cuts corners and depersonalises, because it works when consumers fall easily into general and broad categories, is incentivised to encourage consumers to identify ''themselves'' in categories that suit suppliers do that work for you, and as such ''polarises'' and tribalises the market — in asking people to reduce their priorities to broad, basic, emotional issues, ''infantilises'' the market. | | {{essay|work|jobsworthism|}} |
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| Boy that all just came out in one great big gush.
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| This is not to claim some great conspiracy, or to call for some great social manifesto kicking back against our overlords, by the way, but just to point out system effects. This is ''bound'' to happen to some degree, without any mendacity by anyone. This is how complex systems will tend to work where there is the means to reap the benefits to be gained from automation. What has changed is our tools: our capacity for automation is geometrically greater than it was a generation ago.
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| Bound to happen because it is a Darwinian market and those who don't do it will die, unless they devise a new way of surviving. And there is scope for playing at the edges of market — going [[off piste]], playing in the rich and uninterrupted back country. The rewards are collossal — but so are the risks. And there is no ski patrol. If you go over, you are on your own.
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| We are where we are.
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| Another charge to the rapsheets
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| Automation removes the scope for ''discretion''. Discretion implies expertise, judgment, worldliness, all of which is expensive. The underlying theory of data modernism is [[Pareto triage]] — to separate the world, operations, the market into the codable, easy boring, lay-up 80 percent, that can be safely handed over to the chatbots — and the rich, complicated, risk 20 percent that requires special attention.
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| There is a kind of averagarisnism at play here. If your enterprise is a production line, a kind of nomological machine you can control from beginning to end, but even then the production line requires adjustment and ongoing optimisation and expertise on the line is vital.
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| {{Sa}}
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| *[[Jobsworth’s charter]]
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