Reports of our death are an exaggeration: Difference between revisions
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Deutsche Bank’s CEO John Cryan thinks his employees’ days are numbered. | Deutsche Bank’s CEO John Cryan thinks his employees’ days are numbered. Machines will do for them, in due course. Not just back office grunts: ''everyone''. Cryan’s high-rolling bankers are vulnerable. Even, we suppose, Cryan himself. No bad thing, some might say — who will miss a few liquidated bankers? | ||
“Today,” he warns, “we have people doing work like robots. Tomorrow, we will have ''robots behaving like people''”. | |||
One can infer the view, widely held, that technology is about to reach a tipping point: no longer will machines be faster, cheaper and less aggravating than we sacks of meat at executing routine tasks, but they will equal — they will even ''better'' — the sacks of meat who do the ''hard'' stuff. | |||
But technology is not new. | But technology is not new. As long as we’ve had the lever, wheel and plough, humans have used machines to get things done: boring things; repetitive things; things requiring brute strength. The constraint has always been available technology. | ||
So: machines follow unambiguous instructions better than humans do. By ''definition'': that’s what means is to be a machine. They’re quicker, stronger, nimbler, cheaper, less error-prone. | |||
But machines can only operate in | But machines can only operate in constrained environments. They can react, flawlessly, to pre-conceptualised decisions with pre-configured responses. But take a machine out of its designed environment and it is useless. (Good luck getting a [[Jacquard loom]] to plough a field). | ||
By contrast, humans are better than machines at handling ambiguity, conflict, novel situations. They’re not flawless at it — God knows we’re not perfect — but we can produce an answer. We don't hang, or freeze, or suffer a [[Blue Screen of Death]]. Syntax errors are par for the course: they don't cause a crash. Humans are good at configuring machines: we can form theories of operational theories, test them, adjust them - diagnose what is wrong with them. We have insight. Machines have no insight. | |||
Throughout history | Throughout history technology has created short-term dislocations — some big ones — and we are going through one now. But, to date, their long-term prognosis has been uniformly benign: labour-saving devices have freed the human race to do things it previously had no time to do, or hadn’t realized it was possible to do, before the technology came along. Technology opens up design-space. It stretches the intellectual ecosystem: It takes us places we couldn't go before. | ||
Technology domesticates the ground you know, and opens up frontiers that you don’t. | Technology domesticates the ground you know, and opens up frontiers that you don’t. |