Template:M intro systems financialisation: Difference between revisions
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The lesson is this. If we mistake the map for the territory — if we organise our interests and judge our outcomes exclusively by reference to the map, ''we thereby change the territory''. The territory more closely resembles the map. This is only convenient for cartographers. It is bad for the people in the territory whose interests the cartographers are supposedly trying to represent. It leads to two kinds of bad outcomes. | The lesson is this. If we mistake the map for the territory — if we organise our interests and judge our outcomes exclusively by reference to the map, ''we thereby change the territory''. The territory more closely resembles the map. This is only convenient for cartographers. It is bad for the people in the territory whose interests the cartographers are supposedly trying to represent. It leads to two kinds of bad outcomes. | ||
{{L1}}It makes life easier for business units that can only work in terms of numbers. It enhances financialisation be reducing ineffability. The benefit of network nodes that ''can'' handle ineffability — that tend to be more expensive and less predictable — we call these [[subject matter expert]]s, or even humans — is diminished. <li> | {{L1}}It makes life easier for “algorithmic” business units that can only work in terms of numbers — call these “machines”. It enhances financialisation be reducing ineffability. The benefit of network nodes that ''can'' handle ineffability — that tend to be more expensive and less predictable — we call these [[subject matter expert]]s, or even humans — is diminished. Now of course we can assign humans to algorithmic roles — where there is peripheral intractability in a network function, we have no choice — but as the territory redraws itself to the map, we can further marginalise that ineffability, and deploy cheaper humans, and at the limit, replace them altogether. Where intractability is hard, but not important — by interpreting unstructured inputs, as in a consumer helpline and triaging easy/low value queries— then techniques like AI can already handle it. By agreeing to behave like machines, to be categorised according to numerical terms, to be financialised — we ''surrender'' to machines<li> | ||
It leads to actual bad outcomes in the territory. No better example than the [[Post Office Horizon]] scandal. | |||
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Things that can’t be ranked and counted — that aren’t “legible” to this great high powered information processing system — have no particular [[value]] in its terms, whether or not they actually have any value. The unique pleasure you derive from Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations reduces precisely to the amount you are prepared to pay for it over the cost of producing and distributing it. Any greater value — the life lesson, aphorisms and fortitude it magically confers that guide you through through your heaviest seas and blackest storms count for nothing. It is hardly a novel idea to regret that something is being lost hereby. | Things that can’t be ranked and counted — that aren’t “legible” to this great high powered information processing system — have no particular [[value]] in its terms, whether or not they actually have any value. The unique pleasure you derive from Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations reduces precisely to the amount you are prepared to pay for it over the cost of producing and distributing it. Any greater value — the life lesson, aphorisms and fortitude it magically confers that guide you through through your heaviest seas and blackest storms count for nothing. It is hardly a novel idea to regret that something is being lost hereby. | ||