Automation eliminates value but not risk
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The design of organisations and products
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If you can automate something, you can’t monetise it. You automate, therefore, as a defensive strategy: because everyone else is automating, and if you don’t, your unit cost is higher.
This plays to a pet theory of the JC’s: the quotidian is a utility, not an asset. If you believe you have intellectual property in your boilerplate, you will waste precious resource defending a common asset. You will misprice that asset, and you may be disappointed in how many people will be prepared to pay for it.
Proprietors of contract assembly tools, take note. The value is in what you assemble, not how.
Automation keeps you in business; it isn’t a business. If every function in your organisation can be managed by an algorithm, it is game over. There is no excitement, no difficulty, no skill required, no value left. Behold the difference between noughts and crosses and chess: both are deterministic, zero-sum games — therefore unsuitable analogies for technological unemployment, but that is another story — but noughts and crosses has been solved. There are trivial, mechanical steps to force a stalemate. It is no fun. Skill in noughts and crosses has no value. It doesn’t really even count as a skill. Chess is capable of algorithmic solution, but it has not been solved.[1] Hence, to those who enjoy that kind of thing, chess is still fun. Skill in chess has some value.[2]
But (rigorous and competently executed) automation can remove micro-risks — risks that are intrinsic/internal to the process being automated; you can iron out the inconsistencies, foibles and errors of the meatware — but not the extrinsic risks that arise from the interaction of your new automated process with the outside world. those are emergent risks, impossible to see at the level of the process (certainly when a machine is carrying out that process), but that are a function of complexity.
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- ↑ Yet. But it is a matter of time, and processing power. Interesting question actually: can we deduce, now, that when Chess is solved, the solution will be a stalemate? Statistics seem to imply that white has a first-mover advantage, though Wikipedia tells us “chess players and theoreticians have long debated whether, given perfect play by both sides, the game should end in a win for White or a draw. Since approximately 1889, when World Champion Wilhelm Steinitz addressed this issue, the consensus has been that a perfectly played game would end in a draw”.
- ↑ But a diminishing amount: even though not entirely solved, the enhanced algorithmic power available to neural networks and so-on mean that they can consistently beat humans, which kind of makes it less interesting to see how well humans play.