Reports of our death are an exaggeration: Difference between revisions

Reports of our death are an exaggeration (view source)

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-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''. High-rolling bankers are vulnerable. Even, presumably, Cryan himself.
+John Cryan thinks his  Deutsche Bank employees’ days are numbered. Machines will do for them. Not just back office grunts: ''everyone''. Even, presumably, Cryan himself.
 “Today,” he warns, “we have people doing work like robots. Tomorrow, we will have ''robots behaving like people''”.
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 No bad thing, you might say — who will miss the bankers?
-One can detect in this the fashionable view that technology is at a tipping point, at which ''we'' will be tipped out. The machines are coming for us. They have taken over our routine tasks, but they will outdo us at the ''hard'' stuff, too.
+You can see in this the fashionable view that technology is at a [[tipping point]], at which ''we'' will be tipped out. The machines have taken over our routine tasks, but soon they will outdo us at the ''hard'' stuff, too.
 A fashionable view. But a big call, all the same.
-Technology is not new. As long as there has been the lever, wheel or plough, humans have used machines to get things done: boring things; repetitive things; things requiring brute strength beyond our frail earthly shells. Because machines follow instructions better than we do, ''by definition'': that’s what means is to be a machine. They’re quicker, stronger, nimbler, cheaper and less error-prone.
+Technology is not new. As long as there has been the lever, wheel or plough, humans have used machines to do boring things, repetitive things and things requiring brute strength beyond our frail earthly shells. Because machines follow instructions better than we do, ''by definition'': that’s what means is to be a machine. They’re quicker, stronger, nimbler, cheaper and less error-prone.
 But they can only operate in constrained environments. They make flawless decisions, as long as the question and the answer are pre-configured. But take a machine out of its designed environment and it is useless: Good luck getting a [[Jacquard loom]] to plough a field.
-We sacks of meat are better at handling ambiguity, conflict, novel situations. We’re not flawless at it, but whatever the conundrum we can at least produce an answer. We don't hang or freeze waiting for a dialogue box to be clicked: syntax errors are par for the course: we don’t crash.
+We sacks of meat are better at handling ambiguity, conflict and novel situations. We’re not flawless at it, but whatever the conundrum is we can at least produce an answer. We don't hang or freeze waiting for a dialogue box to be clicked: syntax errors are par for the course: humans don’t (easily) crash.
 It’s a partnership. A division of resources. Technology is an extended phenotype. It has caused the odd short-term dislocation but the long-term prognosis has been benign: “labour-saving devices” have freed us to do things we previously had no time to do, or hadn’t realised you could do, before the technology came along. As technology has developed, so has the world's population has grown and rates of poverty and indolence have fallen. Whatever technology is doing, it ''isn’t'' putting us out of work.