Reports of our death are an exaggeration: Difference between revisions

Deutsche Bank’s CEO John Cryan thinks his employees’ days are numbered. The rise of the machines will do for them, in due course: not just back office grunts, cranking out settlements and reconciliation: ''everyone''.  

“Today,” he warns, “we have people doing work like robots. Tomorrow, we will have robots behaving like people”.

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?

But it implies a view, widely held, that technology is about to reach a tipping point: no longer just faster, cheaper, better and less aggravating than the sacks of meat who carry out your routine tasks, but equal —-  even better than — the sacks of meat who do the hard stuff.  

There is much millenarian hand-wringing about this, on blogs and on the new media.  

But technology is not new. Since someone invented the lever, the wheel and the plough, humans have used machines to get boring things done: repetitive things; things require brute strength. Things which don’t require judgment. The constraint has always, only, been available technology.

Start with this observation: machines follow unambiguous logical instruction sets better than humans do. By definition - that’s what it is to be a machine. They’re quicker, stronger, nimbler, cheaper, less error-prone. Always have been and always will be.  

But machines can only operate in {{isdaprov|constrained environments}}. They can react, flawlessly, to pre-conceptualised decisions with pre-configured responses. But take a machine out of its environment and it is useless. (Good luck getting a [[Jacquard loom]] to plough a field).  

Buried in that observation is this one too: humans are better than machines at handling ambiguity, conflict, novel situations. They’re not perfect — God knows we’re not perfect — but we can at least give it a go. We are great 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 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.