Reports of our death are an exaggeration: Difference between revisions

Reports of our death are an exaggeration (view source)

Revision as of 14:25, 5 November 2019

1,115 bytes added , 5 November 2019

no edit summary

Amwelladmin

Bureaucrats, Interface administrators, Administrators

81,821

edits

@@ Line 3: / Line 3: @@
 ''A shame you couldn't say the same for John Cryan. Originally published in 2017, this article, and the grit in the steampunk wheel who wrote it — are still grimly hanging on, whereas the then CEO of Deutsche Bank is now the ex-CEO of Deutsche Bank.''
-John Cryan thinks his employees’ days are numbered. Machines will do for them. Not just back office grunts: ''everyone''. Even, presumably, Cryan himself.<ref>The horror! The horror! The irony! The irony!</ref>
+In 2017, then-CEO of Deutsche Bank John Cryan thought his employees’ days are numbered. Machines would do for them. Not just back office grunts: ''everyone''. Even, presumably, Cryan himself.<ref>The horror! The horror! The irony! The irony!</ref>
-“Today,” he warns, “we have people doing work like robots. Tomorrow, we will have ''robots behaving like people''”.
+“Today,” he warned, “we have people doing work like robots. Tomorrow, we will have ''robots behaving like people''”.
 No bad thing, you might say — who will miss the bankers?
@@ Line 13: / Line 13: @@
 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 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.
+Technology is not new. As long as there has been the lever, wheel or plough, humans have used machines to do tasks which are [[tedious]], repetitive or require 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. ''In the stuff they are good at'', they’re quicker, stronger, nimbler, cheaper and less error-prone.
-As {{author|George Gilder}} recently put it: “The claim of superhuman performance seems rather overwrought to me. Outperforming unaided human beings is what machines are supposed to do. That's why we build them.”
+But it’s an important caveat: as {{author|George Gilder}} recently put it: “The claim of superhuman performance seems rather overwrought to me. Outperforming unaided human beings is what machines are supposed to do. That's why we build them.”<ref>{{br|Life After Google: The Fall of Big Data and the Rise of the Blockchain Economy}} (2018)</ref>
+===The division of labour===
+Machines can only operate in constrained environments. They make flawless decisions, as long as both question ''and'' 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.
-Machines can only operate in constrained environments. They make flawless decisions, as long as both question ''and'' 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 and novel situations. We’re not perfect, 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: even though syntax errors are par for the course: humans don’t (easily) crash. That’s the boon and the bane of the [[meatware]]: you can’t tell when one makes a syntax error.
+But put human and machine together and you have a powerful proposition: the machine handles the rule-following; the human figures out what to do when you run out of road. It’s a partnership. A division of resources. Technology is an extended phenotype. But this is nothing new: this is always how we’ve used technology: the human fiqures out which field to plough and when; the horse ploughs it.
-We [[sacks of meat]] are better at handling ambiguity, conflict and novel situations. We’re not perfect, 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: even though syntax errors are par for the course: humans don’t (easily) crash.
+Now technology has caused the odd short-term dislocation — the industrial revolution put a bunch of hand-weavers out of work — 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 grown, while poverty and indolence have fallen. ''People have got busier''. Whatever technology is doing, with due regard to the risk of confusing [[correlation]] and [[causation]], it ''isn’t'' putting us out of work.
-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.
+Technology opens up design-space. It expands the intellectual ecosystem, domesticating the ground we know, and opening up [[frontier]]s we don’t. [[Frontier]]s are places where we need smart people to figure out new tools and new ways of operating. Machines can’t do it.
-For technology opens up design-space. It expands the intellectual ecosystem: It domesticates the ground we know, and opens up frontiers we don’t: places where we need smart people to figure out new tools and new ways of operating.
+But it also creates space and capacity to care about detail. [[Parkinson’s law]] states: it frees us up to care about things we never used to care about. The microcomputer made generate duplicate and distribute documents far, far easier.
 So, if you want to say this has all changed — that now the machines will put us out of work — you have to explain ''how''. What has changed? Why is this time different? We’ve heard this record before: twenty years ago, the wizards told us the internet had changed start-up valuations forever. Didn’t work out so well.