A World Without Work: Difference between revisions

A World Without Work (view source)

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 But in the conflicted, dirty, unpredictable universe we find ourselves in out here in TV land, there will continue to be plenty of work, as there always has been, administrating, governing, auditing, advising, [[rent-seeking]] — not to mention speculating and bullshitting about the former — as long as the computer-enhanced tight-coupled complexity of our networks doesn't [[Lentil convexity|wipe us out first]].
+===Employment and Taylorism===
+Susskind’s conception of “work” as a succession of definable, atomisable and impliedly dull tasks — a framework, of course, which suits it perfectly to adaptation by machine — is as retrograde and-out-of-touch as you might expect of an academic son of an academic whose closest encounter with paid employment has been as a special policy adviser to government. Perhaps he once had a paper round. This kind of Taylorism is common in management layers of the corporate world, of course, but that hardly makes it any less boneheaded.
+The better response is to recognise that definable, atomisable and dull tasks do not define what is employment, but it's very inverse: what it should not be. The [[JC]]’s law of worker [[entropy]] is exactly that: [[tedium]] is as sure a sign of waste in an organisation. If your workers are bored, you have a problem. If they’re boring each other, then you’ve got an exponential problem.
 {{sa}}