A World Without Work: Difference between revisions

Hand-waving about [[Chess]] and [[Go]]-playing supercomputers — there is a lot of that in {{br|A World Without Work}} — does not advance the argument. Both are hermetically sealed games on small, finite boards with simple sets of unvarying rules between two players sharing a common objective. Outcomes are entirely deterministic, and you can see that, at the limit, the player with the superior number-crunching power ''must'' win. Even here the natural imagination of human players, otherwise at a ''colossal'' disadvantage from an information processing perspective, made the job of beating them surprisingly hard. This ought to be the lesson: even in thoroughly simplistic binary games, it takes a ton of dumb processing power to beat a puny imagineer. Instead, Susskind reads this as a signpost to the [[Apocalypse]].

But life is not a two-person board-game on a small-board with fixed rules a static, common, zero-sum objective. Analogising from this — ironically, something a computer could not do — is not great police-work. In the world of [[systems analysis]], [[Chess]] and [[Go]] are [[complicated]], not [[complex]], problems. The risk payoff is normal, not exponential. They can, in theory, be “brute force” managed by skilled operation of an algorithm, and the consequences of failure are predictable and contained — you lose. ''[[Complex]]'' problems — those one finds at the frontier, when one has boldly gone where no-one has gone before, in dynamic systems, where information is not perfect, where risk outcomes are [[convexity|convex]] — so-called “[[wicked environment]]s” — are not like that.<ref>There is more on this topic at [[complex systems]].</ref> Here algorithms are no good. One needs experience, wisdom and judgment.

By design, computers can only follow rules. One which could not be relied on to process instructions with absolute fidelity would be a ''bad'' computer. ''Good'' computers cannot think, they cannot imagine, they cannot handle ambiguity — if they have a “mental life”, it exists in a flat space with no future or past. Computer language, by design, has no ''tense''. It is not a ''symbolic'' structure, in that its vocabulary does not represent anything.<ref>See: [[Code and language - technology article|Code and language]].</ref> Machines are linguistically, structurally ''incapable'' of interpreting, let alone ''coining'' [[metaphor|metaphors]], and they cannot reason by analogy or manage any of the innate ambiguities that comprise human decision-making.  

And even this is before considering the purblind, irrational sociology that propels all organisations, because it propels all ''individuals'' in those organisations. Like the academy in which {{author|Daniel Susskind}}’s millenarianism thrives, computers function best in a theoretical, [[Platonic form|Platonic]] universe governed by unchanging and unambiguous physical rules, and populated by rational agents. In that world, Susskind ''might'' have a point — though I doubt it.  

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]].

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 [[third 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 it’s an exponential problem.