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Reports of our death are an exaggeration: Difference between revisions
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Reports of our death are an exaggeration (view source)
Revision as of 18:55, 16 January 2023
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Why surrender before kick-off like that? | Why surrender before kick-off like that? | ||
===On being a machine=== | |||
We are in a machine age. It is a machine age because machines have proven consistently good at doing things we could not, because we were too weak, too slow, too inconstant or too easily bored. | |||
Machines are good. We don’t want to run down machines. But we have indoctrinated ourselves that machine qualities — strength, speed, consistency, [[fungibility]] and ''mundanity'' — are the highest goods. We are taught these. We aspire to them. | |||
But executing a task with strength, speed, consistency, fungibility and patience are the highest human good ''only if you haven’t got a suitable machine''. If you have got a machine, use it. Let your people do something more useful. | |||
We are used to using the machine as a metaphor for mind: what about body as a metaphor for machine. | |||
Automate temperature regulation, the pulmonary system, balance, digestion, aspiration. Humans have no business there. But leave interpersonal relationships, communication, perception, fight-or-flight, decision-making in times of uncertainty, imagination and creation to the conscious mind. | |||
The challenge is not to automate indiscriminately, but to ''optimise'', so your people are not diverted from valuable work by box-ticking, form-filling and formalism. | |||
===A real challenger bank=== | ===A real challenger bank=== | ||
Optimised [[automation]] has its place. Ceteris paribus, an organisation that has optimised its machines will do better than one which hasn’t. | |||
An organisation where machines are optimised is one whose ''people'' are also optimised: maximally free to work their irreducible, ineffable, magic. | |||
Now, the dilemma. If, over thirty years, you have systematically recruited for those who best display machine-like qualities, and then treated them, and thereafter rewarded them for behaving in a machine-like way, ''your people won't be very good at it weaving magic''. | |||
Most likely, ''nor will you''. | |||
difference between excellent banks and hopeless ones: the transparent ''informal'' networks by which a good institution mysteriously ''avoids'' landmines, pitfalls and ambushes, while a poor one walks into every one. | |||
Sundar Pichai can’t code that. The same human expertise the banks need to hold their creaking systems together, to work around their bureaucratic absurdities and still sniff out new business opportunities and take a pragmatic and prudent view of the risk — this is not a bug in the system, but a feature. | Sundar Pichai can’t code that. The same human expertise the banks need to hold their creaking systems together, to work around their bureaucratic absurdities and still sniff out new business opportunities and take a pragmatic and prudent view of the risk — this is not a bug in the system, but a feature. | ||