Reports of our death are an exaggeration: Difference between revisions

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 It is a machine age because machines have proven consistently good at doing things we cannot, because we are too weak, too slow, too inconstant or too easily bored.
-Machines are good at being machines. 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.
+Machines are good ''at being machines''. We don’t want to run them down, ''but they aren’t magic'': they just ''seem'' like it, sometimes. Yet we have convinced ourselves and indoctrinated our children that machine-like qualities — strength, speed, consistency, modularity, [[fungibility]] and ''mundanity'' — should be their loftiest aims.
-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.
+But executing a task with strength, speed, consistency, fungibility and patience are lofty aims ''only if you haven’t got a suitable machine''. If you have got a machine, use it. Let your people do something more useful. Line question: ''should we be doing these tasks at all?''
-We are used to using the machine as a metaphor for mind: what about body as a metaphor for machine.
+===The body as a metaphor===
+We are used to “Turing machine” as a [[metaphor]] for “mind”: how about inverting that? How what about “body” — yes, in that dishonourable dualist, Cartesian sense — as a [[metaphor]] for “Turing machine”? “Mind” and “body” as a principle for the [[division of labour]] between human and 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.
+What goes to body, give to a machine. Motor skills.  Temperature regulation. The pulmonary system. Digestion. Aspiration. The conscious mind has no business here. There is little it can add. It only gets in the way. There is compelling evidence that when the conscious mind takes over motor skills, things quickly go to hell.<ref>This is the premise of {{br|Thinking: Fast and Slow}}</ref>
+But interpersonal relationships, communication, perception, decision-making in times of uncertainty, imagination and creation to the conscious mind. Leave the machines out of this. Let them report, by all means. Let them provide, on request, the information the mind needs to make its plans, but ''do not let them intermediate that plan''.
+The challenge is not to automate indiscriminately, but judiciously. To ''optimise'', so the mind is not diverted from its valuable work by formalistic requirements of the machine.
+Here “Machine” carries a wider meaning than computer. It encompasses any formalised, preconfigured process. A [[playbook]] is a machine.  A policy battery. An approval process.
-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===
-Optimised [[automation]] has its place. [[All other things being equal]], an organisation that has optimised its machines will do better than one which hasn’t.
+Optimised [[automation]] has its place. [[All other things being equal]], an organisation that has optimised its machines will do better, in peacetime and when at war, 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 hunting out new lands, identifying new threats, forging new alliances — ''playing the [[Finite and Infinite Games|infinite game]]'' — while uncomplaining drones till the fields, tend the flock work the pits, carry the rubble away from the coalface and police known pitfalls. To minimise the chance of [[human error]]. The machines must be historical. They look backward, by reference to available data, which is [[Big data|from the past]]. They cannot anticipate the future — because you can’t extrapolate the past from the future — any better than humans can. But  humans can improvise in the face of the unexpected in a way that machines can’t.