Template:M intro design System redundancy: Difference between revisions

{{Quote|A form of modernity, characterised by an unfaltering confidence in science and technology as means to reorder the social and natural world.

:—Wikipedia, on ''High Modernism''}}

[[System redundancy|One of the]] [[JC]]’s pet theories is that western commerce — especially the [[Financial services|parts concerned with moving green bits of paper around]] — is deep into the regrettable phase of a love affair with “[[data modernism]]”, our own term for a computer-adulterated form of [[high modernism]].

Just as the natural world can be ordered by science, so can the business world be ordered, and controlled, by ''[[process]]''. [[Process]] is a sort of [[algorithm]] that runs on a carbon and not a silicon [[substrate]]: that is, ''us''.

[[Data modernism]] has systematically undermined the significance in the organisation of ''those with inneffable expertise''. As a result, the poor professional has been, by thousands of cuts — literally — denuded of her status. In a slow, but inevitable, descent into the quotidian, she has been expected to supply her ''own'' accoutrements: do-it-yourself typing; [[bring your own device]] — and the same time that once commodious office became communal, then lost its door, then its walls, diminished to a dedicated space along a row, and most recently has become a conditional promise of a sanitised space at a [[telescreen]] somewhere in the building, assuming you’re quick or enough people are out sick or on holiday.  

The [[metaphor]] works best if we consider the workforce to be carbon-based Turing machines. Such a distributed network is best optimised centrally, and from the place with the best view of the big picture: the top.<ref>curiously, this is not the theory behind a distributed network of computers, which is rather [[end-to-end principle|controlled from the edges]]. But still.</ref> All relevant information can be articulated as [[data]] — you know: “[[Signal-to-noise ratio|In God we trust, all others must bring data]]” — and, with enough data everything about the organisation’s present can be known and its future extrapolated: this is the promise of science and technology.<ref>It isn’t. It really, really isn’t. But still.</ref>  

The organisation’s permanent infrastructure should be honed down and dedicated to  its core business, and its peripheral activity — [[operation]]s, [[personnel]], [[legal]] and ''~ cough ~'' strategic [[management consultant|management advice]] — outsourced to specialist service providers who can be scaled up or down as requirements dictate,<ref>“Surge pricing” in times of crisis, though.</ref> or switched out altogether should they malfunction or otherwise be surplus to requirements.  

This philosophy of optimally efficient allocation of resources, espoused as it is by ''~ cough ~'' strategic [[management consultant| management advisors]] — can seem self-serving. It is responsible for a generational drift from inefficient businesses run arbitrarily by unionised humans to enterprises run like unblinking machines: infinitesimally-sliced ''processes'', each [[triage]]d and managed by pre-automated applications, with what minimal human oversight there is provided by external service providers in low-cost locations.  

''Business'' became “business-process-as-a-service”.

It gets worse for the poor old [[subject matter expert]]s. Even though, inevitably, one has less than perfect information, extrapolations, mathematical derivations and [[Large language model|algorithmic pattern matches]] from a large but finite data set will, it is ''deduced'' — have better predictive value than the gut feel of “[[ineffable]] [[expert]]ise”.  

The status we have historically assigned to experienced experts is grounded in folk psychology, lacks analytical rigour and, when compared with sufficient granular data, cannot be borne out: this is the lesson of {{br|Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game}}. Just as Wall Street data crunchers can have no clue about baseball and still outperform veteran talent scouts, so can data models and analysts who know nothing about the technical details of, say, the ''law'' outperform humans who do when optimising business systems. Thus, from a network of programmed but uncomprehending rule-followers, a smooth, steady and stable business revenue stream [[emerge]]s. Strong and stable. Strong and stable. Repeat it enough and it sounds plausible.

It’s worth asking again: if we’re getting nearer some kind of optimised nirvana, how come everything seems so joyless and glum?

Since data quantity and computing horsepower have exploded in the last few decades, the [[high-modernist]]s have grown ever surer that their time — the [[Singularity]] — is nigh. Before long, and everything will be solved.

Done of this is new: just our enthusiasm for it. The prophet of [[data modernism]] was [[Frederick Winslow Taylor]], progenitor of the maximally efficient production line. His inheritors say things like, “[[The Singularity is Near|the singularity is near]]” and “[[Software is eating the world|software will eat the world]]” but for all their millenarianism the on-the-ground experience at the business end of this all world-eating software is as grim as it ever was.

====Time====

We have a theory that in reducing everything to measured inputs and outputs, [[data modernism]] collapses into a kind of ''[[reductionism]]'', only about ''time'': just as reductionists see our knowledge of the universe as being reducible to infinitesimally small sub-atomic essences — so a function of theoretical physics — so do data modernists see all of commerce as explicable in terms of infinitesimally small windows of ''time'' so thin that they are static. Let’s call these windows “frames”, resembling as they do individual frames in a movie reel. The beauty of static frames is, not being in motion, they can’t do anything unexpected. Yet, if you run a sequence of consecutive frames close to one another they ''appear'' to move, in the same way that still movie frames do. In this way does data modernism replace  the ''actual'' passage of time with the appearance of passing time.

Data modernism has no concept of time at all: the computer languages in which it is written don’t do [[tense|''tense'']]: they are coded in the present, and have no frame of reference for continuity.  

But 'existential continuity backwards and forwards in “time” is precisely the problem that the human brain solves: this is the thing that demands continuously existing “things”, just one of which is “me”, moving through a spatio-temporal universe, interacting with each other and hence requiring definitive boundaries.<ref>{{author|David Hume}} wrestled with this idea of continuity: if I see you, then look away, then look back at you, what ''grounds'' do I have for believing it is still “you”? Computer code makes no such assumption. It is the human genius to make that logical leap. How we do it, and how consciousness works, defies explanation. {{author|Daniel Dennett}} made a virtuoso attempt to apply this algorithmic [[reductionist]] approach to the problem of mind in {{br|Consciousness Explained}}, but ended up defining away the very thing he claimed to explain, effectively concluding “consciouness is an illusion”. But on whom?</ref>

[[Data modernism]] thereby does away with the need for time and continuity altogether, but rather ''simulates'' it through a succession of static slices — but continuity vanishes when one regards the picture show as a sequence of frames.  

But dealing with history is exactly the challenge.

Gerd Gigerenzer has a nice example that illustrates the importance of continuity.  

Imagine a still frame of two pint glasses, A and B, each containing half a pint of beer.<Ref>One that costs more than a fortnight’s subscription to the JC, by the way.</ref> Which is half-full and which is half-empty?

Now, imagine a short film in which glass A is full and glass B empty, then a little Cartesian homunculus tips half of the contents of glass A into glass B. ''Now'' which is half-full and which is half-empty?

The first scenario seems to pose a stupid question. The second scenario tells us something small  about the history of the world. To capture that information using code is possible, sure, but it is extremely complicated.

And it is partly because having to cope with history, the passage of time, and the continued existence of objects, makes things exponentially more complex than they already are. An atomically thin snapshot of the world as data is enough of a beast to be still well beyond the operating parameters of even the most powerful quantum machines: that level of detail extending into the future and back from the past is, literally, infinitely more complicated. The modernist programme is to suppose that “time” is really just comprised of billions of infinitesimally thin, static slices, each functionally identical to any other, so by measuring the [[delta]] between them we have a means of handling that complexity.

In any case, just in time rationalisers take a cycle and code for that. What is the process, start to finish, what are the dependencies, what are the plausible unknowns, and how do we optimise for efficiency of movement, components and materials, to manage

===On the virtue of slack===

The “leaner” a distributed system is, the more ''fragile'' it will be and the more “single points of failure” it will contain, whose malfunction in the best case, will halt the whole system, and in [[tightly-coupled]] [[complex system]]s may trigger further component failures, chain reactions and unpredictable nonlinear consequences.

A financial market is a [[complex system]] comprising an indeterminate number of autonomous actors, many of whom (notably corporations) are themselves complex systems, interacting in unpredictable ways.