Day: 1 March 2018
Pivoting ‘the book’ from individuals to systems
It’s a sound generalisation that people do the best they can within the limits of the systems they find themselves in. That best may include pushing at those limits, but even if it does, that doesn’t make them any less real. Two things follow from that. The first is that it is pointless blaming individuals for operating within the constraints of the system. The second is that if you want to change the system, you have to change the system.
That’s not to say that people are powerless or that we can all resign personal and moral accountability. On the contrary, the systems are themselves human constructs and can only be challenged and changed by the humans who are actors within them. That’s where this post comes in, which is in effect a prospectus for a not yet written book. What different systems do changes in social, economic and technological contexts demand, where are the contradictions which need to be resolved? The book, when it comes, promises to be fascinating; the post is well worth reading in its own right in the meantime.
Why can’t we make the trains run on time?
On a morning where transport is disrupted across the UK by snow and cold winds, it’s worth returning to this post from a few years ago, which explains why small amounts of snow here are so much more disruptive than the much larger amounts which are easily managed elsewhere. In short, the marginal cost of being ready for severe weather, when there isn’t very much of it, isn’t justified by the benefits from another day or two a year of smooth operations. That is a very sensible trade off – the existence of which is immediately forgotten when the bad weather arrives.
It’s a trade off with much wider application than snow-covered railway tracks. Once you start looking, it can be seen in almost every area of public policy, culminating in the macro view that everybody (it is asserted) wants both lower taxes and better services. Being more efficient is the way of closing the gap which is simultaneously both clearly the right thing to do and an excellent way of ducking the question, but at best shifts the parameters without fundamentally changing the nature of the problem. Hypothecation is a related sleight of hand – let’s have more money, but only for virtuous things. In the end, though, public policy is about making choices. And letting the trains freeze up from time to time is a better one than it appears in the moment to the people whose trains have failed to come.
How AI will transform the Digital Workplace (and how it already is)
AI is often written about in terms of sweeping changes resulting in the wholesale automation of tasks and jobs. But as this post sets out, there is also a lower key version, where forms of AI appear as feature enhancements (and thus may not be apparent at all). Perhaps self-generating to do lists are the real future – though whether that will be experienced as liberation or enslavement is very much a matter of taste. Either way, AI won’t be experienced as robots, breaking into the building to take our jobs; instead tasks will melt away, enhanced in ways which never quite feel revolutionary.