age-of-the-smart-machine.md

[[!meta title="In the Age of the Smart Machine"]]

## Index

* Deskilling, diplacement of "the human body and its know-how" and reskilling, 57.
* Rebellion against the automated door, 21-23.
* Humanization (Marx) as "tempering animality with rationality" in the progress of civilization, 30.
* Uncivilized, savage worker's "spontaneous, instinctually gratifying behavior"
  in the past, signaling the problem of "how to get the human body to remain in one place,
  pay attention, and perform consistently over a fixed period of time", 31-34.
* Paradox of the body; body's dual role in production: effort and skill (No Pain no Gain), 36.
* "Singer Sewing Machine Company was not able to produce perfectly interchangeable parts.
  As a result, they relied on skilled fitters to assemble each product.", 39.
* Continous Process as a possible way to break the effort-skill body paradox and the U-curve
  of social integration, 50-56

## Impressions

* Intro mentions a control room like the Star Trek bridge. It makes me relate
  to the skilled worker at one of its limits - those of the austronaut. Highly
  skilled and disciplined, could be an interesting comparison.

* The pathway from motor knowledge to abstract knowledge recalls Piaget's discussion
  about intelligence.

* Also some bridges can be built with Nicolelis' discussion of technology
  transforming itself in extensions of the brain.

* I to, sometimes, can feel my systems. How they're running, which are
  the bottlenecks, what should I look for. Load average from a server is
  something you can "feel" just by delays in your terminal.

* Transitional generations might feel a strange feeling.

## Excerpts

### Choices on knowledge, authority and collaboration

    The choices that we face concern the conception and distribution of
    knowledge in the workplace. Imagine the following scenario: Intelli-
    gence is lodged in the smart machine at the expense of the human
    capacity for critical judgment. Organizational members become ever
    more dependent, docile, and secretly cynical. As more tasks must be
    accomplished through the medium of information technology (I call
    this "computer-mediated work"), the sentient body loses its salience
    as a source of knowledge, resulting in profound disorientation and loss
    of meaning. People intensify their search for avenues of escape through
    drugs, apathy, or adversarial conflict, as the majority of jobs in our
    offices and factories become increasingly isolated, remote, routine, and
    perfunctory. Al ternativel y, imagine this scenario: Organizational lead-
    ers recognize the new forms of skill and knowledge needed to truly
    exploit the potential of an intelligent technology. They direct their
    resources toward creating a work force that can exercise critical judg-
    ment as it manages the surrounding machine systems. Work becomes
    more abstract as it depends upon understanding and manipulating infor-
    mation. This marks the beginning of new forms of mastery and provides
    an opportunity to imbue jobs with more comprehensive meaning. A
    new array of work tasks offer unprecedented opportunities for a wide
    range of employees to add value to products and services.

    [...]

    The choices that we make will shape relations of authority in the
    workplace. Once more, imagine: Managers struggle to retain their tra-
    ditional sources of authority, which have depended in an important
    way upon their exclusive control of the organization's knowledge base.
    They use the new technology to structure organizational experience
    in ways that help reproduce the legitimacy of their traditional roles.
    Managers insist on the prerogatives of command and seek methods that
    protect the hierarchical distance that distinguishes them from their
    subordinates. Employees barred from the new forms of mastery relin-
    quish their sense of responsibility for the organization's work and use
    obedience to authority as a means of expressing their resentment.
    Imagine an alternative: This technological transformation engenders a
    new approach to organizational behavior, one in which relationships
    are more intricate, collaborative, and bound by the mutual responsibili-
    ties of colleagues. As the new technology integrates information across
    time and space, managers and workers each overcome their narrow
    functional perspectives and create new roles that are better suited to
    enhancing value-adding activities in a data-rich environment. As the
    quality of skills at each organizational level becomes similar, hierarchi-
    cal distinctions begin to blur. Authority comes to depend more upon
    an appropriate fit between knowledge and responsibility than upon the
    ranking rules of the traditional organizational pyramid.

    [...]

    Imagine this scenario: The new technology becomes the source of surveillance
    techniques that are used to ensnare organizational members or to subtly bully
    them into confor- mity. Managers employ the technology to circumvent the
    demanding work of face-to-face engagement, substituting instead techniques of
    remote management and automated administration. The new techno- logical
    infrastructure becomes a battlefield of techniques, with manag- ers inventing
    novel ways to enhance certainty and control while em- ployees discover new
    methods of self-protection and even sabotage.  Imagine the alternative: The new
    technological milieu becomes a re- source from which are fashioned innovative
    methods of information sharing and social exchange. These methods in turn
    produce a deep- ened sense of collective responsibility and joint ownership, as
    access to ever-broader domains of information lend new objectivity to data and
    preempt the dictates of hierarchical authority.

    -- 5-7

### A paradox

    From the unmanned factory to the automated cockpit, visions of the future hail
    information technology as the final answer to "the labor question," the
    ultimate opportunity to rid our- selves of the thorny problems associated with
    training and managing a competent and committed work force. These very same
    technologies have been applauded as the hallmark of a second industrial
    revolution, in which the classic conflicts of knowledge and power associated
    with an earlier age will be synthesized in an array of organizational inno-
    vations and new procedures for the production of goods and services, all
    characterized by an unprecedented degree of labor harmony and widespread
    participation in management process. I Why the paradox?

    -- 7-8

### Informate and automate: the duality of Information Technology

    Thus, information technology, even when it is applied to automati-
    cally reproduce a finite activity, is not mute. It not only imposes infor-
    mation (in the form of programmed instructions) but also produces
    information. It both accomplishes tasks and translates them into infor-
    mation. The action of a machine is entirely invested in its object, the
    product. Information technology, on the other hand, introduces an ad-
    ditional dimension of reflexivity: it makes its contribution to the prod-
    uct, but it also reflects back on its activities and on the system of activi-
    ties to which it is related. Information technology not only produces
    action but also produces a voice that symbolically renders events, ob-
    jects, and processes so that they become visible, knowable, and share-
    able in a new way.

    -- 9

    [...]

    An emphasis on the informating capacity of intelligent technology can provide a
    point of origin for new conceptions of work and power. A more re- stricted
    emphasis on its automating capacity can provide the occasion for that second
    kind of revolution-a return to the familiar grounds of industrial society with
    divergent interests battling for control, aug- mented by an array of new
    material resources with which to attack and defend.

    -- 11-12

### The natural attitude

    The most treacherous enemy of such research is what philosophers
    call "the natural attitude," our capacity to live daily life in a way that
    takes for granted the objects and activities that surround us. Even when
    we encounter new objects in our environment, our tendency is to expe-
    rience them in terms of categories and qualities with which we are
    already familiar. The natural attitude allows us to assume and predict a
    great many things about each other's behavior without first establishing
    premises at the outset of every interaction. The natural attitude can
    also stand in the way of awareness, for ordinary experience has to be
    made extraordinary in order to become accessible to reflection. This
    occurs when we encounter a problem: when our actions do not yield
    the expected results, we are caught by surprise and so are motivated
    to reflect upon our initial assumptions. 2 Awareness requires a rupture
    with the world we take for granted; then old categories of experience
    are called into question and revised. For example, in the early days of
    photography, the discrepancies between the camera's eye and the hu-
    man eye were avidly discussed, but, "once they began to think photo-
    graphically, people stopped talking about photographic distortion, as it
    was called.,,3

    -- 13

### The Control Room

Whoa, the description of the Control Room from the Piney Wood Mill recalled me
the Cybersyn Control Room built -- and then destroyed -- less than a decade
before:

    Workers sit on orthopedically designed swivel chairs covered with a royal blue
    fabric, facing video display ter- minals. The terminals, which display process
    information for the purposes of monitoring and control, are built into polished
    oak cabi- nets. Their screens glow with numbers, letters, and graphics in vivid
    red, green, and blue. The floor here is covered with slate-gray carpet- ing;
    the angled countertops on which the terminals sit are rust brown and edged in
    black. The walls are covered with a wheat-colored fabric and the molding
    repeats the polished oak of the cabinetry. The dropped ceiling is of a bronzed
    metal, and from it is suspended a three dimen- sional structure into which
    lights have been recessed and angled to provide the right amount of
    illumination without creating glare on the screens. The color scheme is
    repeated on the ceiling-soft tones of beige, rust, brown, and gray in a
    geometric design.

    -- 20-21

### Technology, work and the body

    Technology represents intelligence systematically applied to the
    problem of the body. It functions to amplify and surpass the organic
    limits of the body; it compensates for the body's fragility and vulnera-
    bility. Industrial technology has substituted for the human body in
    many of the processes associated with production and so has redefined
    the limits of production formerly imposed by the body. As a result,
    society's capacity to produce things has been extended in a way that is
    unprecedented in human history. This achievement has not been with-
    out its costs, however. In diminishing the role of the worker's body in
    the labor process, industrial technology has also tended to diminish the
    importance of the worker. In creating jobs that require less human
    effort, industrial technology has also been used to create jobs that re-
    quire less human talent. In creating jobs that demand less of the body,
    industrial production has also tended to create jobs that give less to the
    body, in terms of opportunities to accrue knowledge in the production
    process. These two-sided consequences have been fundamental for the
    growth and development of the industrial bureaucracy, which has de-
    pended upon the rationalization and centralization of knowledge as the
    basis of control.

    [...]

    Throughout most of human history, work has ines- capably meant the exertion and
    often the depletion of the worker's body. Yet only in the context of such
    exertion was it possible to learn a trade and to master skills. Since the
    industrial revolution, the acceler- ated progress of automation has generally
    meant a reduction in the amount of effort required of the human body in the
    labor process. It has also tended to reduce the quality of skills that a worker
    must bring to the activity of making something. Industrial technology has been
    developed in a manner that increases its capacity to spare the human body,
    while at the same time it has usurped opportunities for the devel- opment and
    performance of skills that only the body can learn and remember.

    -- 22-23

    The progress of automation has been associated with both a general
    decline in the degree of know-how required of the worker and a de-
    cline in the degree of physical punishment to which he or she must be
    subjected. Information technology, however, does have the potential
    to redirect the historical trajectory of automation. The intrinsic power
    of its informating capacity can change the basis upon which knowledge
    is developed and applied in the industrial production process by lifting
    knowledge entirely out of the body's domain. The new technology sig-
    nals the transposition of work activities to the abstract domain of infor-
    mation. Toil no longer implies physical depletion. "Work" becomes
    the manipulation of symbols, and when this occurs, the nature of skill
    is redefined. The application of technology that preserves the body may
    no longer imply the destruction of knowledge; instead, it may imply
    the reconstruction of knowledge of a different sort.

    -- 23

    There is reason enough to want to avoid exhausting work, but the
    constancy of repugnance was not confined to forms of labor that were
    extremely punishing. As noted earlier, in the membership practices of
    some guilds, even the craftsworker was liable to be an object of con-
    tempt because of the manual nature of that work. Such repugnance is
    in itself an act of distancing. It is both a rejection of the animal body
    and an affirmation of one's ability to translate the impulses of that body
    into the infinitely more subtle behavioral codes that mediate power in
    complex organizations. Once this translation occurs, the body is no
    longer the vehicle for involuntary affective or physical displays. Instead,
    it becomes the instrument of carefully crafted gestures and behaviors
    designed to achieve a calculated effect in an environment where inter-
    personal influence and even a kind of rudimentary psychological insight
    are critical to success. In the interpersonal world of court society, the
    body's knowledge involved the ability to be attuned to the psycho-
    logical needs and demands of others, particularly of superiors, and
    to produce subtly detailed nonverbal behavior that reflected this
    awareness.

    -- 28-29

    The differences between the work performed by the skilled
    workers and the laborers was not of an "intellectual" versus manual
    activity. The difference lay in the content of a similarly heavy manual
    work: a content of rationality of participation for skilled workers versus
    one of total indifference for laborers. 5 5

    The work of the skilled craftsperson may not have been "intellec-
    tual," but it was knowledgeable. These nineteenth-century workers
    participated in a form of knowledge that had always defined the activity
    of making things. It was knowledge that accrues to the sentient body
    in the course of its activity; knowledge inscribed in the laboring body-
    in hands, fingertips, wrists, feet, nose, eyes, ears, skin, muscles, shoul-
    ders, arms, and legs-as surely as it was inscribed in the brain. It was
    knowledge filled with intimate detail of materials and ambience-the
    color and consistency of metal as it was thrust into a blazing fire, the
    smooth finish of the clay as it gave up its moisture, the supple feel of
    the leather as it was beaten and stretched, the strength and delicacy of
    glass as it was filled with human breath. These details were known,
    though in the practical action of production work, they were rarely
    made explicit. Few of those who had such knowledge would have been
    able to explain, rationalize, or articulate it. Such skills were learned
    through observation, imitation, and action more than they were taught,
    reflected upon, or verbalized. For example, James J. Davis, later to
    become Warren Harding's Secretary of Labor, learned the skill of pud-
    dling iron by working as his father's helper in a Pennsylvania foundry:
    "None of us ever went to school and learned the chemistry of it from
    books. . . . We learned the trick by doing it, standing with our faces in
    the scorching heat while our hands puddled the metal in its glaring
    bath. ,,56

    -- 40

### The Scientific management

Taylor, when "worker's know-how was expropriated to the ranks of management",
using information technology -- that _automates_ and _informates_ -- before
computer adoption, 41-44.

    Scientific management frequently meant not only that individual effort was
    simplified (either because of labor-saving equipment or new organizational
    methods that fragmented tasks into their simplest components), but also that
    the pace of effort was intensified, thus raising the level of fatigue and
    stress.  Effort was purified-stripped of waste-but not yet eased, and resis-
    tance to scientific management harkened back to the age-old issue of the
    intensity and degree of physical exertion to which the body should be subject.
    As long as effort was organized by the traditional practices of a craft, it
    could be experienced as within one's own control and, being inextricably linked
    to skill, as a source of considerable pride, satisfaction, and independence.
    Stripped of this context and mean- ing, demands for greater effort only
    intensified the desire for self- . 69 protectIon.

    Taylor had believed that the transcendent logic of science, together
    with easier work and better, more fairly determined wages, could inte-
    grate the worker into the organization and inspire a zest for production.
    Instead, the forms of work organization that emerged with scientific
    management tended to amplify the divergence of interests between
    management and workers. Scientific management revised many of the
    assumptions that had guided the traditional employer-employee rela-
    tionship in that it allowed a minimal connection between the organiza-
    tion and the individual in terms of skill, training, and the centrality of
    the worker's contribution. It also permitted a new flexibility in work
    force management, promoting the maximum interchangeability of per-
    sonnel and the minimum dependence on their ability, availability, or
    motivation. 70

    [...]

    A machinist gained prominence when he debated Taylor in 1 914 and
    remarked, "we don't want to work as fast as we are able to. We want
    to work as fast as we think it's comfortable for us to work. We haven't
    come into existence for the purpose of seeing how great a task we can
    perform through a lifetime. We are trying to regulate our work so as
    to make it auxiliary to our lives. ,,73

    -- 45-46

Fordism:

    "The instruction cards on which Taylor set so much value, Ford was able to
    discard. The conveyor belt, the traveling platform, the overhead rails and
    material conveyors take their place. . . . Motion analysis has become largely
    unnecessary, for the task of the assembly line worker is reduced to a few
    manipulations. Taylor's stop-watch nevertheless remains measuring the time of
    operations to the fraction of a second. ,,74

    The fragmentation of tasks characteristic of the new Ford assembly
    line achieved dramatic increases in productivity due to the detailed
    time study of thousands of operations and the invention of the conveyor
    belt and other equipment that maximized the continuity of assembly.

    [...]

    Effort is simplified (though its pace is frequently intensified) while skill
    demands are reduced by new methods of task organization and new forms of
    machinery.

    The continuity of assembly depended upon the production of interchangeable
    parts for uniform products.

    -- 47

Effects:

    For the majority of industrial workers in the generations that followed, there
    would be fewer opportunities to develop or maintain craft skills. Mass
    production depended upon interchangeability for the standardization of
    production; this principle required manufacturing operations to free themselves
    from the particularistic know-how of the craftsworker.

    [...]

    Thus, applications of industrial technology have simplified, and gen-
    erally reduced, physical effort, but because of the bond between effort
    and skill, they have also tended to reduce or eliminate know-how. 78

    [...]

    Self-preservation would induce the worker to accept automation.

    [...]

    the machine assumes responsibility

    [...]

    In Braverman's influential critique of what he called the "degradation
    of work" in this century, he used Bright's study to make a very different
    point. Where Bright saw the glass half full because the physical demands
    of work were curtailed, Braverman saw the glass being drained, as work-
    ers' skills were absorbed by technology. For Braverman, the transfer of
    skill into machinery represented a triumph of "dead labor over living
    labor," a necessity of capitalist logic. As machinery is enlarged and per-
    fected, the worker is made puny and insignificant. By substituting capital
    (in the form of machinery) for labor, Braverman believed that employers
    merely seized the opportunity to exert greater control over the labor
    process. As the work force encountered fewer opportunities for skill
    development, it would become progressively less capable and, thus, less
    bl ... 85

    -- 48-49

### The Transfer

The transition from manual to automated, the process of transferring knowledged
from the body to the machine is a sistematization of the transference of
knowledge from art (work whose reproduction is challenging) to technics
(pramatized art, the art of practical, efficient life):

    However, the term transfer must be doubly laden if it is to adequately describe
    this process. Knowledge was first transferred from one quality of knowing to
    another-from knowing that was sentient, embedded, and experience-based to know-
    ing that was explicit and thus subject to rational analysis and perpetual
    reformulation. The mechanisms used to accomplish this transfer were themselves
    labor intensive (that is, they depended upon first-hand ob- servation of
    time-study experts) and were designed solely in the con- text of, and with the
    express purpose of, enabling a second transfer- one that entailed the migration
    of knowledge from labor to manage- ment with its pointed implications for the
    distribution of authority and the division of labor in the industrial
    organization.

    -- 56-57

    The worker's capacity "to know" has been lodged in sentience and
    displayed in action. The physical presence of the process equipment
    has been the setting that corresponded to this knowledge, which could,
    in turn, be displayed only in that context. As long as the action context
    remained intact, it was possible for knowledge to remain implicit. In
    this sense, the worker knew a great deal, but very little of that knowl-
    edge was ever articulated, written down, or made explicit in any fash-
    ion. Instead, operators went about their business, displaying their
    know-how and rarely attempting to translate that knowledge into terms
    that were publicly accessible. This is what managers mean when they
    speak of the "art" involved in operating these plants.

    -- 59

### From action-centered to intellective skill

    This does not imply that action-centered skills exist independent
    of cognitive activity. Rather, it means that the processes of learning,
    remembering, and displaying action-centered skills do not necessarily
    require that the knowledge they contain be made explicit. Physical
    cues do not require inference; learning in an action-centered context is
    more likely to be analogical than analytical. In contrast, the abstract
    cues available through the data interface do require explicit inferential
    reasoning, particularly in the early phases of the learning process. It is
    necessary to reason out the meaning of those cues-what is their rela-
    tion to each other and to the world "out there"?

    -- 73

    As information technology restructures the work situation, it ab-
    stracts thought from action. Absorption, immediacy, and organic re-
    sponsiveness are superseded by distance, coolness, and remoteness.
    Such distance brings an opportunity for reflection.

    [...]

    The thinking this operator refers to is of a different quality from the
    thinking that attended the display of action-centered skills. It combines
    abstraction, explicit inference, and procedural reasoning. Taken to-
    gether, these elements make possible a new set of competencies that I
    call intellective skills. As long as the new technology signals only deskil-
    ling-the diminished importance of action-centered skills-there will
    be little probability of developing critical judgment at the data inter-
    face. To rekindle such judgment, though on a new, more abstract foot-
    ing, a reskilling process is required. Mastery in a computer-mediated
    environment depends upon developing intellective skills.

    -- 75-76

    [...]

    The second dimension of this crisis involves the ambiguity of action.
    It is conveyed in the question, what have I done? The computer system
    now interpolates between the worker and the action context, and as it
    does so, it represents to the worker his or her effects on the world.
    However, reading symbols does not provoke the same feeling of having
    done something as one gets from more direct, organic involvement in
    execution. There is a continual questioning of action-Have I done
    anything? How can I be sure?

    -- 81