Books: In the Age of the Smart Machine: chapter two

books/sociedade/age-of-the-smart-machine.md

@@ -3,13 +3,12 @@
 ## Index
 
 * Deskilling, diplacement of "the human body and its know-how" and reskilling, 57.
-* Body's dual role in production: effort and skill.
 * 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, 36.
+* 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
@@ -17,28 +16,21 @@
 
 ## Impressions
 
-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):
+* 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.
 
-    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.
+* The pathway from motor knowledge to abstract knowledge recalls Piaget's discussion
+  about intelligence.
 
-    -- 56-57
+* 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.
 
-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.
+* Transitional generations might feel a strange feeling.
 
 ## Excerpts
 
@@ -413,3 +405,86 @@ Effects:
     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