[FRIAM] !RE: A million tech jobs unfilled

glen ☣ gepropella at gmail.com
Wed Mar 15 13:13:02 EDT 2017


Well, it wouldn't, necessarily ... any more than a computer would ever be artificially intelligent.  But the same argument for AI (namely that computers are better at some things than humans are) applies to organizations.  In the context of this discussion, it strikes me that it might be possible to build a company that is better at bureaucracy than individual humans.  All the _work_ it takes to create a sweet spot environment for humans to "follow their nose" is currently done by competent bureaucrats.  Each person Owen has listed owes debts to whatever set of bureaucrats worked hard on creating an environment for that person to excel (though many of those people may not recognize their debt).

And as you point out, constituents specialize, just like computation can be categorized.  So the type of computation computers are better at than humans is the "low hanging fruit" for AI.  Analogously, the type of bureaucracy corporations might be better at than individual bureaucrats might be the "low hanging fruit" for an Artificial Bureaucrat.

Of course, we already do this to some extent.  Building a business is all about the executives codifying their individual skills into their organization.  Some of those skills get "delegated" to good filing systems, databases, policies and procedures that can be adhered to and executed on by less skilled employees, etc.  The part of that bureaucracy we're discussing here is human resources.  So, the point of my question was to see if we could identify the organizations that lead to good work experiences like Owen's and perhaps see if we could identify _if_ they've made it mindless.  And if they have, then how did they do it?

My suspicion is that they did _not_ make it mindless.  So I agree with you.  At each place Owen mentions, there are sets of competent bureaucrats that structured the environment so that it facilitated the individuals.  But I'd be happy to be wrong.


On 03/14/2017 05:09 PM, Marcus Daniels wrote:
> Why would a mindless organization be better than a set of minds that know and care about the domain?   I don't have a problem with another constituent that knows about organizational psychology, but that sort of person is not sufficient.  

-- 
☣ glen




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