Richard Samson, author of the forthcoming book called “The Human Edge”, is convinced we are teetering on the precipice of an employment revolution for only the second time in modern history. According to Samson, where the industrial revolution provided the means to automate hard manual labour, the electronics revolution is threatening to replace human brain-power.
“It’s déjà vu,” Samson states in his book. “We’re starting to feel the same empowerment but suffer the same trauma experienced by labourers when machine power extended muscle power but extracted the livelihood from labour,” Samson writes. “Except now it’s mind power that’s flowing out of us and into our tools. Back then, people adjusted by moving from labour intensive jobs to know-how jobs, but that won’t work this time because know-how tasks are the very kind being usurped.”
Blame automation
The electronics revolution is being partially driven by our desire for automation. Samson sees technological advancements increasingly automating our knowledge-based functionality to disastrous effect. Consider for a moment the increasing capability of EDA. How long before the next generation of chips is so complex that it can only be designed by its forerunner?
“All jobs based on know-how are endangered,” Samson warns. “Transferred bit by bit into electronic systems, these jobs are getting smaller and most will eventually go away entirely.”
To prevent the simultaneous empowerment and displacement effects of technological advancement on employment, Samson says we need to move into a third revolution, one that he calls the “hyper-human” or “meta-mental”. Put simply, this means focusing on the fact that we’re alive and electronic systems aren’t.
Samson admits that getting paid for simply being alive “may sound crazy” but there’s a method to the madness. Consider what electronics is good at: We’ll never beat silicon at number crunching, mass storage and retrieval, remote sensing, structured decision-making, control of repetitive processes or labour-intensive instruction. But by the same token hard logic flounders with conscious perception and motor control, pursuing ethical objectives, creativity, subjective decision-making and hypothesising.
“The winning strategy for the information age is to inject “aliveness” into everything we do, and let electronic systems take over the dead, dull stuff,” Samson says.
Samson’s argument assumes it’s the machines that are becoming more human, but what if it’s actually the other way around? What if it’s the humans who are becoming more like the machines?
Feminist theory and technoscience professor Donna Haraway refers to this evolution of sorts as our transition into cybernetic organisms or cyborgs—a sort of blurred line between humans and machines. Put simply, the argument says that we tend to take up technology that extends our human capabilities, becoming increasingly reliant on it in the same way as the fully-fledged cyborgs typical of the Schwarzenegger movies.
Take the mobile phone. The reason for the device’s ubiquity is simply because it enhances our capability to communicate with each other over long distances. Essentially it becomes a machine-based extension of us.
Yet it seems that the automation backlash has begun. Tired of those virtual secretary answering systems and voice recognition that just can’t seem to understand you no matter how slowly you speak, many companies are again employing real people to field their customer calls. Make no mistake—automation still exists, Samson says. But the good news is that it is now in support of hyper-human functions, rather than designed to replace people.
Sceptics ahoy!
Humans as cyborgs in an automated world? If this sounds like an unlikely scenario to you, you are far from alone. Many discard the likelihood as remote; and history supports the scepticism.
After all, who could forget the failed paperless office coup? Along with the grossly exaggerated impact of the “information superhighway”, the paperless office is one of technology’s greatest myths. Far from eliminating the need for paper, electronics has multiplied its use.
UK digital world researcher Richard Harper and HP Labs senior research scientist Abigail Sellen explain this in their book “The Myth of the Paperless Office”. Both authors conclude that while many activities are undertaken electronically, they inevitably end up on paper because people are comfortable with it and digital technology fails to take on its characteristics. More to the point, the use of paper has increased around new technologies like e-mail, which the authors say can lead to a 40 percent increase in paper consumption.
“Putting new technologies in place doesn’t necessarily reduce the amount of paper used, rather, it may simply shift the point at which documents are printed out,” Harper says. “Until such time as digital technologies can provide equal or better support for many of the tasks that are central to using information, the future for paper continues to look bright,” co-author Sellen adds.
Having failed to take over the role of paper, what’s to say electronic systems can go ahead and take over our roles as well? “Personally I’m a bit sceptical about the claims,” Amtex general manager Jim Kuswadi told Electronics News. “I think what will actually happen is products will become more uniform with strict quality controls because there isn’t the reliance on human intervention in the system.”
So, SkyNet isn’t about to assume control just yet; but there is at least one key area where the machines do seem to be in the ascendency.
Busting buzzwords
Like it or not, technology is taking over the way that we talk. And type. Users of short messaging services (SMS) create abbreviations out of necessity—but it’s their transition into everyday language that is disconcerting.
Where once we could explain the role of machines in our own terms, we now speak in acronyms at the expense of comprehension. And the electronics engineering community is one of the worst perpetrators. Take just one example, “ASP”. Does it refer to application specific processor, active server page or even average selling price?
But linguistic control may also be a direct contributor to the current technological market situation. According to the AMD Global Consumer Advisory Board (GCAB), many potential buyers are delaying product purchases because they don’t understand the language of the technology industry.
Surveying 1,500 people in China, Japan, the UK and the USA, only three percent managed to achieve a perfect score on the technology terms quiz, which asks buyers to define terms such as MP3 and Bluetooth. Even of the more slightly knowledgeable (those who identified more than seven of the eleven terms correctly), only slightly more than a third could correctly identify the definition of a digital video recorder (DVR). This reporter was one of the two-thirds that didn’t.
Even those with a better grasp of the concepts said they wouldn’t take up new technologies because they are perceived as too complex. PDAs were cited as the most perplexing product.
“The [industry] is spending more than US$10 billion [$15.1 billion] a year in the US alone advertising the speeds and feeds of the products,” says Patrick Moorhead, chairman of the AMD’s GCAB. “But [its] not getting the full value of the advertising dollars when, for example, only slightly more than half of the PC users we spoke with don’t understand the term ‘megahertz’ - as used in a vast majority of personal computer advertisements.
“The technology industry must simplify its vocabulary.”
Graham Prophet, Editor of Electronics News’ sister title, EDN Europe, encapsulates the dilemma in his lament on the demise of the VCR: “Ever since its introduction, the VCR has provided the reference level against which to judge incompetence in the operation of consumer appliances,” says Prophet. “When we are no longer able to pass judgment on someone’s technical savvy by saying that they ‘can’t even program the VCR,’ where will we find the new low-water mark of competence to operate the gadgetry of the 21st century?”
Nonetheless, despite our increasing reliance on technology, an apocalyptic future is unlikely, but it does depend on how much we cede control to silicon.
As an “enabling” technology, electronics, allied to artificial intelligence, biotechnology and genetic engineering, could still yet be the catalyst that triggers the rise of the machines.