This e-mail is sent only to a voluntary subscriber list. If you no longer wish to receive these weekly columns, send a blank e-mail (no
message) to [email protected]. Or write to me personally, [email protected]
Sunday July 5, 2015
The future may have caught up to us already
By Jim Taylor
It’s flattering to have your name attached to a popular theory – like Einstein’s Theory of Relativity, Schrödinger’s
Equation, or Newton’s Laws of Motion.
Some names get attached to more frivolous theories. Murphy’s Law, for example: “Whatever can go
wrong, will.” With its primary corollary: “And it will choose the worst possible time to do it.”
Not many people know about Godwin’s Law. Basically, it asserts that in any heated argument – especially
in an on-line forum – someone will inevitably invoke an analogy to Hitler or Nazism.
The law’s inventor, author and attorney Michael Godwin, considered the use of such an analogy to be the
last gasp of a losing cause. Whoever “played the Hitler card” automatically lost the debate, whatever it was.
I have my own corollary to Godwin’s Law – that whoever resorts to quoting the Bible as conclusive proof
of a position also has nothing left to offer. It will never be known as Taylor’s Law, however, because the Taylor
name has become associated with something quite different.
It’s called “digital Taylorism.” It takes its name from an engineer, Frederick Winslow Taylor, who devised
a system over a century ago that he called scientific management.
You’ll know it better as Henry Ford’s assembly line.
The progress of technology
The process breaks every task down into small components. So instead of one worker building an entire
car, a hundred people each build one small part. Instead of a professional seamstress fashioning a complete dress, a
sewing machine operator does dozens of armpits every hour. She may get very good at doing armpits, but she’s lost
doing collars. Or waistbands.
Frederick Winslow Taylor really shouldn’t get the credit for developing this process. It has been going on
ever since the first human created the first tool.
Every new technology takes the skill that had belonged to an individual, and transfers it to the equipment or
system.
The club, the spear, the sword, transferred power from the muscled warrior, just as the gun makes any
wimp a killing machine. Opera singers once needed powerful voices; now the microphone amplifies anyone.
In a global economy, digital Taylorism makes jobs easy to export. Employers don’t need qualified staff any
more. They can take a semi-literate peasant and train him to do a single repetitive job. Like staffing a call centre, for
example.
Differentiation and integration
Sir Isaac Newton, interestingly, didn’t just discover gravity, from which he formulated the laws that are still
the foundation of physics. He also invented calculus, which -- long before F.W. Taylor or Henry Ford – included a
process called differentiation. Mathematically, differentiation slices problems into the thinnest possible sections.
Each slice can then be more easily analyzed and calculated.
A second process, integration, puts those slices back together.
Managers and executives have gleefully applied differentiation to the physical process of assembly lines.
But they have assumed that their intellectual skills would always be needed to integrate the larger picture.
As Peter Wilby put it in the Guardian, “They did not understand that, as the industrial revolution allowed
manual work to be routinized, so in the electronic revolution the same fate would overtake many professional jobs.
Many ‘knowledge skills’ will go the way of craft skills. They are being chopped up, codified, and digitized.”
Perhaps, like harness makers before Ford’s Model-T, we cannot imagine how we ourselves could become
unnecessary, irrelevant.
Software takes over
But it’s already happening. Bank managers used to have discretion to apply local knowledge in deciding
which customers qualified for loans. Now software makes those decisions for them.
Lowly clerks once needed to know their company’s business, so that they could answer customer queries.
Now when I call a company’s service line, I rarely speak to anyone who actually knows the product personally. I get
a voice recording. I push buttons to choose a preferred language, to choose a particular range of services, to identify
myself…
Or I visit a website that offers me a “Frequently Asked Questions” page. If my query doesn’t fit the predetermined parameters of the software, I get nowhere.
More and more, people send me links to articles that wonder what will happen to us humans, when
computer intelligence surpasses our own. When the curve of change climbs so steeply that everything happens at
once. When computers take over the world.
Futurists have taken to calling this “The Singularity” – a term invented by physicist John von Neumann and
popularized by Ray Kurzweil -- a moment beyond which we cannot imagine.
I wonder if we’re already in it.
********************************************************
Copyright © 2014 by Jim Taylor. Non-profit use in congregations and study groups encouraged; links from other blogs welcomed; all
other rights reserved.
To send comments, to subscribe, or to unsubscribe, write [email protected]
********************************************************
YOUR TURN
Okay, so I didn’t get a lot of letters about last week’s column on the purpose of art (and perhaps about the purpose
of municipal councils!).
Isabel Gibson did write: “I laughed out loud at your municipal instructions to noted artists. Maybe we should start a
list….”
It can be fun. I had also imagined some instructions to Beethoven, Jackson Pollack, Coco Chanel, and the
person who invented Nanaimo Bars – thus including four of our five physical senses. You might try considering
your own favourite work of art, in any medium, and imagine what a don’t-want-to-offend-anyone politician might
ask them to do to their masterpiece.
I’ve written in the past about some of the emotional and mental problems our adopted grandson deals with. I’ve also
written about how our mindsets sometimes create our problems.
Len Wiebe picked up on those two themes with this letter:
“We have friends with whom we have been very close, in study groups. Sunday school classes, same
Church, supporting same socially conscious problems, and above else, very close personal freeness family to family.
They adopted a small child (a few weeks old), same socio-economical standards. To my mind and theirs, a
successful adoption, I believe.
“They are now seemingly asked what they did to their son to make him what he has become. He was
married and divorced. They used very trustworthy counsellors during this time. He reconnected well with his
discovered birth family, and kept in fairly close connection with them. As adults, they and their children followed
where life and his job as an engineering technologist took him.
“But there is this nagging question: Is there a problem because there seems to be no problem? Is this an
exception [to the presumed rule that adopted children always have troubles] or should people go poking around?”
********************************************
TECHNICAL STUFF
This column comes to you using the electronic facilities of Woodlakebooks.com.
If you want to comment on something, send a message directly to me, at [email protected].
To subscribe or unsubscribe, send me an e-mail message at the address above. Or you can subscribe electronically by
sending a blank e-mail (no message) to [email protected]. Similarly, you can un-subscribe at
[email protected].
You can access several years of archived columns at http://edges.Canadahomepage.net.
I write a second column each Wednesday, called Soft Edges, which deals somewhat more gently with issues of life and faith.
To sign up for Soft Edges, write to me directly, at the address above, or send a note to [email protected]
********************************************
PROMOTION STUFF…
If you know someone else who might like to receive this column regularly via e-mail, send a request to [email protected]. Or, if you
wish, forward them a copy of this column. But please put your name on it, so they don’t think I’m sending out spam.
Other sources worth pursuing:







Ralph Milton’s HymnSight webpage, http://www.hymnsight.ca, with a vast gallery of photos you can use to enhance the
appearance of the visual images you project for liturgical use (prayers, responses, hymn verses, etc.)
David Keating’s “SeemslikeGod” page, www.seemslikegod.org;
Alan Reynold’s weekly musings, punningly titled “Reynolds Rap” -- [email protected]
Isobel Gibson’s thoughtful and well-written blog, www.traditionaliconoclast.com
Wayne Irwin's “Churchweb Canada,” an inexpensive service for any congregation wanting to develop a web presence, with
free consultation. <http://www.churchwebcanada.ca>
Alva Wood’s satiric stories about incompetent bureaucrats and prejudiced attitudes in a small town are not particularly
religious, but they are fun; write [email protected] to get onto her mailing list.
Tom Watson writes a weekly blog called “The View from Grandpa Tom’s Balcony” – ruminations on various subjects, and
feedback from Tom’s readers. Write him at [email protected]
***************************************