Productivity in the UK is at its worst since 1794, according to Bloomberg. It’s not just that you can’t see clear improvements in productivity. It’s clear rather that “something” is absolutely relentlessly and steadily destroying human productivity, the more we implement all this smart, effort-saving technology.
To replace humans with machines, you have to dumb down what the humans do. This is the secret order of battle which you are missing. In a trillion years, you could never teach an AI the skills that even the dimmest Johannesburg minibus taxi driver deploys even with a hangover. What you need to do is have regulated lanes and barriers to keep all pedestrians and animals off the roads. You have to reduce driving a vehicle to an absolutely set routine within a strictly controlled environment. You have to dumb it down, dumb it down, dumb it down.
While you’re doing this, you’re making the systems themselves ever more complex, even as they try to accomplish the simplest thing. They must be “smart” and “interactive” and “dynamic”. So while you’re trying to fight your way through a thicket of notifications and protocols and passwords and permissions and Captcha puzzles, just to open one email, you are also bombarded by flashing lights and ringing bells, videos playing, pop-ups appearing, every application second-guessing what you’re trying to do and changing your layout and autocorrecting your words (“follow the kink” is my current favourite, a URL sent via a “smart” phone.) Artificial unintelligence, I call it.
There are a lot of other issues causing problems with productivity. Rampant ADD in younger people, rampant Alzheimer’s in older ones — these are also the effects of technology. The Swedish neurosurgeon Leif Salford found that just two minutes of cellphone radiation opened the blood-brain barrier in rats, flooding their brains with toxins and destroying brain cells on a truly terrifying scale. Salford in 2000 predicted that “teen dementia” would become common. You can now see it all around you. It’s so normal you don’t even notice it. But you certainly see it in your productivity stats.
Social relations in offices — where the workplace is seen more as a site of equality activism, a healthy social life, and the accumulation of benefits, than a place where you actually work — are another issue.
As an educator who walked out of the South African education system in 1994, when I saw what they were doing with Outcomes Based Education, I then took my life in my hands and started researching OBE. I confirmed without doubt that this was part of a vast, long-term plan to dumb the population down, while saturating them with digital bells and whistles and training them to be slaves addicted to their smartphones and tablets.
Nothing has destroyed productivity more than the mobile phone. (Texting while driving is now the leading cause of motoring deaths, and there’s nothing like being a mangled corpse in the smoking wreckage of a car to mess up your productivity). Apart from that, it’s been shown that just having a mobile phone visible in a room reduces people’s concentration. I’ve never owned a mobile phone in my life, and I’ll bet you I’m more productive (just in terms of sheer volume of words) than most of you with phones. For one thing, I touch type with all ten fingers, I don’t just use two thumbs.
If only these people could actually do something truly smart with this technology, I would be all for it. Don’t call it artificial intelligence, there’s no such thing. At the most, it’s “intelligent design”. Just because a machine with Deep Learning™® © can’t explain why it decided to drive a car into the three nuns on the left, instead of the ten schoolchildren on the right, doesn’t mean that the machine is somehow achieving something deeper than human understanding, that we must now be in holy awe of the algorithm, like Mark Zuckerberg is. The machine is as dumb as ever. The trick is to make the people even dumber. And that is what you are seeing in your productivity stats.
I present today’s Dilbert, and then I rest my case.
