Productivity and Efficiency? No thanks, I am human.

Praise of Uncertainty — Part 2

This is a continuation of a previous post, “The lie of the monthly salary - Praise of Uncertainty, Part 1”, that ended in the following way:

Taking the time to think and reflect is definitely not appreciated by the mass and by a society that wants “everything right now”. Avoiding emptiness and uncertainty makes us feel apparently more efficient, more productive and more stable.

In this second part I express my ideas in favor of human thinking in contrast to the recent race for human productivity and chasing of happiness, which I consider a best seller for candidate robot-beings.

Productivity and efficiency, a quick summary.

From the Latin productivus “fit for production”, productivity is known in mechanics as the ratio between volume Output and volume Input.

From the Latin efficere “work out, accomplish”, Efficiency is known in mechanics as the ratio of useful work done to energy expended. It is a measure of how much work or energy is conserved in a process. A perfect process would have an efficiency of 100%.

In brief, productivity relates to quantity and efficiency relates to quality.

From living humans to functioning beings

Productivity and efficiency can be easily measured. As they can be measured, it is easy to assess their improvement. That is how a car engine improved since 1940 until today.

The same happened to factories in the last industrial revolution, that moved towards increasing productivity and efficiency of each one of their workers.

Today, we are learning how to be more productive and efficient in our personal life as well, filling up our day with more activities, producing more work in less time and achieving better results with less energy spent. We do that mostly by relying on productivity apps, reading books that tell us what to DO to achieve happiness and which rules to follow in our life: We are behaving more and more like functioning algorithms rather than thinking humans. We are at the beginning of a scenario where machines and humans are going to merge together.

Are the superhumans described by Yuval Harari the next species of human beings?

As the theory of the extended mind by Andy Clark and David Chalmers proposes, our mind is not limited to our own self, but can be extended to other more or less artificial entities. If we accept this argument, being a combination of artificial “helpers” and human body (and mind) should not be a threatening or surprising concept.

What is frightening, in my opinion, is instead the avoidance to using our intrinsic and unique human ability: thinking and understanding.

What makes us different from machines?

Consider a simple task where some inputs are to be transformed into outputs. Humans or machines would be able to perform this task with the same results. Probably a machine could eventually perform it better! Anyway, the final outcome would be the same.

So, what is the difference in executing a task, between a machine and a human being?

From an external perspective, observing the execution of the task itself, none. The difference does not lay in the execution of the task, but in the overall understanding of it. A classic argument to explain such difference is the Searle’s “Chinese Room Experiment”. Searle says that a machine, even if passing something like the Turing test, will never have what is called “aboutness”. It will never be able to understand the value of each input and/or output. On the contrary, a thinking system should be able to understand the semantic properties as well as the syntactic ones.

The ability to understand a task and to reflect on its input and output is the ability than any human being has to think about his own thoughts. It is through this ability that humans are able to distinguish between different arguments and therefore are also able to understand their relative importance to each other. Moreover we are able to understand their deep meaning.

Instead, a machine does not distinguish between thoughts. It receives inputs and provides output, through a given set of instructions. It might be perfect at converting input into output but it cannot understand the input itself.

Not understanding leads to being unable to distinguish between more or less meaningful inputs. When there is no understanding, any task has the same value.

The flattening productivity

While the gap between robots and humans is shrinking, I am left with a simple question: from which side is the gap getting smaller? Are human beings becoming more “machines” or machines becoming more human?

Probably both: humans are moving towards machines as machines are improving their “human” abilities.

In the hype of productivity, technology is giving a great push to productivity and efficiency. Productivity apps, IoT, AI etc. are making our lives apparently easier and more productive. We rely more and more on external inputs to get answers for our questions and often we get the answers even before asking the questions. And the less we need to ask questions, the more apparently productive we become.

Or, the more productive and efficient we become, the less able we are to criticize our own thoughts: Christopher Bollas calls it “horizontalism of thoughts” and “homogeneity” that “reduce the time taken up with considering different points of view and the resulting tensions.”

The dominating idea is that following precise proved methodologies in life, as well in our jobs, make us, individuals, more productive for we are able to do more things in less time, and more efficient as well.

Such a behavior is not that different from the behavior of a machine.

The ability to think, that makes us superior to the animals and the machines, is being suppressed for short-term productivity and efficiency.

“Soma” for everyone!

More productive workers generate a more productive company as well as a more productive set of individuals make a more productive society. When a productive society is composed by a group of individuals that follow and use the same methodology to execute tasks, in both their lives and their jobs, two consequences arise.

1. Homogenization: The difference between individuals are flattened out by the use of the same methodologies and approaches to life. Individuals loose their characteristic of being being individual, i.e. of being a person separate from other people or a group of people and having individual needs, rights and responsibilities.
2. “Horizontalism” of thoughts: In order to be able to Follow an instruction, individuals do not need to ask themselves questions on e.g. why this instruction was given or generated. This lack of questioning makes it hard to generate debates about different thoughts and therefore harder to distinguish between more or less important one. When thoughts can’t be distinguished from each other, their relative hierarchy is lost, i.e. any thought has the same importance.

This type of society is definitely more stable, predictable and easier to manage. Aldous Huxley vision of a “Brave New World” is not that far from this scenario, and the growth of the Depression Drugs Market reminds of the central happy pill of the story, called “soma”.

Chasing happiness: A best seller for candidate robot-beings!

Rules for life, happiness courses, recipes for success: the bookstores are full of those “how to..” books. The hype of gurus proposing the “how” of living and being is perfectly in line with the lack of thinking.

Understanding the “why” is certainly cognitively harder than following the “how”.

Those gurus (of marketing..) propose general methodologies, or rules, for accomplishing an “happier” individual life. It clearly does not make sense if readers were just reflecting on the contradiction between the “general” and “individual” terms.

Furthermore, in analogy with the robots, proposing rules to follow is what humans do with machines: they provide robots with a set of instructions to follow, in order to achieve certain goals. Following a set of instructions, life rules and methodologies for life, is a typical machine task, a highway to becoming a perfect Robot-being!

But unfortunately for the candidate robot-beings, they will hardly compete against real robots’ computational power, hence they will be replaced, in any area of “life”.

Meaning vs happiness

That is why I hardly understand the modern trend of chasing happiness, reducing one’s life to a productivity container, where to accomplish tasks listed on a check list and pretend to “feel happy”.

I believe chasing happiness is not a human goal: A thinking brain cannot be just happy.

If machines can classify tasks being more and less important, based on given parameter and weights, humans should distinguish between more or less meaningful activities.

Meaning, not happiness. But the research for meaning is a continuous exploration and explorations are not productive and their outcome highly uncertain.. Can one stand the frustration of his own irrational and rational thoughts? Can one stand confusion, boredom and non-productivity? The deep emotions rising from exploring states are in great contrast to the road to chasing happiness.

Exploration: a non productive activity

A ship in harbor is safe — but that is not what ships are built for.” — John A. Shedd.

The same for humans, we want to explore. We are explorers by nature and motivated by curiosity. Using Stephen Hawking words, “This is a uniquely human quality. It is this driven curiosity that sent explorers to prove the Earth is not flat and it is the same instinct that sends us to the stars at the speed of thought, urging us to go there in reality. And whenever we make a great new leap, such as the Moon landings, we elevate humanity, bring people and nations together, usher in new discoveries and new technologies.”

Yet uncertainty is scary for everyone, for the leaders of the society first, that are looking for “stability” and control. A society made by people who do not work 9 to 5 is scary, uncontrollable. People who are free to think and question might start asking clever and uncomfortable questions. Governments don’t want that, they want control. So they put people on sleep, which is now called “employment”.

“How is it possible that all the people in the world need exactly 8 hours to accomplish their work? It isn’t. 9–5 is arbitrary.” — Tim Ferris

The 9 to 5 is the modern version of a strategy to suppress people thoughts, to control and shape our society from top down.

Yet, avoiding chaos is against our origins…

In the beginning God created the heavens and the earth. The earth was formless and void, and darkness was over the surface of the deep, and the Spirit of God was moving over the surface of the waters. — Genesis 1:2 TLV.

Employees do not like chaos, that is why they tend to do the same things every day, in their limited comfort zone. Governments do not like chaos either. The tendency is the opposite: to put order to anything that might appear chaotic.

On the contrary, any exploration starts with chaos. Chaos put the explorers in uncertain situations, making their mission vulnerable to the eyes of the spectators, who often defend their stability, criticizing the apparent non-productivity of the explorer. What an example of short-term thinking, if we consider the later explorers’ discoveries!

Are explorers really non-productive and in an unstable position? Or maybe they take advantage from disorder and become “Antifragile” as Nassim Taleb suggests?

To be continued..