Tag: productivity

Job Automation

By 2030, what kinds of capabilities will computers have; how well will those capabilities prepare them to do jobs currently done by humans; and what proportion of the workforce might be displaced or rendered unemployable? The results are rather scary. After looking at trends in machine vision, speech, reasoning, and movement, and estimating how important these are for doing various kinds of work, the author estimates that displacement rates could be over 80% in some fields– sales, administrative support, food preparation, and personal care. These are also the sectors that employ the largest number of people. The safest fields for humans? Law (6%), medicine (10%), science (10%), and engineering (11%)– fields which currently employ the smallest number of people.

ha! the sectors of the economy that are just adding transaction cost but not creating anything will be replaced by computers by > 80%. invest in warm bodies at your own peril.

The Outsourced Life

I decided I needed to outsource my worry. For the last few weeks I’ve been tearing my hair out because a business deal is taking far too long to close. I asked Honey if she would be interested in tearing her hair out in my stead. Just for a few minutes a day. She thought it was a wonderful idea. “I will worry about this every day,” she wrote. “Do not worry.”

i would totally pay for someone to do all the nonsense for various bureaucracies.

Outing bureaucrats

In the day to day world, the Churchills write books in the country, the Mandelas serve their prison sentence and the Grants get drunk. The bureaucrats run countries, banks, schools, armies, drug companies, government agencies and our lives. My hope though is that the bureaucratic power is revealed for what it is by organizations that adopt the use of social software. My hope is that as millions of young enter the workforce expecting to use social software that they will open up the internal workings and “out” those that have little to say about the real work of delivering the result to the customer, or the voter, or the patient, or the student.

I’m not a witch! I’m not a witch!

I remember a time, it must have been the early 1980s, when it was common to ban phones with direct dial facilities. Why? Because people might talk to their friends and family during work time. It took a while for firms to figure out that this was a stupid thing to do, but most carried on with a limited ban, usually on international direct dialling. That lasted a little longer. Then, by the early 1990s, when internet e-mail emerged, it too was banned. In fact there are stories about the banning of corporate e-mail as well, continuing into this century. Soon it was the turn of Instant Messaging to bear the wrath of Corporate Policy. Then came blogs and wikis and social software in general. Now it’s about social networking.

only companies with already low productivity would think about banning social networks. how about working on the real problem: people running around looking busy and doing nothing?

Chore Wars

Chore Wars lets you claim experience points for household chores. By getting a few people in your house or workplace to sign up, you can assign experience point rewards to individual chores, and see how quickly each of you levels up.

i should get a least 5000 XP for filing a police report

Dreyfus Model experiment

The Dreyfus Model is a model of skills acquisition that describes how people progress in their knowledge:

  • Novice – Needs to be told exactly what to do. Very little context to base decisions on.
  • Advanced beginner – Has more context, but still needs rigid guidelines to follow.
  • Competent – Begins to question the reasoning behind the tasks, and can see longer term consequences.
  • Proficient – Still relies on rules, but able to seperate what is most important.
  • Expert – Works mainly on intuition, except in circumstances where problems occur

When we are involved in a discussion, guess the Dreyfus level of participants. Then, tailor the conversation to that. If you are the lower number one, bring the conversation to your level. Conversely, be sure you aren’t talking over the heads of the other participants.

why rules hurt experts

What are you busy doing?

It’s not a trick question. Workplaces everywhere are full of people busy doing next to nothing . . . only they don’t realize it. What these people are doing is mostly shifting information around. They spend large parts of their days responding to e-mail and voice mail; they attend meeting after meeting after meeting; they watch scores of presentations and prepare still more. It all appears extremely important and productive, but when you look at it closely, what you see is an organization that spends nearly all its time swapping information from person to person, without having the time to consider fully what it contains, let alone act on it.

looking busy doing nothing: going to meetings, preparing presentations that no one reads, cc everyone. this piece has all the symptoms of a dysfunctional organization (ie, most of them).