Tag: Nicholas Carr

Frederick Taylor & the quantified self [Article]

Nicholas Carr writes that the principles of ‘scientific management’ as counseled by Taylor have gone from being applicable to manufacturing workers to the office workers, & steadfastly resulting in narrowing of the realm of human possibility:

One thing that Taylor’s system aided was the mechanization of factory work. Once you had turned the jobs of human workers into numbers, it turned out, you also had a good template for replacing those workers with machines. It seems that the new Taylorism might accomplish something similar for knowledge work. It provides the specs for software applications that can take over the jobs of even highly educated professionals.

Thinking is knowing is thinking [Article]

Nicholas Carr quotes psychologist Daniel Willingham:

It’s hard for many people to conceive of thinking processes as intertwined with knowledge. Most people believe that thinking processes are akin to those of a calculator. A calculator has available a set of procedures  (addition, multiplication, and so on) that can manipulate numbers, and those procedures can be applied to any set of numbers. The data (the numbers) and the operations that manipulate the data are separate. Thus, if you learn a new thinking operation (for example, how to critically analyze historical documents), it seems like that operation should be applicable to all historical documents, just as a fancier calculator that computes sines can do so for all numbers.

 During the K – 12 years, developing a solid store of knowledge is essential to learning how to think. There’s still no substitute for a well-furnished mind.

Lethal autonomous robots are coming [Article]

Nicholas Carr picks up Christof Heyns’ report on Lethal Autonomous Robots (LAR) to the UN Human Rights Council. 

LAR’s are “weapon systems that, once activated, can select and engage targets without further human intervention,” have not yet been deployed in wars or other conflicts, but the technology to produce them is very much in reach. It’s just a matter of taking the human decision-maker out of the hurly-burly of the immediate “kill loop” and leaving the firing decision to algorithms. 

The question is will people take notice before this technology takes off big time. 

A decade later, has history proved you right? [Article]

In 2003, Harvard Business Review published an post by Nick Carr, who wrote that companies had “overestimated the strategic value of IT, which is becoming ubiquitous, and therefore diminishing as a source of competitive differentiation”.  Ten years later, he gazes back at his predictions. An interesting article, for those of us that believe that we will innovate our way out of mankind’s problems, and for those of us that don’t.

Treating people as things [article]

Nicholas Carr worries that we’re beginning to see conversational pleasantries as unnecessary, even annoying. In a recent blog article, Conversation points, Carr points out that

allowing the mechanism of communication to determine the terms of communication could also be seen as a manifestation of what Adorno termed “an ideology for treating people as things.”