The Burned-Out Bulb of Bright Ideas

For the last week I have been enjoying catching up on sleep.  This has not been an entirely painless process; as my body has begun to mend itself after a year and a half of excessive work, I have at times physically felt the discomfort of the mending process.  (To use a metaphor, wait until the engine has cooled off before you try to pop the hood and refill the radiator.)  The recent experience of working like a dog has given me further insights and inspiration for the essays on precarity which I have yet to write.  However, I am not going to try to tackle that subject today, except for a few brief observations.  

First, there are a couple of interesting recent articles which describe how the rate of scientific discoveries in the industrial world has been slowing over the last several decades.  The title of one of these articles is "Papers and patents are becoming less disruptive over time" and the other article, "Rate of scientific breakthroughs slowing over time: Study", cites the first article which I have linked.  (It's interesting that both articles have been published on websites which have chosen to support themselves partially by renting space for ads for gadgets, toys, t-shirts, and gossip.  The academic profession seems to be falling on hard times these days ...)  The chief researcher cited in these articles has suggested that a key reason for the decline of truly groundbreaking research is the fact that quantity of published research has begun to be emphasized over quality of research.  This is because funding for research has become tied to the number of papers published by research institutions as well as the number of citations of published papers by other publishing peers.

Second, my past year and a half of crazy busy work has introduced me to design automation tools which I had not had a chance to use during the past several years of my career.  I found that while I had been involved in things unrelated to the production of technical work products, the tools for producing that technical work had undergone a rapid and drastic evolution.  The software products of Autodesk are a particular example of this evolution - and of the consolidation of multiple formerly separate design functions into one software package, available on a monthly or yearly subscription basis.  By the way, I am not singing the praises of Autodesk!  I think they have created a near monopoly racket.  Their subscription model for providing software services is to me like having a family of leeches stuck to one's legs.  I will be using an Autodesk package to do my part of a multidisciplinary design project during the next several months.  Thankfully, the client is paying for the software during the project.  But I have noticed all the things the software can do - things which a human being used to need to know how to do.  This has led me to ponder the de-skilling which is now taking place among many knowledge workers as a result of the automation of much of their jobs by software.

Where will this de-skilling ultimately lead?  And what will be its ultimate impact?  The answer to that question will vary, depending on whom you ask.  I will consider only one prediction, from that group of prognosticators known as "techno-optimists."  That prediction is the same prediction that has been made by such folks over much of evolution of the Industrial Age, namely, that automation of knowledge work would lead to increased leisure for knowledge workers as the tasks that would normally take such workers a day to do were sped up so that they could be accomplished in only a few hours.  After the last year and a half, I must disagree with such a prediction.  Digital task automation may speed up tasks, but what actually results is not that knowledge workers get to go home early each day, but rather, that they get more work to do.  For digital automation tools are not seen by capitalists as a means to grant more leisure to their workers, but as a means of getting more work out of them.  The deployment of such tools is usually followed by the demand that workers produce more each day.  Meanwhile, the workers (at least those whose jobs are not replaced by the automated processes) become more and more stupid as time passes and an increasing portion of their skill sets and the theoretical knowledge they learned in college is taken over by the automated processes they serve.  Thus knowledge workers of the early 21st century may well be turning into the cubicle equivalent of de-skilled industrial factory workers of the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

In short, our society seems to be evolving into a configuration in which the ability to think deeply and outside the box is dwindling, and in which our work is to blame for this dwindling.  (To read further about this evolution, please see "The Woodcutter's Dull Ax.")  We see here a trap to be avoided by those people in search of true craft, people who truly want to learn to engage in beautifully good work in order to meet necessary needs, that they may not be unfruitful.  Learning to avoid that trap should be an interesting experience.