On Possibility and Choice

There is an acquaintance of mine who is pursuing a PhD in the Information Systems and Management group at the Warwick Business School at the University of Warwick. His research journal is posted at http://www.luminousgroup.net/. When I reach a blank slate while writing in my own journal I pop over to his for a break. The overlap in our interests makes his journal interesting, his outlook is sufficiently different that I can see the same thing in a different way.

Earlier this week he made a posting http://www.luminousgroup.net/2012/02/possibility-and-choice.html which has a quote from Zuboff (Zuboff, S., 1988. In the Age of the Smart Machine: the Future of Work and Power, Basic Books., p. 387-388)  The quote pertained to the kalidescopic way in which our machines present the world to us but how in the end we are still faced with choices. I had commented that the quote brought the cybernetic view to mind and how the machines enhance or augment our perceptual system and changes us in subtle ways. He responded that he agrees with the augmented perception, "but I would question whether it has had the effect on the general population of extending mind" I can understand his point of view but as regards to how humanity has adapted, I ultimately disagree. I am choosing to expand on my idea here rather than continuing the discussion in comments to the original post.

I am teaching an intro to CS currently. Since the class does not articulate to any CS class and is nominally intended for non-majors as well as majors, I take a broad sweep over the material and place a heavy emphasis on the uses of information technology over human history. One thing I discovered in gathering material for the presentation of the abacus was a YouTube of Japanese students preparing for competition. I expected them to be fast with the abacus. What I had not previously known was that the best students don't bother using the physical device any longer but merely manipulate virtual beads with their fingers in lieu of the device. This is the most dramatic demonstration I can think of for the potential of the human mind to develop computational skills.

We all know that with practice we can add long columns of numbers without mechanical aid. What these Japanese students demonstrate is how far the limits of computation can be taken. Savants are known for their ability to multiply large numbers together with incomprehensible speed. But all of this makes the current state of computation skills at a college entrance level shocking to someone of an earlier, pre-computer, generation. An extreme case was one student I was tutoring who could not give an answer when I asked him to multiply a number by 10. Students are learning computation differently now.

I have been careful to call it computation and not math. While computation is certainly needed at some point when learning math, the inexpensive electronic calculator has made the advanced human computation skills irrelevant to society. But what is also evident in society today is how "innumerate" society seems to be at times. Take the ongoing Washington debate over the national debt. Millions, billions and trillions are sprinkled throughout conversation and it is not uncommon to hear someone confuse them. Yet, of course, these figures differ by 3 orders of magnitude. For the engineering student whose best computational tool was a slide rule, keeping track of the decimal place becomes second nature. Yet in the public sphere it seems like the average person is actually less capable of keeping track of the relative size of these numbers than they were several generations ago. Correlation is not causation but it is not unreasonable to posit that there is a causal connection. So I'll just assert that I have a belief that the ubiquitous computational ability has caused our education to neglect the old-fashioned drill on computation with an increasing dependence upon mechanical computation. The change is more in the form of atrophy of the skills possessed by prior generations. That loss of skills is made possible by the augmentation of humans by ubiquitous computation. Perhaps not what Barton thought I was going for when I claimed an enhancement in people but a change none-the-less.

Barton is ultimately more concerned with organizations than with individuals. Yet even there I see some profound shifts in management decision making over my lifetime and they are largely due to the reduced cost of computation. Prior to WWII, organizations were either limited in size or limited in their ability to act in a command-and-control structure. Mid-level managers were given great latitude simply because the ability to micro-manage did not exist. But with the growth of information technology (including communications) and the reduced cost of computation a new model of management grew out of the 1960s. I am not a fan so you'll need to excuse the fact that I derisively call this "spreadsheet management." Economic models began to first augment, and then in some cases, replace human judgement in the organization. The link between management and the functions being managed has grown so tenuous that a CEO from one industry can become the CEO of another industry without anyone thinking there is anything odd about it. The CEOs job after all is to create shareholder wealth and what does it matter what the line is doing when that wealth is a function of short-term financial decisions rather than the result of long-term strategic vision.

Given this view of contemporary management in large multi-national organizations, I see the growth of IT as having had an enormous impact on management decision making. The financial models and projections envisioned in the 60s are now easily realizable by our machines at almost no cost. Management decision making has shifted from a human centered activity to a data driven activity. To me this is profound and part of the source for the economic melt down.

One of the many factors in the recent economic turmoil was the failure of risk assessment organizations to properly quantify the risk in the marketplace. The real-estate wealth drove the economy into uncharted numbers of wealth and diversity but the knowledge of how it could all come unraveled after a turn in the market was willfully ignored. Like a snowball at the top of a ski run, a relatively small event cascaded through the economy just like the proverbial butterfly wing causing a hurricane. Our machines are capable of great feats of computation but the models underlying the meaning we attribute to those numbers is still human as is greed and optimism.

In short, what I see as the effect of this ubiquitous computing in organizations has been a reliance upon those models that are efficiently executed by the machine and a dulling of the management skills in the organization. When you are rewarded or punished because of the numbers you are nominally in control of, what incentive is there to understand the complex model that creates those number or to challenge them if you do? The skills a mid-level manager needs now are more political than analytic since it is likely her boss does not understand these models either.

Given this cynical attitude toward numbers it is almost humorous that I am choosing to pursue the empirical route which will stress numbers over persuasive rhetoric. But it is precisely because of this cynicism that I am choosing this path. It is not as much that I have lost faith in what the numbers can do for us. I think there is ample evidence to suggest they can do great things. What I rail against is the loss of humanity and the loss of what I can only at this time describe as common sense when it comes to using these numbers. As with individuals it looks like the atrophy of skills that were more broadly developed by prior generations of managers. I see to many otherwise bright people think that the only thing that exists is what has been measured and quantified. Mind you, not what COULD be quantified, but only what has. I believe that even the universe of what could be quantified is insufficient for the best performance at a management level. Qualities like persuasion, leadership, and inspiration will never be delivered in a spreadsheet but only through direct human contact. Yet a modern manager must be able to use numbers to effectively do these things as well in our world. The numbers and their appropriate use will be an important skill in management as well as in engineering. I am not interested in the management route any longer since I feel there are too many people as good as me or better who want that more. However it is the engineers who will do the exploration into the quantitative world and find the techniques and models that will influence the managers of future generations. Whether those managers will use the knowledge properly or not is not my concern. But I am motivated to ensure these workers have the best tools available to understand how machine processes can be crafted as deliberately as we manufacture hardware today.