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PREDICTIONS ASTRAY
Time magazine, April 1965:
Men such as IBM economist Joseph Froomkin feel that automation will eventually bring about a 20-hour work week . . . thus creating a mass leisure class.
Many scientists hope that in time the computer will allow man to return to the Hellenic concept of leisure, in which the Greeks had time to cultivate their minds and improve their environment while slaves did all the labor. The slaves, in modern Hellenism, would be the computers.
Hasn’t really worked out like that, has it?
No it hasn’t, and I’m pissed. Where’s my Jetsons-style flying car? Where’s my flawless android babe, ready to provide every service? Internet porn - big deal.
We’ve been cheated of the future.
I blame Bush.Posted by SwinishCapitalist on 2007 11 02 at 05:10 PM • permalinkI’d be happy with one of those gleaming cities-of-the-future. The ones with no litter and no crabgrass(flying cars a bonus). I mean all the stuff that was promised to us at the 1964 New York World’s Fair.
Now, if they would have been honest and said Look, kid, the future is going to be reducing your carbon footprint and internet porn….
Well, I’d have chosen a different profession.It’s simple. The man who figures out how to get all his work done in half the time realizes he can use the rest of his time to double his output and get twice as much money. The rest of the economy is forced to compete at his pace or lose entirely. The rat race is determined by the biggest, fastest rat.
Also, the majority of people wouldn’t know what to do with the free time and would end up working either to avoid boredom or to pay for whatever expensive leisure pursuits they adopted.
Hasn’t really worked out like that, has it?
In addition to the above comments, the computer has actually created a whole new work category, “Feeding The Information Monster”.
I don’t know if this is prevalent in private business, but I assure you that, in government, it’s practically an entirely new function.
There are hordes of bureaucrats, plopped down in front of their computers, with a latte close at hand, whose sole job seems to be finding new and more complicated reports to submit upwards on an ever increasing frequency, regardless of whether or not you actually get anything done.
And then they complain that you aren’t getting anything done, or are falling behind schedule.
“Data calls”, some call them. “Reports”, say others. Me, I view them as a form of torture worse than waterboarding. Or being forced to the latest posting from GiGi or Tim Dunlop, or listening to The Goreacle™‘s latest speech.
Oh, the humanity!
Posted by The_Real_JeffS on 2007 11 02 at 06:28 PM • permalinkThe problem is that because computers are so good at keeping records, crunching numbers and generating reams of meaningless statistics, many workplaces (mine included) have developed a culture of working to feed them to capacity.
As much as I’m a geek and love my PCs, we would be better served by removing 95% of PCs from the workplace.
School students shouldn’t be let near a PC until their final year and certainly not until they can demonstrate that they’ve already mastered English and mathematics.
The prediction was partly right, by the following analysis: Working stiffs put in de facto 60-70 hours weekly, especially if you count hours spent on commuting time, pit-stops, appointments for job-derived servicing like accountancy, farmed-out child-minding & home repairs etc. BUT the work-fit retired and invalid pensioners (nearly 3 million Oz adults there)plus a half-million jobless in this booming economy and another 1.5 million who’d work part-time but can’t justify the costs of employing them in this high waged economy: all these have willing or unwilling free time which in total would might well pull down the average work-week to something like 20 hours if divided equally among all adults competent to do SOME sort of work. Thanks to “the way we live now.”
#12
Tell me about it, too smoky.
So many times I need a report to help me keep track of my work and I find that all the pre-prepared reports report on crap that’s of no earthly use to me.
Like reports in the Government’s Research Master and the place I work at’s latest Timetabling and Roombooking system.You spend time trying to figure out how to get around things to make the reports work for you.
We have a fabulous front end for all our data bases it’s called Business Objects.
Problem is that it has access to so many data bases to gather information you need a bloody pilot’s licence to get it to report what you want to report on, and every section of the university requires different data in their reports; different focus areas.Certainly not. I spend all my time designing and debugging computers of various sorts.
Posted by Wimpy Canadian on 2007 11 02 at 07:30 PM • permalinkThere are hordes of bureaucrats, plopped down in front of their computers, with a latte close at hand, whose sole job seems to be finding new and more complicated reports to submit upwards on an ever increasing frequency, regardless of whether or not you actually get anything done.
Heh. The application I work on has two essentially independent reporting systems, generating some 3-dozen reports with many variations in what data is shown, how it’s rolled up, etc. A bag slung on its side generates reports for another, completely unrelated, function.
Oh, and we’re responsible for producing some reports by hand.
All the other projects in our department have their own reporting capabilities—that’s about a dozen different projects doing reports.
I believe there are people dedicated to assembling other reports from the data we generate, scattered around the country.
Rumor has it people actually look at these reports.
Posted by Rob Crawford on 2007 11 02 at 07:34 PM • permalinkInstead we have virtual slaves in Chinese factories and prison camps churning out cheap computers so we can work harder.
Posted by eeniemeenie on 2007 11 02 at 07:48 PM • permalinkRumor has it people actually look at these reports.
Rob, that hits so close to home that I can’t decide whether to laugh or cry.
Some of the systems that I work with have a LOUSY reporting system, with some of the silliest data requirements evah, and no search function worth a dang. More than once, I’ve had some a$$hat higher up in the food chain contact me to re-send a report because they can’t find it in the system. In fact, they seldom even try to find it; instead, they “ask” me to copy it into an e-mail or fax it to them. I s**t you not.
Posted by The_Real_JeffS on 2007 11 02 at 09:50 PM • permalink#22 TRJS
Seems a common complaint.None of the reports developed by the
boofheadsboffins who create the system report on anything that someone who actually uses the data system to enter and retrieve data needs to know.And quite often not in a format that can be sorted, unless it’s cut and pasted elsewhere, if you’re lucky!
Actually, it has.
Computers have replaced almost all human calculating calculating and accounting, they record your TV shows, monitor your car, help you write letters, send those letters, track your pets, let you talk from a phone you can carry in your pocket, answer your phone, play your music… I could go on. I haven’t even mentioned porn yet.
We do actually have more leisure, according to some studies; labor-saving devices are quite a bit better than 40 years ago. And we’re quite a lot wealthier, thanks to our much greater productivity.
#24
Recall (from Auntie’s radio Science Show) some while ago that, on average, we are said to be destined to work a certain amount of hours in a lifetime: e.g. coal miners a centruy ago worked longer hours but retired/died earlier; and that labour saving devices aren’t cutting back on housework hours (cos the devices themselves require some upkeep).Guess it’s like ever bigger harddrives/flash RAM devices, etc. - we quickly find content to fill ‘em with - e.g. from still pics to motion videos (MP4 movies on Pods, etc.)
I remember quite clearly being told by one of my high school teachers that the biggest problem we’d face was how to deal with so much leisure time. Humans would only work 2 days a week and the rest of the time they’d flat out trying to think of what to do for the next 5 days. He imagined a stratified society with artists at the top and the indolent masses driven to distraction with boredom, below.
I pretty much based my entire academic and work career on the assumption of not having to do much. Bastard sure got it wrong.
Those computer simulations certainly are useful, though.
One allowed me a Civil War do-over, in charge of the Rebs, and we handily won each and every battle.
Another allows the Warmenists to almost put one over on us.
What’s not to like?
Posted by Harry Bergeron on 2007 11 02 at 11:34 PM • permalinkThe part of the theory he overlooked: As with the original meatware slaves, all the time we save employing computers we spend watching them to make sure they don’t screw up…
Posted by richard mcenroe on 2007 11 03 at 01:13 AM • permalinkHarry—What did you do, drown Bragg and Early, or elect McClelland President?
Posted by richard mcenroe on 2007 11 03 at 01:14 AM • permalinkHow many times do I have to explain this? Okay yes, the fembots are up and working. And if the criteria was simply looking lifelike and being able to function independently and carry out a clandestine operation, yes, they do the job well. But try to get them to do household chores and all you get are responses like they’re too technilogically sophisticated to clean a bathroom, they’re so so busy and have more responsibilities than they can deal with, that they absolutely need a human maid to help around the house, and so on. And I have five of them telling me that.
Well, maybe they can wash a load of towels if they wouldn’t go shopping at the mall every day. How many pairs of 5” stiletto heels does a fembot need?
Posted by wronwright on 2007 11 03 at 05:55 AM • permalinkBah! Look, if I wanted to live at 1965 levels, yeah, I could do that on 20 hours a week, and spend my “leisure” time gathering firewood, beating laundry on wet rocks down by the river or making Jello salad or whatever people in the 1960s did.
The key problem in this “leisure class” assumption is that people would be fine with static living standard levels. But when computers increase productivity, and everyone is grabbing for more productivity and you don’t, you feel relatively poorer, “leisure time” be damned.
Posted by Matt in Denver on 2007 11 03 at 10:31 PM • permalinkWhat the predicters of increased leisure time neglected was the discovery of the scientific law known as Parkinson’s Law. It states (in its most succinct form) Work expands to fill the time alloted to it. So if you’ve got a 40 hour work week whatever you are doing will expand to occupy the whole week. Parkinson based his discovery on his study of the British Admiralty, where as the numbers of ships precipitously declined the numbers of civil servants dealing with the navy rose astronomically.
On the matter of the rat race, P. J. O’Rourke had a good comment. He said that the rat race takes place in the Third World too, and sometimes it’s won by real rats.
Posted by Michael Lonie on 2007 11 04 at 12:54 AM • permalinkand that labour saving devices aren’t cutting back on housework hours
I don’t buy it. I’ve never handwashed a dish, or spent a minute repairing a dishwasher.
You know, one thing people generally fail to realize is that women were really needed at home in the old days; one reason they’ve joined the work force is that homemaking is no longer 50 hours a week of work. Cooking, cleaning, and washing clothes used to be a full-time job before automation. Much of that was automated by 1965, but computers have extended the trend of increasing productivity per unit of human labor and increased leisure.
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That’s because you’ve got geeks in charge of product development. Us ordinary computer users want to use them to write draw and keep records, quickly and efficiently. The nerds who create the hardware and software think its fun to have to worry about port settings and crap like that. Result: more time spent tuning your goddamned computer than actually using the bugger!