In 1911, Frederick Winslow Taylor published his book ‘The Principals of Scientific Management’, which used logic and maths to describe the pathway to efficiency. It shaped the practice of management for the next 80 years, until, slowly, we realised that not all behaviour was rational, able to be broken down in a binary way. In fact, most of our behaviour is not binary in the way envisaged by Taylor. It is shaped by the forces that have driven our evolutionary success, best described by Daniel Kahneman in his great book, ‘Thinking, Fast & Slow’.
Increasingly I am seeing and reading stuff that reflects the explosive growth of AI, and the impact it will have on our lives, working and private. I cannot help but wonder if this is another manifestation of the same mistake that Taylor made.
Artificial intelligence will be a huge boon to all sorts of tasks, it is way better than we mere humans at all sorts of things, but it cannot, at least yet, reflect the nuances of human behaviour, and reactions to the things that makes us a successful species.
How will AI deliver us the elements of pride and accountability we have in a complex job, when that job is broken down into a series of sequential tasks to be done by the ‘recipe’ without variation? Where does the insight and creativity that comes from doing such a job emerge when it is being done by the numbers generated by a machine?
My mother in law used to do paintings by the numbers, her unit had quite a number of ‘originals’ by famous artists, all done by the numbers, with great care and attention, and the application of considerable skill in attending to the minutest details. However, they were not the originals, not even great copies of the originals, they were by the numbers.
Algorithms are great, but not at everything.
