Logan’s Run
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The heyday of Artificial Intelligence (AI) was in the 1970s and 1980s. Here was the logical evolution of office and industrial automation that would put an expert into every computer and by doing so both replace and augment employees, changing forever the world of work. Only it turned out not to function that way because we underestimated the effort involved. It was easy to imagine putting intelligence into a computer but very difficult to do so in practice. There wasn’t enough processing power available for one thing, nor were there even enough experts, since it seemed to require having one on-hand to keep the machine in tune. Now IBM appears to have a plan to do it all again, though with a twist. And this time, thanks to Moore’s Law and high costs for employee health care and pensions, it might even work. God help us.
Today’s computers are smaller and thousands of times more powerful than the ones we worked with during the AI boom, but the problem is still one of programming — getting knowledge into the system in an efficient and usable manner. For that matter, it is hard to envision computers other than robots performing many of these workplace functions, and robots aren’t ready. The better solution then, according to a just-published IBM patent filing (US29228426A1), might be to find a way to suck knowledge out of the experts then inject it into younger, stronger, cheaper employees, possibly even in other countries.
IBM’s proposed Platform for Capturing Knowledge describes how to use an imersive gaming environment to transfer expert knowledge held by employees “aged 50 and older” to 18-25 year-old trainees who find manuals “difficult to read and understand.”
IBM also discusses how its invention could be made available for customers’ use in return for “payment from the customer(s) under a subscription and/or fee agreement.”
What we’re talking about, then, is a possible revolution in workplace training, one where a lifetime of experience would ideally be sucked from the mind of an experienced worker to be injected into a trainee and then the older worker discarded.
There are several thoughts that came to mind as I read this patent application. Could IBM really be serious about such a plan? Then I imagined how enthusiastically the idea must have been received at IBM intergalactic HQ in Armonk. What a great idea! Transfer knowledge from old to young, American to Argentinian, or even just hold it in machine storage for later use, disposing of the expert in the meantime.
To see it this way you have to understand one recent IBM mindset, which is that culturally IBM does not believe in job specialization. Anyone can manage anything. Anyone should be able to perform any job. For a company whose motto used to be “think,” IBM is trying to reduce it to “do as instructed.”
This patent is a natural extension of that culture. Though part of being an expert is the ability to figure out new stuff and master it. But when you get rid of the real experts, who is going to figure out the new stuff?That doesn’t automatically fall out of this computer gaming scenario, which teaches functions and techniques, not intuition or actual experience.
Then I thought about that moment late in the tenure of IBM CEO John Opel when someone came up with the bright idea of urging companies that leased IBM mainframes to buy them, creating a huge revenue bubble that grew the company to more than 400,000 employees, setting it up for its 1990s crash. Converting the leases was not, in itself, a bad idea. What was bad was assuming that such huge, essentially one-time, revenue would continue perpetually, which is exactly how IBM saw it. Really. Isn’t this the same thing, only now they are converting employees into some more disposable form? What happens when there are no more experts to convert?
IBM’s greatest threat is its ability to stifle innovation. The way the company is off-shoring jobs and minimizing the value of its support workers demonstrates this. The threat will be when a group of smart folks in China or India realize how things could be done better, then starts taking work away from IBM. They will have access to an army of IBM foreign workers, too, who will bring customer contacts with them.
On the other hand, this application is also typical of an IBM patent. There are many aspects to implementing such a training process — data gathering, information management, software, hardware, etc. — and IBM has patented every part. So if anyone makes a something similar, IBM could sue. If you create gaming software to teach almost anything to almost anyone, this patent may trump you.
In the end it may not matter then whether IBM runs out of experts or not. Just so long as they don’t run out of lawyers.
I, Cringely readers from the Boston area who want to see if I reflect light in person can run that controlled experiment next Thursday, September 17th, when I speak to the Society for Information Management’s Boston Chapter. Here’s the link. My topic is Consumerization of IT: Is Corporate IT about to Lose Control Again? The answer of course is “yes,” but the devil is in the details. Please attend if you can.
As a one time expert systems knowledge Engineer, I smile. The knowledge based expert system idea was great, and relied on a KE who could envision doing anything in a way that they could extract and capture the expert’s knowledge. However, the very management who looked for KE’s failed to realize that these were the core of the core experts. As this was in the heyday of the “a good manager can manage anything” mentality, I moved on.
Incidentally, I am seeing exactly the effect of this in my specialty (warning, buzzwords ahead), constrained private cloud scalability for SAP landscapes. Very few get it because you have to be able to organize meta-knowledge across a bunch of domains, each with their own mentally-grey-haired experts: SAP, Networks, Storage, Operating systems, virtualization (both storage & computational). Eureka! I am a KE again and Darn! few get it this time either.
Daemeon
I missed a line: this is the same critical node (now merely an “interviewer”) in IBM’s patent filing.
I am currently involved in an “over 50″ project. Two of us (both over 50) met as contract-for-hire at a manufacturing company. Our job is embedded software.
We noticed early on that our experiences were not only similar, but that we had an opportunity to ‘leverage’ that experience to our new employers (we both got hired).
This was several years ago.
Industrial kind of leads or lags the economic booms (depending on your point of view). The point is that the corporate sponsorship of our method was important to the company, mostly because it was so “lite” (as they would have said in the ’90s;-).
It took many years, but we finally got what I would call a ‘stable’ team.
Now my partner and I are working diligently to pass on several skill sets to ensure that the community we leave behind is well supported. Hundreds of jobs are involved, so this is, in our opinion, an important part of the project; how to teach a very young group how to move a project forward (sort of the ‘when to hold them and when to fold them’).
Our method is simple (and not a candidate for patent, as it is the same method your grandmother would have advised); start now, let them work, be their safety net.
The real “money” in all this is making and living with your mistakes. I know of no other way to become successfully wary and responsibly suspicious in a manner that ensures profitable success.
Remember those old saws, things like; “…going in the right direction has a statistical probability of over 90% that your path will end in a cul-de-sac…”
and my favorite, in an engineering organization; “…if you are thinking, you are doing it wrong..” (bless you Sid Finer, where ever you may be!).
Sincerely,
C Wilson
Have to wonder where it is all going? Will the empire collapse? Should we be finding another country to live and work in? With the left running rampant it won’t be good for business and it was not great to begin with. Everyone I talk to is saying they are very slow. And that with us being told things are turning up.
I’m going to put on the anthropologist cap and ponder what this ‘invention’ means in a greater context of how humans as a species generate, retain, distribute, and use knowledge to sustain life.
Downloading information from a human brain and uploading into another person’s brain is very difficult, and any incremental improvement in speed and efficiency in doing so has had major impact on economics, politics, and social structure throughout history.
Consider invention of writing. It is a way of downloading knowledge accumulated in the head of the author. The written material can then be replicated and transported across space and time. Then it can be read by other people, thus uploading the information into other people’s brains.
The efficiency or accuracy of this process depends on (but not limited to) skill of the author and the readers, the method of encoding information (language, mathematics, pictures), the medium used to contain writing (papyrus vs. paper/ink vs. floppy disk vs. magnetic encoding in hard disk in some server farm etc.), and distribution method (courier on horse vs. removable type/book sellers vs. internet).
Whenever technologies employed here had improved, humans were able to do things that were previously impossible, and the old way of doing things (and livelihood that depended on the old business model) faded away. This transition can sometimes be bloody, since those who benefit from the old ways fight back by not giving up the knowledge, sabotaging, etc. by every possible way.
I’m sure that to 18th century nobles, it seemed impossible how common people could be mass-educated and trained to perform simple tasks based on reading/writing, and then could be organized into bureacracies that administer business of a state. Yet, we no longer have monarchies ruling with support of few, privileged land-governing nobles. The vast majority of present day states rely on picking people out of mass public-educated population pool to take care of their businesses: government, military, and commerce. This new social organization has been enabled (not necessarily driven) by various improvements made in method of distributing information between human brains.
Of course, today we have many many methods of moving knowledge from one brain to another, and the invention referenced in this article tries to introduce another. In particular, it tries to improve efficiency of transferring advanced business knowledge from experienced employees to new employees. What’s important is not whether this invention will work, but rather that there is an economic incentive to do this.
Experienced employees command higher salaries for various reasons, including:
1) they are able to generate new knowledge on how to operate business in new environment (market, legal, technological boundary conditions)
2) they possess business knowledge that accumulated over time, which are difficult to extract and instill into new employees.
If efficiency improvement can be made in expert knowledge transfer, then businesses can reduce cost of training new employees. As a by-product, the value of some of experienced employees will diminish, as many derive justification for higher salary solely based on holding difficult-to-teach knowledge.
So I think that’s one point worth debating: should there continue to be an economic reward for simply holding/retaining (not creating) knowledge, in an age where knowledge moves around at an ever-increasing speed? If so, then how much, and who/how should it be decided?
This system is entirely dependent on getting the knowledge out of the expert at the start of the process. The system they have listed to do this in the patent is ‘generic interview templates.’ Having done extensive functionally oriented interviews I can say that results depend almost completely on the combination of knowledge of the interviewer about the subject, their skill as an interviewer, preprepared materials and the environment of the interview. While the gaming platform might be able to teach subject matter expertise if the interviewer doesn’t ask all of the correct questions or if the expert misinterprets those questions or if the expert makes a mistake or has a bad day you build a system for teaching bad information very well.
Experts are experts because they have extensive knowledge, know which part is important when and know how to use it. This is terribly difficult or impossible to extract as ‘information’ owing to the sheer amount of it, the complexity and sometimes from the lack of expertise of the expert in communicating what they know or how they know it. If it were not the case we could teach the charisma that politicians have, the technical ‘knack’ that the best engineers have or the business acumen that high level executives have.
I don’t think this is anything earth shattering. If you thought of CBT’s as a game it would exist already.
[...] As discussed at the Owl Bar this evening: IBM’s proposed Platform for Capturing Knowledge describes how to use an imersive gaming environment to transfer expert knowledge held by employees “aged 50 and older” to 18-25 year-old trainees who find manuals “difficult to read and understand.” IBM also discusses how its invention could be made available for customers’ use in return for “payment from the customer(s) under a subscription and/or fee agreement.” [...]
[...] How #IBM Uses #IntellectualMonopolies to Exploit the Little Guy http://www.cringely.com/2009/09/logans-run/ [...]
[...] monopolies on software algorithms — is IBM. Cringely has taken IBM to task by stating what IBM is doing to the public with its big bag of patents: IBM’s greatest threat is its ability to stifle innovation. The way the company is off-shoring [...]
I can say, as an IBMer, that the patent application does not surprise me in the least. Nor, frankly, do I feel all that particularly threatened. As Bob and other opinion providers have pointed out, the point is to capture knowledge of gray-hairs, not come up with new knowledge. Thus, “do as instructed”.
If you want to know where this leads, take a good, long look at the U.S. Government. They make up 90% of my client base, and I can say, with certainty, that they are not paid to “think”. They are told to follow instructions, or they will be “written up,” (my clients tell me all the time why they can’t “do the right thing”, else it goes into their employment record).
There are two ironies in all of this. One, is that IBM is hired to provide the thinking capacity for clients like these. When IBM has reduced its services professionals – by its own insatiable need for cutting costs – to a herd of automatons, its usefulness to clients will collapse, and it will begin a long period of decline. Two, the very principles which lead to a series of repeatable, measurable tasks, (i.e. “lean” and “six sigma”) that can be done by cheap(er) labor requires, first, a thoughtful individual who can facilitate the transformation of data into information and then into insights.
After the implementation of the concepts behind patent, how many of those folks will be left?
Answer: it won’t matter. We’ll be working directly for other clients and firms.
Has IBM just tried to patent what the Military is and has been doing with efforts since before rocks were thrown?
I talk about the drills and “games” of yore as well as TopGun/RedFlag up to and past Americas Army v3. Vets (ie older soldiers) are debriefed and simulations/games are produced so rookies and others “learn” the things not to do or to do in a given scenario?
Just because they tie it into a fancy name and/or use fancy XML is not very innovative.
As for Non Military work Boeing has been doing this _already_ to train aircraft techs – just search google for boeing training using graphic simulation (aka Game).
Until IBM clients begin to realize the immense DRAINing of employee veteran talent and the TOP heavy and willing to cut peoples throats for a investor’s buck of profit attitude of IBM management the slide will continue.
I just remember the quote from Aliens
Ripley: How many drops is this for you, Lieutenant?
Gorman: Thirty eight… _simulated._
Vasquez: How many *combat* drops?
Gorman: Uh, two. Including this one.
Drake: Sh@t.
Hudson: Oh, man…
IBM should just patent how to ram the US patent system into the ground and get it all over with.
Ben Franklin is rolling in his grave. He refused the patent on the Franklin Stove as he knew society would benefit as a whole by not doing so.
Its not that he did so on each one of his inventions but he knew that patents were there to promote Community and not destroy entire neighborhoods which are surround the factory/plant/office as an entire industry gets carted off to the cheapest labor force by Management.
Two things will stop IBM and those like them — eventually.
1) Culture Clash
2) Trust in the Enforcement of Law
1) Its impossible to think how proud IBM USA management is to think that they will not hear the word “NO” eventually from their colony employees. At which time they will have to get US government or another government to put down the strike. This is the modern IBM – East India Company all over again. All cultures tend to not respect “foreign management” for long.
2) I ask you. If somebody outside the USA is entrusted to run my company IT or whatever and he/she sells out my data/passwords to my competitor and destroys my company?
Why yes, I _sue_ IBM USA but the guilty will not likely or never get prosecuted in his country but only fired by IBM Division XYZ. Same if they do a shabby job, don’t deliver on time or the product. So its really impossible for IBM or individuals they employ to be “criminally punished” other than in economic terms in off shoring work.
Indeed the USA is becoming more morally corrupt but as a citizen I hope that if my management/coworkers are caught being bribed, taking kickbacks, etc they go to jail, prison and/or get their assets seized and forfeited as ill gotten gains. If they pollute then my kids in the neighborhood beat up their kids in the neighborhood. I can stand outside their yard and protest at their house. But all this breaks down under off shoring.
This is necessary to society if but to preserve the Trust & reputation of the industry or industry practice. If customers don’t “trust” the enforcement of law between companies who do you think will still be doing business?
TRUST, which is impossible to buy through acquisition or increase because of offshoring, was really once THE hallmark of IBM. They have lost it because of investor greed and mismanagement.
Now if some asks me, “Do I buy IBM or not?” I might say its a marginal company – what they buy is good, what the do with it is mediocre but as a whole I hesitant to trust them to support my business as it were their own business over the long term.
[...] I Cringley informs us that IBM has patented a “platform for capturing knowledge”. Quoting Cringley (it uses) an imersive (sic) gaming environment to transfer expert knowledge held by employees “aged 50 and older” to 18-25 year-old trainees who find manuals “difficult to read and understand. [...]
HA! I thought the funniest thing about this post was that right next to it on the website when I viewed it was a nice, fat ad from IBM touting its business services to small business. It figures that even when it’s being criticized IBM will be trying to make money.
As a patent, this is ridiculous. I know for a fact that the CIA used the game “Hidden Agenda” for training purposes. And how was that game developed? A content expert used knowledge of Latin American socio-political and economic circumstances to develop models. The game-engine developer provided the context and tools for encoding that knowledge model into a runnable form. Somebody at IBM needs to read “Computers as Theater” (Brenda Laurel, 1993). I wouldn’t be surprised to find a diagram in it that looks a lot like this patent.
Remember the movie “I, Robot” with will Smith? And the hologram Dr. Lanning left behind? “I’m sorry, my responses are limited… you must ask the right questions”.
TWH is right.
“Information is not knowledge. The only source of knowledge is experience.”
(Albert Einstein)
Why that? Simply because information is “dead” data while experience is “alive” data (data that makes sense because it is related to real-life situations that the subject HAS HAD to overcome -hence the inner understanding).
And the obvious question is ‘how can we extract, store and transmit this experience’?
We can, if we understand that this is only possible to do it without algorithms: the structure is the information.
If you understand the structure then you know what experience is.
[...] X. Cringely’s latest column is (somewhat) about a knowledge capture platform. Nestled in among the usual rant about IBM and [...]
Same thing going on at NASA these days with push to outsource everything and use Knowledge Capture to allow fresh outs to do the work of people with 20+ years of experience.
Good luck with that.
it is all about money.
“….What was bad was assuming that such huge, essentially one-time, revenue would continue perpetually, which is exactly how IBM saw it….”
Which is exactly the corner that Microsoft has backed themselves into now
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ensure that the community we leave behind is well supported. Hundreds of jobs are involved, so this is, in our opinion, an important part of the project; how to teach a very young group how to move a project forward (sort of the ‘when to hold them and when to fold them’).
Our method is simple (and not a candidate for patent, as it is the same method your grandmother would have advised); start now, let them work, be their safety net.
The real “money” in all this is making and living with your mistakes. I know of no other way to become successfully wary and responsibly suspicious in a manner that ensures profitable success.
Remember those old saws, things like; “…going in the right direction has a statistical probability of over 90% that your path will end in a cul-de-sac…”
and my favorite, in an engineering organization; “…if you are thinking, you are doing it wrong..” (bless you Sid Finer, where ever you may be!).
Sincerely,
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