Logan’s Run
Podcast: Play in new window | Download
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.
http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/fog0000000024.html
“Big Macs vs. The Naked Chef”
The main danger in this kind of thing is that it hollows out the middle. Instead of having a healthy mix of all kinds, you end up with a barbell distribution – a bunch of those rare people who can work through systems they’ve never seen before and fix them at the top, and a bunch of people to act as interchangeable cogs at the bottom. But the middle area between those extremes was where things like the middle class and upward mobility happened. This is the same class of problem as your earlier “Is Technology Evil?” entry.
Once again we confuse “Expert” with “Expert System”. These two things are almost diametrically opposed.
Experts understand exceptions, learn and focus on the unusual
Expert Systems codify knowledge and focuses on the common.
In fact the economic incentives for expert systems reward handling the common cases first and returns tend to decrease as the more uncommon cases are added. IBM isn’t reproducing and storing real experts, just finding a way to stamp out repeatable workers and miss labelling them.
Expert systems made the process of securitizing home mortgages, as well as other forms of debt so easy that the wall street idiots could bring bankrupt themselves without knowing what hit them. The idiots could not have done it without these systems.
There are new expert systems now entering the mainstream.
In the 80′s medical professionals worried about getting sued for assisted diagnoses (“what do you mean a computer misdiagnosed my lung condition?”) even though the expert system outcomes were better than raw doctor diagnoses.
There are other domains though where expert systems are doing just what you suggest … focusing on the “common cases”, assisting in routine circumstances, and providing more info to the true human expert when things go wrong. Look at Zenprise, http://www.zenprise.com, for example — it routinely scans a corporation’s MS Exchange/Blackberry Enterprise Server environment to compare current conditions to thousands of rules to diagnose and suggest ways to resolve problems.
@Doug K.: concidentally, Zenprise apparently does encode rules in some XML format.
>> For a company whose motto used to be “think,” IBM is trying to reduce it to “do as instructed.”
That was just sales training PR. IBM was, is, and always will be a Sales company. The job is “client management”. It built computers from the 50′s to the 90′s because it had to, not because it wanted to. Look what it did to Codd: ignored him until that Oracle thing showed up.
And don’t forget: IBM perfected the step-by-step manual (repair, maintenance, and training), railroad tracks and all.
What a perfect piece of inane managerialism (but I repeat myself) that diagram embodies. I particularly like the “Knowledge Model (XML)” tag. The XML of course guarantees all good things will ensue.
At first I thought it was an elaborate joke.
XML —> ? ——> Profit
The upcoming decision in Bilski v Doll will probably hammer a nail into the coffin of these type of patent applications.
The problem with Artificial Intelligence is – lack of WISDOM (on both the computer and the programmers part). My own definition of wisdom is this – Wisdom is the act of coming up with CORRECT answers. Why climb the mountain to ask the great guru a question? Because he comes up with the correct answer most every time.
This means that a computer (and OS) represent INTELLIGENCE – raw processing power and great amounts of data. Getting a computer to do what we WANT it to do is the process of instilling wisdom. But a computer cannot be more wise than its programmer . . .
No wonder AI hasn’t gone anywhere! If my analysis above is correct, then there is nothing to worry about with IBM – since no one would accuse them of being wise . . .
I always thought of wisdom as being tied directly to power. Look at it as if power is a scalar and wisdom is the vector produced by that scalar. The analogy partly breaks down, because I don’t know what property to assign to the unit vector. The “wisdom vector” expressed in a negative direction is then Foolishness. By that token, a powerless person can’t be very wise, or very foolish. To really do either requires a lot of power.
Not exactly the same as your definition, but it’s not really opposed to it, either.
Foolishness is making many (overt) decisions – based on low wisdom. Talking about scalars sounds like an “IQ” system – which mixes aspects of intelligence and wisdom. They are independent qualities . . .
Wisdom … is …having the patience…to see the obvious.
“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.”
Come on – they knew EXACTLY what they were doing! CEO 101: Short-term profits, from which you can earn millions, are much more important than the long-term health of the coimpany
This is nothing more than a Scott Adams Dilbert story arc coming frighteningly to life. When does the hilarity ensue?
Hilarity ensues when they actually try to put this into wide use; at least if you’re not an IBM stockholder.
‘If you create gaming software to teach almost anything to almost anyone, this patent may trump you.’
Prior art? The net is has plenty of gaming software used to teach almost everything. I’ve written some of it myself. Heck, some of my games even use XML.
I thought the diagram was like mnftiu.cc comics, and with a similar sense of humor
[...] Logan’s Run – Cringely on technology 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. via cringely.com [...]
As a former IBM employee, I can attest to the effects of these practices. Most of the young talent got the hell out of there if they could. When I started at Big Blue fresh out of college, it felt like some fucked-up Hobbesian world where the management were going to throw anyone making more than enough to afford a subsistence life in a tent under a bus. I constantly looked for a way out of there after being freaked out by various low-rent Thomas Friedman offshoring propaganda on the internal w3 network.
What the hell does IBM even do anyway? Outside of low-level labor arbitrage, they flog overpriced server chips, point-of-sale terminals, and useless “enterprise” applications like Rational and Lotus Notes used to enslave corporate drones into the big blue hivemind of mediocrity.
All of that is superfluous legitimations though. The majority of IBM’s profits are siphoned out of the economy from their trading desk by way of carry-trades and other corpofascist malfeasance. Sam Palmisano and the rest of the board seem to be hell bent on proving Marx correct. What’s the point of having a innovative corporation when you can just rape the future through inflation? Within the next century, corporation will be redefined as “large institution used to predate the public and exascerbate the ecoholocaust.”
I suppose the end game is that Palmisano and the rest of the sociopathic plutocrats will fly around the dystopian future from their private islands while the rest of the population fights it out for survival from tent cities. What else would you expect from the company who sold punch card machines to the Nazis and poisoned the water supply in Fishkill?
> What the hell does IBM even do anyway?
You’re looking at it – this article covers one of many things. A year or two back an IBM exec gave a talk to one of my graduate classes. Their whole game plan is to shift from just offering specific software or hardware-based solutions, and move towards “management” or “organizational” engineering services, i.e. designing and developing business and knowledge processes for companies. Correct me if I’m wrong, but isn’t that what the management at companies are supposed to do? But then again, maybe that’s the point, why not outsource something if it can be outsourced? That’s the corporate creed these days anyway.
Information = Data in Context
Context = Organized Data
Learning = Self Organization of data
In other words, if we both learn the same thing we still end up with a slightly different view on it. Adding new data will create a slightly different information for both of us. We can only have the same common view, shared with a lot of people. Even so called experts are operating on a different levels, up to gifted people.
What ever Intelligence is it’s doesn’t seem to exists inside IBM.
This is eerily similar to Asimov’s short story “Profession,” in which people are hooked up to machines that deliver expert-level skill in some task directly to their brains.
Sounds like these intelligent machines could learn managerial functions, too. Then we’d have a corporation for and by machines. No humans involved!
This reminds me of a Twilight Zone Episode, The Brain Center at Whipple’s. A manager uses machines (IBM mainframes?) to replace all of his employees until he too is replace by robot.
Forget throwing away the experts after the knowledge is transferred, I would think that we are facing a critical shortage of experts already. It’s been a long time since I talked with anyone about a problem where I could actually talk to an expert. All I get these days is some script reader or the run around when I call “support” and the problem never gets solved.
My wife is a teacher in our vaulted public school system. I kid you not, the schools are using second grade readers in eighth grade classes, yet many of the 8th graders cannot read it. The TAAS test (the annual test that is used to evaluate the effectiveness of the High School educational results) has been dumbed down year after year since its inception. Recently we found out that to be certified as a high school teacher now, all you have to do is pass a certification test that mirrors the TAAS questions. In other words, the system is hiring teachers based on their ability to teach the TAAS answers. Is it any wonder students can graduate from US schools and still be dumb as a tree stump?
The biggest problem I see is that 50+ people will find it hard to retire because there will be no 20 year olds that can take their place.
I couldn’t agree more. I would pay right now to train developers to work exactly as I do. Support too – it would immediately raise the quality of their game (which is pretty good but still too many questions end up in my inbox). And I would get trained as well in everything from cooking and baby care to development of AIs. Arguing against this kind of tech is like arguing against expert books or university education. Personally I live of selling highly specialized expertize codified in software but I would love for this kind of tech to work. Which I don’t think it will btw but it would be great nonetheless.
As a thirty something with 4 years of professional programming experience, 2 years computer support experience, 2 years restaurant cooking experience and 3 years teaching experience since graduating from college (with a science degree) let me say I’d love to have had the opportunity in my twenties to have a stable job that I could have mastered rather than being hired only long enough to get a company over a hump because they didn’t have any experts. The job market for people under 35 sucks. Companies don’t want to pay benefits so jobs are temporary. Thus few of us in the younger set are able to build up experience and are thus less employable. Want good 20yr olds then hire them for more than a single project and institute a mentoring program. After bouncing from project A at Company A (now out of business, management under investigation) to project B and Company B (who now employs only overseas programmers) to project C and Company C (which then decided that improving the product only required marketing) people get tired and get out of the game.
I am glad OUR public schools are doing a better job of educating our teachers, expect more from the kids, and have higher standards. There are school systems in our community who are “getting by.” It is interesting to visit each school…
In the good schools the teachers (and many of the kids) arrive early and leave late. It is not uncommon to see full classrooms outside of the school day with teachers and kids revisiting material. The energy level in the school is healthier and you can tell the kids are happy.
One of the first things you notice in the not-so-good schools is the “race to the parking lot.” The teachers are usually the first ones in their cars. The climate of the school is worse. The kids look like their school experience is more like detention than education.
It all comes down to leadership and expectations. Teachers would kill to work in our (the good) school system. They want to do what they love to do — teach! I know many kids have troubled family lives and the schools can’t fix that. Education starts at home. The tone of the school system starts with the community.
Don’t worry. People over 50 won’t have enough saved up to retire anyways. Problem solved.
Bob Cringely, sorry this is offtopic, but is your Mortgage Blog still being updated? Also, is the www home account com web site still with us? It looks dead…
most large IT companies are trying to get rid of support experts (which are costly and hard to replace) with monkeys connected to knowledge databases. assuming of course that any customer will be able to navigate the mazelike answering robot and talk to the monkey.
this in the illusion that profit can be endlessly expanded through cost cutting measures, which is of course impossible.
of course, once experts are gone, the knowledge databases are useless because they are full of garbage. they tend to fill with garbage anyway.
unfortunately, given the bad general quality of software written by kids just out of school, the support organizations are more necessary than ever, and more useless than ever. and this is even happening for sw and hw which cost millions…
oh well, i have to hang on only another 15 years and will hopefully be out of it..i mean IT..
The big leap here is that a revolutionary educational theory has been produced by IBM that suddenly allows them to “suck” information out of people and shove it into other people. Anyone remember “sleep learning”? If this were true, it would have bigger implications than the future of IBM.
Bob, you’re writing those Luddite articles once again!
I think that we should have no fear of the atomic energy because we’re not gonna stop the time.
Reminds me of The Matrix. Let me know when they can upload Kung Fu or how to fly a helicopter.
Sounds more like the sci-fi movie “Looker”. In that story they created computer simulations of fashion models. Once created, whydid you need to pay the model? Here we are tying to do it with the experts.
Experts “see” the holes in a plan or design and try to work around it. The learn how to see the holes by falling through a few of them. Experience is learned by doing, not by reading or downloading – otherwise everyone would be a rocket scientist.
We actually already have a “barbell” demographic in many critical areas of engineering. This may have been the motivation for this work at IBM. It’s a naive solution to the problem.
However, It’s been my experience that this kind of thing can’t work because the nature and amount of tacit knowledge involved in high tech engineering is so ephemeral and yet enormous. This becomes the primary core reason of why “I can always Google the answer” is a complete and utter sophistry. In many ways, Google is the practical implementation of this patent’s goal.
Actually son, no, you can’t “just Google it” because you have to have context in the form of facts and experiences to even imagine what to Google. You have to have the same context to even *imagine* why you’d need to Google anything in the first place.
The absolute classic experience I had just a few years ago involved a newly minted and so-called “PhD” who imagined he could simply “Google” various materials constants for his product’s components. This is despite the fact that anyone with any practical manufacturing experience would “know” such values must vary significantly with the specific company’s manufacturing process. They were “you have to actually measure them yourself” different from “average values”.
Even worse, the constants he “needed” were thin-film values and the only readily available values for the materials on Google were for bulk values. He went and used the bulk values, with tragically expensive consequences. He didn’t have enough context to realize the difference mattered (despite having a PhD, or actually more likely, because he had a PhD). No expert system could ever have prevent this because the kid never knew what he didn’t know. And even when it was pointed out, well, he had a PhD so it was “STFU!” rather than “ORLY?”. The “miracle” of PhD-holder incuriousness and ego – so predictable.
Karma was preserved, however, as he was fired within a year but it cost the company dearly in lost time and wrong directions taken. The VC had deep pockets so that worked ok, but every person at this firm took a major equity haircut because this boy thought he could “just Google it”.
I know it’s fun to rag on academics, but clearly the case here is the guy was just an idiot. He probably shmoozed his way through his degrees. Remember, you usually only have to get c’s or b’s to make it. There are some who are perfectly content with that, and those are the ones to watch out for. If he’d paid any attention to his lab courses, he would have realized right away that your suggestions were spot on. Testing the specific manufacturer’s materials yourself was something learned as an undergraduate!
I think this points more towards the problem of how to filter between people who have equivalent academic credentials, but innate differences in critical thinking aptitude and self-motivated desire to always learn and improve. As of yet, I’ve not found a proper test for that other than real-world experience.
I was hired by Andersen Consulting back in the 1990s. They had a similar idea. Experts like me would write down everything we did, and this Book of Knowledge could be given over to an eager beaver college graduate who made less than half of my salary.
I wrote down everything I did and all possible exceptions and problems which came out at over 500 pages. This was given to a younger worker who immediately messed everything up. Although I wrote down every step I did and all the various issues I ran into, and the steps to solve those problems, the manual couldn’t give the new kid any experience.
The problem is that much of knowledge is simply experience and even the experts themselves aren’t sure why they simply know certain things. Experience is the doctor who can’t find anything abnormal in the test results, but simply suspects that something isn’t quite right. It’s the network architect who can look at a diagram and tell you that your setup will cause problems.
Look at the history of Apple. Three CEOs, all successful with their former companies, nearly drove Apple into irrelevance and bankruptcy. At one time, Apple tried to sell itself to Sun (which most business experts thought was Apple’s only hope). Jobs, a college dropout, turned the company around and made it a technology juggernaut. Did Jobs have some sort of secret company decision flowchart that no one else had? Or, was its Jobs previous experience at Apple, his experience at NeXT, and his experience in Pixar that made him successful?
Jobs learned a lot in his previous experience. However, what that experience really taught him was when to trust his hunches, and when to get expert advice. Jobs started the Apple stores just when Dell and Gateway pulled the plug on there stores. Why did Jobs think he could succeed when the others failed? In fact, find me one person in the industry who thought it was a good idea.
Here’s the big question: If you can so easily transfer knowledge to lower paid workers, why are CEOs so highly compensated? They’ll tell you that its their knowledge, experience and innate leadership abilities that makes them impossible to replace with someone from Bangalore sitting in front of a computer and making $20/hour. Yet, these very same people think it is so easy to replace their highly technical staff with inexperienced people and a few flowcharts and diagrams.
: : why are CEOs so highly compensated?
I’m not sure what they would tell you, but here’s my take on it.
1) Relationships — the company is renting somebody with relationships to, or the cultural background to establish such, other big shots at suppliers and potential customers.
2) Ruthlessness — somebody to act as a remorseless managing machine. The Plan might sink the company in two years after a few quarters’ gains, but if any shareholder ever catches you bleeding away a dollar on scruples (unless it’s for corresponding gain in PR value), you will find yourself fired or in court.
Whether or not I like it, this is largely the way of the world our society has structured.
Point being: the CEOs know that “wisdom” or “knowledge” is a very small part of their job, so they don’t feel that they can be outsourced.
[...] http://www.cringely.com/2009/09/logans-run/ a few seconds ago from web [...]
Pragmatically speaking, all the primary claims require “standardized XML,” so if you use a different format to transmit the knowledge it looks like you’re good.
This smacks of real product, rather than pie-in-the-sky future ideas, so I think this one is primarily defensive.
What a game.
Jimmy
The army have already beat them to it.
It was then released as a game called “Full Spectrum Warrior”. It taught battle tactics and was developed for more or less the exact same reasons as IBM said.
To the David W:
Jobs was able to “create” Apple with no experience.
Maybe it’s the individual and not the experience that is the point.
However I suspect AI will “learn” to replace even intuition – with the internet and it’s almost infinite resources to draw from.
“Immersive” has 2 M’s. Spell check, Bob
Also…
@David W: I really liked that last paragraph: never thought about it in those terms. What a great analogy/argument
The Profession by Asimov, good catch.
I was thinking of movies like Strange Days, Brainstorm, and even THX 1138, where there is a scene in which children have knowledge pumped into them intravenously.
Logan’s Run only fits the topic in that the older workers will be shown the door once they have been tapped of their knowledge.
The Great B-school CEO’s of our time haven’t even comprehended that out-sourcing to the 3rd World doesn’t work. Sure, you can cut your labor costs to some fraction (say a third), but the quality of the work will be so poor, you spend all your “savings” remediating what the foreign workers did. Over time, you may develop some highly skilled 3rd world workers, but guess what? By that time, they’ll either cost as much as 1st Worlders, or, as Bob notes, they’ll rebel and become your competition. The stupidity of the modern executive never ceases to amaze me. They gave us Enron. They gave us the banking failure. They give us this current “knowledge sucking plan”. It’s like something out of “Starship Troopers” except we’d be “sucked” by 20-something slackers instead of giant insects.
Its a shame Big Blue does not spend more time actually innovating AI and pursue the goals of AGI, rather than devising underhanded business models to stifle competition.
Yet history repeats itself, and Rome always falls in the end, no matter how big the corps(e). If IBM cannot lead us into the future, then ditch ‘em. If I recall correctly, they didn’t even want to get their hands serious and dirty with the PC and its OS, and look what happened to that ball, and who went running with it !!
Lets encourage those wise old dudes, and hot shots away from IBM altogether, and back those new entrepreneurs. Free them all for the future of humanity!
The funny thing is, I thought the illustration at the top of the article was a relic of the 70s AI era. Seriously, if this is patentable under the current system, it’s really a poster child for patent reform. As has already been pointed out, these are not new ideas–even if somebody at IBM gussied it up with a flowchart labeling everything a ‘knowledge’ thingie.
I’ll give them their Game XML, though–LOL.
This note is in no way directed at my neighbors and peers in India and China. I sincerely hope their national economies will continue to grow and mature, and bring more prosperity to their societies.
Many years ago when I was graduating with an engineering degree, I was recruited to go to graduate school. I was surprised, pleased, and a bit flattered by the opportunity. But I sensed there was more to the story and I kept asking questions. The answer…
In the next academic school year there would be no USA citizens in the graduate engineering program at a major USA university. The school wanted some balance in its student body and was recruiting selected seniors.
Why was this an issue? It seems one day a few incoming graduates were visiting the university. The university took them out to lunch. On the way back from lunch went through a parking lot while someone was jumping the car. The incoming engineering graduate students with excellent academic accomplishments did not understand the process of jumping a car. They could not identify the major components in the engine compartment. Things like the battery, the alternator, …. (Remember, this is not a criticism.) They were gifted students, no doubt more academically gifted than I. However they had very little real world knowledge about the application of engineering. They did not grow up thinking designing a new car or plane. They did not design and build their own stereo or ham radio. They did not build a tree house. I did.
Understanding a technology does not mean you have mastered its use or application. You can not capture and bottle experience, judgment, intuition, or creativity. When you trivialize these skills you are setting yourself up for problems — buildings that collapse, industrial accidents (Bhopal), engines that fall off of planes, and so on. History is full of examples of engineering mistakes — the Kansas City Hyatt Regency. Do you want to be in the emergency room, in trouble, with your doctor unable to access your medical records, and someone in tech support is telling him/her to reboot their computer??? Was it really the doctors workstation or the hospital’s server?
In my senior year of engineering school one of the mandatory courses was an engineering ethics class. In it we studied countless engineering mistakes, disasters, their impact to society, and what the engineers should have done to prevent them. Technology must be used responsibly. In the absence of good judgment and responsibility, people or society get hurt.
If it truly is IBM’s goal to package and ship its support expertise off shore, then a time will come when IBM can not support the technology it develops and the products it sells.
Good story, John. There’s some value in having experience and context in which to interpret the rule book. But that’s already been said, good night.
-Rob, a programmer who could weld, solder, draft and do some construction in high school, even if I couldn’t afford a computer.
[...] I, Cringely » Blog Archive » Logan’s Run – IBM’s plan to use Jeff Weiner’s knowledge search vision to screw over experienced workers [...]
So this is a serious patent application? Not a joke?? Wow. See how the other half lives. Wouldn’t that time have been better spent coding something real?
’18-25 year-old trainees who find manuals “difficult to read and understand.”’
You could save characters by just saying “Americans” instead.
or indians/chinese where english isn’t the primary language.
Looks as though IBM outsourced the writing of the patent to India or China. I mean, look at the language! Even the diagram is labeled in funny English: “Ensure the Game to follow correct knowledge logics”. And “currently many companies are facing a big challenge of loosing talent”. It seems IBM extracted the expert knowledge of their once famous patent attorneys, and injected it into some offshore writers who were trained in English on a gaming system.
This is nothing to fear. In fact it’s laughable. Companies that rely on scripts, computerized or not, will simply be replaced by companies that innovate. IBM management is destroying it’s future in order to cut costs and show short-term profit. Bob is merely documenting the decline of a dinosaur.
I see this every day at Microsoft as well. Management acts like it’s running a starving startup. There is no innovation, there is only bean counting. Their days are numbered as well, only their monopoly position will draw the death rattle out a few decades.
Sounds like they are specifically not acting like a starving startup. The startup would be forced to realize that every seat in a chair isn’t just a filled seat, but an investment in the company.
Computer is one gadget that requires huge maintenance. If you think that once you purchase a PC, you can use it for ever, it does not happen that way. You will come across many glitches with the working of your computer. This is why you require computer support services
I’m doing some research on IBM for my blog and what innovations are possible in companies in the “mature” stage of the business life cycle. I became interested in IBM because of Rosabeth Moss Kanter’s latest book, SuperCorps, in which, I believe, she touts the innovative, people/customer centered practices at IBM.
When my son, who works in the tech industry, told me about this patent, I thought it was a joke. First of all, I thought there was going to be a shortage of younger workers and so older workers were needed in the work force. I guess I was wrong. But I don’t understand why an older, more experienced worker would just consent to having their knowldege “extracted”, when they know this is the step before being replaced. What does IBM have, some kind of wisdom-extractor that sucks knowledge directly from the brain.
And whose knowledge is it, anyway? Intellectual property is one thing, but the storehouse of wisdom, of recognizing connections, of understanding the complete scenario, does not belong to anyone except the person who holds it. So I say, older workers, tell them nothing they don’t already know, just the facts. That will confuse them.
Why is Moss Kanter so intrigued with them? Now I really do need to read her book.
There is a school in Manhattan with the same idea: teach the young ones with games:
http://www.popsci.com/scitech/article/2009-09/first-public-school-based-games-set-nyc-debut
De-skilling is _such_ a great idea – just look at what it did for the North American car business!
Time was, a senior tool & die maker could write off a million dollars worth of tooling – in the fifties, when a million was more than parking meter money. By the sixties, it took a committee of engineers to do the same thing. So progressively, everyone in manufacturing became a controlled-from-the-top robot. Once the top decided that was costing too much, they fastened on another great idea – automation (but typically, automation of an inefficient process, so the savings weren’t great). While the Big Three were on autopillot, staving off the inevitable with SUV’s and pickups, Asian competitors used a judicious mix of people and machines to build their cars better, within processes that were constantly being improved by people who were rewarded for improving those processes. Meanwhile the Big Three’s processes were potted in epoxy, inefficiencies and all.
And IBM wants to repeat this process for all of human life? “Think” has turned into “Thunk”.
The patent sounds like the result of a brainstorm session on how to deal with the problem of the baby boomers and retirement – a problem IBM is certainly interested in solving – for a fee. But certainly one could take a more cynical view of it. I am reminded of a Doonesbury cartoon where one of the characters outsources his own job (and is given a promotion for the improved quality of his work!).
We also thought we’d be driving flying cars and colonizing Mars by now. Obviously our vision from the 70s still lags behind reality.
An expert mechanic can listen to the sound of a car and tell what might be wrong. I think we’re still a long way off from capturing that knowledge and experience directly from his brain. Just ask the “experts” in brain science. Hah!
This kind of diagram reminds me of most IT management strategic brainstorming sessions. A product of both by-the-manual MBA schooling and false belief that flow charts can solve real problems. Just because you’ve learned how to block out some schematic in PowerPoint does not translate into real working solution. This is the typical illusion software and IT projects give you (if we named it so and repeat it often enough it must be true-ism). Most often it gloss over a most critical but unstated initial assumption that is wrong to begin with. Same here.
The authors of the patent appear to assume that the experts will willingly disgorge their expertise in a usable form. The expert senior is probably world wise as well and will see that she/he is disposable once the expertise is assimilated.
The wily expert will simply provide misinformation to the system (how will it know?) and continue to enjoy the fruits of employment until ready to depart to become a consultant – and charge a hefty fee for the same expertise.
Cunning and Guile beats Youth and Enthusiasm every time.
Cynic. I think the mediocre will hold back but the really good people will be grateful for the many years of relavent-to-the-company experience and be glad to pass it on. When the time comes to cut the budget the hold-backers will be the first to go since their supervisors will be on to them.
Remember who you answer to, yourself and your family. The “company” to the stockholders and is dedicated to delivering value to their stock holders. You are merely a means to that end. If you have something of value to offer them that they want, then they pay you for it. That’s what your salary is.
If the “company” wants to pay me a lot of money to disgorge my expertise into their system (experetise obtained by more than my employment tenure with them, I might add), then they ought to pay a premium for it or get what will be usless to them if they do not.
Replace “trainee” with “student” and “expert” with “teacher” and (as Cornhoolio alluded to) could they just be claiming ownership of IP with the hope of licensing anyone applying AI to schools of the future?
IBM does not value highly skilled and experienced professionals – all that matters is minimizing cost. IBM has shed 140,000 US jobs in 7 years, while moving those jobs to low-cost countries, with low-cost and low skilled labor. Many of those global resources aren’t even employees – they’re contractors and temporaries. The cuts aren’t limited to the US – all high cost countries are effected by resource cuts.
IBM has been trying for years to capture that knowledge of the skilled and experienced in a variety of ways, but has failed miserably and will continue to fail. Oh they try the 6 month “knowledge transfer” schemes which fail, but the pass the job on to the global resource and dump the US professionals regardless of whether the global resource can do the job. As long as the cost savings of the unskilled global resources are greater than the penalties for missing customer contract specifications, IBM executives are pleased.
The big failure with knowledge transfer is that you cannot “knowledge transfer” professionalism. Professionalism is a mindset, a way of life, a committment to get the job done regardless, of strong ownership , dedication and drive, and of maturity – none of which can be “knowledge transferred”, all of which come from within and are earned. Very few of the IBM global resources in the six different countries I work with regularly have that “professionalism”.
This is why “knowledge transfer” alone is woefully inadequate. IBM already has problems where there aren’t sufficient professionals available to coach, watch over and cleanup after the failures of the poorly trained global resources. It also is a harbinger of the future failures that will be legion when once IBM ruthlessly cuts all the experienced professionals in the US.
Imagine what happens then when due to IBM’s workforce’s lack of skills, experience and discipline, IBM customers have chronic unacceptable experiences due to poor quality products that don’t work, delivery of poor quality and unreliable services, or failure to meet service level objectives and contractual agreements.
Without a fundamental change in the current “offshore everything to low cost countries regardless of whether they can do the work” strategy, I think IBM will to ultimately go bankrupt – maybe as quickly as 5 years. from now.
Needs shock electrodes!
Part of experience is knowing how painfully wrong things can go (for days, weeks or months on end). It is that knowledge that gives me the energy to demand that our project people do all the necessary work to ensure we understand the problem and do the painstaking analysis to ensure the solution will work. If you are too lazy to RTFM, why would you put out enough energy to understand the problem or ensure it really gets solved?
As an IBM employee we see this anyone-can-do-anyhing attitude towards everything. Recently I was made believe I could be a software design analyst when I had no experience at all in the software development industry. Only to find myself frustrated that to do a good job I have to have a lot more knowledge and experience then I currently have. That bothers me (that I’m possibly not doing a good job) but it doesnt seem to bother my management at all.. and the client is not complaining too. And that leaves the question, if IBM is coming up with all these insane/dumb solutions… that’s because someone is buying and is happy with crappy work, right?
IBM was once a nice place to work but now I’m looking for a way out ASAP.