Experts in the automobile industry, at least those who are candid and honest, are quite clear about this. The automobile of today, despite all its high-tech trappings, is a nineteenth century device dressed up to look modern. Since the technology is decrepit and inherently inefficient, the cost of a car keeps going up every year while almost everything else that is manufactured is getting better and cheaper every year.
Wait a minute.... cheaper, perhaps...but better?
In the case of information technology, despite tomes being written and countless seminars and workshops, usability and user-friendliness remain huge barriers, yet to be scaled.
Imagine if you had a new rental car to drive every morning, with strange locations of all controls.. the gear shift, light switches, the wipers, the radio, the heater, the defroster, the mirror adjustments, and so on.
Well, turning on your PC every morning is a bit like renting a new car every morning. In the night before, those tech trolls in Redmond, or Santa Clara, or Bangalore, or Taipei, or Tel Aviv, or some similar place have strived to make things "better" for you. Your screen opens up to new downloads, patches, "improved" interfaces, "easier" navigation buttons, "friendlier" sound prompts, "exhilirating" animations and video clips, and so on.
But, despite all the strangeness, your strange new rental car starts up in a few seconds when you turn the key.
Try getting your computer to do that. No, we won't even talk about "flick-the-switch-and-the-light-turns-on" responsiveness from your mobile phone or your PC. Just give us our daily spam-free email bread, and a glass of water, and we will be happy.
So, why is IT not user friendly and is often usuriously fiendish? All the dollars you "save" in buying the IT gadgets with their plummeting prices... well, many times more "shadow dollars" are spent in terms of the hours and hours you have to spend dealing with such IT. The Moorish Law of fiendish IT user experiences easily clubs into submission the rightly famous Moore's Law of falling costs and prices of IT devices.
Yes, okay... but why is this the case?
The answers lie, of course, in the nature of information technology and the nature of the industrial-competitive culture that supports the development of such technology.
In the techno-industrial-competitive culture surrounding information technology, rewards go to those who innovate in the next, emergent arena rather than to those who fix yesterday's and today's problems.
This is of course in sharp contrast to the dinosaur auto industry where any make and model that does not start promptly when the key is turned, or whose brakes may or may not work depending on the "mood" of the vehicle, would be driven right off the planet. Attempts at adding the extra cup holder, the surround sound audio system, and the sexy spoiler are rewarded only after the ignition and the brakes work.
But even in the high-tech world, some industries (are forced to) behave differently. Imagine a pharmaceutcal company that launches a very unreliable drug for hypertension and then moves all its research energies into the next big thing: a highly uncertain way of controlling the spread of cancer. The FDA, the professional medical community, and the vigilant consumers provide enough checks and balances that such things do not happen -- for the most part.
Until there are such countervailing checks and balances, and until the reward mechanisms of the techno-industrial-competitive culture of IT change dramatically, we are doomed to crashing computers and signal-dropping mobile phones.
Kinda makes you nostalgic for the Model T (or at least the orginal Beetle Bug), doesn't it?
Nik Dholakia
Friday, September 12, 2003
Wednesday, September 03, 2003
The New PINs: Dvision of Informational Labor
Extolling the virtues of division of labor in 1776, Adam Smith wrote about the great efficiencies that had been brought about to the process of making metallic pins, through the simple process of division of manufacturing operations:
"___ the way in which this [pin-making] business is now carried on ___ it is divided into a number of branches, of which the greater part are likewise peculiar trades. One man draws out the wire, another straightens it, a third cuts it, a fourth points it, a fifth grinds it at the top for receiving the head: to make the head requires two or three distinct operations to put it on, is a peculiar business, to whiten the pins another; it is even a trade by itself to put them into paper; and the important business of making a pin is, in this manner, divided into about eighteen distinct operations, which, in some manufactories, are all performed by distinct hands___ I have seen a small manufactory of this kind where ten men only were employed___. Those ten persons___could make among them upward of forty-eight thousand pins in a day. But if they had all wrought separately and independently, and without any of them having been educated to this peculiar business, they certainly could not each of them have made twenty, perhaps not one pin in a day; that is, certainly not the two hundred and fortieth, perhaps not the four thousand eight hundredth part of what they are at present capable of performing, in consequence of proper division and combination of their different operations. "
Well, the new pins are, inter alia, services rife with PINs (Personal Identification Numbers). One after the other, businesses in economically advanced countries, especially in USA, are looking at their business processes and wondering how to slice up the processes and how to outsource the more labor-intensive parts to those countries where such work can be done cheaply and efficiently. As Adam Smith pointed out over two centuries ago, it is not the overall skill and education of the worker that matters. The great efficiencies result from specialization in narrow tasks, and rapid improvements in these narrow task-skills over time.
So, you have college graduates in India poring over the details of USA's Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) and training their ears to the multiethnic accents of American physicians. Why? So that they can listen to voice dictation files sent via the Internet by USA -based physicians and hospitals, transcribe these into text, and email back the transcriptions at one-tenth the cost of getting the same job done in the United States.
Sounds like 1776 all over again...
There are of course differences. Once the division of labor goes global, whether in manufacturing or informational labor, it sets into motion political forces that decry the loss of jobs, and economic forces that want to lower costs at any cost. Moreover, especially now, there are the voices of caution from the security apparatuses that worry about the vulnerabilities that arise from shipping intricate software and information-intensive tasks overseas.
So the Americans IT firms work furiously to automate processes so that some of the new "PIN work" can be kept home, partly as a mild political sop to the rabble-rousing pro-proletarian populist politicians, but mostly as a strong way of ingratiating their firms with the military-informational complex.
And the Indians work furiously to lower costs even further while upgrading their IT worker skills even more. After all, India is not the only outsourcing destination -- the Philippines, Thailand, Vietnam, South Africa, and Ghana are nipping at India's heels. And there is always China. That great global manufactory is in a massive phase of adding on a great global software-service industry. Yes, the world would eventually start taking MSL (Mandarin as Second Language) classes. But that is still decades away. Way before that happens, China is going to saturate perhaps a modest 10 percent of its population with ESL (English as Second Language) training, creating an over-100 million-strong IT workforce ready to take on any comers.
So, dear friends from rich nations, as well as my fellow ethnic Indians, have you practiced your Mandarin today?
At least get started with your new username and password in Chinese -- it is going to be your new PIN.
Nik Dholakia
"___ the way in which this [pin-making] business is now carried on ___ it is divided into a number of branches, of which the greater part are likewise peculiar trades. One man draws out the wire, another straightens it, a third cuts it, a fourth points it, a fifth grinds it at the top for receiving the head: to make the head requires two or three distinct operations to put it on, is a peculiar business, to whiten the pins another; it is even a trade by itself to put them into paper; and the important business of making a pin is, in this manner, divided into about eighteen distinct operations, which, in some manufactories, are all performed by distinct hands___ I have seen a small manufactory of this kind where ten men only were employed___. Those ten persons___could make among them upward of forty-eight thousand pins in a day. But if they had all wrought separately and independently, and without any of them having been educated to this peculiar business, they certainly could not each of them have made twenty, perhaps not one pin in a day; that is, certainly not the two hundred and fortieth, perhaps not the four thousand eight hundredth part of what they are at present capable of performing, in consequence of proper division and combination of their different operations. "
Well, the new pins are, inter alia, services rife with PINs (Personal Identification Numbers). One after the other, businesses in economically advanced countries, especially in USA, are looking at their business processes and wondering how to slice up the processes and how to outsource the more labor-intensive parts to those countries where such work can be done cheaply and efficiently. As Adam Smith pointed out over two centuries ago, it is not the overall skill and education of the worker that matters. The great efficiencies result from specialization in narrow tasks, and rapid improvements in these narrow task-skills over time.
So, you have college graduates in India poring over the details of USA's Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) and training their ears to the multiethnic accents of American physicians. Why? So that they can listen to voice dictation files sent via the Internet by USA -based physicians and hospitals, transcribe these into text, and email back the transcriptions at one-tenth the cost of getting the same job done in the United States.
Sounds like 1776 all over again...
There are of course differences. Once the division of labor goes global, whether in manufacturing or informational labor, it sets into motion political forces that decry the loss of jobs, and economic forces that want to lower costs at any cost. Moreover, especially now, there are the voices of caution from the security apparatuses that worry about the vulnerabilities that arise from shipping intricate software and information-intensive tasks overseas.
So the Americans IT firms work furiously to automate processes so that some of the new "PIN work" can be kept home, partly as a mild political sop to the rabble-rousing pro-proletarian populist politicians, but mostly as a strong way of ingratiating their firms with the military-informational complex.
And the Indians work furiously to lower costs even further while upgrading their IT worker skills even more. After all, India is not the only outsourcing destination -- the Philippines, Thailand, Vietnam, South Africa, and Ghana are nipping at India's heels. And there is always China. That great global manufactory is in a massive phase of adding on a great global software-service industry. Yes, the world would eventually start taking MSL (Mandarin as Second Language) classes. But that is still decades away. Way before that happens, China is going to saturate perhaps a modest 10 percent of its population with ESL (English as Second Language) training, creating an over-100 million-strong IT workforce ready to take on any comers.
So, dear friends from rich nations, as well as my fellow ethnic Indians, have you practiced your Mandarin today?
At least get started with your new username and password in Chinese -- it is going to be your new PIN.
Nik Dholakia
Tuesday, September 02, 2003
Techlemma
The enormous power of information technology, especially the instantaneity and efficiency of getting tasks done, paradoxically creates its own dilemmas. When such technology fails, or is incomplete; or is corrupted, compromised, snatched away, or attacked, we are left helpless. This is a new, near-nihilistic level of helplessness. It is paralyzing to the extreme, and frustrating to the core.
Such paralyzing dependence on technology is new. Yes, such dependence has characterized all technologies that become popularly entrenched. But nothing, not even the automobile, has embedded so deeply and pervasively in the lifespaces of the information working class as contemporary IT has. Even electrical outages, such as the Great North American Blackout of 2003, are less paralyzing because atavistic memories of how to subsist without electricity can be summoned up. In fact, all you have to do is hark back to that camping or fishing trip in the wilderness. But with the IT-drenched lifeworld, there is nothing to hark back to. Carrier pigeons and horsedrawn stagecoaches are not pre-IT formats, in ways that a camping trip is a pre-electricity format.
IT transforms and redefines lifeworlds.
This irreversible escalation of vulnerability that IT brings about.... in the retro perspective of looking back from the next millennium, that would perhaps be the hot topic of salon discussions...
Nik Dholakia
Such paralyzing dependence on technology is new. Yes, such dependence has characterized all technologies that become popularly entrenched. But nothing, not even the automobile, has embedded so deeply and pervasively in the lifespaces of the information working class as contemporary IT has. Even electrical outages, such as the Great North American Blackout of 2003, are less paralyzing because atavistic memories of how to subsist without electricity can be summoned up. In fact, all you have to do is hark back to that camping or fishing trip in the wilderness. But with the IT-drenched lifeworld, there is nothing to hark back to. Carrier pigeons and horsedrawn stagecoaches are not pre-IT formats, in ways that a camping trip is a pre-electricity format.
IT transforms and redefines lifeworlds.
This irreversible escalation of vulnerability that IT brings about.... in the retro perspective of looking back from the next millennium, that would perhaps be the hot topic of salon discussions...
Nik Dholakia
Thursday, August 28, 2003
The End is Always a Beginning...
THE END IS ALWAYS A BEGINNING...
It has all ended.
The Millennium. The Soviet Empire. History. Postmodern Excesses. The Bottomless Cup of Coffee for a Quarter...
And yet, in the interstices of those technology-laced lifespaces and culturescapes... in those sloshing, moss-laden, brine filled cracks and crevices -- alternately saturated and drained by the ebb and flow of finanzkapital and political expediency -- resilient new beginnings are taking shape.
In the Tekzume blog, I will strive to present my interpretations and guidemaps of these spacetimes. Once the tone and character of the blog have identifiable shapes, then other selective members will be invited to join the Tekzume blog.
The commentaries, critiques, and connections in this blog stem from observations, personal experiences, research, introspections, and -- very importantly -- the flashes of insight and patches of enlightenment that emerge from friendships and intellectual discourses.
Visit often, and be a part of the beginnings..... the start of things beautiful, just, and peaceful.
The end is near... of forces that stifle new beginnings.
Nik Dholakia
It has all ended.
The Millennium. The Soviet Empire. History. Postmodern Excesses. The Bottomless Cup of Coffee for a Quarter...
And yet, in the interstices of those technology-laced lifespaces and culturescapes... in those sloshing, moss-laden, brine filled cracks and crevices -- alternately saturated and drained by the ebb and flow of finanzkapital and political expediency -- resilient new beginnings are taking shape.
In the Tekzume blog, I will strive to present my interpretations and guidemaps of these spacetimes. Once the tone and character of the blog have identifiable shapes, then other selective members will be invited to join the Tekzume blog.
The commentaries, critiques, and connections in this blog stem from observations, personal experiences, research, introspections, and -- very importantly -- the flashes of insight and patches of enlightenment that emerge from friendships and intellectual discourses.
Visit often, and be a part of the beginnings..... the start of things beautiful, just, and peaceful.
The end is near... of forces that stifle new beginnings.
Nik Dholakia
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