The Numerati
August 30th, 2008After staring down the bottomless abyss of formal schooling, this is what the best and brightest can expect when working for IBM: Full time, automated surveillance by a Magic 8 Ball system that will match “commoditized” workers to tasks and monitor their progress on a minute by minute basis.
Via: Business Week:
By building mathematical models of its own employees, IBM aims to improve productivity and automate management…
Haren says the efforts under way at places like IBM will not only break down each worker into sets of skills and knowledge. The same systems will also divide their days and weeks into small periods of time—hours, half-hours, eventually even minutes. At the same time, the jobs that have to be done, whether it’s building a software program or designing an airliner, are also broken down into tiny steps. In this sense, Haren might as well be describing the industrial engineering that led to assembly lines a century ago. Big jobs are parsed into thousands of tasks and divided among many workers. But the work Haren is discussing is not done by hand, hydraulic presses, or even robots. It flows from the brain. The labor is defined by knowledge and ideas. As he sees it, that expertise will be tapped minute by minute across the world. This job sharing is already starting to happen, as companies break up projects and move big pieces of them offshore. But once the workers are represented as mathematical models, it will be far easier to break down their days into billable minutes and send their smarts to fulfill jobs all over the world.
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It’s getting late in Takriti’s office. I can see that he’s concerned about my line of questioning. This virtual assembly line sounds menacing. The surveillance has more than a whiff of Big Brother. For those of us who aren’t $1,000-per-hour consultants, life bound to a mathematical model is sounding like abject data serfdom.
