When Machine Goes from Servant to Master
More than ever, to work in the modern world is to be on call at all hours. The computing devices that were supposed to free us up increasingly chain us to their rhythms.
“Instead of our offloading time-intensive tasks to our machines, we attempt to match the speed of our network connections,” Douglas Rushkoff wrote this week in The Wall Street Journal, in an article adapted from his new book, Present Shock. “Instead of teaching our technologies to conform to our own innate rhythms, we strive to become more compatible with our machines’ timeless nature.”
None of this—what Rushkoff calls the “digital trap”—is helping us to be better people or professionals. “By letting technology lead the pace, we don’t increase genuine choice or human competence at all,” Rushkoff warned, citing the example of bloggers who “disconnect themselves from the beats they may be covering by working through the screen and keyboard, covering the online versions of their subjects.” What we must try to do now, he said, is defy this trend and use traditional technology to “bring us back into sync.”
That technology can turn from servant into master has been learned the hard way through human history. Peter Drucker often wrote about the importance of remembering that humans are not machines—a reality often disregarded by the traditional assembly line. “It did not use the strengths of the human being but, instead, subordinated human strengths to the requirements of the machine,” Drucker asserted in Managing in Turbulent Times.
Photo credit: JaxGraphix
Unfortunately, Drucker saw in computers the emergence of a similar sort of tyranny. “It is fashionable today to measure the utilization of a computer by the number of hours it runs during the day,” Drucker observed in an essay written in 1969 and collected in Technology, Management and Society. But the real test of whether computers were proving helpful was, in Drucker’s eyes, their ability to free up professionals for “direct, personal, face-to-face relationships” with other people.
“By this test, of course, almost no computer today is being used properly,” he wrote. “Most of them are being misused, that is, are being used to justify spending even more time on control rather than to relieve human beings from controlling by giving them information.”
Rushkoff’s example of the desk-bound blogger could apply equally well to the manager. “To know something, to really understand something important, one must look at it from 16 different angles,” Drucker wrote. But that takes time that many managers have little of—and have even less of it they’re computer-bound.
In Drucker’s view, rather than let a computer further rob the manager of time, a manager should use the computer to make time. “Then he can use the rest of his time to think about the important things he cannot really know—people and environment,” Drucker counseled. “These are things he cannot define; he has to take the time to go and look.”
What do you think? How can we gain control of our machines rather than having them control us?
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8 Comments
Richard Straub
March 16, 2013We all know that we feel an increasing dependency on electronic communication tools – just think about your e-mail or your mobile phone out of operation during 48 hours. Maybe we are over-connected as Bill Davidow describes it in his book on this subject. However, the genie is out of the bottle – not way to get it back. Obviously our digital culture is in its early stage – it is just happening driven by fast changing technology. Market forces and innovation will tell us what we can delegate to machines. However, ultimately it will be a question of how we set the priorities for our lives. Instead of being blind followers we should be conscious leaders of this revolution. We have the means of building a groundswell – exactly via these electronic tools – provided that others feel the same sense of urgency as Douglas Roushkoff does.
jean sanders
March 16, 2013I am concerned that there is another strong “bubble” of computers going through the schools in particular. I experienced the growth of computers from 1968 — my first desk model was a CRT screen and a teletype keyboard — and I could see a lot of value in what I was doing for my work. Things that were hard for me in statistics became easier as i could see the computer models working things out. The computer bubble bothered me on a personal front with my work and as a debacle of stock market deals like the savings and loan banking industry (in Texas in particular). In my literature and drama courses we had talked about Deus ex Machina and that is the way I look at the computer bubbles… and we
seem to be experiencing another one. You don’t need to know of my work experience other than the uplifting of the machine over human beings , and the promise of computers as wonder drugs that can do anything (reminds me of snake oil) really bothers me as I see it
escalating again. The oversell creates a backlash; overpromising and then “ripping off” from clients/consumers when it is in the public domain (tax payer dollars) turns me into a person who appears to be opposed to computers even when I am not. I can give you the example because it is in the Boston Globe.
Jed Harris
March 16, 2013This is a strangely superficial treatment of an important issue. The pressure to maximize use of computers over 24 hours in 1969 was due to their high cost — the same tends to be true of any other high cost resource. Now with much cheaper more powerful computers in our pockets we use them at our convenience, not theirs.
Regarding time, space and control: In fact computers, plus digital communications (email, texting, twitter, etc.) give us the *option* of much less tightly managed lives — we can reply to others when and where we wish, and arrange to meet (or not) on the spur of the moment rather than scheduling far in advance. We are not tethered to offices or desks.
More generally, what does it mean that “technology can turn from servant into master”? Did the machines that moved the assembly line set the rules? I don’t think so. The masters in that situation were the masters before and after — the managers who ran the enterprise. They chose to run it in certain ways. Why? Perhaps they were seduced by technology, perhaps it served their desire for a certain sort of control, perhaps it was economically rational, or many other possibilities. The superficial discussion here will never illuminate that question.
To understand the implications of technical change we need to understand the ways it interacts with social power, human desires, perceived benefits and costs, and so forth. Writing as though the technology was the agent itself is closing our eyes to the real issues.
Michael Felberbaum
March 25, 2013Jed, Thanks for adding some depth to the discussion. The issue always has a human source I think because all of this technology was developed for human ends. It seems disingenous to surrender agency at a point in which technology is simply more robust and complex.
George L. Williams
March 16, 2013When Peter first made us aware of this phenomenon in class in the mid-80′s, we were struck with the question: what happens to people, when the machines do all the work?
Peter’s answer then was his description of the “knowledge worker” who both possessed necessary knowledge and “owned” that possession.
We now know the “knowledge worker” owned nothing! He has become a “piece-worker” like the itinerant farm workers decades ago. His money has been stolen from his 401K funds by the same “money boys” who have become his task-master on the job!
This scource has spread to infect every possible type of human relationship and turn humans into some “lesser form” than we once were accustomed to expect.
David Waldman
March 17, 2013I agree wholeheartedly with the theme of this article. Here are some questions to consider:
1. What does it mean that a person cannot go for a simple walk or hike in nature without having his smart phone along? Otherwise, s/he would simply feel “naked” or that a part of him/her was missing?
2. Why do we see people literally clutching their smart phones as if those phones were metaphorically like electronic security blankets?
3. How is it that people think they can begin and even end a significant relationship (e.g., even marriage) on social media like Facebook without ever having met the person with whom they are supposedly having the relationship? What would the term “relationship” even mean for such people?
4. Can we be expected to truly “be here now”, as the writer Ram Dass once wrote when our technology forces us to be somewhere else?
We can only be the masters of technology when we come face-to-face with the reality that that technology is creating in people and their relationships.
What Peter Drucker Would Be Reading | The Drucker Exchange | Daily Blog by The Drucker Institute
March 19, 2013[...] we looked at the ways in which computers and technology have changed the rhythms of our lives and asked whether we could control our machines rather than having them control us. Reader Jed Harris objected to the premise and had the following to [...]
Michael Felberbaum
March 25, 2013Why blame computers? Why blame machines?
Isn’t that giving devices too much power?
Nothing makes me take my phone out and glance at my email. Nothing makes me feel like a piece of me is missing because I don’t have my phone. I choose to take my phone and to check in because I prefer to be “in the loop” and to “know what’s going on.” I can easily turn it off and do something else.
Just because the phone vibrates (because I set it to do that) does not mean I have to answer it. I am free to choose how I will relate to any particular device, am I not?
I wonder: what is the cost to human dignity and power of faulting technology for a sense of anxiety and overwhelm?
I’m not claiming that there is no impact from the Internet and digital devices of all kinds. I just don’t see it as an obstacle to silence or mindfulness or calm or anything else. The proclivity is there, it seems, in every person to check the device all the time, to go to it out of boredom, etc.–that’s not the fault of the technology; it’s the choice of the user.