Monday, October 22, 2012

The future, retirement

Cut from the web --- not intended as humor 

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.

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.

And don’t forget: IBM perfected the step-by-step manual (repair, maintenance, and training), railroad tracks and all.

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.

But I am an expert with experience. Every thing I learned came from books, then I tried to use that and then I started to learn what was really being done. Mind you, that was dirt and people acting like construction workers, doing what they had previously done with a twist. 

But is all that information worth anything? or is it all just smoke that will blow away? Does anyone care? Does anyone want the information? I doubt it. 

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