Comment by TeMPOraL
12 days ago
> typing machines vs word
That actually had substantial negative consequences that still go mostly unrecognized. MS Word was an improvement over typewriters - such a big improvement, in fact, that it allowed people to do things they previously wouldn't, including things they'd pay other people to do. This is actually a bigger deal than it sounds.
In short, office productivity tools allowed people to do things they'd otherwise delegate to others. You could write memos and reports yourself, instead of asking your secretary. You could manage your calendar and tasks yourself, instead of having someone else do it for you. You could design your own presentations quickly, instead of asking graphics department for help. And so on, and so on.
What happened then, all those specialized departments got downsized; you now have to write your own memos and manage your own calendar, because there are no secretaries around to do it for you. Same for graphics, same for communication, same for expense reporting, etc. Specialized roles disappeared, and along with them the salaries they commanded - but the work they did did not go away. Instead, it got spread out and distributed among everyone else, in tiny pieces - tiny enough, to not be visible in the books; also tiny enough to not benefit from specialization of labor.
Now apply this pattern to all other categories of software, especially anything that lets you do yourself the things you'd pay others to do before.
And then people are surprised why actual productivity gains didn't follow expectations at scale, despite all the computerization. That's because a chunk of expectations are just an accounting trick. Money saved on salaries gets counted; costs of the same work being less efficient and added to everyone else's workload (including non-linear effect of reducing focus) are not counted.
> but the work they did did not go away
I'm forming an opinion that this exact problem is actually THE problem that people keep ignoring because it is compensated for by the burnout of people who care.
We talk a lot about enshitiffication. But we also build tools that do the work of a human specialist at (say) 85% of the quality of a human specialist (much faster and much more cheaply, that is the point).
These tools operate with or without time and effort from another non-specialist person. In the case that another human needs to do SOME work they didn't have to previously, this is effectively the definition of overwork in the presence of the same expectations.
This other person must now be the executor of whatever that work is because hiring a specialist in that area does not make financial sense.
And so gradually we erode the quality of all the intersectional work 15% (for example) at a time, while adding a small amount of work to the remaining (fewer) people.
Now maybe we can build a tool that is 99.9% the quality of a human for negligible cost. But it still doesn't take very many multiplications of 99.9% with itself to end up with shit.
Yes, and I feel stupid every time I have to do a task I am not specialised in, purely because I have to educate myself all over again from the basics to get the job done. Like fixing a leaking tap. I know theoretically where the issue might lie, but by God it takes an eternity to fix because I don't have the right tools lying around and the dexterity required hasn't been built to do it correctly.