An economy of automated engineering and automated operation presents a new burst requirement on human labor. We need a labor model that can rapidly dedicate people to solve emergency problems caused by automation and yet that automation is essential for continued operation of the economy or for avoiding some future disaster.
Dedomenology has a saturation aspect, requiring very long periods of work stretching over many days regardless of the concepts of standard working hours such as a 40 hour workweek. When something needs to be tackled, it will employ the dedomenologist continuously until there is some level of completion. There will be an endless stream of assignments that someone will need to dive into the depths of the data ocean and staying there for a long time until the assignment is over.
IQ data is similar to bright ultraviolet light: it can provide very good illumination (with compatible sensors) but it must be used with abundant caution. Fine-resolution IQ discrimination must result in major implications for the culture, if that discrimination is occurring. I believe it is occurring with the emerging social specialization of an emerging human hive.
In doing so, I’m satisfying my fatherly instincts by contributing to the human hive rather than to my biological offspring. Even if I had children, it is almost certain they would not have benefited as much as the unrelated people who happened to be in the right position for me to influence.
The unfulfilled task also represents a cost to the capable but not qualified worker. In an employment scenario, such a worker will have the opportunity to prove his otherwise unexpected capabilities. Through the opportunity of participating in the crisis task, the employee may discover an unexpected capability. Successful completion of the task will result in recognition of this capability both by the employer and within the larger market place.
High income is great if the fruits of that income can compensate for the required repression of the parts of a personality that don’t match the brand. On this blog, I also make theories to explain declining workforce participation. With the above discussion of how automation and technology is pushing celebrity status down to ever lower positions, a justification for avoiding work may be to avoid becoming a celebrity. Becoming a celebrity means repressing most of a person’s real self to fit in the brand of the celebrity. It is one thing to demand a coffee-house chain to remain true to a brand image of nothing-but-good-coffee. It is another to expect that kind or restraint from a talented human being.
Unlike established businesses, labor costs for start-ups is much larger portion of their expenses. With current minimum wage laws, the labor costs are prohibitively expensive for most start-up opportunities requiring a team of people. A suspension of the minimum wage law would allow us to collect real data about this potential for new job creation within the country based on opportunities available in this modern age of modern technologies and infrastructure.
Instead of assigning teams of excellence certain sprints to build minimally viable products, we could be employing individuals to freely explore the issue with independent determination. This determination and independence is characteristic of following the muses where the muses will lead a path into areas of incompetence or uncertain capabilities. The muses will lead to discoveries that we can not anticipate. It is those discoveries that offer the promise to solve the big problems we face not only within government but also in business. These discoveries are the antithesis of the minimally viable product that can be selected in advance. Pursuit of discovery (or following the muses) means we can’t anticipate the results. The results may involve new skills we did not bring to the project. The results may involve something incompatible with any existing team of excellence.
The advice of following a passion may translate to the idea of following a muse. Mike Rowe has a point in that this may be bad advice. We judge the advice to be bad advice when it doesn’t lead to success in life. As illustrated in the example of playing multi-player computer games, the advice to follow that kind of muse will not result in financial or career success. Some people may not see financial or career success as something that will give them happiness. If Aristotle is correct in defining ultimate good as happiness, career or financial success may get in the way. True happiness may be in the pursuit of the muses in obscure poverty. For those who measure happiness that way, then following the muses may be exactly the right advice. The right advice is to pursue happiness by following the muses even if that requires dropping out of the labor market.
My little germ of a thought for today is an parallel I see with declining workforce participation and our ancestor’s experience of no longer needing draught animal as a consequence of the industrial revolution and in particular the use of fossil fueled mechanical engines. The image that occurred to me is that we are in…
Hypothesis Discovery 