10 ms·

Tech’s Two Philosophies

242 points by techrede 8y ago

arthurjj 8y ago
Interesting that the author didn't mention Intelligence Augmentation/amplification[1] in the article. IA is often contrasted to AI that it makes humans more able to do their job. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligence_amplification https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligence_amplification
- goatlover 8y ago
  It's interesting how AI gets so much hype and the potential dangers and benefits are discussed so much. But the reality of tech so far has been IA. We make tools to enhance our abilities, not tools that exist for their own purposes.
  - ozim 8y ago
    IA is not sexy, you cannot get huge funding for improving existing workers. That is what computers should do anyway (and not succeded bc peple visit FB, hackernews at work) . But AI promises you don't need employees and that is something owners would invest. Reality doesn't matter, they want full automation promise, what they get is another topic.
    - mirimir 8y ago
      > But AI promises you don't need employees and that is something owners would invest. Also no owners. Or at least, no management.
      - TeMPOraL 8y ago
        > Also no owners. Or at least, no management. Managers are just another employees from the POV of the owners. What the owners hope for is AI eliminating workers, and strong IP laws ensuring they still get to be the owners and rake in all the profits.
- empath75 8y ago
  I think that’s the Apple/Microsoft philosophy.
  - arthurjj 8y ago
    Agreed. I more meant I was surprised that the term intelligent augmentation wasn't used explicitly.
  - TeMPOraL 8y ago
    I don't think so. IMO, Apple and Microsoft are just less aggressive in taking all the agency away from their users. They do that too, but they don't put as much focus on it as Google does.
allthenews 8y ago
>Zuckerberg, as so often seems to be the case with Facebook, comes across as a somewhat more fervent and definitely more creepy version of Google At this point I think the difference between what FB and Google are doing is superficial marketing. The abuse potential of their technologies grows with every new peephole that they drill into your life. While people become increasingly dependent on said technology for a growing proportion of life's activities, FB and google have repeatedly demonstrated that they do not have our best interests in mind, and serve primarily to exploit overreaches in privacy and trust. Not to be melodramatic, but it's like some weird kind of slavery.
dfgdghdf 8y ago
Those who have watched Halt and Catch Fire might be reminded of the competition between Rover & Comet, which are two companies with different philosophies in a similar space.
dredmorbius 8y ago
An interesting and thoughtful exploration. I'd like to add Jack M. Balkin an Jonathan Zittrain's notion of information fiduciary to the pot: https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2016/10/information-fiduciary/502346/ https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2016/10/infor... Also very interested in Hans Jonas and his work. Any recommended readings?
jpfed 8y ago
This appears to be saying that some companies want to be your framework (and so own the problem); other companies just want to be your library.
- real-hacker 8y ago
  Nice analogy. We want tech to help us only when we need them, not to tell us how to live our lives.
bambax 8y ago
> In Google’s view, computers help you get things done — and save you time — by doing things for you. Duplex was the most impressive example — a computer talking on the phone for you But who is "you"? Obviously, "Duplex" talks on the phone on behalf of people needing an appointment, ie, not everyone. And specifically, not the people tasked with answering the phone, who are duped into thinking they're having a human interaction when in fact they're talking to a machine. It's even worse than that. We're used to telling machines to do things for us. But the people answering Duplex calls are being told what to do, by a machine. When GPS became popular I had a friend who absolutely refused to get one because, she said, she "wouldn't take instructions from a machine". At the time, I thought that was the silliest thing ever. Now I completely get her point.
- TeMPOraL 8y ago
  It is a silly example, because GPS (or rather, GPS-based nav systems) really, 99% of the time, is better than you at navigating. Also, the technology itself is pretty much purely informative - a map with a path displayed. Voice instructions are optional and something implicitly understood as friendly directions, not orders. I think most examples of machines telling people what to do still happen in context of paid work, and even there, quite often there's a good reason for that. Personally, my worry with Duplex is all the abuse - er, growth hacking - that will happen.
  - Ngunyan 8y ago
    99% of the time? Where did you get that? GPS is better than human only wherever it has better data. Bring it to a place where it has no data and its useless. Meanwhile, humans can easily adopt to find themselves in places they've never been before.
  - aserafini 8y ago
    There are good, honest use-cases for this technology though: for example a food ordering platform that needs to gather holiday openings hours for hundreds of thousands og restaurants globally. These restaurants are not tech-savvy: so the only alternative is using people to call them.
scarface74 8y ago
The business model follows from these fundamental differences: a platform provider has no room for ads, because the primary function of a platform is provide a stage for the applications that users actually need to shine. Please tell Microsoft this. Windows 10 and Skype are both littered with ads. But I guess this is what happens when operating systems become commoditized. All of the other major operating systems are either free for anyone to install (Linux) or freely avallable to OEMs (Android/ChromeOS) or bundled with hardware (Apple's operating systems).
- kolpa 8y ago
  Microsoft could return to charging for Windows (via OEM installs and fleet licenses); or just leave it free as the "best way to experience Live/365/Azure".
  - scarface74 8y ago
    I'm almost sure they charge OEMs but they charge less than they use to for low end computers to compete with Chrome OS and people are keeping computers longer. They also gave Windows 10 away to anyone who had at least Windows 7.
- rjsw 8y ago
  I wonder whether someone within Microsoft deliberately made Windows 10 often fail to upgrade itself to the version containing ads.
- skrebbel 8y ago
  > Windows 10 and Skype are both littered with ads. I keep reading this on HN, from a Windows 10 box with no ads. And I've searched! Where are the ads? Either I accidentally installed Windows 10 No Ads Edition, or you're spreading baseless FUD.
  - TeMPOraL 8y ago
    Windows 10 being "littered with ads" might be an overstatement, but I remember seeing plenty of them in start "menu". AFAIR the start "menu" in Windows 8/10 is by default filled with bullshit pseudo-ads like tiles with crap newsfeeds, tiles linking to Windows Store games you really should play, Xbox games ads, etc. I always aggressively clean up the start "menu" whenever I get on a new Win8/Win10 instance, so at the moment I don't have one near me to tell you exactly what the ads were.
jl2718 8y ago
> collective action... the best form of which is bounded by the popular will This notion is dangerous. Popular will brings fascism, authoritarianism, discrimination, instability, and uncertainty. Popular will is not and never has been a sustainable form of authority. Political economists have a term, ‘institutions’ to describe sustainable forms of authority, like laws, morality, family structure, culture, language, literacy, technical education, career stability, and pedagogy. Institutions like “don’t be evil”, and “we will never sell your data”, are the entire reason why the current batch of tech earned enough trust to exist at all. “Do the right thing”, and “bring people together”, however nice they sound, appear to be easily manipulated by popular will, which will be either their downfall, or ours.
- mattnewport 8y ago
  I think he's saying something different in this context: that the reason democracies are generally the least bad forms of government is that they are bounded by the popular will, that is the consent of the governed puts limits on the exercise of power. He's not advocating for the tyranny of the majority, rather saying that the power of Google and Facebook is particularly dangerous because it is not constrained or bounded in the way that a democratic government's power is bounded. I think you make a good point about institutions though. In practice they may be more important on a day to day basis than the popular will in placing constraints on government power.
  - TeMPOraL 8y ago
    I really love how you described this. Democracies run on their institutions, but are held together by the bounds the popular will sets on power.
  - AnimalMuppet 8y ago
    But Google and Facebook are constrained and bounded by the popular will of the users.
    - imartin2k 8y ago
      At least when it comes to Facebook, for a significant number of people, participation in Facebook is not an actual choice. It's similarly to living without electricity: Yes, you could do it, but the costs are too large to actually do it in practice. It's still freedom of choice on paper (because no one points a gun at people and forces them to use Facebook), but not in practice. This is maybe one of Facebook's most crucial achievements: It has turned itself into something which people feel they cannot live without, even if they might hate it. Google is a bit different story. Living without Google is doable with some but not gigantic sacrifices.
oflannabhra 8y ago
The attempt to create a dichotomy between the two philosophies is a bit thin when you frame the question around products instead of "computers" All four companies care deeply about creating compelling and useful products for users. That gets spread across many different domains for all of those companies. Someone can love and find value in a piece of software just as easily as they can a piece of hardware.
skybrian 8y ago
This article is making strategies out of tactics. For example, Gmail's new autocomplete apparently helps people write email faster. It doesn't write the email for you. Why isn't that a bicycle for the mind? It's partially helping you do something you could do anyway, but faster. (And maybe better, if you're still learning English?) Maybe someday, for some emails, Gmail will be able to ghostwrite the entire body of an email for you? But that's just a matter of technical competence, not a change in strategy. Tech companies will change tactics based on what's feasible. But maybe the big change is when you let the machine take full, mostly-unattended responsibility where safety is on the line (real driverless cars).
- hyperpallium 8y ago
  Yeah, automation vs. amplification is a perennial issue, not sure it maps that well to companies. The difference is control, whether the task is sufficiently predictable and well-understood. Similar to how much of a task can be hidden behind an API - the specific usage determines acceptable performance metrics. autocomplete/suggest is a T9/Clippy offspring, the latter by MS, and closer to automation. BTW: to be fair, when Steve Jobs demoed the iPhone, he used it to prank a cafe for 2000 lattes. Whereas Google pranked a business automatically.
  - TeMPOraL 8y ago
    > automation vs. amplification is a perennial issue How is that even a difference? Amplification is done by automating subcomponents of what you're trying to do. If you automate away the entire task, it means you amplify the human working one level up.
hndamien 8y ago
Is there a third philosophy of decentralisation which has different incentives and new constraints that are more to our liking in avoiding a dystopian future.
mirimir 8y ago
> I believe that we need to design technology to help bring people closer together. And I believe that that’s not going to happen on it’s own. So to do that, part of the solution, just part of it, is that one day more of our technology is going to need to focus on people and our relationships. ... If Landmark Education (or one of its many descendants) focused on software technology, that would arguably be a key message. I wonder if that's just a coincidence.
- throeaway 8y ago
  Off-topic, but: Do you know if Landmark is a cult? Is it something to be worried about? A close friend has recently gotten super involved with it and has done all three courses and is evangelizing it pretty hard, he's normally not someone who gets sucked into this kind of thing easily though. He also doesn't seem "brainwashed". I've googled about the organization and have my reservations, but I'm not sure if it's legitimately helpful with some bad marketing strategies or Scientology/Waco/Jonestown
  - mirimir 8y ago
    No, they're not a cult. And unlike Scientology, their courses aren't insanely progressively expensive. On the other hand, the organization's mission is transforming the world. Just as their website says. And a key aspect of that is hard-core evangelism. Just as Zuckerberg said in that quote :)
mark-r 8y ago
The ratio of articles to ads in that illustration is completely backwards.
- rejschaap 8y ago
  A large percentage of the articles are ads.
mc32 8y ago
So, on the one hand one approach is to replace the mind (take it out of the loop and "let the robots take over". The other is to "augment the mind and enable it to do more". One sounds better then the other. The robotic choice unfortunately has a very authoritarian or centralist vibe. That is, it's taking over for the person with but with central tutelage. The other the tutelage is in the person using the augmenting tech. Obs it remains to be seen how things pan out.
- TeMPOraL 8y ago
  Both approaches are really equivalent on the technical level. Augmenting the mind is done by automating and abstracting away lower-level stuff - taking the mind out of the loop and letting the robots take the details over. And the problem with all those companies is agency. It seems they all try to minimize user's agency, by making it purposefully impossible to control or dig into underlying automation. They differ by the effort put into taking control away from the user, with Google being the leader in blatantly dumbing down and isolating everything.
  - mc32 8y ago
    Thanks for framing the issue more succinctly. Yes the issue is removing agency from people coated in the sweet nectar of convenience.
hefeweizen 8y ago
The "bicycle of the mind" platform vs aggregator argument is a bit contrived: the author is conflating features built on top of platforms with the platform itself. Most of the examples listed (Google Photos auto-edit, Maps suggestions, Gmail compose) are typically features built on top of platforms that can be (and are) used without these features. Instead, I would think of these tools as an electric bicycle of the mind (to borrow from the article): the purpose of the motor is to help you on steeper hills. It is inherently still a bicycle. Maybe stop trying to shoe-horn multi-decade companies with thousands of employees into ill-fitting philosophical silos? I'm all for arguments for/against companies but retro-fitting them into narratives and then proclaiming A is better than B is disingenuous.
sanatgersappa 8y ago
“Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking of them. ” Quite sure that automation is closer to this than bicycling.
- sah2ed 8y ago
  That's an especially apt quote from 1911 by Alfred North Whitehead. https://en.m.wikiquote.org/wiki/Alfred_North_Whitehead https://en.m.wikiquote.org/wiki/Alfred_North_Whitehead
bryanrasmussen 8y ago
facetiously, ff a computer does things for you it frees up your time to watch more ads on the computer, if a computer helps you to do the things you need to do more efficiently it frees up your time to get off the computer.

242 points by techrede 8y ago

Interesting that the author didn't mention Intelligence Augmentation/amplification[1] in the article. IA is often contrasted to AI that it makes humans more able to do their job. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligence_amplification https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intelligence_amplification

goatlover 8y ago
It's interesting how AI gets so much hype and the potential dangers and benefits are discussed so much. But the reality of tech so far has been IA. We make tools to enhance our abilities, not tools that exist for their own purposes.
- ozim 8y ago
  IA is not sexy, you cannot get huge funding for improving existing workers. That is what computers should do anyway (and not succeded bc peple visit FB, hackernews at work) . But AI promises you don't need employees and that is something owners would invest. Reality doesn't matter, they want full automation promise, what they get is another topic.
  - mirimir 8y ago
    > But AI promises you don't need employees and that is something owners would invest. Also no owners. Or at least, no management.
    - TeMPOraL 8y ago
      > Also no owners. Or at least, no management. Managers are just another employees from the POV of the owners. What the owners hope for is AI eliminating workers, and strong IP laws ensuring they still get to be the owners and rake in all the profits.
empath75 8y ago
I think that’s the Apple/Microsoft philosophy.
- arthurjj 8y ago
  Agreed. I more meant I was surprised that the term intelligent augmentation wasn't used explicitly.
- TeMPOraL 8y ago
  I don't think so. IMO, Apple and Microsoft are just less aggressive in taking all the agency away from their users. They do that too, but they don't put as much focus on it as Google does.

allthenews 8y ago

>Zuckerberg, as so often seems to be the case with Facebook, comes across as a somewhat more fervent and definitely more creepy version of Google At this point I think the difference between what FB and Google are doing is superficial marketing. The abuse potential of their technologies grows with every new peephole that they drill into your life. While people become increasingly dependent on said technology for a growing proportion of life's activities, FB and google have repeatedly demonstrated that they do not have our best interests in mind, and serve primarily to exploit overreaches in privacy and trust. Not to be melodramatic, but it's like some weird kind of slavery.

dfgdghdf 8y ago

Those who have watched Halt and Catch Fire might be reminded of the competition between Rover & Comet, which are two companies with different philosophies in a similar space.

dredmorbius 8y ago

An interesting and thoughtful exploration. I'd like to add Jack M. Balkin an Jonathan Zittrain's notion of information fiduciary to the pot: https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2016/10/information-fiduciary/502346/ https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2016/10/infor... Also very interested in Hans Jonas and his work. Any recommended readings?

jpfed 8y ago

This appears to be saying that some companies want to be your framework (and so own the problem); other companies just want to be your library.

real-hacker 8y ago
Nice analogy. We want tech to help us only when we need them, not to tell us how to live our lives.

bambax 8y ago

> In Google’s view, computers help you get things done — and save you time — by doing things for you. Duplex was the most impressive example — a computer talking on the phone for you But who is "you"? Obviously, "Duplex" talks on the phone on behalf of people needing an appointment, ie, not everyone. And specifically, not the people tasked with answering the phone, who are duped into thinking they're having a human interaction when in fact they're talking to a machine. It's even worse than that. We're used to telling machines to do things for us. But the people answering Duplex calls are being told what to do, by a machine. When GPS became popular I had a friend who absolutely refused to get one because, she said, she "wouldn't take instructions from a machine". At the time, I thought that was the silliest thing ever. Now I completely get her point.

TeMPOraL 8y ago
It is a silly example, because GPS (or rather, GPS-based nav systems) really, 99% of the time, is better than you at navigating. Also, the technology itself is pretty much purely informative - a map with a path displayed. Voice instructions are optional and something implicitly understood as friendly directions, not orders. I think most examples of machines telling people what to do still happen in context of paid work, and even there, quite often there's a good reason for that. Personally, my worry with Duplex is all the abuse - er, growth hacking - that will happen.
- Ngunyan 8y ago
  99% of the time? Where did you get that? GPS is better than human only wherever it has better data. Bring it to a place where it has no data and its useless. Meanwhile, humans can easily adopt to find themselves in places they've never been before.
- aserafini 8y ago
  There are good, honest use-cases for this technology though: for example a food ordering platform that needs to gather holiday openings hours for hundreds of thousands og restaurants globally. These restaurants are not tech-savvy: so the only alternative is using people to call them.

scarface74 8y ago

The business model follows from these fundamental differences: a platform provider has no room for ads, because the primary function of a platform is provide a stage for the applications that users actually need to shine. Please tell Microsoft this. Windows 10 and Skype are both littered with ads. But I guess this is what happens when operating systems become commoditized. All of the other major operating systems are either free for anyone to install (Linux) or freely avallable to OEMs (Android/ChromeOS) or bundled with hardware (Apple's operating systems).

kolpa 8y ago
Microsoft could return to charging for Windows (via OEM installs and fleet licenses); or just leave it free as the "best way to experience Live/365/Azure".
- scarface74 8y ago
  I'm almost sure they charge OEMs but they charge less than they use to for low end computers to compete with Chrome OS and people are keeping computers longer. They also gave Windows 10 away to anyone who had at least Windows 7.
rjsw 8y ago
I wonder whether someone within Microsoft deliberately made Windows 10 often fail to upgrade itself to the version containing ads.
skrebbel 8y ago
> Windows 10 and Skype are both littered with ads. I keep reading this on HN, from a Windows 10 box with no ads. And I've searched! Where are the ads? Either I accidentally installed Windows 10 No Ads Edition, or you're spreading baseless FUD.
- TeMPOraL 8y ago
  Windows 10 being "littered with ads" might be an overstatement, but I remember seeing plenty of them in start "menu". AFAIR the start "menu" in Windows 8/10 is by default filled with bullshit pseudo-ads like tiles with crap newsfeeds, tiles linking to Windows Store games you really should play, Xbox games ads, etc. I always aggressively clean up the start "menu" whenever I get on a new Win8/Win10 instance, so at the moment I don't have one near me to tell you exactly what the ads were.

jl2718 8y ago

> collective action... the best form of which is bounded by the popular will This notion is dangerous. Popular will brings fascism, authoritarianism, discrimination, instability, and uncertainty. Popular will is not and never has been a sustainable form of authority. Political economists have a term, ‘institutions’ to describe sustainable forms of authority, like laws, morality, family structure, culture, language, literacy, technical education, career stability, and pedagogy. Institutions like “don’t be evil”, and “we will never sell your data”, are the entire reason why the current batch of tech earned enough trust to exist at all. “Do the right thing”, and “bring people together”, however nice they sound, appear to be easily manipulated by popular will, which will be either their downfall, or ours.

mattnewport 8y ago
I think he's saying something different in this context: that the reason democracies are generally the least bad forms of government is that they are bounded by the popular will, that is the consent of the governed puts limits on the exercise of power. He's not advocating for the tyranny of the majority, rather saying that the power of Google and Facebook is particularly dangerous because it is not constrained or bounded in the way that a democratic government's power is bounded. I think you make a good point about institutions though. In practice they may be more important on a day to day basis than the popular will in placing constraints on government power.
- TeMPOraL 8y ago
  I really love how you described this. Democracies run on their institutions, but are held together by the bounds the popular will sets on power.
- AnimalMuppet 8y ago
  But Google and Facebook are constrained and bounded by the popular will of the users.
  - imartin2k 8y ago
    At least when it comes to Facebook, for a significant number of people, participation in Facebook is not an actual choice. It's similarly to living without electricity: Yes, you could do it, but the costs are too large to actually do it in practice. It's still freedom of choice on paper (because no one points a gun at people and forces them to use Facebook), but not in practice. This is maybe one of Facebook's most crucial achievements: It has turned itself into something which people feel they cannot live without, even if they might hate it. Google is a bit different story. Living without Google is doable with some but not gigantic sacrifices.

oflannabhra 8y ago

The attempt to create a dichotomy between the two philosophies is a bit thin when you frame the question around products instead of "computers" All four companies care deeply about creating compelling and useful products for users. That gets spread across many different domains for all of those companies. Someone can love and find value in a piece of software just as easily as they can a piece of hardware.

skybrian 8y ago

This article is making strategies out of tactics. For example, Gmail's new autocomplete apparently helps people write email faster. It doesn't write the email for you. Why isn't that a bicycle for the mind? It's partially helping you do something you could do anyway, but faster. (And maybe better, if you're still learning English?) Maybe someday, for some emails, Gmail will be able to ghostwrite the entire body of an email for you? But that's just a matter of technical competence, not a change in strategy. Tech companies will change tactics based on what's feasible. But maybe the big change is when you let the machine take full, mostly-unattended responsibility where safety is on the line (real driverless cars).

hyperpallium 8y ago
Yeah, automation vs. amplification is a perennial issue, not sure it maps that well to companies. The difference is control, whether the task is sufficiently predictable and well-understood. Similar to how much of a task can be hidden behind an API - the specific usage determines acceptable performance metrics. autocomplete/suggest is a T9/Clippy offspring, the latter by MS, and closer to automation. BTW: to be fair, when Steve Jobs demoed the iPhone, he used it to prank a cafe for 2000 lattes. Whereas Google pranked a business automatically.
- TeMPOraL 8y ago
  > automation vs. amplification is a perennial issue How is that even a difference? Amplification is done by automating subcomponents of what you're trying to do. If you automate away the entire task, it means you amplify the human working one level up.

hndamien 8y ago

Is there a third philosophy of decentralisation which has different incentives and new constraints that are more to our liking in avoiding a dystopian future.

mirimir 8y ago

> I believe that we need to design technology to help bring people closer together. And I believe that that’s not going to happen on it’s own. So to do that, part of the solution, just part of it, is that one day more of our technology is going to need to focus on people and our relationships. ... If Landmark Education (or one of its many descendants) focused on software technology, that would arguably be a key message. I wonder if that's just a coincidence.

throeaway 8y ago
Off-topic, but: Do you know if Landmark is a cult? Is it something to be worried about? A close friend has recently gotten super involved with it and has done all three courses and is evangelizing it pretty hard, he's normally not someone who gets sucked into this kind of thing easily though. He also doesn't seem "brainwashed". I've googled about the organization and have my reservations, but I'm not sure if it's legitimately helpful with some bad marketing strategies or Scientology/Waco/Jonestown
- mirimir 8y ago
  No, they're not a cult. And unlike Scientology, their courses aren't insanely progressively expensive. On the other hand, the organization's mission is transforming the world. Just as their website says. And a key aspect of that is hard-core evangelism. Just as Zuckerberg said in that quote :)

mark-r 8y ago

The ratio of articles to ads in that illustration is completely backwards.

rejschaap 8y ago
A large percentage of the articles are ads.

mc32 8y ago

So, on the one hand one approach is to replace the mind (take it out of the loop and "let the robots take over". The other is to "augment the mind and enable it to do more". One sounds better then the other. The robotic choice unfortunately has a very authoritarian or centralist vibe. That is, it's taking over for the person with but with central tutelage. The other the tutelage is in the person using the augmenting tech. Obs it remains to be seen how things pan out.

TeMPOraL 8y ago
Both approaches are really equivalent on the technical level. Augmenting the mind is done by automating and abstracting away lower-level stuff - taking the mind out of the loop and letting the robots take the details over. And the problem with all those companies is agency. It seems they all try to minimize user's agency, by making it purposefully impossible to control or dig into underlying automation. They differ by the effort put into taking control away from the user, with Google being the leader in blatantly dumbing down and isolating everything.
- mc32 8y ago
  Thanks for framing the issue more succinctly. Yes the issue is removing agency from people coated in the sweet nectar of convenience.

hefeweizen 8y ago

The "bicycle of the mind" platform vs aggregator argument is a bit contrived: the author is conflating features built on top of platforms with the platform itself. Most of the examples listed (Google Photos auto-edit, Maps suggestions, Gmail compose) are typically features built on top of platforms that can be (and are) used without these features. Instead, I would think of these tools as an electric bicycle of the mind (to borrow from the article): the purpose of the motor is to help you on steeper hills. It is inherently still a bicycle. Maybe stop trying to shoe-horn multi-decade companies with thousands of employees into ill-fitting philosophical silos? I'm all for arguments for/against companies but retro-fitting them into narratives and then proclaiming A is better than B is disingenuous.

sanatgersappa 8y ago

“Civilization advances by extending the number of important operations which we can perform without thinking of them. ” Quite sure that automation is closer to this than bicycling.

sah2ed 8y ago
That's an especially apt quote from 1911 by Alfred North Whitehead. https://en.m.wikiquote.org/wiki/Alfred_North_Whitehead https://en.m.wikiquote.org/wiki/Alfred_North_Whitehead

bryanrasmussen 8y ago

facetiously, ff a computer does things for you it frees up your time to watch more ads on the computer, if a computer helps you to do the things you need to do more efficiently it frees up your time to get off the computer.