Automation and Practice
AI Literacy Masterclass №3
Every job consists of tasks. No matter how much we would like to avoid it, habits form over time, and those habits can be structured and eventually automated.
Taylor’s scientific management (1911) invited systematic, standardized thinking to all aspects of work, essentially making work, and everyone within it, average and optimized.
But the average worker doesn’t exist. When the Air Force measured thousands of pilots against the ten dimensions of the “average” cockpit, the number who fit all ten was zero, as Todd Rose writes in The End of Average.
The fix wasn’t a better average, but an adjustable cockpit.
AI models are averaging machines by definition. But that is ok, for average things. Things that are specific and not generalizable need to be thought of and planned for differently.