Category: AI, Computation, and Technology

UPDATE : Oversing Update : How Much Do You Want To Really Know About Your Business?

(curious) (software)

You know, we pretty much, all of us, have internalized that we have an amazing product on our hands. Sure it’s early. And it’s not like we don’t have a lot of work left to do. But it’s the kind of thing that once you use it a bit, you think that it’s SO amazing you end up asking “Why didn’t anyone do this before?”

The flip side is different though. And it’s just beginning to dawn on me. And it’s that, are there indeed things that you do not want to know?

For example, I designed a piece of software a very long time ago, and it was, somewhat like Oversing, so insightful into the business, that it was disturbing. For example, we could measure how much less productive smokers were. (Or rather, the data was odd and we discovered it was that smokers were running out of energy earlier in the day.)

Now, any experienced manager knows the reality that most people cannot really do more than four to six hours of work in a day. And that the most productive people are those that simply can work longer and more consistently. Repetitious work is quite different. But only some of us can really problem solve (concentrate) for eight, ten or even fourteen hours.

So, if Oversing provides you with so much information about your business, and so much ability to control that business, then, how do I prevent that information from being misinterpreted and misused?

I mean Oversing is like E.S.P. for project managers. and project managers tend to be pretty good managers if they’re successful; since Project Management of time and budget and people is a pretty unforgiving specialty with pretty empirical measures. I’m more concerned about the average idiot C-level (financial types) who haven’t managed people in a creative capacity trumpeting their positivist ignorance from on high – completely unaware that what is wrong is their illusion of man, not how the employees are working.

But, I suspect that Oversing’s various weights and measures and social scoring tell us the hidden value people provide, and that it takes time to collect all that data. So maybe we can use that.

I guess the compensation for employees is that in exchange for making politics in the organization almost irrelevant – actually powerless, and rendering the middle management political nonsense out of existence – that the transparency to do that comes at the cost of transparency into your work too. It’s hard to argue with the truth. It’s hard to argue with transparency. But to some degree, we don’t like people to know the truth about us.

One thing the internet has taught us though, is that while we were concerned about privacy, the fact is, that the loss of some of our privacy due to social media, educated us: we are all full of foibles and failings and once aware of that, they become meaningless both as questions of guilt for us and matters of judgement for others.

We are all human. And transparency reminds us of that.