High Hopes
Looking beyond the embers of bridges glowing behind us
To a glimpse of how green it was on the other side
Steps taken forwards but sleepwalking back again
Dragged by the force of some inner tide
Pink Floyd, High Hopes, The Division Bell, 1994
Socrates was concerned about technological disruption. He worried about the negative effect reading and writing would have the oral traditions of rhetoric and argument. Socrates didn’t write anything down. We owe our understanding of his thinking to Plato, his student.
Socrates complaints about writing were captured by Plato in the dialogue Phaedrus, which is about love but is actually about the art of rhetoric, and by way of incidental example, includes an observation on dangers of writing.
Socrates has two related concerns about writing: first, if people started to write—to use this new technology widely—then their thinking skills would degrade; and second, the written word is inferior to learning things through debate and dialogue.
To think and to learn is for Socrates to interact. We only understand an argument when we can test and interrogate it with others. To write and to read is to learn nothing of the craft and art of constructing a persuasive argument. Reading and writing are isolated and self-absorbed activities.
Future generations will hear much without being properly taught, and will appear wise but not be so, making them difficult to get along with.
This seems a strikingly prescient insight.
The underlying concern here, as it always is with new technology, is do we know what we are losing?
All technology, implicitly or explicitly, has at its core an ideology—a view on how the world works. We should be interested in not only the benefits of technology but also the ideology it carries. We should be thoughtful about the ethical ambiguities of ‘progress’ as it is presented to us by those with clear self-interest in us adopting and applying technology.
In Greek mythology Daedalus created the complex Labyrinth on Crete that kept the Minotaur in check; and then, having been locked in a tower with his son to prevent his knowledge of the Labyrinth from becoming public, he fabricated wings made of feathers and wax for himself and his son to fly to freedom. Unfortunately, while Daedalus escaped Icarus flew too close to the sun and fell to his death.
Daedalus is always presented as excited about what he can achieve. His focus is exclusively on solving the problem as it is presented to him without consideration for the long term implications. Stories of his ingenious achievements are always tempered by observations about the long term problems arising from his inventions. Daedalus does not suffer from these consequences, but others do.
The lesson is that if we don’t think hard enough about technology we let our pride and hubris lead us to overextend with dreadful consequences for others.
Daedalus always seemed to be hired to invent for selfish people looking solve immediate problems. There was a lack of responsibility for the myriad of follow-on problems. The result was a cycle of short-term technological fixes that accumulated into collective disaster. Daedalus is not really Disney film material.
I think about Socrates and Daedalus in terms of technologies that impact on people, work and organisation. Today, our view of technology is so advanced that we believe we can aspire to total efficiency and effectiveness—we can aspire to performance without waste.
Yet, work in many of its forms remains practical, social, and similar to work as it was performed in the past. We are organised in recognisable ways, we worry about familiar issues, and we respond using the same principles. There is a primitive truth to how we work that tends to defy technology.
Technology has always expanded the scope of work and organisation. Today’s disruption is that work we have considered as exclusively the domain of humans—reasoning, judgement, learning and foresight—now appear to be within the grasp of technology.
This challenges us to consider what it is we will contribute to work and organisation. The self-interested, short-term conversations about the future of work play to our many fears.
There are, however, two long term questions that arise from new technologies that deserve attention:
What are we losing?
What is it to work?
As we burn our bridges behind us and turn to stare longingly into the embers of the past, these are the questions where we need to answer in order to set aside our hubris and think hard about the future of work.