I'm working on two major projects for this year. One's high tech. The other is "low tech". High tech just means it's mostly computer programming stuff rather than any real world thing.
I've been working about half time on each project. As I'm moving along, it's really evident that I can make extremely rapid progress as an individual doing engineering work.
The high tech project is to create aerial photography maps from drone photos. In a nutshell, the drone goes and takes many photos of some area, then software stitches them together and maintains a database of the spatial relationships of all the photos. I went from nothing to a working prototype in about a month, i.e. around 80 hours. I've done work in the mapping domain before, and I've done work in image processing, and in the method of fingerprinting something like a photograph, so I have a base of knowledge to build from, but still I was kind of surprised at how quickly I was able to move along.
My experience at doing this project is significantly different than my experience working at various corporations over the years. Typically an engineering project involves multiple teams of people who are working within the bloated bureaucratic structure of a corporation. The corporation is ostensibly all about efficiency and profits, but it's not really at all. In the middle of a project for example, you might have to take a couple of hours to watch videos about how trannies should be called by their chosen pronouns, plus there will be probably four times as many people working on something than is really necessary.
Corporations, governments, and many other similar entities are really rube goldberg-esque contraptions. The template for these contraptions doesn't come from nature, nor is it some ancient, traditional form of organization. It only dates back to the 16th century or so. It's the Hobbes' Leviathan scheme of organization, that is it's a meta-man. It's a paper simulacra of a "man" that's sort of ritually conjured into existence through things like meetings and contracts.
It's instructive to compare these things to their natural equivalents. The systems of our body that keep us alive, for example, function in a way that's tied to nature, and governed by nature with a tendency toward self regulation. By contrast, governments, corporations, and other bureaucracies are like cancers. Their systems, like the tax system, grow out of control and create more problems than they solve. They end up being corrupt and self serving.
Various industries like a car industry or the smart phone industry, and their products reflect this tendency in spades. The automobile manufacturers invented the concept of "planned obsolescence" for example. Their engineers chase after financial outcomes for the company they work for instead of honing their designs and products to actual perfection. Smartphones are really similar. They accumulate new gizmos and capabilities while at the same time, they fail to perform their basic functions very well--it's quite common that you can't even hear a person who's talking on a smart phone even if they've got a good signal, etc... The apps crash. Sometimes the whole operating system on the phone can crash even though millions of man hours has been invested in the development of those devices.
It seems pretty plausible to me that the opposite basis of the Hobbes Leviathan and the Adam Smith Wealth of Nations (division of labor) method of organization would really work better, especially now with so much technological capability at the disposal of individuals. The thing that's easiest to automate away is the overhead of corporations. It's conceivable that a cottage industry based economy would be much better in every way than the corporate/financial economy.
No comments:
Post a Comment