"A clock, then, is a kind of time machine that produces symbolic time" <-- this was the most insightful bit for me. Emergence of symbols to describe time -> ability to share mental models -> social clocks.
This i think is a key insight and recommendation: “Third, explore social clocks and time machines. Simple examples as political cycles of mandates or press cycles are obvious to most of us - but there are so many other clocks at play as well...” This is where I have seen teams and orgs get tripped up; they may have a good internal clock but that clock isn’t synched with or understood in a broader context. Also the clocks often conflict, which then requires prioritization and triage. Great essay!
That is a good point - the conflict of clocks is probably much more common than we appreciate - and then a decision often comes down to picking a time! Thank you.
Your comments on the Hegelian notion and formula of: time + technology = resources. This reminds me of a Keynes quote and a Heidegger quote.
“The importance of money flows from it being a link between the present and the future”
John Maynard Keynes, General Theory Of Employment , Interest And Money
“The present-as soon as we have named it by itself, we are already thinking of the past and the future, the earlier and the later as distinct from the now”
Martin Heidegger on Time and Being
This is because the measurement of time, I will argue is vital to organized societies.
If “Technology makes time available as a resource and so, in some sense, also diminishes it.”
The very commodification of time, allows for wages, contracts, and changes society from a set of social obligations, to a series of debits and credits. In effect, the regimentation of time is a prerequisite for organized civilization. If fiat currency only works through trust, and if money is important because it is a link between the present and the future, then time, money, and trust are the foundation of many of our organized societies. Once one plans for the future, as distinct from the now then we can introduce the need for organization by way of institutions, bureaucracies, and corporate bodies.
Nothing demonstrates this better than the modern legal contract, which involves the transfer of goods, services, money, or a promise to transfer any of those at a future date. Organized society therefore is a regimented society, from a regimented society we created specialized societies which in turn have created the largest material gains in human history by way of industrialization.
No wonder that the Enlightenment Christian philosopher William Paley saw God as “the Great Clockmaker” in his 1802 book Natural Theology or Evidences of the Existence and Attributes of the Deity. For which God, the Clockmaker, sets the universe in motion according to specific rules.
comments on Taylorism vs Fordism and organized time.
The second topic I want to address is the Fordism vs Taylorism systems of organization. While Fredrick Taylor believed you could train employees mainly by adjusting their incentive structure through instruction to obtain efficiency gains, Fordism takes the lack of skill as a productive resource through the assembly machine.
Henry Ford believes that he succeeded despite the influence of experts rather than due to them. Which model should modern corporations look at? Certainly we could make the conclusion that Amazon is the inheritor of Fordism and Google the inheritor of Taylorism? What both these systems have in common, is:
1) That they were ways to optimize time and resources (labor and capital) into output.
2) They submersion the individual identity (the worker) for the benefits of the collective, the Corporation
For if in the long run we are all dead, as Keynes argued, then surely it must be evident that time is the most scarce of resources? If time, through the use of technology, can be commodified, bought, sold and repackaged as currency, contracts, and credits. Then how long should a manager spend on training and building a team? Should the manager expend resources on creating suitable physical environments that maximize cognitive abilities or workspaces that maximize workplace output? How much time should we spend on these endeavors? What resources should we expend?
This is not an easy question to answer, but I come back to Keynes here, yes it is true that Keynes has said “in the long run we are all dead,” in 1923 but later in 1942 he added that “in the long run almost anything is possible.” This is certainly correct, as the only limits we have on output are time, resources, and biological capacity (labor) which all three are derivations of physics.
AI and Keynes
Artificial Intelligence is the new frontier in human output. Keynes himself speculated in his essay the economic possibilities of our grandchildren, of a society where due to technological advancement humanity would overcome scarcity and that “the economic problem is not-if we look into the future- the permanent problem of the human race.” Humanity has essentially had five times it radically rearranged its material conditions. That is during the agricultural revolution, the industrial revolution, the electrical revolution, and the information revolution. We are today working towards a fifth outbreak where AI, in its current for, is set to dominate the field of predictions. We may be on track to solve Keynes’ “economic problem.” AI may in a very real sense, be able to buy humanity time.
"A clock, then, is a kind of time machine that produces symbolic time" <-- this was the most insightful bit for me. Emergence of symbols to describe time -> ability to share mental models -> social clocks.
This i think is a key insight and recommendation: “Third, explore social clocks and time machines. Simple examples as political cycles of mandates or press cycles are obvious to most of us - but there are so many other clocks at play as well...” This is where I have seen teams and orgs get tripped up; they may have a good internal clock but that clock isn’t synched with or understood in a broader context. Also the clocks often conflict, which then requires prioritization and triage. Great essay!
That is a good point - the conflict of clocks is probably much more common than we appreciate - and then a decision often comes down to picking a time! Thank you.
Your comments on the Hegelian notion and formula of: time + technology = resources. This reminds me of a Keynes quote and a Heidegger quote.
“The importance of money flows from it being a link between the present and the future”
John Maynard Keynes, General Theory Of Employment , Interest And Money
“The present-as soon as we have named it by itself, we are already thinking of the past and the future, the earlier and the later as distinct from the now”
Martin Heidegger on Time and Being
This is because the measurement of time, I will argue is vital to organized societies.
If “Technology makes time available as a resource and so, in some sense, also diminishes it.”
The very commodification of time, allows for wages, contracts, and changes society from a set of social obligations, to a series of debits and credits. In effect, the regimentation of time is a prerequisite for organized civilization. If fiat currency only works through trust, and if money is important because it is a link between the present and the future, then time, money, and trust are the foundation of many of our organized societies. Once one plans for the future, as distinct from the now then we can introduce the need for organization by way of institutions, bureaucracies, and corporate bodies.
Nothing demonstrates this better than the modern legal contract, which involves the transfer of goods, services, money, or a promise to transfer any of those at a future date. Organized society therefore is a regimented society, from a regimented society we created specialized societies which in turn have created the largest material gains in human history by way of industrialization.
No wonder that the Enlightenment Christian philosopher William Paley saw God as “the Great Clockmaker” in his 1802 book Natural Theology or Evidences of the Existence and Attributes of the Deity. For which God, the Clockmaker, sets the universe in motion according to specific rules.
comments on Taylorism vs Fordism and organized time.
The second topic I want to address is the Fordism vs Taylorism systems of organization. While Fredrick Taylor believed you could train employees mainly by adjusting their incentive structure through instruction to obtain efficiency gains, Fordism takes the lack of skill as a productive resource through the assembly machine.
Henry Ford believes that he succeeded despite the influence of experts rather than due to them. Which model should modern corporations look at? Certainly we could make the conclusion that Amazon is the inheritor of Fordism and Google the inheritor of Taylorism? What both these systems have in common, is:
1) That they were ways to optimize time and resources (labor and capital) into output.
2) They submersion the individual identity (the worker) for the benefits of the collective, the Corporation
For if in the long run we are all dead, as Keynes argued, then surely it must be evident that time is the most scarce of resources? If time, through the use of technology, can be commodified, bought, sold and repackaged as currency, contracts, and credits. Then how long should a manager spend on training and building a team? Should the manager expend resources on creating suitable physical environments that maximize cognitive abilities or workspaces that maximize workplace output? How much time should we spend on these endeavors? What resources should we expend?
This is not an easy question to answer, but I come back to Keynes here, yes it is true that Keynes has said “in the long run we are all dead,” in 1923 but later in 1942 he added that “in the long run almost anything is possible.” This is certainly correct, as the only limits we have on output are time, resources, and biological capacity (labor) which all three are derivations of physics.
AI and Keynes
Artificial Intelligence is the new frontier in human output. Keynes himself speculated in his essay the economic possibilities of our grandchildren, of a society where due to technological advancement humanity would overcome scarcity and that “the economic problem is not-if we look into the future- the permanent problem of the human race.” Humanity has essentially had five times it radically rearranged its material conditions. That is during the agricultural revolution, the industrial revolution, the electrical revolution, and the information revolution. We are today working towards a fifth outbreak where AI, in its current for, is set to dominate the field of predictions. We may be on track to solve Keynes’ “economic problem.” AI may in a very real sense, be able to buy humanity time.