There is a fair bit of stress that is associated with uncertainty and we know it. Yet modernity gives us a lot of tools to prepare, and make certain bits of the future which only makes us crave for more control and perhaps heighten our expectations that the uncertainty can be eliminated.
So part of our stress now comes from the expectation of certainty. We no longer how to enjoy flexibility, and embrace the dynamism that exists in uncertainty. And then when everything is under control, we find ourselves bored, craving for some kind of variation and so on.
As the aspects of work that has complete certainty slowly gets outsourced to computers, robots and perhaps even artificial intelligence, we are going to be getting the harder bits of work. The ones that require us to actually embrace uncertainty; the type that involves no one knowing the answer. We need to regain our ability to think and solve problems bit by bit as opposed to treating everything as though there has to be a right answer and we have to get it right.
We are embarrassed about our mistakes. We need to get over them, and often, we do so by avoiding them. Please don’t talk about it or revisit the experience. That can be psychologically comforting. But are we doing justice to the cost that we bear for the mistakes?
I’ve written quite a fair bit in the past about the social or culture attitude towards mistakes, and I think a lot of the ideas are still worth exploring:
All of this is so that we can build and develop wisdom, where we know how to work within and navigate a dynamic environment. The problem with theoretical approaches and specific methodologies to achieving outcomes is that they assume that there is an ordered, stable environment within which we conduct our activities. Sometimes, that is just not exactly the case.
The only time you have to say something is a feature, not a bug, is when it appears to be a flaw. The notion behind this idea is that there was an intention. That aspect of a software, or product design, or service experience was not supposed to be a flaw but an intentional part of the design. It assumes there was an intention, some objective being served.
The reason people might think it was a bug could be because:
They had different objectives from that of the way the product designer had imagined the objectives of their users to be
They were not the target audience of the product/service
They were forcefully making a product fit their needs
They did not know how to use the product – which could reflect badly on the UI design or the UI of whatever instructions needed
The product had a poor product-market fit
The product designers were giving excuses for themselves
There isn’t supposed to be a debate whether something is a feature or a bug. It should always be resolved by the one who had designed the product/service. If it was a result of something being overlooked, it is a bug, and pointing out that it could be a feature is just an excuse.
You bought an expensive foie gras meal and paid for it but can’t finish it. So who foots the bill?
If you finish it and get sick as a result? Is the doctor’s fee part of your foie gras bill?
If you don’t finish, and it goes into a food waste heap that requires public subsidy to manage and clean up, are the taxpayers footing your bill?
Would knowing all that change your decision to buy that foie gras meal?
What if you knew the future path of your choices? Who would you allow to foot the bill? How far ahead would you care about the consequences of your actions?
This is a story about externalities, cost and consequences. Who should care? Who should we care for? How much should we care? No one teaches us all these? We have to work them out and make decisions.
The faceless corporate had been painted as the enemy of man in popular culture and broader artistic endeavour. The idea is haunting. Some kind of machinery driving its machinations through its cogs and gears to achieve some broad vague goal that sounds appealing in concept but nefarious in practice.
Of course, the reality is that it is not just the corporate that can behave and seem this way. There is the bureacracy that is a manifestation if a “government” or even a non-profit. There is also loose organisations centered on single-dimensional stuff (hobbies, interest groups, certain kind of political activism, etc).
The point is this idea of a “corporate” or some kind of machinery is anti-thetical to being human. Why would that be so? Here’s the tricky part.
We are all complex and multi-dimensional that in creating singular objectives or goals and trying to relentlessly pursue them reduces us to something less than human. And those “big entities” essentially embody this limited dimensionality compared to what life really is. Same goes with money, when we make everything in business about that. We reduce richness with riches. What a shame.
We don’t have to be anti-corporate. But we probably would do better to understand why its reach should not be all-extending.
We all want to make the world a better place. And in Singapore, we’ve somewhat cultivated the idea that we need to force people to take the right action or they won’t. Often it is because they will point to others who have not done it and say ‘why don’t you ask them?’
The people who failed to bring their trays back to the shelves at the hawker centres before NEA’s mandate had excuses – they were busy, the cleaners had to have something to do, they forgot, and so on. But it was never clear enough that they ‘had to’ do it. Once the mandate and the penalties came, it was clear. As clear as day. So, mandates make requirements clear to a large extent. It makes people sit up and recognise they had to take some action. More so than the consequences of dirty hawker centers, or when you have to take over a messy table.
What can we learn from this that we can apply to climate change?
If we don’t feel hit by the experience of a messy, unclean hawker centre, it is even harder to feel like we need to take any particular course of action just because we have a few more hot days. After all, one could turn up the air-conditioning (which worsens the problem at the system level). So mandates are needed to help with the coordination. The direct consequences alone are insufficient because of externalities, so the government should step in to ‘make them feel the pain’.
What does a job mean for you? What is work to you?
It used to be just tasks or collection of tasks that had to be done. The tasks were easily connected to the end goals.
Then things got complex and the tasks were clear but it felt more distant from the ultimate outcomes that the whole lot of people were trying to achieve.
Finally we did away with task-based identification of the work and changed parts of the work to be based on creating some kind of outcomes. In trying to connect the outcomes to the person, we lost the clarity on the specific tasks required. That can lead to undisciplined exhaustion of energies and burn out.
On the other hand, for all the jobs where tasks can be clearly specified, technology has been used to displace human workers. Leaving humans to only supervise or check through the results. In fact, at some point even the quality checks can be automated.
Where does that leave us? What does that mean about the future of work?
The future of work can be meaningful if we resume our human role of caring for who the outcome of work is for, and the manner in which the work is done. We carve out that higher role for ourselves by being capable of continuous improvement that focuses on the final objective of the work itself – the satisfaction of the user.
Everything that has become a norm in our lives went through some hype cycle. So in essence people may overblow its usefulness and think these things are going to change the world but then it doesn’t change the world overnight so things comes crashing down for a while before it goes on to slowly change the world. The internet is probably the best example. In the 90s people were sure that the internet was going to change everything, and so it went through a bit of a hype. So did computers in the 80s. But after the hype, things crashed, and then life went on except it got changed bit by bit, steadily and surely.
Generative AI is itself going through a bit of that; we are all sure things are going to turn out great. Of course, some doomsayers will be warning the world of the problems and calamity it would bring – just as Socrates thought writing was a poor form of communication and would also bring about the decline in memory of men. I think it is probably necessary to create more safeguards for AI and allow the governance to evolve with its development.
I think Gen AI will be helping to augment the capabilities of human workers for a really long time before they come to ‘replace’ workers so to speak. Yes of course you could use some kind of AI technology to help you even have a conversation at the call center, but it’s not going to be able to handle 100% of the queries, you will eventually still have a human in place. Consultants for example, who might have been spending time copy-pasting or doing data entry type of work might lose their jobs but then there will still be someone senior who needs to intervene.
The real economic challenge for us is how are we going to let Gen AI do the so-called low-level jobs while maintaining a pathway for us to train more junior workers into capable senior workers. Sure there is the grunt work that has to be done but traditionally, the juniors learn the ropes by doing those work. If they are going to be performed by Gen AI, then how on earth are they going to be able to get the chance to learn?
There is still substantial job opportunities which are slightly underpaid but cannot be replaced by Gen AI. These work are underpaid either because of systematic biases in the economic systems or as a function of labour market rigidities. They include the care-giving, pastoral guidance type of roles, as well as all of the cases where it is important to have a human example who can model moral character and other crucial human attributes. No kid is going to see the politeness of a Gen AI figure or speech bot and say he or she wants to be courteous because they are a role model for the kid.
To me, those problems will need to be gradually resolved before we would allow AI to play a bigger part in the lives of people. Part of the way some of these problems are resolved is actually through mutual cancellation with the demographic transition challenge. Economies that are mature and have severely ageing population will need to rely on AI for many things. Improving labour mobility globally should slow down the need for that but it is inevitable for these markets who have the resources to play the early adopters’ role.
We can organise our economy in very different ways, and even as the free market and the idea of capitalism reign, there can be different extents to which goods and services are produced and supplied to the end consumers. The non-profit organisation can serve as a way to coordinate activity that delivers real economic results in the form of goods and services.
I think we have overlooked the ability of such a form of economic organisation to do more for the world. The advantage of a non-profit that it explicitly pursues resources specifically for a cause. It doesn’t mean it will squander resources inefficiently, but the stated purpose of it, is to generate the impact or advance towards the mission. Ironically, some of the more profitable companies in the world can tend to make claims that are similar to non-profit in terms of the contribution it brings to society.
And since non-profits often have to deliver results in exchange for funding, or to unlock pre-committed funding, they will learn to optimise their budget and utilise resources optimised to deliver some of the results or at least provide inputs to the causes they are trying to champion. The funding portion of non-profits may be different but the way it should be ran operationally is probably not so different from a typical company, with the exception it may not be able to use the usual incentives for its staff (in those circles, they sometimes call it a passion tax).
Yet perhaps more forms of organisations should be acting as non-profits. For example, banks should potentially operate without profits, with the key objective of optimising risks in the system while providing access to credit for organisations and people. In fact, I think that all financial institutions, even those providing payment solutions probably should have limitations placed on their profits because ultimately, it is the real economy that they are trying to drive and allowing them to extract too much from the real economy can hinder the more fundamental process of capital allocation – which is what we are already seeing. Everyone needs to contribute to the real economy and finance in particular, has become the tail wagging the dog, in name of the pursuit of profit. That is a shame.
Continuing my series of musings about the nexus of sports and life. Something more important than winning in the sports arena is that your character is being built. How do you measure the extent of character development? What am I thinking about exactly? And why does it matter?
You can’t measure character. It doesn’t mean it is not important but you just cannot measure it. In the film Les Choristes, the Maths teacher, Mr Mattieu, formed a choir believing it would help reform the badly behaving boys. And it did! But how do you measure it? What changed? Maybe the school grades, maybe the noisyness of the classroom, perhaps even their sense of aspirations. In sports, the players’ performance can be seen in their behaviour on the pitch or courts, as well as their scores, but perhaps also in their lives, the way they treat the people around the sport, and so on. Even how they treat their competitors and how they talk about them. Max Maeder, the Singaporean kite-foiling Olympic medalist, impressed everyone by giving kudos to his competitors after finishing third in his final race when asked to comment on the race.
So that’s what I’m thinking about. There’s something unmeasurable that we can achieve in sports and sporting culture. Are we going to invest into that as a nation? Do we care enough about our people’s lives and their mental fortitude, resilience in face of struggles, competition, and need to perform? Those are precisely what sports offers us an opportunity to train and build up. And so investing in sports is not just about shiny stadiums, sport science degree programmes but also providing athletes with sport psychologists, equipping athletes with the science involved in training, practice, self-care and so on.
An excerpt from Roger Federer’s commencement speech for the graduating class of 2024 at Darthmouth this summer:
In tennis, perfection is impossible… In the 1,526 singles matches I played in my career, I won almost 80% of those matches… Now, I have a question for all of you… what percentage of the POINTS do you think I won in those matches?
Only 54%.
In other words, even top-ranked tennis players win barely more than half of the points they play.
When you lose every second point, on average, you learn not to dwell on every shot.
He could be considered perhaps the most long-running, persistently successful individual athlete of our times, and the lessons he can draw from his experience are timeless. If we could have more of such models and examples to train, motivate, and encourage our next generation of Singaporeans – for their lives not just in sports but other aspects, won’t it be great?
