Why work?

freedom by ~rippedknees on deviantART 

So I read this article a while ago called "Will smart technology create a world without work?" about how automation is killing jobs. At one point, the writer was talking about how even something as automation unfriendly as driving a vehicle could someday be the new norm. And while pondering the implications of this new situation, he asks :

If automation can unseat bus drivers, urban deliverymen, long-haul truckers, even cabbies, is any job safe? Vardi (introduced earlier in the article) poses an equally scary question: "Are we prepared for an economy in which 50 percent of people aren't working?"

But something about that question strikes me as being slightly off. The proper emphasis, to me, would be : "What if 50 percent of people didn't need to work?" 

Let that sink in a minute...

I for one think that that would be the most awesome thing ever, but that doesn't matter for now. What's important is that soon we'll be given an opportunity to rethink everything we think we know about words like "work", "play", "duty", "responsibility" and "fulfillment". I mean, if we reach a stage where we've effectively secured our free time for all of us, what would that mean for society? What would it be like to live in such times? Literally everything would change because a lot of the old motivations for doing things would be completely thrown out the window. If people's daily sustenance were secure would they then tend to gluttony and excess, or would they use that freedom to do all their "someday" projects? Would the education system become less competitive because you're actually there to learn and not just "secure a good future"? Maybe no one'd care anymore because they'd be too busy watching robot ultimate-fighter matches...

Well I, for one, don't have the faintest clue. But I remain an optimist and believe that in the absence of unnecessary competition, humanity's better nature will finally have a chance to flower. There's a lot I hope to write about this and related topics in the future but for now I want to specifically speak to two commonly used arguments against trying to free humanity from drudgery. 

"If everything can be perfectly manufactured, why would anybody do anything anymore!"

Well technically yes, it would be possible at some point to go into a store and buy a perfect table, say. Heck, you might be able to print one in your own home, perfectly matched to your floor so that it's absolutely horizontal. But to imagine that people will stop making tables just because they don't need to is preposterous. Rather, now that they don't have to do it, it just becomes that more valuable when someone does put their time into making a table. And he might just give it away for free, just happy in the joy of making something. Or if there was some currency in this economy, that table would command a much higher price than one off the assembly line.

In a related line, another argument is :

"Wouldn't everyone just get bored?"

 

For me, this would be the most interesting part of the whole thought experiment. As Alan Watts would ask "What would you do if money was no object? How would you really enjoy spending your life?" Imagine a society centered around each individual finding the answer to that question, imagine what that would be like. And thinking about it, does anyone look at an infant and wonder how it never gets bored? Well it would stop to eat and sleep and poo and stuff, but more or less all a baby really "needs" to do is to play. And that's what would happen, I fondly imagine life would be a game again.

But I could be wrong, and everybody might get really really bored and start collecting and displaying the results of their nose-mining expeditions. And those samples would be arranged not only chronologically but by shape, size, colour and viscosity or whatever. Maybe there would then be experts in the field who would arise. Perhaps exhibitions and fairs where nose-miners and aficionados the world over gather to discuss the cutting edge of the game. And perhaps some experimental art project would spring up asking people to mail in samples, along with a note about what they were thinking about while they excavated it. Then they could be arranged in a giant mural, covering the side of the building, with the notes made accessible to visitors via an interactive display. 

...That'd be sorta beautiful I think, in a strange way. Something about how "We're all in this together", kinda thing. 

Meanwhile, for anyone who's not particularly happy with their job at the moment, here's a little something that might be of use to you. 

  

Alan Watts - Work As Play from PrometheanReach on Vimeo.

Leave me a comment... What's on your "someday" list? 

On "Being Smart"

So I'm reading this article that's ostensibly about Andrew Mason leaving as CEO of Groupon and the lead quote jumped out at me :

What we’re finding is that 'being smart' isn’t really a job qualification."

And again, further on in the article :

Most of us millennials... kind of grew up thinking we were more “idea guys.” Remember that IBM commercial where people were lying on the floor in a server room “ideating”? That’s us. Ideas, man. Big ideas. That implementation bullsh*t? Not so much.

Mind. Blown.

Which brings us to the present. Right now I find myself in Germany (in a small town called Hildesheim to be precise) and further away from familiar settings than I have been in a long while. Lemme say that nothing lets you know the exact extent of your capabilities than not being able to do simple, basic, everyday stuff for yourself. Like being worried about accidentally destroying your (limited stock of) thermal wear by running the wrong washing machine program, or repeatedly burning rice even in an allegedly idiot-proof rice cooker.

Side bar : Don't believe the various YouTube videos btw... maybe it's just with Basmati rice, but rice to water ratio is 1:3 in a rice cooker, not 1:1. Also, with a little help from the neighbour, my clothes are now sparkly fresh once more. Booyeah!

*Cue 'I get by with a little help from my friends' *

A couple of years ago at my parents' 25th anniversary I gave a little speech and, among other things, remarked that one of the greatest privileges I owe my folks is the space they provided me in which to think and explore and learn and grow as an individual. And even though I'd decided then that it was time to stop "Ideating" and start actually doing stuff, the past year has continued to have a certain comfortableness to it. So the gradual route having not worked, hopefully my time here in Germany will be enough of a stint over at the deep end of the pool.

There's a bunch of things I'd like to get done while I'm here. For starters I'd like to attain some kind of basic German conversational ability. I'd also like to atleast get a start on some of the several projects I've had in the pipeline since forever. Overall I'd just like to soak up as much of Europe as possible while I'm here and just get a little practice looking after myself. At the very least I'll finally be able to say I can cook up something more than just eggs.

On an unrelated note, I'm washing the dishes the other day (this being before someone explained the dishwasher) when suddenly "Can't go back" by The Weepies starts playing. Tell me that's not some crazy coincidence...

The Weepies - Can't Go Back Now from nettwerkmusic on Vimeo.

Anyway, here's to an exciting few months. I hope to check in regularly with updates so that similarly afflicted armchair philosophers can take heart. But now, some dinner I think... *digs in to omlette*

Beauty vs Truth : A Case Study

It started, innocently enough, with a picture...

And a comment...

"Why couldn't all of you just stand in this order : \/ \/ /\ \/ /\ \/ \/
Instead of : \/ \/ \/ /\ \/ \/ /\

The lack of symmetry disturbs me to no end [sic], I am forced to assume that the arrangement is
\/ \/ \/ /\ \/ \/ \/   :)"

Yes the lack of  symmetry is rather vexing, now that it's been pointed out. But as good as my calves look in a dress, surely there must be some simpler way to resolve this travesty...

But despair not, there is hope yet! We can always turn to the Data Analytics field to save us. Btw, 'Data Analytics' (also called Data Mining or Business Intelligence), is something that is pretty much indispensable for businesses these days and might soon become a crucial skill-set for individuals as well. No need to be intimidated though, it's a relatively simple concept:

"Analysis of data is a process of inspecting, cleaning, transforming, and modeling data with the goal of highlighting useful information, suggesting conclusions, and supporting decision making."

Let's get to it then. The first thing to do when approaching a problem is to form a hypothesis. Here obviously, the hypothesis we'll go with is:

"All images must contain symmetry".

Let's take another look at our data set :

Now that simply won't do. It's too vague, our hypothesis, and is clearly mistaken. Not only are the people not gender-symmetric, they're not arranged by height, weight, skin colour, muscle tone, style of attire or even how wide their smiles are either. No matter, we can simply ignore these factors as not being relevant and concentrate on any single aspect. In this case our new hypothesis now reads:

 "All images of people must be composed in such a way that their arrangement contains gender symmetry". 

By the way, it hardly matters that we've now zero-ed in rather arbitrarily on a relatively unimportant aspect of the picture, atleast we're making good progress. We'll have this hypothesis proven yet no sweat!

Next we need to set some ground rules. This is important because without any constraints we'd just run mad with power and start turning elephants into mole-hills and horses will be riding flying-pigs! So we shall have some rules and we shall christen them *hushed tones* The Methodology...

So with our sample data for example, we could just rearrange the people but as the original commenter points out, that would be illegal because :

"...since the picture is already taken, you need least effort transformations (in your head) to enforce symmetry... Rearranging people requires more effort than a single gender transformation..."

Well he's right but it's not very helpful because "least head effort" is a rather vague term. For the sake of the argument, let's quantify it and say that the easier it is to Photoshop something, the easier it is to imagine. By this scale, our commenter is proven correct; My lazy Photoshopping aside, it would be harder to swap people around to enforce symmetry than it would be to apply gender transformations to the stud in the middle and the belle on the left.

And again, one gender transformation is less expensive than two.

But again it seems our original commenter hasn't really considered every option. After all, considering photoshop as the reference, there's a much easier solution. All we'd have to do to enforce gender-symmetry is crop the picture at the ends...

Or if you want a cleaner image without people's shoulders sticking out at the edge of the frame, we could crop another one which would leave us with :

Quick side note : In data analysis the cropping we just did is called 'Removing Outliers' or (more pejoratively) 'Cherry Picking of Data'. This is an important tool in *hushed tones* The Methodology because sometimes data points aren't really relevant to your experiment. So for example if you're doing a study on the effects of smoking on life expectancy and one guy is a hundred and two and still puffing that'd be a huge finding! But then if it turns out he has a secret lab that's cloning replacement lungs for him every few years, you can safely ditch him as a data point. However not all things are so clean-cut, and there's a very fine line that separates "Removing Outliers" from "Cherry Picking".

And there we have it, our hypothesis is now quite firmly proven and no one's junk had to be re-wired or anything! *Wild Cheering* But before we pat ourselves on the back we must ask, what exactly have we accomplished here? We had a hypothesis and we proved it, but we haven't exactly learned anything new. Also typically, after a hypothesis is proven, you can use that as a base for other hypotheses but here there's really nothing useful that you could extrapolate. So the dirty secret is that really all we did was to twist data to suit theories, rather than theories to suit reality.

More generally speaking in our everyday lives as well, it would be beautiful if things just always worked as you think they should. But sadly that girl at the bar won't magically realize you've been standing there for the last hour, hopelessly slack-jawed. Likewise, you don't just trip over success while out for a walk and things like good health appear to require conscious effort. Ultimately one must give the truth it's due and hope for the best rather than turn the data into a kind of Rorschach blot on which to imprint ones expectations. And who knows, you might find that reality has a beauty all of it's own... :)

rorschach. by ~Sea-of-Ice on deviantART

The Routine Less Travelled

You know it's a bad scene when it's been more than a three week delay to put together a post about beating procrastination. *sigh* Oh the irony. Incidentally, I don't know if you've noticed how distracting the internet can be...

"But getting stuff done isn't that complicated." you may say. "Just stop goofing around so much!" Well first of all, that's easier said than done. Secondly, and this may sound silly, "hard work" is much harder work than it sounds. No really, you should try it! And I don't mean that one night you chugged twelve coffees and stayed up all night to do... whatever, by the flickering blue light of your monitor. I mean sustained, sustainable hard work that you can then use to "realize your dreams" and what not. It doesn't help that the media we consume everyday focuses almost exclusively on the result; the end of the race, the knockout punch, the moment of victory... the exclamation at the end of the sentence! "Real-life" is presented as a never-ending series of climactic moments, happening one after another in full HD splendor. Oh, and have another Coke while you're at it.

But then clearly there are people who have made something of themselves. Elon Musk, for example. Here's a man whose entrepreneurial journey has led him from founding PayPal.com all the way to his latest company SpaceX, whose mission is "...to ultimately enable people to live on other planets". Nothing cooler than a guy whose factory floor was used for the filming of IronMan 2, while also probably being the director's inspiration for the portrayal of Tony Stark. But what can us ordinary folk do? Clearly these people must have some edge, some special ingredient that gives them the drive and determination to accomplish so much. Maybe if I could just find out what cereal he eats in the morning...

But then again, Albert Einstein spent years working at a relatively menial clerk position in a patent office before he became recognized by the physics community. Athletes prepare for years to shave the merest fractions of a second off their times. Good singers don't become awesome just by doing lots of karaoke. It would appear as if there's more to the picture than just the Kodak moments that we focus on. While there's definitely an aspect of natural talent involved, greatness seems to be built from the ground up. The challenge for us seems to be more in consistently harnessing the little things rather than expecting success (whatever that means to you) to come suddenly in one big epic moment.

If I may, it seems to me that the trick is to figure out how much it's possible to do in a given day. Lets say everyone has a certain number of "Decision Credits" available per day. So on a day when you wake up feeling great, you have more credits. Or you wake up with a runny nose and don't feel like getting out of bed, that's less credits to use. It also explains that feeling where you're literally "spent" at the end of a long day. A post on the 'Four Hour Work Week' blog calls this state "Ego Depletion". Of course, all this is purely subjective; even some super successful, super healthy person probably has days where they feel shitty but the key thing is the concept of a limited amount of energy to put to use.

If that's true, then it would make sense to make to invest each Decision Credit carefully to make sure one gets the most out of it. At the same time, expend as little energy as possible on decisions that could be made automatic by setting up, say, an auto-pilot schedule. How that works is that you schedule repeating tasks on particular days so that from day to day you only have to manage the unpredictable stuff. Stuff like this is a one-time cost that then pays huge dividends in the amount of mind-space it would free each day. In fact a lot of the anxiety people deal with day-to-day probably stems from a feeling of constantly having forgotten something. And this sort of "background fear" constantly erodes away at your already limited stock of credits.

But planning isn't enough without knowing what to plan for. Here, Maslow's Heirarchy of Needs might be of some help. 

Lets say that you're deeply concerned with making a name for yourself in whatever field you're in but you find yourself constantly frustrated by failure. Taking a cue from Maslow's pyramid, maybe your "foundation" isn't strong enough to support you so you find yourself struggling. Whether it's starting a business or even just learning the guitar or trying to take better care of yourself, ultimately some kind of support structure is required to succeed. So initially spending credits on the basics will then free up mind-space over time to start being awesome at higher levels. Even if your current situation doesn't allow you to take time off to get everything exactly right, keeping the pyramid in mind gives a sort of framework in which to make the best use of what's available.

One last thing to be said about routines is that it's sad that they've been so maligned and misrepresented, to the point where the very word has become a synonym for druggery and "same ol' same ol'". But Barry Shwartz put it interestingly in a Ted talk on The Paradox of Choice. While talking about the importance of having some basic structures, he used the example of a fish in a bowl. The bowl itself is definitely a limitation on what is possible but say the bowl is shattered, now truly everything is possible. But instead of freedom, what the fish gets is paralysis because effectively nothing is possible.

  

Final thoughts 

Ultimately all of this is about freedom. Freedom from worry and anxiety, freedom to do the things you really want to do with your time. Procrastination essentially amounts to a daily tax that you impose on your dreams. Tomorrow, if the opportunity you've been waiting for presents itself, you should be in the best possible position to take it. Weird as it might sound, it's the simple, normal stuff that we take for granted that might be the difference between success and failure.

“We are not made for the mountains, for sunrises, or for the other beautiful attractions in life - those are simply intended to be moments of inspiration. We are made for the valley and the ordinary things of life and that is where we have to prove our stamina and strength.” 

~ Oswald Chambers

Any idiot can face a crisis - it's day to day living that wears you out.
~ Anton Chekhov 

  

A word of caution...

With all this talk of scheduling however, there is a danger in taking all of it too far. After all, life as such has it's own inherent roughness and doesn't always conveniently fit itself to schedules. Plus, to think that one has any kind of complete control over life would be self-delusion at it's most epic. The important thing to understand is that having a routine is only a kind of framework and shouldn't become a thing unto itself.

“Because one does not want to be disturbed, to be made uncertain, he establishes a pattern of conduct, of thought, a pattern of relationship to man etc. Then he becomes a slave to the pattern and takes the pattern to be the real thing.”
~Bruce Lee.

Treated with a  certain healthy detachment however, a routine can become an invaluable tool to help you do whatever you want.

What do you think, what're some of the tricks you use to conserve "Decision Credits". Leave me some comments. :)

An Ode to the Curves of Sir Benoit Mandelbrot

Celadon Surf by ~mandelbrat on deviantART

If you've been around the internet for any length of time, you're bound to have stumbled onto trippy stuff like this. Well it's based on a branch of mathematics called fractal geometry and it's... What's that... you're saying you've heard about fractals and have had questions about it ever since high school? And what, you were just thinking how great it'd be if someone were to explain the basics and their relevance to everyday living? Well today is clearly your lucky day! Pioneered in 1975 by Sir Benoit Mandelbrot, fractal curves (also called Mandelbrotian curves) are rarely given more than a passing mention in school. Thus denied, the average barely-pubescent male must then seek his curves elsewhere... *wink wink*

But I digress. Traditionally, what we're taught in school is the regular ol' Cartesian geometry. We graduate from the doodling of our early years to learn about straight lines and how to construct them. Then it's on to squares, circles, rectangles and triangles. Then it advances to three-dimensional shapes and all their possibilities; not just spheres, cubes and cones but then conical-sections as well. Conical-sections incidentally, are the different 2-D curves (the ellipse and others) you would get if you were to take a katana and go to town on a traffic cone.

So with all of these shapes available, it seems like we're pretty much set to go out with a pen and capture pretty much anything on paper and so we did! We built bridges and buildings and skyscrapers and even sent a man to the moon! But over time, it started to become apparent that Cartesian geometry had some serious limitations when it came to describing the geometry of naturally occurring objects. So for example if you had to design a car you were golden. But what if you had to describe the way a tree was growing, or the way that lightning strikes the ground. Sure, you can draw it out but the point is that you don't really know any more about it after you're done.

Enter Benoit Mandelbrot. *Cue Superman theme*

"Why is geometry often described as 'cold' and 'dry?' One reason lies in its inability to describe the shape of a cloud, a mountain, a coastline, or a tree. Clouds are not spheres, mountains are not cones, coastlines are not circles, and bark is not smooth, nor does lightning travel in a straight line... Nature exhibits not simply a higher degree but an altogether different level of complexity."

~Benoit Mandelbrot

The Fractal Geometry of Nature (1977), Introduction, xiii.

So when he looked at a picture of lightning, he noticed several properties like self-similarity (that a zoomed-in version looks exactly like the full picture) and scale invariance (the zoomed-in version has the same mathematical description as the overall picture). Basically there's no difference between the branching that happens at any scale level, it's the same rule applied recursively over and over again until you get the entire branching structure.

Self-Similarity illustrated in a lightning strike

This was a huge breakthrough because it suddenly allowed people to study things that were earlier dismissed as just being "too chaotic". Medical science made massive headway in terms of our understanding of the lungs (because of the way bronchi branch into bronchioles and then subdivide until it finally reaches the alveoli) and in the circulatory system (again, because of how chaotically it seems the arteries branch into capillaries) among others. Fractal geometry also led to a greater understanding of seemingly chaotic events and heavily influenced modern Chaos Theory. Fractals can also be seen pretty much everywhere because the mathematics allows you to automatically generate say, a landscape or a sea of clouds rather than having to actually model them by hand.

A landscape from Minecraft

(Side note : Check out Minecraft if you have some time to kill and want to do something that feels constructive. Or watch the minecraft-yogscast if you just want to waste time. ^_^)

I'm hoping some poor soul didn't have to sit and draw this all out. :p

But here's where it gets really interesting for me. What Sir Benoit Mandlelbrot essentially accomplished was to actually measure the seeming randomness of things, what he called 'roughness', and in doing so managed to create a new geometry. A geometry for thing that didn't have a geometry! Over the course of his work he expressed all of his various insights in what is called The Mandelbrot Set where as you continue to zoom in you keep seeing the same patterns getting generated over and over to infinity. The video below is a zoom down to the 6th-level mini-set, set to Jonathan Coulton's "Mandelbrot Set". Check out the lyrics btw, highly amusing. :)

What's cool about the Mandelbrot set is that it demonstrates that an infinitely complicated structure can arise from the recursive application of simple rules. This is super important, so I'm going to say it again: "...an infinitely complicated structure can arise from the recursive application of simple rules."

And here, i think, we may have been too timid with the way we apply fractals. We've applied the learnings of fractal geometry to a whole bunch of things but when we've applied them to ourselves we seem to stop short at a "hardware" level. So we're quite comfortable talking about how our lungs and our blood-vessels and even the rhythm of a heartbeat have a fractal construction (Check out the Music of the Heart project btw. Music from ECG recordings = super cool tunes). But at a "software" level it seems we haven't considered that we might ourselves be somewhat fractal in nature in terms of even our personalities. The truth is that it's a worrying thought that we might not be completely in control. But as much as we might protest that we are the masters of our own fate or destiny or whatever, evidence would suggest that the course of every life has a strong element of the haphazard to it. At the very least we can admit that we don't control every single aspect of what goes on in each and every day. But rather than let that be a worrying thought, maybe fractals could offer another way to examine our lives. Like if you want to figure out what your life might be like in the next twenty or forty years, take a day and just kind of walk around your own life as it is right now. Patterns might start to emerge that might let you glimpse the future. Or maybe you're not particularly happy about something in your life right now. Rather than something drastic where you're booking a trip to the Himalayas to meet with the Rishis, maybe the answers you need are right in this moment.

As an approach to problem-solving as well, fractal geometry might have something to offer. Say there's a particular situation you feel anxious about, it might not be practical to try to fix the entire big picture all in one massive burst of change. Maybe all it would take is to handle the littlest thing right now, and then again in the next moment and again over and over and to just stay watchful as each moment compounds on itself. Eventually a new picture will have emerged out all of the individual decisions. I read a quote once that neatly summarised it:

"Watch your thoughts, they become words.

Watch your words, they become actions.

Watch your actions, they become habits.

Habits become character, and character becomes destiny."

~Lao Tze

And again,

"We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence then, is not an act, but a habit."

~Aristotle

And at a larger scale, if a city is composed of individuals then maybe whole societies could be analysed as having this sort of fractal, recursive element to it. I'm not quite sure how one would do so but if you could model a city in this manner then solutions might present themselves to problems like large-scale waste management, or poverty or health care or racism even, who knows! Anyway I'm not really going anywhere with this line of thought, it just continues to fascinate me how much Philosophy is present in Math and Science and how they kind of just blur together at the edges. In closing, I leave you in the capable hands of the legend himself:

A word before we begin...

A patchcord is just a little electrical cable, something we used extensively in our college labs to rig circuits. But more generally it's any cable that can connect two separate electrical or electronic or optical devices and get them operating together.

At this point in my life there are lots of decisions that I need to take and a whole lotta options. Too many, one might argue. Take just career for instance. In school I veered toward software and computer science. In college, for several reasons, I chose a predominantly-hardware based engineering degree in telecommunications. And now at work I have people suggesting I consider management as an option. As much anxiety as all these options cause in the present, the hope is that I can somehow leverage this somewhat wide perspective to do better in the future.

This blog, then, is an attempt at trying to distill all the information, experiences and ideas I've accumulated thus far; to take seemingly disparate ideas and connect them, and then start converting inspiration into action.

Also, 'Patchcording' seemed a nice euphemism for what others might take for wasting-time-on-the-internet. :p

Anyway, I'm excited... let's get to it. More posts soon. :)