Tuesday, February 18, 2014
Impenetrable
One of the sciencey websites mentioned a project that involved "Socio-Technical Integration Research", which supposedly means applying ethics to technology. Roused my curiosity, since "ethics" in modern usage means exactly and specifically and explicitly "KILL BABIES! KILL DISABLED PEOPLE! KILL OLD PEOPLE! STARVE THE POOR! ENRICH THE BANKERS!" When you do all of those things you are ethical. When you fail to do any of those things you are unethical.
Every theory reduces to From Whom and To Whom. Usually the payer and payee, the victim and thief, are instantly obvious. Not so with STIR. Google yields an amazingly impenetrable jungle of jargon with no clear referents or stopping points.
Here's a typical passage from a Wiki entry:
Carvajal [7] states that "the rate at which uncertainty overwhelms an organisation is related more to its internal structure than to the amount of environmental uncertainty". Sitter in 1997 offered two solutions for organisations confronted, like the military, with an environment of increased (and increasing) complexity: "The first option is to restore the fit with the external complexity by an increasing internal complexity. ...This usually means the creation of more staff functions or the enlargement of staff-functions and/or the investment in vertical information systems".[8] Vertical information systems are often confused for "network enabled capability" systems (NEC) but an important distinction needs to be made, which Sitter et al. propose as their second option: "…the organisation tries to deal with the external complexity by 'reducing' the internal control and coordination needs. ...This option might be called the strategy of 'simple organisations and complex jobs'". This all contributes to a number of unique advantages. Firstly is the issue of "human redundancy"[9] in which "groups of this kind were free to set their own targets, so that aspiration levels with respect to production could be adjusted to the age and stamina of the individuals concerned".[3] Human redundancy speaks towards the flexibility, ubiquity and pervasiveness of resources within NEC.Might be vaguely related to work and workplaces, but that's as far as I can get.
Labels: Ethics
¶ 8:47 AM
