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IBM's Patent To "Capture Expert Knowledge" With Games
theodp writes "Robert X. Cringely offers his take on IBM's patent-pending way to suck knowledge out of experts and inject it into younger, stronger, cheaper employees, possibly even in other countries. IBM's 'Platform for Capturing Knowledge' relies on immersive 3-D gaming environments to transfer expert knowledge held by employees 'aged 50 and older' to 18-25 year-old trainees, even those who find manuals 'difficult to read and understand.' It jibes nicely with an IBM White Paper (PDF) that advises CIOs to deal with Baby Boomers by 'investing in global resources from geographies with a lower average age for IT workers, such as India or China.' While Cringely isn't surprised that Big Blue's anyone-can-manage-anything, anyone-should-be-able-to-perform-any-job culture would spawn such an 'invention,' he can't help but wonder: When you get rid of the real experts, who is going to figure out the new stuff?"
When you get rid of the real experts, who is going to figure out the new stuff?
The masterminds on Slashdot.
On an unrelated note, where can I sign up to be first man to be send to Mars again?
Yeah, I'm sure that's their motivation... (Nothing about salaries or insurance or taxes or any of that financial stuff.
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
can be transferred. I mean, how much can one actually learn from getting teabagged.
My expertise in y0 face!
Monstar L
I'm sure the "Experts" are going to be really co-operative and forthcoming with the information...
How's that going to help this quarter's earnings?
"You might as well get your son a ticket to hell as give him a five string banjo." -unknown minister
...to 18-25 year-old trainees, even those who find manuals 'difficult to read and understand.'
Do these people have enough attention span to actually learn something? If they can't even read manuals, maybe they shouldn't be employed in tech related jobs...
The Summary raises an interesting question: How you can have capable professionals if their learning process is dumbed down? We have a serious cultural problem. Idiocracy has taken over.
The good, the evil and the vacuum tubes.
Sorry for being ignorant, but where is the invention? Reading the "patent" (I really cannot call it that), I see a lot of buzzword bingo (hint: put XML on your list) and not a single shard of how they want to accomplish that task. They do not explain what the interviewer has to do. I think that interviewer has to be an expert in his field himself.
Furthermore, the text does not say how the knowledge is extracted from an interview, other than that it is "semantically parsed". Where is the invention itself? A system that COULD extract "knowledge" (if you can define the word at all) should be brilliant in itself. Now a patent should be explaining the invention and I cannot see the inventions themselves. Only that those mystery inventions are applied, and it is the application of those magical inventions that seems to be patented here.
Furthermore, a magic box that could convert boring knowledge (I DO read manuals) to games is also high order magic to Ponder about. As a side note, I'd rather look up the manual page than blast all those aliens to their deaths first.
Nae king! Nae laird! Nae yurrupiean pressedent! We willna be fooled again!
"When you get rid of the real experts, who is going to figure out the new stuff?""
A big employment issue IBM & companies in general have is finding new employees who might become super creative and innovative.
Multiple choice employment forms and interviews only give clues.
relies on immersive 3-D gaming environments to transfer expert knowledge held by employees
This sort of interactive interface seems to be better suited to capture or refine 'gut feeling' reactions, instinctive responses to situations (like threats, etc.) rather than carefully thought out strategies for solving problems. Its better for developing quick reactions to problems like "Which alien do I shoot first?" I mean, what sort of 'immersion' does one use to extract knowledge from an expert? An avatar of a PHB screaming at employees to hurry up and get the engineering done fast? That's not the sort of knowledge we need to capture (witness the ongoing saga of the Boeing 787).
I'd look for more of a text or conversational based Q and A system. But here's a problem for IBM. We've had those for a few decades now. They work just fine. No new patents needed here.
he can't help but wonder: When you get rid of the real experts, who is going to figure out the new stuff?"
When I see an industry starting down this trail, I think, "This industry is dying. Management doesn't see any future in product or process improvements. Where should I be investing my money now?"
Have gnu, will travel.
Sure. You want to control it so that shit doesn't get out-of-hand.
No folly is more costly than the folly of intolerant idealism. - Winston Churchill
I'm mostly a capitalist. I generally think I should be paid for work that I do, however, there is a sense of dignity missing in the rush to the bottom attitude of raw unbridled capitalism that is disgusting.
Money "right now" greed will be the destruction of capitalism and the end of democracy as we know it. Democracy depends on an independent society. As the poor get poorer and the rich get richer, the notions of government and individual rights and dignity become less relevant. What good are environmental laws, worker safety laws, tax rates, etc. when corporations can just go to some 3rd world shit-hole and work those people for cheap. Then, if they have the temerity to demand rights and pay, then the corporation will just jump to the next shit-hole and exploit those workers.
Maybe I'm old fashioned, but man-kind evolved a social structure that worked. It was a balance of personal avarice and societal responsibility. One was supposed to have an amount of greed BUT! Also have an amount of social responsibility. The community protected itself against threats. The well-to-do (from hunter gatherers to railroad tycoons) knew they needed the protection and/or good will of the community to survive, so, while they lived better than most, they made sure their wealth also provided for the society that allowed them to be successful.
Once the society stops taking care of itself and it is an "everyman for himself situation," civilization is over. There must be a notion of a common good. There must be a notion of âoefor the good of society,â even in capitalism. It is a race to the bottom and no good can come from abandoning the stake holder for the sole purpose of enriching the share holder. There must be a balance between greed and society or we will lose both our wealth and our civilization.
Big companies like IBM are hard to get into. Therefore the folks who get in are typically very competetive or they don't survive the filter. Creative people are typically more of the self-actualization types who realize the only thing they're really competing with is their potential. It's a self-defeating system.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
Or the manuals are written in English, and IBM thinks that their "solution" is better than translating the manuals into Chinese.
The written word isn't that old in terms of human history. It was invented as the best way to use the current technology - making symbols in wet clay which was then moved to other materials then to paper and now to the computer screen. Before that it was oral. Writing isn't necessarily the best way to share information and it's the reason we have illustrations and photos and movies to help and augment the information being transmitted.
As we become more and more sophisticated technologically, we will develop better methods of propagating information from one to another. Call it 3D, virtual reality, or alternative learning, there will be better ways and some would argue that there are better ways than the printed word: learning by discovery has been my personal favorite. The printed word is just too limited to share information completely; hence experience comes into play. If the manuals were enough, experience would be a no factor.
It's NOT me! It's the meds! I'm on 1000mg of Fukitol.
I had an uncle who worked in IBM - they were doing lots of interesting work, but the downside was that he found himself being moved all over the world - Glasgow, California, Europe, so the nickname "I've Been Moved" was accurate.
In the past, they had some attractive sounding positions - 3D visualisation engineers/architects. But if they have a policy of shuffling people between different research groups, then what's the point of working for them if they are just going to move you away from your area of expertise?
Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
The innovation will come from acquiring startups.
The rank-and-file workers of modern mega-corporations are basically welfare recipients. Their tangible day-to-day contributions, if there in fact are any, are dispersed through a miasma of powerpoints and politics. Reward is likewise twisted as it mapped through this noise. This patent/methodology is not surprising at all; in fact I find it rather fascinating, in that it's a black-and-white acceptance of the fact that most employees are superfluous.
"They were pure niggers." – Noam Chomsky
"For if you yesterday treated us better than the [workers] you have had so long..."
No one has come up with an educational game before? Educational game makers have never gotten material from experts before?
Don't we also need to treat workers in India as if they were part of our society, and elevate them as well, and be responsible for their training and their education? Society is global now. What benefits them will, in the long term, benefit us too. It is already the case that wages in India are rising sharply because of the American demand for their labor; the money flowing into that country will educate them, but IBM can take care of its own as well.
There's also an assumption that hiring outsourced workers means "letting middle-aged workers go". This need not be the case. Companies will retain workers that are valuable, regardless of where they're from.
It's rare that you're presented with a knob whose only two positions are Make History and Flee Your Glorious Destiny.
When you get rid of the real experts, who is going to figure out the new stuff?
The article implies that any 'real' expert *must* be of middle age, and that young people can't be experts by definition. I think that's unrealistic: being an expert or not has nothing to do with age. Young people can be just as expert as middle aged people, and they *can* be 'real' experts to figure out the new stuff.
IBM.. those are the guys that used to know how to make computers, chips and operating systems, and now they don't know how to do anything. If you really wanted to get some tech knowledge, why would you ask a bunch of washed up losers?
This is my sig.
We have a similar misconception in the information technology risk management world (actually, the greater risk world as well) where executive management mistakenly believes that compliance practices will eliminate risk. Even if we have 100% compliance with regulations (like PCI) and standards (like ISO 27000 series, CoBIT, ITIL, etc.) and could have an imaginary 100% effectiveness in the controls provided by these regulations/standards, we'd only eliminate known risk.
Consider what regulations and checklists provide to assess risk: a checklist. And where does the checklist come from? Previous situations where we had problems occur. We learned, for instance, that simple 6 character passwords suck and are easily bruteforced, so the checklist asks if passwords are longer than 8 characters, have complexity, etc. But no checklist can ask for what problems we haven't encountered yet. So while we'll have regulators, external assessors, internal auditors and other compliance professionals examine an environment on a periodic basis, it will never substitute for a risk program that uses methods for uncovering risk from the un-checklisted and unknown terrain. Advanced techniques, such as those that use approaches that illuminate the risk domain through the creation and exploration of new vantage points, efforts that shock the perspective comparable to critical theory's radicalization, or those that de/reterritorialize and allow us to apply different thought models to a domain (e.g. looking at network attacks from a rhizomic, not a hierarchical model which reflects how a DDoS attack might manifest) are all non-checklist methods to assess risk.
Interestingly, these approaches are not able to be appropriated by a hierarchical expert-system approach. Consider how expert systems create decision-trees, subject to all the Deleuzian problems (Galloway's books http://cultureandcommunication.org/galloway/Protocol: How Control Exists After Decentralization, or his work with Gene Thacker, The Exploit: A Theory of Networks, are both exceptionally valuable in understanding non-hierarchy problems in information technology). Plus such expert systems are subject to countless other problems known to information theorists and end up creating predictable paths through the model, to which any information system will adapt, and regress to the mean. Consider this example: if the IBM expert system is employed in the information security realm, it will specify a predictable path to responding to any security incident. Any information system will naturally recognize this predictable response and then use it against the system. This basic technique is already employed by most competent hackers -- measuring, testing, assessing your target to learn of the quality of their response to your efforts.
In other words, any organization that would rely upon this service from IBM will be a predictable, exploitable target. They might as well publish the blueprints of their network and list user names and passwords. God help the fools that believe that knowledge is static and life is not competitive.
There was an old SF short story about this kind of thing. Career education became an immediate process where the knowledge required to fill a job was injected into people. But those injections would be updated regularly, so that students given a more recent injection learned newer concepts than their peers, and had a better career as a result. But none of these students were able to invent anything new.
The main character in the story is a kid who broke a rule, and read up on his career choice before he was given the injection. Instead of injecting him, they confined him to a room and encouraged him to read more books. He thought this was punishment at first, but then realized that he and the people like him, who valued the quest for knowledge over the following of procedure, were the people given the task of learning the old wayâ" through booksâ" and inventing new things.
Does anyone out there remember the title of this story? I can't place it.
You are also talking about the Gilded Age if you don't know it, at least in reference to what's going on economically now. Noblesse oblige is a concept in which the rich, the tycoons, the aristocrats, the upper 1%'ers gave back to the society from which they took so much, usually in the form of higher wages for their employees or through charitable act to the community at large. This was not so much out of any altruistic sense, but rather the idea that they cannot continue to be affluent if the society at large suffers. The Gilded Age that followed bears a striking resemblance to the "race to the bottom" capitalism that exists now, that somehow there will always be cheaper labor, there will always be shelters from tax, there will always be room for growth, and people should consider themselves lucky that they have a job.
Not surprisingly... the Gilded Age was followed by the Great Depression.
Who cares?
Incumbent CEOs who fire their experts will have left the company and cashed out their options long before "new stuff" can become a problem.
It's their successors who will have to deal with the results. And of course, their customers.
Tech Public Policy stuff
I really like this whole idea of "capturing knowledge"...
It reminds me a lot of ghostbusters, where they had plasmatron-whevers that would snare the ghosts.
They should just build little boxes that "capture knowledge", and hook experts directly up to it for a few seconds.
That way, knowledge learned by experts over 20 years can be stored, and then they can just ask the boxes how to build Quantum Computers, or rockets, or solve energy problems.
Better yet, if you want a super-smart knowledge system to solve global problems, you just connect up several of these blocks together like legos.
Life is a bitch then you die.. .get over it and go do something
The consulting company McKinsey has knowledge management and transfer down to a T -- pairing and making available ANY older expert anywhere in the world available to any younger (really any) consultant.
The US Navy also excels in their job short-term job rotation -- how does a entire carrier operate (as a system) with so many new people in roles they've never held before.....think about it....
Old age and treachery almost always overcome youth and skill.
If you are dealing with IBM, the absorption of experience and skills from older employees to younger ones using their techniques and processes has one major catch: Whatever you let IBM see becomes their property to re-use anywhere and with anyone (including your competitors) at any time.
You try to get IBM to sign a contract where they agree to penalties for loss of your intellectual property, your corporate secrets, your edge in the market and you'll see they'll never agree to it.
Beware! These games serve a dual objective. The first is to help you be dependent on their processes to keep your IT going. The other, more sinister objective is to steal you blind of any intellectual property you have that makes your business successful.
"When you get rid of the real experts, who is going to figure out the new stuff?" Interesting question. Why not ask the former management of Circuit City?
I have prior art that invalidates this patent attempt. My theses work from 1986 long predates this and did the same thing. If IBM pushes this patent they stand to lose.
I have prior art on this dating back to 1986 in my thesis work. If IBM pushes this patent they will lose.
What really kills me is the focus on the Boomers ("O Great and Seminal Generation") and the Millennials ("O Naive and Brilliant ReBoomers") while in between the Gen Xers ("Cynical Boomerwannabes")are kicked to the side. Obviously all the real experts are Boomers--those Gen Xers never amounted to anything.
Unless it's us Xers who are shoving the Boomers into retirement. Then that's cool.
never mind, you can't.
Tech Public Policy stuff
IBM has long had a tradition of leveraging a small number of competent employees to float a team of cogs that follow written instructions that a competent employee generates. The competent employee is often told that they are paid way more than "others in your job category" and the expert will be paged/called during night/vacation because no one else can solve issues that has not been seen and documented.
My first week there my team lead took me aside and told me "You are too bright to work here, you should go work at a small company in a big city" It took me years to realize that he was spot on. Basically I was exploited to float an entire department. I was underpaid and overworked. I did have an excellent manager and received many awards and recognitions, but I was offered 30% more to work the same job somewhere else with many more benefits.
In general IBM loves replaceable cogs because it gives stability. They are inexpensive and very easy to replace with any recent graduate. You could think of many jobs being very simular to help desk where you have levels of competence which funnel up to one or two people who are generally underpaid and overworked as they support an entire department worth of work.
My best friend and I both had technical expert roles at IBM. Our experience was that most employees have no ability to research new issues. I could send a person to the correct page of the correct manual and they still could not understand the problem from reading the manual. My friend was flown all around and given any project that used any device new to the team. (Which he then wrote the red papers on) But it was a kick in the nuts to find that half the team was paid more than you due to seniority and yet had to follow the instructions you left behind.
I automated a full department's worth of work. When I left I literally had 10 minutes of work each day because if I had automated the scripts so my colleagues would stop screwing them up. The team managed to justify its continued existence for a couple years after I left by making graphs to explain the data my scripts had collected. With that level of "innovation" you can hardly afford not to outsource.