Like most neoliberal institutions, Boeing had come under the spell of a seductive new theory of “knowledge” that essentially reduced the whole concept to a combination of intellectual property, trade secrets, and data, discarding “thought” and “understanding” and “complex reasoning” possessed by a skilled and experienced workforce as essentially not worth the increased health care costs.
Damn that’s the most relatable thing I’ve heard in a while.
Knowledge inside your employees’ heads is impossible to quantify on a spreadsheet. This, combined with the obvious truth that tacit knowledge exists which cannot be codified, transmitted, & instantaneously rehydrated inside of new employees’ brains, will forever irritate the shit out of beancounters.
This is the real reason they want neuralink.
Until they have full-on androids they just need a meat bag they can slot a chip into.
mayos are very bad at even considering the existence of unknown knowns. For example it should be obvious that your employees do a ton of background work and expertise that you don’t explicitly quantify or pay them for, and that you DEFINITELY know nothing about–an unknown known (in that it’s known by your company). It should also be obvious that you can’t actually interface a digital silicon chip with an analog meat-brain seamlessly, because cells are alive and they way they move/react is incredibly fluid and intelligent–an unknown known (in that it’s known by your body’s cells, but not by you).
But mayos are really good at falsely convincing themselves that reality is an assortment of discrete mechanistic things and processes instead of a dynamic web of flexible and reactive phenomena
be cautious here. Input works pretty well because the brain is plastic. They’ve done (limited resolution) artificial vision through basically an electrode grid. Hundreds of people, google Argus II. Hit the brain with some arbitrary electrical inputs and eventually it will stop interpreting them as pain and start decoding the patterns.
You can quantify it on a spreadsheet by comparing your other metrics vs. turnover rate, esp. by department. The bean counters do this all the time in the big corps. Smaller ones might just make things up but the big ones have teams of people building out strategies all centered around certain profitability / marketshare / stock price goals. Such as those at Boeing.
They’re making intentional decisions to hollow the place out to maximize short-term profit and to break the unions at their workplaces. They have an estimate of what this will cost them and then they hit the “yes” button.
What they fucked up at is that they got too close to the “horrific safety and PR disaster” line mostly by doing blatantly negligent things, nothing requiring deep knowledge. Make are the bolts are tightened. Make sure QA does inspections. Make sure that when QA finds something wrong, it gets fixed. This was all replaced by “do it fast and don’t complain” incentives. This does tie into the union busting though, as it was part of opening up new non-union shops in various red states.