History of Hard Right Angles in Human Workers--Prehistoric Illustrations of the Technical Singularity, Part I

JF Ptak Science Books    Post 1966  
      
 

See also Cyborgs and Robots Man as Machine and Machine as Man

Some images are sleepily iconic, instantly recognizable, symbols of something bigger than themselves. This is the case with the photographs below--this image of athletic posture makes me think of the development of human-robot (and then robot-human) interaction.

This series of images--which seem to be a celebration of straightness, of flatness in the human body, breathing at right angles--were actually (simply but not-so-simply) displays of physical tests given athletes in France to determine whether they had a higher physical capacity for their sport, identifying (they hoped) those with indelible gifdts that could be squeezed out via medical/physical instrumentation.

These ideas may well have had their origin in the motion/industrial/human control experiments and theories of Frederick Winslow Taylor (1856-1915), who was seen as an iconic leader in establishing human motion studies for efficient factory (and etc.) operations in early 20^th century America.  He did very detailed motion studies of people working—say, in this case of a man shoveling coal into a furnace at Bethlehem Steel in 1907—to determine that best sort of arrangement/placement of tools and supplies.  It was very influential work, for sure, and Taylor, who loaned his name to the movement of this sort of effective watchmanship, (“Taylorism” and "Taylorization" and also "scientific management") and took a huge step forward in establishing efficient factory and business operations and also automatizing the human working cogs in the workplace.  According to the wonderful Eames' book, A Computer Perspectives (1973), "Taylor established the scientific fact that...a first-class shoveler will do his largest day's work when he had a shovel load of 21 1/2 pounds.  Then as a matter of common sense...it was necessary to furnish each worker with a shovel which would hold exactly 21 1/2 pounds of the particular material which he was called upon to shovel" (page 52).

There were a number of other people at work on this meme-like idea, all at about at the same time. Among these people is Henry Ford (and "Fordism") who practiced an economy of motion in human work production like no other person. (And he did this so well in fact that Taylor--on his visit to Michigan to see the Ford works in the year before his death in 1915--remarked that he was amazed that Ford could have achieved his level of sophisticated utilization of motion without the help of expert Taylorites. Ford famously disdained "experts", and had no connection with Taylor save for the two of them coming onto the same series of ideas at about the same time).

Scientific Management was a distinct disadavantage to the worker, the idea of the beast being to extract as much useful labor from the worker as practicable and possible.  And this was in spite of the relatively good pay rate and rest periods advocated by Taylor for his more significant and productive worker; he was far less kind those who were unskilled.  Taylor's system was seen as a boon to some industries, and a but to others--it was the U.S. government which was in that later group, taking Taylor to task in his systematization of the Watertown Armory  (on the Charles River, in Watertown, Massachusetts), finding it dangerous and ineffective, and banning its implementation in similar government operations.

Taylor introduced a sort of prehistoric singularity, where workers simply behaved like machines as best they could, human workers with no metallic parts, but with brain and muscle that were trained to react in relatively identical ways from series to series as tasks were performed.  The practice commodified the labor, made the workers into replaceable and standardized units, making the job unpleasant; and when real industrialization and robotics came along decades later, the humans in the unpleasant jobs lost even that to the machines; and then those machines lost their jobs top other machine which did the work cheaper in other countries. 

It was really another dawning in the coming era of robot workers and automated means of production--and more deeply, the probably-at-some-not-too-distant-date human-machine singularity. The term "singularity" emerges early on (though not the first time) with the great Stan Ulam, who paraphrased John von Neumann as saying:

"One conversation centered on the ever accelerating progress of technology and changes in the mode of human life, which gives the appearance of approaching some essential singularity in the history of the race beyond which human affairs, as we know them, could not continue".--Ulam, S., "Tribute to John von Neumann", Bulletin of the American. Mathematical Society, vol 64, nr 3, part 2, May,. 1958, p1-49.

It has bene argued though that von Neumann wasn't necessarily speaking of singularity in the way that many speak 
of it presently, in terms of irreproachable superhuman intelligence. A very good example of this definition is seen 
with I. J. Good (Good, I. J., "Speculations Concerning the First Ultraintelligent  Machine", in Advances in 
Computers, vol 6, edited by Franz L. Alt and Morris Rubinoff, eds, pp31-88, 1965, Academic Press), which I 
present below in a poetic format, mainly because the original seemed so, well, "poetic" to me:

              Let an ultraintelligent machine be defined as a machine 
             that can far surpass all the intellectual activities of any
              any man however clever.  Since the design of machines is one of
              these intellectual activities, an ultraintelligent machine could
              design even better machines; there would then unquestionably
              be an "intelligence explosion," and the intelligence of man
              would be left far behind.  Thus the first ultraintelligent
              machine is the _last_ invention that man need ever make, 
              provided that the machine is docile enough to tell us how to
              keep it under control.
    
              It is more probable than not that, within the twentieth century,
              an ultraintelligent machine will be built and that it will be
              the last invention that man need make.

Notes:

A good review of "technical singularity" is seen in the article by Vernor Vinge (Department of Mathematical Sciences San Diego State University), "The Coming Technological Singularity: How to Survive in the Post-Human Era" written for VISION-21 Symposium sponsored by NASA Lewis Research Center and the Ohio Aerospace Institute, March 30-31, 1993 (and also retrievable from the NASA technical reports server as part of NASA CP-10129), here:

          o The development of computers that are "awake" and
              superhumanly intelligent. (To date, most controversy in the
              area of AI relates to whether we can create human equivalence
              in a machine. But if the answer is "yes, we can", then there
              is little doubt that beings more intelligent can be constructed
              shortly thereafter.
            o Large computer networks (and their associated users) may "wake
              up" as a superhumanly intelligent entity.
            o Computer/human interfaces may become so intimate that users
              may reasonably be considered superhumanly intelligent.
            o Biological science may find ways to improve upon the natural
              human intellect.

I've reproduced the first four elements of a definition below; you can follow the link above to the rest of the article.