{"id":2967,"date":"2025-01-01T10:39:19","date_gmt":"2025-01-01T18:39:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/enfascination.com\/weblog\/?p=2967"},"modified":"2025-01-01T10:39:20","modified_gmt":"2025-01-01T18:39:20","slug":"what-if-governance-technologies-are-the-last-thing-we-need","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/enfascination.com\/weblog\/post\/2967","title":{"rendered":"What if governance technologies are the last thing we need?"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p><\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Something I&#8217;ve been stuck on for several years. There&#8217;s the part of every task that you do to get it done, and there&#8217;s the part that you do to benefit from the process of doing it.&nbsp; We&#8217;ve made this pretty bimodal: with some tasks (literary reading, expressive writing, educational problems) that are primarily about the experience and others (most things at work) that are about the result.&nbsp;&nbsp; Some things are clearly both (sports) but I think there are some things that are invisibly both. It&#8217;s important because it influences where we apply technology.&nbsp; If there are things that we think are about the output that are actually about the process, then they shouldn&#8217;t be automated. A good potential example is note-taking: if it&#8217;s less about the notes and more about the taking, the mass adoption of LLM summarization may not serve us.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>I&#8217;m always afraid that maintaining governance systems (taking notes, facilitating meetings, getting to agreement, processing information) is about &#8220;both&#8221;. What if low-tech manually maintained governance helps us keep our self-governance muscles in practice, maintaining the habits of running effective teams, exhibit and instills values of service (commitment to a team&#8217;s mundane work is a strong signal), create things that are socially valuable because they were costly to provide (a well run gathering as a valued ritual), and even evaluate our peers (observe who is responsible in their commitments and trustworthy in their notetaking)?&nbsp; If there&#8217;s anything to any of this, then governance technologies may be the last thing we need: the most counterproductive thing to invest engineering\/automation\/technical effort into.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>There are a few obvious counterpoints, namely that those things can be developed (maybe better developed) by doing the more meaningful work that&#8217;s not automated.\u00a0 Maybe that&#8217;s right, or maybe it assumes too much learning transfer, and certainly is disregards the credibility and legitimacy of drudgery: in community houses cleaning the toilets was acknowledged as less desireable and more appreciateable work than cleaning the kitchens<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>There&#8217;s a great\u00a0<a rel=\"noreferrer noopener\" href=\"https:\/\/enfascination.com\/weblog\/post\/2857\" target=\"_blank\">example<\/a>\u00a0in Ostrom&#8217;s work of technical improvements killing a commons<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>The more constructive version of the same question: what is the role of technology in tasks that shouldn&#8217;t be automated away?<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>p.s. turns out Brian Eno says the same thing about music in AI:<br>https:\/\/bsky.app\/profile\/karlbode.com\/post\/3ldf6zg65ic2b<\/p>\n<!-- AddThis Advanced Settings generic via filter on the_content --><!-- AddThis Share Buttons generic via filter on the_content --><!-- AddThis Related Posts generic via filter on the_content -->","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Something I&#8217;ve been stuck on for several years. There&#8217;s the part of every task that you do to get it done, and there&#8217;s the part that you do to benefit from the process of doing it.&nbsp; We&#8217;ve made this pretty bimodal: with some tasks (literary reading, expressive writing, educational problems) that are primarily about the &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/enfascination.com\/weblog\/post\/2967\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading <span class=\"screen-reader-text\">What if governance technologies are the last thing we need?<\/span><\/a><!-- AddThis Advanced Settings generic via filter on get_the_excerpt --><!-- AddThis Share Buttons generic via filter on get_the_excerpt --><!-- AddThis Related Posts generic via filter on get_the_excerpt --><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"wpupg_custom_link":[],"wpupg_custom_link_behaviour":[],"wpupg_custom_image":[],"wpupg_custom_image_id":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/enfascination.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2967"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/enfascination.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/enfascination.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/enfascination.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/enfascination.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2967"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/enfascination.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2967\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2968,"href":"https:\/\/enfascination.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2967\/revisions\/2968"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/enfascination.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2967"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/enfascination.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2967"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/enfascination.com\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2967"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}