(h) TROM - 2.4 Work

http://tromsite.com - Full documentary, very well organized (download, youtube stream, subtitles, credits, share, get involved, and many more)

Documentary´s description :
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TROM (The Reality of Me) represents the biggest documentary ever created, it is also the only one that tries to analyse everything : from science to the monetary system as well as real solutions to improve everyone's life.

A new and ´real´ way to see the world.

"Before the Big-Bang, till present, and beyond."
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Labor is the direct contribution to the monetary system,

to the circulation of money,

but is also the only way to acquire money,

which leads directly to the obligation of work.

Most jobs only focus on the ultimate prize, money,

with little regard for the human condition.

Labor, in this way, is another form of slavery.

Automation can replace most repetitive jobs today

perfecting the quality of work, but let's concentrate on

something much more important: motivation.

Our motivations are unbelievable interesting, I mean,

I find, I have been working on this for a few years

and I just find this topic still so amazingly engaging and interesting.

So I want to tell you about that.

The science is really surprising.

The science is a little bit freaky, ok?

We are not as endlessly manipulable, and as predictable as you would think!

There's a whole set of unbelievably interesting studies. I want to give you two.

They call in to question this idea that if you reward something you get more of the behavior that you want,

if you punish something, you get less of it.

So let's talk..let's go from London to the main streets of Cambridge Massachusetts,

to The NE part of the United States.

And I wanna talk about a study done at MIT, Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Here's what they did: They took a whole group of students, and they gave them a set of challenges,

things like: memorizing strings of digits, solving word puzzle, other kind of special puzzle, even physical tasks

like throwing a ball through a hoop.

Ok? They gave them those challenges and they said

to incentive their performance, they gave them 3 levels of reward, ok?

So, if you did pretty well you´ve got a small monetary reward,

if you did medium well you get a medium monetary reward,

and if you did really well, you are one of the top performers you´ve got a large cash prize, ok?

We´ve seen this movie before, this is essentially a typical motivation scheme within the organizations, right?

We reward the very top performers, we ignore the low performers, and the other folks kind in the middle ... ok, we give a little bit.

So what´s happens? They do the test, they have these incentives, and here´s what they found out:

one: as long as the task involve only mechanical skill bonuses worked as they would be expected,

the higher they pay the better the performance, ok? That makes sense, but here´s what happened:

but once the task call for even rudimentary cognitive skill, a larger reward lead to a poorer performance.

And this is strange right? A larger reward lead to a poorer performance, how can that possibly be? And the interesting thing about this

is that these folks here who did it , are all economists, two from MIT, other from the university of Chicago, one at Cargenie meilon, ok?

Top tiers of the economics professions, and they reach to this conclusion that seems contrary to what a lot of us learn in economics

which is, which is the, the higher the reward, the better the performance

and they are saying that once you get above rudimentary cognitive skill, it's the other way around.

Which seems to this kind of the idea that the rewards don´t work that way

seems bleakly left wing in socialist, doesn't it? It's kind of, it's kind of weird socialist conspiracy.

But those of you who have those conspiracy theories, I want to point out this sort of notoriously left wing in socialist groups that finances the research,

the Federal Reserve Bank, this is the mainstream of the mainstream coming to a conclusion that it´s quite surprising,

that seems to defies a lot of behavioural physics, so this is strange, the strange is fun , so what did they do?

they say this is freaky, let´s go test it somewhere else, maybe that 50 dollars, 60 dollars prize is insufficiently motivating for an M.I.T.'s... right?

so let´s go to a place where 50 dollars is actually more significant relatively, so we take this experiment we gonna go to Madurai India, Rural India

where 50 dollars, 60 dollars, whatever the number was is actually a significative amount of money

so they replicated the experiment in India, roughly as follow: small rewards, the equivalent of two weeks salary... I mean, sorry, so:

small performance, low performance: two weeks salary, medium performance: about a month salary

high performance about 2 months salary, ok? So this is real good incentive, and you are gonna get a different result here.

Well what happened though, was that, the people offered the medium reward, did no better than the people offered the small reward, but this time around,

the people offered the top reward, they did worst of all. Higher incentives led to worst performance.

What´s interesting about this is that it actually isn´t that anomalous, this has been replicated over and over and over again

by psychologist, by sociologist, and by economists, over and over and over again. For simple straight forward tasks, those kind of incentives

if you do this then you get that... they are great. For tasks that are algorithmics, set of rules, we have this follow along and get a right answer

if then a reward caracteristics oustanding!

but when the task gets more complicated, when it requires some conceptual, creative thinking

those kind of motivators mostly don't work...

fact: money is a motivator at work, but in a sightly strange way: if you don't pay people enough: they won't be motivated

what's curious about this is that there´s another paradox here: which is that the best use of money is as a motivator

is to pay people enough, to take the issue of money off the table. Pay people enough so they are not thinking about money and they are thinking about the work

now once you do that it turns at the 3 factors that science shows that lead to a better performance

not to mention personal satisfaction. Autonomy, mastery and purpose

Autonomy is our desire to be self directed, to direct our own lifes. Now in many ways traditional notions of management run and fall out of that

Management is great if you want compliance, but if you want engagement, which is what we want

in the workforces today, as people are doing more complicated things... self direction is better.

Let me give you some examples of this almost radical form of self direction in the workplace that leads to good result.

Let´s start with this company right here: Atlassian, an australian company, a software company,

and they do something really cool, once a quarter at thursday afternoon they say to their developers:

for the next 24 hours, you can work on anything you want, you can work on it the way you want, you can work on with whomever you want,

all we ask is that you should show the results to the company at the end of those 24 hours,

and this fun kind of meeting, not a start chamber session, but this fun meeting with beer and cake and fun and other things like that,

it turns out that that one day of pure and alluded autonomy has led to a whole array of fixes for existing software,

a whole array of ideas for new products, that otherwise would never emerge, one day!

This is not a "if then" incentive, this is not the sort of thing that i would have done 3 years ago before I knew this research.

I would have said you want people to be creative and innovative? Give 'em a fricken innovation bonus. If you do something cool I give you 2,500 dollars.

They're not doing this at all, they're essentially saying: you probably want to do something interesting,

let me just get outta your way... one day of autonomy produces things that never emerge.

And let´s talk about mastery, mastery is the urge to get better at stuff, we like to get better at stuff, this is why people play musical instruments on the weekend,

you´ve got always people who are acting in ways that seems irrational acknowledgedly...

They play musical instruments on weekends? Why? It's not gonna get them a mate, it's not gonna make them any money, why are they doing it?

Because it's fun, because you get better at it and that´s satisfying.

Go back in time a little bit, imagine, I imagine this, if i went to my first economics professor: a woman named Mary Allen Schulman,

and I went to her in 1983 and said: professor Schulman can I talk after class for a moment?

I´ve got this incline, I´ve got this idea for a business model I just wanna pass you,

here´s how it would work: you get a bunch of people around the world who are doing highly skilled work,

but they're willing to do it for free and volunteer their time 20 sometimes 30 hours a week.

Then she´s looking at me somehow skeptically... hold on, I'm not done... and then what they create... they give it away rather than sell it!

It´s gonna be huge!

I'm sure she truly would have tought I was insane. It seems to fly in the face of so many things,

but what do you have? You have linux powering 1 out of 4 corporate servers and 45 hundred companies...

Apache powering more than the majority of web servers...

Wikipedia... what´s going on? Why are people doing this? Why are they, why are these people, many of them are technically sophisticated, highly skilled people,

who have jobs! Ok? They have jobs! They're working at jobs for pay, doing challenging, doing sophisticated technological work

and yet, during their limited discretionary time, they do equally if not more technically sophisticated work

not for their employer, but for someone else, for free! That´s a strange economic behaviour.

Economists would look into it: why are they doing this? It´s overwhelmingly clear: challenge and mastery

allong with making contribution. That´s it. Would you see more and more of rise of what you might call

a purpose motive. Is it more and more organizations want to have some kind of transcendent purpose

partly because it makes coming to work better, partly because that's the way to get better talent.

And what we're seeing now is in some ways, when the profit motive become unmoored from the purpose motive,

a bad thing happen, bad things, ethically sometimes, but also bad things just, like: not good stuff,

like: crappy products, like: lean services, like: uninspiring places to work.

When the profit motive is ??? or when it becomes completely unhitch on the purpose motive, it's just, people don't do great things

More and more organizations are realizing this and it's sort of disturbing the categories between what's profit and what's purpose.

and I think that actually heralds something interesting, and I think that the companies and organizations that are flourishing,

wether they're profit, poor profit or somewhere in between, are animated by this purpose, i'll only give you a couple of examples.

Here's the founder of skype. He says: our goal is to be disruptive but in the cause of making the world a better place.

Pretty good purpose. Here's Steve Jobs, I wanna put a ding in the universe, alright?

That's the kind of things that might get Jobs in the morning racing to go to work.

So I think that we are purpose maximizers, not only profit maximizers.

Think that science shows that we care about mastery very very deeply, and the science shows that we want to be self directed

and I think that the big take away here is that, if we start treating people like people, and not assuming that they are simply horses,

you know slower, smaller better smelling horses. If we get pass this kind of ideology of caracteristics and look at the science

I think we can actually build organisations and work lives that make us better off,

but i also think they have the promise to make our world, just a little bit better.

So work is mandatory in the monetary system,

and this system makes money the primary motivation for work,

which leads, scientifically, to a very low efficiency of the workers

because autonomy, mastery and purpose are what motivate humans.

Millions of people have already been replaced by machinery

and this will continue.

In fact it's even cheaper to invest in machinery

because they do not need salaries, medical insurance,

air conditioning, holidays or breaks.

Remember that any repetitive work can be automated, as for the other jobs...

Many have a very difficult time seeing how automation can be applied to complex jobs such as doctors, architects, etc

In order to consider this, we first need to ask ourselves, what the true nature of our occupational roles really are

What exactly is a doctor, a carpenter, a plumber or an architect... what are they actually doing?

They recognize and react to observed patterns.

When a doctor examines you, all he's doing is mentally referencing what has been learned.

If you go to other methologists because you think you might have cancer on your arm,

the doctor is going to examine the skin and mentally reference the patterns he or she has been taught.

Then he will take a sample of the skin to be tested by machine analysis.

It is a technical process, there's no reason to say, that an optical scanner connected to a computer database

cannot scan your arm and immediatly understand what problem exists.

Even surgery, as sensitive as it may seem, is a purely technical process.

It is only a matter of time before extremely advanced machines replace surgeons.

The same goes for every other utilitarian occupation in existence.

The utilitarian roles that humans assume in society today are fundamentally technical by nature.

Once that seems obvious in regard to physical labor, and mental labor can now be delegated to computers as well.

If this sounds foreign to you, please note that if you have ever used a calculator you have delegated your decision making to a machine.

When you divide 19,500 by 30 with the calculator, this machine is to decide the result, not you.

We must remember that logical reasoning is the cognitive ability to find solutions from a cause and effect standpoint,

following the rules and laws of a given system,

is entirely a technical process. There's nothing magical or esoteric involved in an addition,

or the identification of a molecule in a component.

If you are going to decide between using metal A or metal B for producing an airplane, it's not done by you being seated and thinking,

but doing the strength resistence experiment with the metals and if they pass those tests, they are selected or discarded.

It is not a hidden process that happens in some area of the brain,

it is informations obtained by doing precise and defined testing, that can beyond as being automated.

There isn't a capitalist or a communist way of building an airplane.

If the airplane doesn't satisfy the physical requirements to be able to fly, it won't fly.

A person can not invent something that has no correlation with reality,

it doesn't matter how imaginative you are,

if what you imagine can not be obtained by rearranging and manipulating existing physical stuff in reality,

it will not materialize.

And do not forget that repetitive work does not help the human brain develop,

it is an embarrassment for an intelligent species.

It's very easy to repeat and to replicate any profession,

but in time people will not work. They go to work, they think well that's the way you earn a living.

No it's not, it's the only way we use today, but in the future, work will be considered to be needless.

Because men have a brain, when you put a girl behind a cash in a department store for 15 years... What can I do for you man?

We have pencils, lipsticks .... (incomprehensible)

all that is crap. That's not using her brain.

All that will be automatically dispensed, very easy to do.

Work is needless. It serves no useful purpose.

[ Alternative Solutions ]

[ 1) Automation ]

The solution will be automating as much as possible,

and the remaining jobs, which would be only a few,

will be done by people because science has shown that a man's work is better

when it is motivated by purpose, and not by money.

Those being proven, man can be free of work, meaning free of slavery in most cases,

which represents a giant step forward in the evolution of humans.

While work is largely done by machines, and man is motivated

by purpose, the access to goods and services will be free of charge.

If automation would lead directly to a lack of jobs,

the remaining jobs would be done because of their purpose, to improve society,

then such a development would not require a monetary system to function.

So if the only reward you get is seeing less poverty and hunger, starvation and deprivation,

kids with swollen bellies, all gone, and that doesn't give you incentive,

if your only incentive is money system, then you don't understand human beings.

Because you all own your own live to the advances made by Edison, Louis Pasteur, and all the other people,

you're alive because of them. So if you don't feel you want to put anything back into the earth to make it a better place,

i would say you're harmful, to yourself and society.

Most of the development we have in our society today, the technology,

the airplanes, TV, radio, moderns production technology, they're really done by very few people.

I would say several hundred people comprise the modern technological civilization.

But you don't need millions of technicians and millions of scientists,

how many people do you know of today, sitting in their home and playing their phonograph and radio and TV,

have any idea of how this works?

The main purpose of technology is to make the individuals' life easier,

and now technology is so advanced that the individuals' life may be

exempt from any involvement in finding food, information,

comfort or any aid.

Only the influence of an extremely harmful system can enforce

a negative situation like the one currently on Earth.

A situation where ordinary individuals know just a fraction

of the available information and where technology

is capable of improvements, but not used.

To compel other individuals of your species to work when work

can be automated, or to ask for obedience in exchange for food,

leads to psychopathic behavior of individuals that create

or perpetuate such situations.

A situation like this can only be the result

of a psychosis of individuals with power in society.