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Health & Fitness

Technology's Stealthy Virus - Mediocrity

Calm down, I am not talking about a computer virus or the overhyped concern that the NSA is coming for you.  I am presenting something much more nefarious.  Like a successful, if slow growing, biologic invader, this organism is doing to professionals and students, what paranoid parents thought marijuana would do to our young back in the sixties. Slowly, the bug is sapping our ambition, making us indifferent and fueling a generation of mediocrity, if not outright incompetence.

In the relentless pursuit of productivity, with its emphasis on making a commodity of all manner of work tasks, including the evaluation of people, we have over extended ourselves in ways that are dehumanizing us, but worse, creating failures that border on catastrophic.

Examples abound.

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We have before us the case of the disturbed man who killed thirteen people at the Washington Navy Yard.  Earlier, there was the psychiatrist Major who killed his fellow soldiers in Fort Hood.  In both situations, we heard little about who their bosses were, or how they came to be trusted with such potentially delicate positions.   Private Bradley Manning and the naive Edward Snowden have leaked information critical to national security in ways that will negatively impact the war on terror, foreign affairs and the safety of human intelligence assets for years to come.   Again, who gave Manning his clearance?  Better still, why have we not heard about the poor judgment of his supervisor? And just how did Snowden’s contractor do his background check. 

The decline in both the competence and morality of middle managers has been exacerbated, in my view, by relying on technology for things that require executive skills.  Decisions and the evaluation of others cannot be left to machines. There are far too many people in responsible positions who want the stripes without the responsibility, the reward without the risk.  They want to pass off their accountability to a computer profile or automated analysis.

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Perhaps the first disaster to come out of the technology boom was the financial collapse. It is true that Fed policy, poor regulations, greed and the securitization of complex financial strategies into trad-able instruments all were causes of the great recession.  Indeed, the primary innovation that made it possible was the ability take your mortgage and transform it from a serious life altering contract between two parties…you and your bank…into one of thousands of cash flows in a pool that could be carved into faceless investments that could then be valued in various ways and even projected into future values.  These instruments were traded using complex algorithms and computer models that went beyond the comprehension of all but the very few who built them.  It made everyone, including the regulators, lazy and clueless. 

You can’t get a job interview without a computer profile, a mortgage without an online history, or a credit card without a credit rating from an agency that most often blindly takes in information without checking the accuracy of the data or the veracity of the institution that provided it.  What is worse, in this case, due to the fallout from the financial breakdown, banks and other credit providers, are doing credit inquiries in excessive numbers which have the effect of damaging credit ratings.

It is not about you anymore; it is about what is in the system about you.  Worse, we are using that system to game everything from what time of day people buy things to whether they will die from a heart attack.  We know this because we rely on the system to game the results and spare us the accountability. The sad thing is that we are gaming ourselves, losing our edge, and making our selves sick with technology bred mediocrity.

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