Ithuta JV

Three resources are required to accomplish any given task; information (knowledge); work (energy) and time. These three resources are interrelated; e.g. we use less energy if we do something slowly and require more information and knowledge if we don’t have enough time. Remember the call in the USA during the oil crisis in the seventies for drivers to drive more slowly (55mph) so as to conserve the energy in their petrol. At the extremes we may think of a thoughtful retired philosopher who has a lot of time and knowledge and uses little energy to accomplish a task; primitive man who used lots of time and energy doing things because he had no knowledge of labour saving devices and our modern technological society where there is lots of information, knowledge and energy but very little time.

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The cost of doing any task is therefore the sum of the costs of the energy, information and time needed to complete the task. Cost reduction has focused mainly on improving the efficiency of energy , enhancing information and decreasing the amount of time required. The more energy and information we allocate to a task the less time we will use and the cheaper will the task be, or so we hope. If this is true, costs should be dropping and we should have more time at our disposal. The fact that, in broad terms, costs are rising and available time decreasing, makes us think that something is wrong somewhere.

Work, information and time are interconnected, with a change in one affecting the others. For example, the more meaningful the information, the better will be a worker’s performance. The more time, the better the information can be evaluated. The better the information the better the performance, and so on.

In many cases there is just too much information for a person, or a computer for that matter, to effectively process in a reasonable time. We seem to be living in an era where quantity is more important than quality. With the technology today, measurements and records of just about anything are possible and this is taken as information. Go into any worker’s office and you will be startled by the reams of computer print outs on his desk or mesmerised by the quantity of data on his computer screen. The problem is that there may be a high information content but very little value content.

The value of information resides not in the raw data but in the amount of work done by its originator that its receiver is saved from having to repeat. The value of information is in its meaning and this meaning does not arise from raw data but arises from the data that was discarded during the process of formulating the information, which then has a specific meaning and value content. Unfortunately extracting meaning from data takes time but because there is so much data there is no time to carry our computations to find meaning. Even for a computer computations take time. A table of the phases of the moon throughout the year, and for future years, can be computed from a simple algorithm-but it takes time. If you wanted to know when next there would be a full moon, the algorithm would perhaps be acceptable provided you had time to do the necessary computations. You would be pretty annoyed if you were only sent the algorithm if you didn’t have time for the computations.

The common sense view of time is that it is a mathematically precise continuous ‘flux’. The passage of time is more than merely our stream of consciousness but it allows us to measure, analyse and describe our physical world with unlimited precision. We believe that there is an all embracing universal time-time is just ‘there’-and cannot be affected by anything. Time just goes on flowing at a uniform rate whatever happens around us. Whatever we are doing, wherever we are and however we are moving, time just marches on reliably and is the same for everyone-it marks out successive moments of reality. There is a moving ‘arrow of time’, with an arrowhead marked ‘now’, that draws a line of a ‘past’, produces a ‘present’ and indicates a direction toward a ‘future’.
In more recent times, however, mainly on account of Albert Einstein and his relativity theory, there is another view of time that has an intrinsic flexibility about it. The experience of time is tied to the individual observer. No longer can one speak only of the time, but must include your time and my time. In this view, time is relative. We each have our own personal ‘arrow of time’, which marks out our successive realities, not someone else’s. Our personal arrow of time is psychological, not mathematical.

These two views of time are quite similar to those distinguished by the ancient Greeks: kairos (personal and social ‘opportunistic’ time) and chronos (external, ongoing time). Kairos was seen as the time of ‘cleverness’ while chronos was the time of wisdom.
The effect of modern society revving itself is a short attention span. Time is becoming compressed and horizons closer. So far there does not seem to be any balancing corrective that encourages a long view. Gratification, be it business or personal, needs to be immediate. As Samuel Johnson said, “we go from anticipation to anticipation, not from satisfaction to satisfaction”. There is no time for investing in the future for, as we believe, “the future is now”.

Because we are humans, thinking and behaving like humans, not like machines, we will always struggle to keep up with the technological acceleration that is driving economic acceleration. Only when technological change becomes genuine human progress will we start yearning for it instead of bracing ourselves against its force.