Contrast between industrial and information machines
Substituting for (and enhancing) physical and mental labour
Relations between mental, intellectual and clerical labour
Relate to the material basis of being
Practice in advance of consciousness
Adequacy of existing distinctions
Pre-existing characterisations of mental labour
Intellectual labour
Clerical labour
Clerical labour can be described as
a machine process
Some forms of clerical labour can not be transferred
into machine process (Dictiction)
Division of occupations
Possibility of distinctions corresponding
to the material basis of being
Semantic
Examples
Human understanding and composition of
written language may be highly intractable
computationally
Writing is undifferentiated (no divisions). Mental labor not broken
down into intellectual (semantic) / clerical
Spell checker
As human mental work motivated by
direct considerations of meaning
Semantic labour increasingly exists as the
residue of what has not been reduced to a
syntactic process
Semantic labour can exceed syntactic labour or processes
The divide between intellectual and clerical work is becoming more blurred
Syntactic
Examples
Copying is a form of syntactic labour
Adding numbers
Motivation
This labour is much cheaper so if a
process can be done syntacticly, it
will be
Labour & Process
Motivated or determined by patterns
"Syntax is not semantics" (Searle, 1980)
Warrant for distinction of semantic from syntactic labour (addition of concept of labour).
The distinction of semantic from syntactic
mental labour has been increasingly adopted
A fundamental distinction between semantic and syntactic labor lies in the fact that
the former is ‘irreducibly human’ and not amenable to mechanization, whereas the
latter is ‘transferable to technology as [a form of] machine process.’
Orginates as semantic labour
Syntactic labour progressively separates out
Easier ways to complete tasks are worked out
Distinctions with regard to labour
Universal and communal labour
Universal labour and syntactic labour
Communal labour and semantic labour
Labour and expertise
Knowledge as the product of
semantic mental labour over time
Expertise as a manifestation of knowledge
Exchange value of expertise
Results of dynamic of interchange
Expansion of scope of syntactic processes
as a significant result (Expansion of human
capacities)
Strategic
If we can understand what is going on, we can intervene more