Finally, we’re unboxing the teleporter

This week’s Wiki Man may read a bit oddly. You see, I haven’t ‘written’ it at all; I’ve dictated it into a kind of dictaphone (an Olympus LS-P4, at £130, needlessly expensive for the purpose, but that’s how I roll) and then uploaded the audio file to an online transcription service called otter.ai. The reason I’m doing this is to find out how long it takes to write a Spectator article when you dictate it and get it transcribed online, compared with writing it on a keyboard like it’s 1940 or something.

I’ll let you know the result at the end of this article. But I’m doing this because I don’t know the answer. It’s a worthwhile experiment — in an area where very little experimentation takes place.

When the pandemic hit, thousands of people were forced to work differently. And, to their amazement, most found Zoom meetings rather than physical ones surprisingly agreeable — and surprisingly productive. In part, there was the absence of commuting. It might also have helped that, as time spent in remote meetings went up, the volume of emails went down. But what’s really horrifying about this finding is that it came as a ‘surprise’.

This suggests that the worlds of management and administration have previously felt little urge to experiment with technology at all. They continued getting up at seven o’clock in the morning and travelling across town (or oceans) to meetings, without considering how new technologies might enable more productive behaviour. It’s as though the crew of the USS Enterprise had been supplied with a teleporter but had never got round to unboxing it.

Most popular

Jawad Iqbal

Blue Origin’s all-female space flight was a step backwards for feminism

We should have been performing these experiments on ourselves years ago, given that blue-collar workers have had their productivity measured, tweaked and Taylorised to within an inch of their lives.