Page:Michael Velli - Manual For Revolutionary Leaders - 2nd Ed.djvu/24

 on this ambiguity. Social life in an industrial epoch does not consist of a predicted sequence of expected situations, but of an unexpected sequence of unimagined situations. It is precisely the human ability to invent original approaches to unforeseen problems that is counted on to make the system function efficiently and predictably. This can be illustrated with the example of a traffic jam in the warehouse district of Manhattan. There are times on weekday afternoons when a large area of narrow streets becomes completely blocked with trucks, buses, cabs and cars standing one or two inches apart in a grid where all exists are barred. The normal flow of laborers and commodities comes to a complete standstill. Drivers are unable to continue to their destinations or to return to their places of origin: they are locked in place. Under present circumstances, the combined ingenuity of the human drivers is required to invent an exit out of an unexpected cul de sac, since every major traffic jam is historically unique. However, in the case of automated drivers, the trucks, buses, taxis and cars would have to be air-lifted out of Manhattan, an event which would only be followed by a yet more spectacular jam at the bridges when the automatons try once again to reach their pre-determined destinations. If the automated drivers are programmed to activate another set of automatons in cases of traffic jams, for example an automated traffic police, the bottleneck could reach proportions which are unimaginable under present circumstances; it could lead to a complete standstill of all industrial activity.

Thus the individuals who are in daily contact with the dynamic elements of society, the constantly changing productive forces, are expected to be automatic and imaginative at the same time. For example, the drivers cited earlier are expected to exercise no more and no less than the powers of their specific office: the transportation of given goods to pre-determined destinations. However, precisely in the course of exercising the powers of their office, precisely while doing what "we drivers" have always done, these individuals are also expected to exercise their own self-powers, to do what "we drivers" have never done. Under present circumstances, namely when truck drivers are also human beings, it would not be normal, even for transport programmers, to expect a driver and a loaded truck to disappear only to be discovered months later locked in a newly built low-clearance tunnel. A "good driver" is not expected to have an imagination while exercising the powers of the office, an imagination which would explore the potential destinations and uses of the products in the truck. Yet the same driver is expected to have an imagination while exercising these powers in order to cope with unprogrammed and therefore unexpected detours, bottlenecks and breakdowns. This duality, this only partial negation of the worker's self-powers, is of course the source of continual turbulence in an otherwise stable system, a fact which explains the recurring interest in robots. The fact that human powers—desire, ingenuity, whim, caprice—remain necessary in an otherwise efficient system daily and hourly reintroduces the possibility that goods will not reach their pre-determined destinations.