Thursday, March 1, 2012

Erp (2)

based on this story (in Finnish) about ERP(enterprise resource planning) going personal:
http://www.digitoday.fi/mielipide/2007/07/17/kuluttajaakin-erppii/200717265/66

a system taking care of person's dull everyday formalities like bills, receipts, bureaucracy. not bad.
your own personal secretary who knows your calendar and whom you can put the do the errands like book a dentist etc.
Isn't this the normal direction of evolution, to get rid of dull routine? Sometimes it works, like you buy your bread and cheese ready sliced. Addition is done by computers, potatoes grown by someone else. But you have to recycle bottles and sort the garbage, type your own documents.

I.e. some tasks you can loose and some you don't. You also get new tasks. It's easier to acquire knowledge via web but then on the other hand, somebody feel compelled to write wikipedia.

Distantly, this relates to a book I read( was it Utterback can't remember). There was an example of cereal-growing in America, how it got more effective during centuries. At a given time the crop increased threefold. But at the same time, the energy needed got tenfold. Efficiency getting worse was the price for more centralized production serving a changed society structure.

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first published 2007
http://mielikuva.blogspot.com/2007/07/erppi.html