Autopilot by Andrew Smart Page A

allowing interns to work overtime against Chinese regulations and during peak periods workers worked more than seven days in a row without a rest day. In addition the investigation recorded many health and safety issues and found that although there is a trade union with a collective bargaining agreement it does not measure up to international or national standards.”
    One Foxconn worker comments, “We get yelled at all the time. It’s very tough around here. We’re trapped in a ‘concentration camp’ of labor discipline—Foxconn manages us through the principle of ‘obedience, obedience, and absolute obedience!’ Must we sacrifice our dignity as people for production efficiency?” In this inhumane environment, Ngai’s study found small acts of resistance among the workers such as stealing products, slow-downs, stoppages, small-scale strikes, and sometimes even sabotage, which really delays production.
    Then there are of course the suicides, the final option for workers to exert control over their lives. The system—in this case, the worker’s brain—tries to inject variation into its life—the stealing and sabotage—to find a more stable space in which the intrinsic dynamics of the system are in balance with the environment.
    Complex systems exist very close to the edge between order and disorder—this is called “self-organized criticality,” and it allows these systems to adapt to new environments. At this edge of chaos, systems rapidly change their internal structures until they find a stable state. There are limits to this adaptability however, and they are nonlinear. They can reach a threshold beyond which the system completely and catastrophically falls apart. A striking example of this is how glaciers melt. They can withstand a certain amount of warming, but when the melting has reached a certain threshold (the popular term for this is “tipping point”) the glacier will start to disappear even if the temperature drops again.
    Sand piles are often used to illustrate how self-organized systems stay on the edge of order and disorder, and to illustrate the concept of a nonlinear threshold. Imagine a completely flat surface on which you pour grains of sand at some constant rate. The grains of sand fall randomly to either side of the pile as it builds up. At first, the pile is small and so the angle of its slope is very shallow. You can keep adding sand and the pile will just get taller.
    At a certain point, the angle of the pile will become steep enough so that adding more sand causes small avalanches. Eventually, the angle of the pile and the frequency of the avalanches will converge to form a balance so that the overall shape of the pile is maintained. However, the key to this is that there is an open dissipation of sand running off the pile to compensate for the new sand being poured on to the pile. If you keep adding sand, the pile angle will become so steep that when you add just one more grain of sand, it will cause a catastrophic avalanche that flattens the whole pile.
    Working nonstop has become a new badge of honor among the professional digital class. We walk around with our gadgets trying to define our value propositions. The compulsion that businesses have to organize our lives with apps and calendars comes from deep ignorance of how the brain actually functions. We refuse to recognize that our brains are already a miracle of complex organization.
    Albert Einstein, in a much-overlooked 1949 essay called “Why Socialism?”, wrote, “If we ask ourselves how the structure of society and the cultural attitude of man should be changed in order to make human life as satisfying as possible, we should constantly be conscious of the fact that there are certain conditions which we are unable to modify. As mentioned before, the biological nature of man is, for all practical purposes, not subject to change.”
    While our