The adjective

Probably because of the sheer volume of it, all historical representations are bound to be selective. So while a high school history student reads about the Indian freedom struggle, she studies the most limited references to the revolutionary period of our struggle for freedom. She learns what Gandhi did, she does not learn what he did not do or what he could have done or if our history post M. K. Gandhi would have been any different if he did different things. She does not learn what those different things might have been & which leaders - no more consequential in our current historical spectrum - thought of these different things & could not agree to the Gandhian way.

It is an immense practical problem to be complete in one's representation of history & then completely remove any bias of any kind in the selection of what goes into 'Official History'. However, this is not stated. No historian claims that his is only a version of the truth. And students do not learn their history with this practical caveat in mind. Then comes the final shaping of opinion depending on which version of truth you're sold on. So Gandhi is both renegade & a Mahatma, a national hero & a luddite in a way.

We have to start acknowledging the inadequacies that we cannot cure our history of. And we can start by ridding history of adjectives.

Personality tests

I'm sure from time to time all of have taken some kind of personality tests. It is 'most inescapable with the net being so full of them & the amount of unsolicited mails one possibly gets from these sites. They judge everything from your ability to turn an omelette to your expertise on leaving a peck on the neck.

However, some are, if not exactly informative, generally accepted to be of value or definitive of some kind of a benchmark. For example, the classic IQ test. The Intelligence Quotient has been believed to be a reliable indicator of a person's intelligence - for a while now - & in some really dubious studies, has been used to prove the superiority of one 'race' over the other. And this in spite of the fact that there is no scientific definition of race.

The Myers Briggs test is an interesting one. It is based on the psychological types defined by C. G. Jung & tries to arrive at the psychological type of the person taking the test by having her answer a series of questions. You can take a free online version of the test here.

It might sound like a far-fetched idea, & my own knowledge on the subject is very limited, but it appears that the test score has implications for your everyday life & career. In fact, this project management book recommends that teams be formed in the light of MBTI scores of the candidate team members.

I also believe that the online version is prone to errors of judgment & your online score is only indicative of your desired or perceived psychological type & it is only after working with MBTI consultants can you get an idea of your true type.

Also, with 16 MBTI types, assuming that people are distributed with equal probability across all types, the average % of people in any type is about 6%. So before you get glorious ideas & muse on the rarity of your psychology, laugh!

The paradox

It is generally accepted that of the following three options, only two can be satisfied at a time:

• To do something well
• To do something fast
• To do something cheap
  

We can combine the three & say that doing something well takes time or money, sometimes both. While money is the external market factor, taking time to achieve a goal & achieve it well, more often than not, translates into time taken to gather knowledge, time taken to generate alternatives, time taken to evaluate alternatives, time taken to implement the solution & so on. It is one of the goals of technology to reduce this time factor. So you have spreadsheet packages to organize data & produce, say, some kind of reports to help you decide faster & better. Note that

• The spreadsheet package example does not reduce the knowledge gathering time, for one.
  
• While it makes evaluation simpler, it does not entirely erase the need for human intervention.
  

It is then probably reasonable enough to deduce, in general, that the use of technology reduces the time taken for a process. Therefore, the more we use technology the faster we can do things. Hidden behind this otherwise benign fact, is the human bottleneck. We need technology because we're slow. Moreover, we're destined to be this way because of the way we're designed, the way we learn & retain knowledge, the way we process information, the way we can't learn easily what is already known, & the total amount of data we remember.

Machines of course have none of these problems.

The Age of Spiritual Machines seems to indicate a future where human existence is slowly enhanced & then slowly replaced by machines.
I'm just wondering that while technology lends itself very well to the solution domain, it is humans & their institutions that constitute the problem domain. Therefore, unless you have/perceive problems, you do not need to do solve it. However, if robots are to be problematic, why make them? And if humans are to continue, then the idea of perfection will continue with it.

And as always, it'll just be on the horizon.