Mental labour

Mental labour

1. Contrast between industrial and information machines

   • Substituting for (and enhancing) physical and mental labour

2. Relations between mental, intellectual and clerical labour

   • Relate to the material basis of being
   • Practice in advance of consciousness
   • Adequacy of existing distinctions
     • Pre-existing characterisations of mental labour
     • Intellectual labour
     • Clerical labour
       • Clerical labour can be described as a machine process
       • Some forms of clerical labour can not be transferred into machine process (Dictiction)
     • Division of occupations
   • Possibility of distinctions corresponding to the material basis of being

3. Semantic

   • Examples
     • Human understanding and composition of written language may be highly intractable computationally
     • Writing is undifferentiated (no divisions). Mental labor not broken down into intellectual (semantic) / clerical
     • Spell checker
   • As human mental work motivated by direct considerations of meaning
   • Semantic labour increasingly exists as the residue of what has not been reduced to a syntactic process
   • Semantic labour can exceed syntactic labour or processes
   • The divide between intellectual and clerical work is becoming more blurred

4. Syntactic

   • Examples
     • Copying is a form of syntactic labour
     • Adding numbers
   • Motivation
     • This labour is much cheaper so if a process can be done syntacticly, it will be
   • Labour & Process
     • Motivated or determined by patterns

5. "Syntax is not semantics" (Searle, 1980)

   • Warrant for distinction of semantic from syntactic labour (addition of concept of labour).

6. The distinction of semantic from syntactic mental labour has been increasingly adopted

   • A fundamental distinction between semantic and syntactic labor lies in the fact that the former is ‘irreducibly human’ and not amenable to mechanization, whereas the latter is ‘transferable to technology as [a form of] machine process.’

7. Orginates as semantic labour

   • Syntactic labour progressively separates out
     • Easier ways to complete tasks are worked out

8. Distinctions with regard to labour

   • Universal and communal labour
   • Universal labour and syntactic labour
   • Communal labour and semantic labour

9. Labour and expertise

   • Knowledge as the product of semantic mental labour over time
   • Expertise as a manifestation of knowledge
   • Exchange value of expertise

10. Results of dynamic of interchange

    • Expansion of scope of syntactic processes as a significant result (Expansion of human capacities)

11. Strategic

    • If we can understand what is going on, we can intervene more