high performance

Harvard Business Review's 'summer reading' (their big summer edition) has a big piece on motivation. Timely, as motivation can dip drastically in a downturn, with employees worried about their finances, their job and the future.

There was a survey of happiness at work. Orchestra members came second from the bottom, just above prison guards. Chamber musicians came top. What's the difference between chamber musicians and orchestra musicians?

Hmmm, machines as an extension of us are part of the new convergence theory. Convergence used to mean IT and Telecomms merging but that's old hat now. Today it means humans merging with machines - light sensitive chips being inserted into the back of the eye so that blind people can see, that sort of thing.

One of the proponents of the gradual merging of human and machine is Stephen Hawkins (yes, that Stephen Hawkins) and you can see how he would lean to this view, given his own use of machines to maintain mobility and to communicate.