Developer Speaker Series: Taylorism has entered the ChatGPT with Heidi Waterhouse

Scientific management says that there is a right way to do things, a best way, and that the way to make workers more efficient and standard is to enforce that one way. Large Language Models take the texts they are fed and predict the most likely thing we want next. While both scientific management and LLMs are a revolution in how work gets done, they are also a tribute to homogeneity, mediocrity, and norming. Join me for a far-ranging exploration of industrial design, standardization, and why normal and average are sometimes a deadly myth.