In Mindless: Why Smarter Machines are Making Dumber Humans (2014), Simon Head introduces the reader to the occult world of "Computer Business Systems" (p. 4) or CBSs. CBSs are defined as largely invisible "amalgams of different technologies that are pulled together to perform highly complex tasks in the control and monitoring of business, including their employees" (p. 6). Head shows how CBSs employ digital networks, large quantities of data, data visualizations, and artificial intelligence in the form of expert systems, towards ends teleologically isomorphic to those of another complex technological system: the Taylorist-Fordist mass production system. Head understands CBSs as tools of rationalization in the interests of profit-maximization and describes them as "essentially latter-day vehicles of Scientific Management, vastly empowered by information technology" (p. 186).
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