Almost six decades later, we appear to be doing just what Feynman implicitly cautioned against. We are cornering ourselves in the narrow view that crowds man and machine onto the same tasks. The latest witch hunt is underway and gaining momentum. The witches are the rapid innovation in robotics and computing, slated to replace humans in performing increasingly sophisticated – i.e. “whitecollar” – tasks and so displace jobs across the employment spectrum.

Says David Rotman in MIT Technology Review’s “How Technology Is Destroying Jobs”:

Brynjolfsson, a professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management, and his collaborator and coauthor Andrew McAfee have been arguing for the last year and a half that impressive advances in computer technology—from improved industrial robotics to automated translation services—are largely behind the sluggish employment growth of the last 10 to 15 years. Even more ominous for workers, the MIT academics foresee dismal prospects for many types of jobs as these powerful new technologies are increasingly adopted not only in manufacturing, clerical, and retail work but in professions such as law, financial services, education, and medicine.

Brynjolfsson and McAfee’s dystopian vision goes further still. According to Rotman, they believe rapid technological innovation has been gobbling up jobs faster than it is creating them. Technological change is thus causally connected to the stagnation of median income and the growth of inequality in the United States.

But even class warfare and total societal meltdown is apparently not an apocalyptic enough vision for some. According to Ray Kurzweil, Elon Musk and others, once artificially intelligent machines are able to design other machines, humans will become an endangered species. Machines will have exponential improvement as a clear evolutionary advantage.

Before you click “submit” on that application for the Mars One one-way mission to colonize our neighboring red planet, you should know there is an alternative view for a positive man-machine dynamic. While in the minority, brilliantly exquisite arguments exist for a symbiotic man-machine future. They celebrate that which is uniquely human – meaning and creativity – and that which, in my humble opinion, should be the primary business of humans in the first place.

In his latest TechCrunch article, David Nordfors makes a distinction between a task-centered and human-centered economy. In the task-centered economy humans have no value beyond the tasks they perform. Consequently, they are indistinguishable from machines and will be replaced by them for reasons of cost-efficiency as soon as technically feasible. In the human-centered economy on the other hand machines liberate humans from predefined tasks with prestated outcomes. This allows them to exercise the value that emerges from collaborating with other humans on open-ended, creative endeavors. Nordfors cites Gallup’s astonishingly low figure of worldwide employee engagement at work (13%) to surmise the opportunity cost between the two economies: $140 trillion over the next few decades in favor of the human economy.

In “Reinventing the Sacred” Stuart Kauffman pretty much puts to rest the notion that human brains can be framed as glorified computational devices and therefore are bound to become indistinguishable from algorithms as machines eventually attain astonishing sophistication. Kauffman draws from fields as varied as complexity, neuroscience and cognitive science and invokes Godel’s incompleteness theorem to point out that higher order human mental processes are beyond algorithmic enunciation. Philosophers such as Sanders Pierce and design thinkers such as Roger Martin have long proposed the ability of human minds to perform leaps of logic to get to creative solutions. Going beyond logical-based arguments and case study proof, Kauffman eloquently describes how machine algorithms, even based on the most sophisticated foreseeable AI technologies, can only solve problems which are bounded by prestated assumptions.

Why do I subscribe to Nordfors’ and Kauffman’s visions? For one, because in my life as a consultant I see the task economy that strips people of their uniqueness and dehumanizes them into glorified algorithm machines every day. It is the very reason why I have a job: because most of my clients have forgotten how to think and solve problems that aren’t tamable by an algorithmic framing. I like to call these “no precedent” problems.

We have for the majority of humanity’s history used humans for menial, mechanic, robotic, repeatable, efficiency-minded tasks. A select few were in the business of thinking creatively for the entire species. Technology has finally reached a threshold where creativity and meaning is accessible to everyone. In the 21st century, creating meaning and innovating will be democratized through technology. As David Nordfors rightly asserts, never yet seen avalanche of wealth and prosperity is waiting to be unleashed. We are on the verge of revolution of pace of progress that will forever eliminate the last form of human slavery: meaningless, dehumanizing, algorithmic work.

In closing, my test for outsourcing human work to machines is this: any task that has an output or outcome which can be prestated or even guessed, should eventually be performed by a machine. Humans should eventually be left to more or less exclusively deal with open-ended endeavors that generate new organic value (as opposed to efficiency derived value). Alluding to Peter Drucker’s thinking, effectiveness should be a human pursuit, while efficiency should be delegated to machines.

It is time for someone to update Feynman’s 1959 postulate for our 21st century reality: there is plenty of room at the top of human mental and emotional ability to more than occupy ourselves for centuries.

Before the Industrial Revolution reliability wasn’t a granted thing. The whole concept of craftsmanship was intrinsically tied to the idea that the quality of the output varied widely with each individual. This lack of uniform standards meant that the benefits of scale economies were out of reach. The big invention fostered by the Industrial Revolution was reliability (arguably at the expense of craftsmanship). Process and procedures become more important than human skill, and indeed people were expected to perform as reliably as machines. This was possible as long as the output was predominantly physical in nature. So one could venture to guess that the biggest “unseen” output of the world in the last 100 years is standards, procedures and processes.

But as the rate of technology innovation and insertion is increasing so is complexity. Picture just one example: two technologies produced by two vendors have each very well defined “how to” procedures. However since the two technologies belong to two different parent companies, there isn’t someone out there worrying about procedures managing the possible interaction. Now scale the argument by a hundred fold and the number of possible interactions increases exponentially. Even if we decided to institute a body whose sole purpose is to create procedures to manage the interaction of various technologies, there wouldn’t be enough time and resources to tackle this endeavor. And so, the same procedures that have served us so well in the Industrial and Knowledge Economies, will fall short in helping us with the complexities of the Conceptual Economy.

Here’s where resilience comes into play. Resilience brings back the “non-reliable” (i.e. adaptive) character of human intelligence. What was seen in the Industrial Revolution as a fallacy of humans, improvisation, will likely make a forceful comeback. Consulting companies have long used jazz-bands and symphony orchestras to advertise performance. But there was a clear disconnect between pictures and words: performance really is more closely related to reliability than complexity. Now resilience works in a complex world precisely because it expects the human to improvise in order to cover the gap between the performance space covered by procedures and the larger space of possibilities yielded by unforeseen interactions.

This brings me to the mechanisms of resilience. I’ve already alluded to the adaptive mechanism that relies on the unique human ability to improvise. There is also a second, structural mechanism of resilience. This structural mechanism provides the build-in buffers within which improvisation can safely happen without degrading the functional coherence of the larger system. In the jazz-band analogy, the drum beat provides the structure within which solo instruments can improvise. And so I strongly believe the world will again come to rely on craftsmanship. I am however unsure as to how we will get there; for example, I am still unclear as to how popular concepts like crowd-sourcing score against the resilience mechanisms criteria I have just reviewed.

My view? There is more to the story than technological disruption. To understand such subtleties, one has to look at the underlying philosophy of education.

As knowledge is fast becoming a commodity, the very business model of traditional education, that of conveying knowledge, will be disrupted. Let me elaborate. I would argue that the traditional model of education was predicated on a robust philosophy. Knowledge was conveyed to the student in the form of recipes applicable to a variety of possible scenarios or situations likely to be encountered in the real world. At the end of the learning experience the student would be in the possession of a catalog of playbooks if you will. And so, at this time, our colleges and universities are still churning out a workforce capable of robustly adressing typical challenges. But what about Nassim Taleb’s Black Swans?

As the world is moving from the knowledge to what Daniel Pink calls the “conceptual economy”, the traditional model of education is at risk. Knowledge is not only becoming abundant and easily accessible, but the “standard” scenarios and situations required by recipes are an endangered species. There are no repeatable scenarios in a complex, causality-blurred world, so why would one invest in recipe solutions? Assuming you agree with me so far, the pragmatist in you might ask about the alternative.

I believe there is such an alternative predicated on a radically different educational philosophy: resilience. If the robust model focused on knowledge itself, an educational model predicated on a resilience mindset would focus on building the capacity or wisdom if you like for evaluating knowledge. Since knowledge is becoming a commodity and since the abundance of recipes guarantees there are conceptual inconsistencies and overlaps, I believe tomorrow’s professionals will pay to learn ways to navigate the fluid knowledge landscape. Skills for making sense of problem ontologies will be more valuable to tomorrow’s student than understanding the specifics of a particular case study. And so, I think we need to teach our future leaders the art of situated knowledge, or knowledge about knowledge, or meta-knowledge.

 
The mental shift required for accepting this new paradigm will be difficult for educators and students alike. After all, it’s easier for educators to test the accumulation of knowledge than wisdom, and students get that warm, fuzzy, confidence reassuring feeling that comes with the ability to repeat a freshly assimilated trick – recipes are finite while sense-making is a never-ending work in progress. The resilience model is much fuzzier when it comes to both validation and satisfaction. But resilience works in the face of complexity, while robustness and recipes don’t – remember, scenarios don’t repeat! As the Godfather character in the movie with the same name might say, this isn’t personal, it’s just where the future is going. Higher education can either keep up or erode itself. And what about technology? I believe it can have an accelerating effect, but I don’t believe it will be the decisive factor. The establishment could cede the robustness model to technology and successfully make the transition to the resilience model, where human interaction is indeed indispensable.

Author:

Liviu Nedelescu is a management consultant and business thought leader with an astute globalization understanding framed by two opposable extremes: high complexity transformation in advanced economies and agile start-up entrepreneurship in emerging markets. Mr. Nedelescu is also a keen observer of the enduring human predicament defined by the perpetual tension between creativity and fear of change.

Combining formal rigor at the intersection of system technologies, design principles and complexity thinking with large scale transformation expertise and entrepreneurial practice, Mr. Nedelescu is currently developing a management science ontology suited for 21st century systemic challenges. Mr. Nedelescu is also currently lending his subject matter expertise to the transformation of the air transportation system alongside industry principals. Most recently, Mr. Nedelescu has become involved with executive business education and advising higher learning institutions on innovation and differentiation strategies. Other career highlights include several patents and peer reviewed publications, two start-ups, disruptive management consulting theoretical models and methods, operational and commercial strategies in advanced and emerging economies, innovation and change initiatives leadership.

Over two and a half millennia ago, Greek philosophers gave us the “dialectical” method of constructive argument. In the 21^st century democracy is faced with significant challenges, and moving forward may require searching for solutions from the wisdom of democracy’s inventors.

The dialectic method is a form of reasoning based on dialogue of arguments and counter-arguments, advocating propositions (theses) and counter-propositions (anti-theses). The dialectical method of dialogue is unique and different from rhetoric and debate in that it aims to converge the opposite points of view and form a new and superior point of view from the synthesis of the initial arguments. This transcendence is possible by searching for commonalities between the two opposing points of view when considered in the larger context or whole of which they are both part. Ancient history not applicable to the problems of today’s highly technologized and interconnected world, right? Not necessarily.

Fast forward to the 21^st century: Roger Martin, #6 on the top fifty management thinkers of 2011 (http://www.thinkers50.com/biographies/95) and a guest speaker at the 2012 Global Drucker Forum is the creative force behind two of the most valued management models: Integrative Thinking and Design Thinking.

Roger Martin defines Integrative Thinking as: “the ability to constructively face the tensions of opposing models, and instead of choosing one at the expense of the other, generating a creative solution of the tensions in the form of a new model that contains elements of the individual models, but is superiors to each” (http://rogerlmartin.com/devotions/integrative-thinking/). Sound familiar? Roger Martin’s concept was actually developed by interviewing some of the world’s top business leaders and entrepreneurs. Apparently these “integrative thinkers” go about solving problems differently than “conventional thinkers”; and step 4 of the figure below has an uncanny resemblance to the dialectical method.

And so, without the benefit of modern technology or access to a study group, Socrates said pretty much the same thing more than 2500 years ago. And as we look to the challenges faced by democracy in the 21^st century, we may have to take Socrates and his fellow Greek philosophers seriously.

But what is the main challenge of our century’s advanced democracies? A lot of the challenges can actually be related to one dominant culprit: complexity. Small start-ups are good sources for inspiration when it comes to agility, but past a critical mass agility gives way to complexity as a bureaucracy grows in size. And advanced democracies are experiencing the “complexity” by-product of progress to a growing degree (see the 2008 financial crisis and other systemic events). And so, in the current construct of democratic progress, agility and complexity seem to be mutually exclusive; so much so that the left and right political ideologies of the leading modern democracy, the USA, can be said to be increasingly aligned to the agility thesis and complexity antithesis. On one hand, the left ideology is advocating for a top-down, bureaucratic approach to tackling complexity. The right by contrast is advocating for an agile bottom-up, government-free approach to tackling complexity. In true agreement with the dialectical method, the future of democracy may well need a transcendence of those two viewpoints into a synthesis that would bring together bureaucracy and agility: an innovative, agile, next generational government together with a private sector responsible to all its stakeholders, not just its shareholders.

But the transcendence of the current left and right political ideologies which could be the answer to the complexity dilemma also has to happen at the level of the individual human being. And there are more subtle ideological differences between the left and right political parties at that “micro” level. There are so to speak, emotional and behavioral differences in how the individual is perceived. The left ideology emphasizes a compassionate view of the individual, and sharing opportunity with the less fortunate, those that are somehow left outside the system with all its benefits. At the same time, the right ideology emphasizes the competitive human side that is by definition individualistic and not necessarily in alignment with compassion. Are these ideologies, apparently opposed, actually facets of the same human construct when regarded from a more holistic perspective? Are human beings both compassionate and competitive? For a successful society that both makes progress and takes care of its less fortunate, are these attributes not required simultaneously? And if so, is there a model that could reconcile these so that democracy itself has a future? Is the distant future of democracy predicated upon the disappearance of the left and right ideologies?

Roger Martin’s second area of interest, Design Thinking, may provide the solution to an ideology-free democratic construct. Design Thinking, closely related to Integrative Thinking, can be described as a style of thinking that is generally associated with the ability to combine empathy for the context of a problem, creativity in the generation of insights and solutions, and rationality to analyze and fit solutions to the context. A Design Thinking approach to political ideology could bring the two dominant ideologies closer together, by demonstrating a shared concern for the individual’s well being, both in terms of the basic need for individualism (competitiveness) and inclusiveness (compassion). Creativity, the key ingredient of Design Thinking, represents that uniquely human trait which could lead the way to a future world where competitiveness and compassion are symbiotic and simultaneously harmonious: that is, there is no need to alternate between the two every four years.

Author:

Liviu Nedelescu is a management consultant and business thought leader with an astute globalization understanding framed by two opposable extremes: high complexity transformation in advanced economies and agile start-up entrepreneurship in emerging markets. Mr. Nedelescu is also a keen observer of the enduring human predicament defined by the perpetual tension between creativity and fear of change.

Combining formal rigor at the intersection of system technologies, design principles and complexity thinking with large scale transformation expertise and entrepreneurial practice, Mr. Nedelescu is currently developing a management science ontology suited for 21st century systemic challenges. Mr. Nedelescu is also currently lending his subject matter expertise to the transformation of the air transportation system alongside industry principals. Most recently, Mr. Nedelescu has become involved with executive business education and advising higher learning institutions on innovation and differentiation strategies. Other career highlights include several patents and peer reviewed publications, two start-ups, disruptive management consulting theoretical models and methods, operational and commercial strategies in advanced and emerging economies, innovation and change initiatives leadership.