This has to be the coolest, best, most wonderful Idea I’ve heard about in years. A fridge where anyone can leave unwanted food and anyone can take it. Takes food from shops that’s past its sell-by date too. https://www.peoplesfridge.com/
Now I’m aware that putting up an image like this does potentially risk an outbreak of panic. If you aren’t already concerned about globalisation, ageing workforces, declining productivity, the war for talent, millennials, managing virtual teams, too much connectivity and too much distraction then perhaps you are now.
I’m fairly sure that artificial intelligence is creating more anxiety than excitement in most quarters too. But relax. Don’t panic.
I’m not saying that AI isn’t an issue. It is. A big one. But we are inventing this technology and we, as individuals, organisations and society as a whole, remain in control of it. If we don’t like where AI is going, we should do something about it.
But that’s not why we should relax. We, and especially HR Directors, should relax because AI will never do what most of us do.
AI can do almost anything humans do, but with four critical exceptions in my view.
1.AIs can’t invent. They never will. Not at a fundamental level. AIs can paint, but they’ll never invent Cubism. AIs can write music and plays, but they’ll never be Mozart or Shakespeare. They’ll never be Steve Jobs or Elon Musk either.
2.AIs can never be truly empathetic. They can never have true emotional intelligence. They can fake it and the movie called Her is a good example. So too is a robotic seal called Paro that’s used in care homes. But AIs know nothing of the human hearts and never will. And without empathy you cannot effectively lead other people.
3.AIs can’t inspire humans. We can fully automate hiring and firing if we choose, we can use AI to spit out an endless deluge of data and workplace analytics, but I cannot see a future where humans will willingly follow AIs with a smile on their face and a spring in their step.
4.AIs contain computer code, not moral code. This has to be programmed by humans. AIs know nothing of fairness either. I could talk about the moral bankruptcy of Silicon Valley at this point, but I’ll spare you the sermon.
So that’s AI. Don’t panic. But I have something else on my mind.
Back in 2014, a Gallup global poll found that almost 90 per cent (I’ll say that again – almost 90 per cent) of employees were doing jobs that they didn’t really like. Almost 90 per cent were either “not engaged” or “actively disengaged” from their work. Given that work is where we spend most of our time, most of our lives in fact, the mind truly boggles.
Why might this be so and what might we do to fix this?
Here are another 3 things to think about.
1.Management. There’s too much of it. We don’t trust people enough. Witness our ongoing obsession with offices. I’m a big fan of the physical office. Work is social and so are people and I don’t think you can create a winning culture 100% virtually. But offices are a physical manifestation of a command and control mentality that’s past its sell-by date in some instances. They are remnants of a feudal system. We need to knock down the enclosures. We need to relax the rules.
I understand why factory workers need to go to a factory to get their work done, but why do knowledge workers? Why do people have to go to a fixed place of work 5 days a week, 9am to 5pm inside a building? Can’t we be a bit more flexible about how and when we allow people work? We need much more personalisation of work contracts and conditions.
2.Disconnection. We are too connected to our work. Thanks to laptops, smart mobiles and cloud computing work has invaded every area of our lives. You can’t even lie by a pool on holiday nowadays without someone being on the phone to the office. As Frankie once said, “Relax.” “Don’t do it.” “When you want to go to it.”
Employers have bought a slice of peoples’ time. Not all of it. If people are being paid to think, or solve problems involving other people, as they increasing are, they need to recharge themselves as well as their devices. Constant connection to the office is impacting physical and mental health and destroying relationships. It has to stop. Holidays should be compulsory. People shouldn’t be allowed to email or call people out of hours unless it’s a matter of survival.
3.Human intelligence. Are we not smart enough to see that we are being stupid?
I’m referring to how we educate people and integrate them into the workforce. We are obsessed with tests that measure logic and memory. Why, when this is precisely what computers are so clever at? We are also obsessed with STEM. Is it because we feel it’s how you futureproof a workforce or a career? Similar mistake.
Coding skills? I’ve met people that are inventing software that can write itself. But to invent things like this you need some level of creative intelligence alongside scientific skills. You need the science, but you also need the art and, as an aside, we should put these two disciplines back together where they started and where they belong.
We should insist that art, music and design are key components of the national curriculum and should be given the same degree of funding and respect as all other subjects. The bedrock is the 3Rs, but above this should sit subjects that teach people how to think critically and creatively.Organisations have a big role to play here. Organisations should provide lifelong learning opportunities across all these areas.If AI really is where things are going I’d speculate that the future actually lies in the humanities.
Most importantly of all, we need to value all forms of intelligence, especially the emotional intelligences. There are eight forms of intelligence, but we tend to only teach, measure or value one or two.
We are obsessed with logical and perhaps linguistic intelligence, but tend to ignore the rest. This is troubling, partly because logical intelligence is the type most likely to be impacted by AI and partly because most jobs nowadays involve dealing with people, and people can be emotional and irrational to put it mildly. Machines, in my view, can’t navigate in this landscape. Only people can. AI can help here, hugely, but it cannot and should not replace people.
If we fix all this, and especially if we start valuing what I’d term emotional work, then we will have a good chance to include the people that currently feel undervalued or valueless to organisations and to society at large.
If we can show people that we care about this and are attempting to rebalance the thing we currently call work then there’s a good chance that the stress, anxiety and dissatisfaction that surrounds so much work will dissipate or disappear.
If we give people the time and space to work with machines, not against them, we can invent a future in which people are paid for being human, not penalised for it.
One of the 100 technologies on my table of disruptive technologies is battlefield robots. Most people will probably think of six foot bipeds out of The Terminator, but tiny insect-sized killer robots might be more realistic and far more of a problem to contain.
This is weird. I had a dream that I was Donald Trump’s speach writer last night. And I was writing his speaches on leaves of iceberg lettuce using a dark blue fountain pen. WTF?
More usefully, I woke up around 4am remembering that the name I had just given to someone as a bitcoin expert was in fact a sci-fi writer. Wrong surname. Got to love how the brain works.
So Volvo are now using the tag line “Human Made”. Meanwhile, there’s a new book out called How to be Human (I was going to use that at one point) and I’ve just seen a t-shirt with the slogan “Remain Human.” (I want one of these). What’s going on here?
I don’t think this has anything to do with the Big Tech Backlash I first speculated about around two years ago. This has to do with the ethical and financial behaviour of certain companies in Silicon Valley along with worries about invasions of privacy and the addictive nature (deliberately designed) of social media and smart phones.
No, this is something else. I’m not sure what yet, but my gut feeling is that it has something to do with the stream of scare articles about AI and robotics and the imbalance between analog and digital.
It’s a human feeling, so it’s hard to put your finger on it.
One of the biggest problems with the current digital deluge is the tendency to no longer see what’s directly in front of us. The sheer amount of information now being passed around means that we’re becoming less able to filter what’s really important from what’s really not. Information is no longer power. Our deep and undivided attention is.
Constant digital distraction (which results in constant partial attention) also means that our concentration spans are shortening (or so they say) and our peripheral vision is narrowing. Throw in some headphones and things aren’t looking good, especially if you are seeking new opportunities or risks. This is because the early harbingers of forthcoming upheaval and disruption are often hidden in tiny snippets of seemingly trivial information or obscured in plain sight in the shadows and auditory obfuscations of our everyday existence.
So how can you spot these ‘weak signals’ or other forerunners of change? How can you spot things that don’t tend to announce themselves in huge data sets? How can you mine for insights in research groups when you don’t know exactly what you are looking for?
The answer is to develop a mind-set that’s always looking for these things. You need to become more attuned to instinct and gut feelings. You need to become furiously curious. You need constantly look for things that are new and might represent a shift in how things are seen or done. But to do this you need to unfreeze and then re-set your mind-set towards deep looking and deep listening.
You also need to go to where anomalies initially emerge, which tends to mean the edges or fringes of established markets and thinking. This might be young minds or it could be academic institutions or upstart start-ups. It might even be passionate users of particular products and services (‘super-users’) or particular places where being different or quirky is seen as being culturally useful or prestigious (California not North Dakota, although the urban fringes of Fargo might contain something, or someone, of interest).
Or you can be lazy. Cultural change often procedes technological or regularly change, so become attuned to new currents in advertising, music and film. For example, I heard the lyric “Don’t go digital on me” in a song lyric the other day. Is that significant? Or there’s an ad on TV for a chocolate bar with the slogan “undivide your attention.” Again, significant?
Beyond anecdotes like these it’s rather difficult to be precise. After all, how can one explain what one’s looking for when one doesn’t really know what one is looking for and whatever it that you are looking for keeps changing the whole time? I think the answer to this is to accept that you will never fully know and to keep looking regardless.
This isn’t something that’s ad hoc. You cannot create a ‘search party’ that looks for weak signals for a week and is then disbanded. It’s something that’s continuous and the activity will suit some personality types more than others.
Let me give you a few more examples. I was in Brooklyn, New York, recently. I was in a hotel lift and someone (I’m assuming not a graffiti artist) had written “Lonely together” in huge white letters on the glass panel inside the elevator. Why was it there? What did it mean? It could have been a subliminal ad for a TV show of the same name or perhaps it meant something more?
Or how about a few years ago when Google bought Zagat, the publisher of local restaurant guides (published on paper). This made no sense. Why would an online publisher (sorry, tech company) buy someone that puts ink on dead trees? Could it be that they were interested in local expertise or search or did they see a role for paper in a digital world? (come to think of it, why did Google send me summaries of my Google Adwords campaign in a posted letter – on paper?). Question anything that doesn’t make sense or doesn’t fit an established pattern. To invert a popular schooldays phrase: question every answer.
Of course, if you start frequenting the fringes you will inevitably bump into some fairly fringe people. Some will be weird, quite possibly annoying and probably of no use whatsoever. But don’t judge these people too soon. Maybe they aren’t crazy. Maybe they are right, but just a little bit early. What’s thought of as weird, crazy or just plain impossible one moment has a habit of becoming conventional wisdom over time. So, button your lip and keep your mainstream prejudices and cynicism to yourself. For example, there are ‘tech hermits’ living off-grid in rural North America. Some of these people claim that the use of mobile phones and Wi-Fi has made them sick. I had a boss once that carried a business card that read “Maybe they’re right” printed on the reverse. Maybe he was right.
This is the opened minded mind-set you’re after and it’s a mind-set that can equally be applied to reading newspapers, looking at webpages or talking to strangers on the subway. (Do you do that? Why not? Expand your network and experiences). Keep asking yourself why someone is saying something? What’s behind a story or opinion? What do they want? What’s their interest here? Are they alone in thinking or doing this?
Also, be aware that you (and everyone else) sees the world and everything in it through a lens hand-crafted from personal experience. What you need are interchangeable lenses. You need one that’s for narrow close ups and another for wide big picture panoramas.
And be aware that you will suffer from a number of notable cognitive biases too, most significantly confirmation bias. These biases seek to close our minds by persuading us (usually subconsciously) that what we are seeing aligns with things we’ve already seen or things we already think or believe. In other words, we tend to frame things in a particular way based upon what we’ve experienced before. You need to be aware of this and fight against it if you are to discover anything that vaguely resembles objective reality.
A more recent example of a weak signal. Why are twenty-somethings buying old tech? For example, what’s behind the re-birth of vinyl and why are so many people, including smart people that work in Silicon Valley and for MI5 (allegedly), using what might be called dumb-phones over smart- phones? Are the two things possibly connected? You can figure this one out yourself, but you might need to switch your smart-phone off to do this.
One final thought. Liberate yourself from the false precision of numbers. Weak signals are, by definition, weak. They are fuzzy, unclear and indistinct. They represent small numbers of people (sometimes just one person) bravely thinking about the world in a different way or doing things somewhat differently from almost everyone else. You cannot put meaningful numbers around these people to ‘prove’ that they are significant. If you can prove it it’s a trend (or possibly a fad or counter-trend) it no-longer represents a weak signal. Got it?
References:
Paul J.H . Shoemaker and George S. Day, ‘Making sense of weak signals’, MIT Sloan Management Review, Spring 2009,
Paul J.H. Shoemaker and George S. Day, ‘Scanning the Periphery’, Harvard Business Review, November 2005.
Martin Harrysson, Estelle Metayer and Hugo Sarrazin, ‘The strength of weak signals’, McKinsey Quarterly, February 2014.
In the distant future I think there’s a real possibility that keys will cease to exist. Instead we will open doors with our faces. Similarly, we won’t have cash or credit cards or even Apple Pay. What we will have is Apple Face Pay or some similar (Facebook Face?). We will pay for things by having machines scan our faces, which are probably a bit more secure than a signature, passwords we can’t remember or, in the case of physical locks, sets of keys (we currently carry an average of 9 metal keys, but have no idea what 3 do!),
In China, companies such as Face ++ (currently valued at around $1 billion), Alibaba and Baidu have developed such facial recognition technology already. Of course China is not the UK or US. In China surveillance is omnipresent and its people don’t seem to care about this too much. Minority Report and Face Off here we come….
Thanks due to Matt Doyle for sign spotting. Do please send any further signs in, especially any related to risk or what might be termed ‘weak signals’.
IMPORTANT UPDATE!
Little bit of an issue. The final table is now embargoed until Monday January 22 for various reasons. I’ll put the table and the PDF back up end of Monday. Sorry.
UPDATE: NOW UP ON THIS LINK
http://toptrends.nowandnext.com/2018/03/12/table-of-disruptive-technologies-innovation/
