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Here’s How To Think About Artificial Intelligence, Jobs And The Economy | Digital Tonto
Henry Ford provides a good model for understanding how displacement, productivity, and reinstatement shape how technology affects jobs and the economy: Automation on his family farm displaced his labor there, which led to him going to work for Thomas Edison. His increased productivity afforded him the luxury of leisure time, which he used to tinker, experiment and imagine new things. It was the third effect—reinstatement—that proved transformative. Ford became prosperous enough to start his own company and pioneer an industry that created many more jobs. Millions left their family farms, where their labor was no longer needed, to work in factories. Their increased productivity allowed them to earn more and educate their children to work in the high-tech industries of today. What’s crucial to understand is that it is ecosystems, not inventions, that determine the future. You can’t understand the impact of the automobile just by riding in one. It’s the second and third-order effects—how improved transportation and logistics transformed industries such as retail and manufacturing—that truly mattered. Electricity did the same for communication, information processing, entertainment and other things. For a decade, I’ve argued that we need to prepare for a new era of innovation. In fact, I considered this idea so important that I chose it as the title of the final chapter of my book Mapping Innovation, with which I concluded, “It is no longer enough to disrupt and disintermediate industrial era institutions; we must forge a new path with a renewed commitment to fundamental innovations.” What will determine our future is not any particular technology, but the ecosystems we build and what they are designed to serve. How can we focus our energies on tasks that AI can’t so easily automate? Do we intend to feed the hungry, cure the sick and protect dignity for every human life? Or do we want to preserve those things for only those that market and technological forces feel are deserving? Only we can shift our focus toward creating completely new industries that can serve us better. No machine, no matter how smart, can automate those decisions for us. Some things, we just have to do ourselves.
Change Usually Fails. Ask These 3 Questions To Improve Your Odds | Digital Tonto
To lead change you have to believe in it. You have to be optimistic and overcome doubts—your own and those of others. So it’s understandable that you want to make sure you have all the answers going in. Unfortunately that’s an unrealistic expectation. Change is inherently unpredictable and nobody has all the answers. But what you can do is ask good questions: Who will resist change and why? What are the sources of power that support the status quo and how can you influence them? Where should you start and who should you start with? These are tough questions without clear or simple answers, but you have to continually ask them. What you definitely don’t want to do is just make a plan and move forward on a timeline, hell or high water. That’s a sure path to misery and defeat. The truth is that nothing slows you down more than failure, so you want to move forward deliberately, learning as you go, and building traction and strength as you progress. Change is nonlinear, you accelerate over time. Pixar’s Ed Catmull described new ideas as “ugly babies” because they start out “awkward and unformed, vulnerable and incomplete.” “Originality is fragile,” he wrote. “The world is often unkind to new talent, new creations. The new needs friends… Our job is to protect our babies from being judged too quickly. Our job is to protect the new.” To take the metaphor a bit further, what you don’t want to do is take your ugly baby down to a biker bar and just let it get wailed on. Yet there’s something about human nature that, when we feel passionately about an idea, we want to convince the skeptics. We want to put the idea in front of exactly the people who hate it most and try to show that we’re right. Don’t do that. Protect the baby. Start by asking the right questions.
Why You Should Beware The Action Trap | Digital Tonto
When you are launching a new initiative, you want to start with a bang. You want to create a “sense of urgency,” conjure images of “burning platforms” and get everybody’s butts in gear. You will have the urge to recruit high-profile executives, arrange a big “kick-off” meeting and look to move fast, gain scale and rack up some quick wins. While this may be a good approach for a traditional initiative, for a transformational project it’s bound to backfire. Yes, you’ll excite and inspire some, but you will also ignite resistance. As opposition forms and begins undermining you behind the scenes, you are likely to get bogged down. Ironically, creating a sense of urgency often creates the opposite effect. That’s why when we work with an organization, we never do a full-blown launch, but rather start with a Keystone Change—a clear and tangible goal that involves multiple stakeholders and paves the way for future change. Yet instead of shooting bigger, we encourage the team to make it as small as possible. Your first actions should be barely noticeable and focused on people who are as enthusiastic about change as you are. Any early failures should be nearly invisible to the larger organization, but a meaningful success will provide traction and momentum to move forward. You don’t need to convince everyone at once, just enough to get going. Action without strategy, on the other hand, is doomed to fail. That’s why so many change efforts floundsert. They rush in, make noise and sputter out. Then people wonder why nothing ever changes.
The End of History All Over Again… | Digital Tonto
Before 1789 the world was ruled by the divine right of kings and the feudal system. Yet that year would prove to be an inflection point. The American Constitution the French Revolution and the first Industrial Revolution, already underway since the introduction of the steam engine in 1776, together created a fundamental realignment of power. Another came in 1919, with the end of World War I, the rise of the United States as a global superpower, and the second Industrial Revolution, driven by electricity and the internal combustion engine. The next half century would not be defined by empires, but ideologies, as capitalism, communism and, briefly, fascism, vied for supremacy. That era ended with the Cold War in 1989 and what comes next remains unclear. The neoliberal global order, if not completely discredited, has been found grossly inadequate. Today, we’re undergoing four major shifts in demography, technology, resources, and migration that are straining the global system towards a breaking point. Our institutions—governmental, educational, scientific, religious and economic—have been under siege for decades and have lost credibility. The main debate now is whether the current system needs to be completely torn down and replaced with some new order or redesigned, streamlined and strengthened. The one constant through it all is the basic need for recognition. That’s been our fundamental mistake over the past half century. We believed we could transcend human nature and build a society on purely rational economic foundations. We were wrong. Whatever comes next will have to begin by acknowledging the visceral human yearning for dignity and meaning.