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May 27 - June 5, 2018
The three largest forces on the planet—technology, globalization, and climate change—are all accelerating at once.
“When you press the pause button on a machine, it stops. But when you press the pause button on human beings they start,” argues my friend and teacher Dov Seidman, CEO of LRN, which advises global businesses on ethics and leadership. “You start to reflect, you start to rethink your assumptions, you start to reimagine what is possible and, most importantly, you start to reconnect with your most deeply held beliefs. Once you’ve done that, you can begin to reimagine a better path.”
In his sobering book Sabbath, the minister and author Wayne Muller observes how often people say to him, “I am so busy.” “We say this to one another with no small degree of pride,” Muller writes, “as if our exhaustion were a trophy, our ability to withstand stress a mark of real character … To be unavailable to our friends and family, to be unable to find time for the sunset (or even to know when the sun has set at all), to whiz through our obligations without time for a single, mindful breath, this has become a model of a successful life.”
Dov Seidman likes to remind me of the Talmudic saying “What comes from the heart enters the heart.” What doesn’t come from your heart will never enter someone else’s heart. It takes caring to ignite caring; it takes empathy to ignite empathy.
When you put your value set together with your analysis of how the Machine works and your understanding of how it is affecting people and culture in different contexts, you have a worldview that you can then apply to all kinds of situations to produce your opinions. Just as a data scientist needs an algorithm to cut through all the unstructured data and all the noise to see the relevant patterns, an opinion writer needs a worldview to create heat and light.
Craig Mundie, a supercomputer designer and former chief of strategy and research at Microsoft, defines this moment in simple physics terms:
‘Disruption’ is what happens when someone does something clever that makes you or your company look obsolete. ‘Dislocation’ is when the whole environment is being altered so quickly that everyone starts to feel they can’t keep up.”
Indeed, there is a mismatch between the change in the pace of change and our ability to develop the learning systems, training systems, management systems, social safety nets, and government regulations that would enable citizens to get the most out of these accelerations and cushion their worst impacts.
even though human beings and societies have steadily adapted to change, on average, the rate of technological change is now accelerating so fast that it has risen above the average rate at which most people can absorb all these changes. Many of us cannot keep pace anymore.
In other words, if it is true that it now takes us ten to fifteen years to understand a new technology and then build out new laws and regulations to safeguard society, how do we regulate when the technology has come and gone in five to seven years? This is a problem.
Universities are now experimenting with turning over their curriculum much faster and more often to keep up with the change in the pace of change—putting a “use-by date” on certain courses.
When the world is flat you can put all the tools out there for everyone, but the system is still full of friction. But the world is fast when the tools disappear, and all you are thinking about is the project.
Hagel, Seely Brown, and Davison elaborated on this theme in a coauthored essay in the January 27, 2009, Harvard Business Review entitled “Abandon Stocks, Embrace Flows.”
In more stable times, we could sit back and relax once we had learned something valuable, secure that we could generate value from that knowledge for an indefinite period. Not anymore. To succeed now, we have to continually refresh our stocks of knowledge by participating in relevant flows of new knowledge.
Singapore invested in both the infrastructure to make sure it was participating in every digital flow as well as the education of its workforce, to make sure they could take advantage of those flows if the government made them available. Individual cities that now do the same thing can reap the benefits. So this isn’t complicated: the most educated people who plug into the most flows and enjoy the best governance and infrastructure win. They will have the most data to mine; they will see the most new ideas first; they will be challenged by them first and able to respond and take advantage of
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Ever since the early 1990s, President Bill Clinton and his successors have been telling Americans the same old, same old: if you “work hard and play by the rules” you should expect that the American system will deliver you a decent middle-class life and a chance for your children to have a better one. That was true at one time: just show up, be average, do your job, play by the rules, everything will be fine … Well, say goodbye to all that.
Average is officially over. When I graduated from college I got to find a job; my girls have to invent theirs.
No politician in America will tell you this, but every boss will: You can’t just show up. You need a plan to succeed.
Within the next decade that digital divide will largely disappear. And when that happens only one divide will matter, says Marina Gorbis, executive director of the Institute for the Future, and that is “the motivational divide.”
Intelligent assistance involves leveraging artificial intelligence to enable the government, individual companies, and the nonprofit social sector to develop more sophisticated online and mobile platforms that can empower every worker to engage in lifelong learning on their own time, and to have their learning recognized and rewarded with advancement.
Intelligent assistants arise when we use artificial intelligence to improve the interfaces between humans and their tools with software, so humans can not only learn faster but also act faster and act smarter.
Lastly, we need to deploy AI to create more intelligent algorithms, or what Reid Hoffman calls “human networks”—so that we can much more efficiently connect people to all the job opportunities that exist, all the skills needed for each job, and all the e...
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“The Olin College curriculum is continually evolving—by design,” said Miller. “The current incarnation provides a snapshot of the best efforts of the Olin community to provide a new paradigm for engineering education. The curriculum currently expires every seven years and must be actively reviewed and either revised or reinstated.”
“The cognitive load is too much,” he added, “and technology has to reduce that cognitive load on the user. Everyone will need and everyone will have a personal assistant.”
As Warren Buffett says, “You only find out who is swimming naked when the tide goes out.”
People often wonder, “Why do tornadoes always hit trailer parks?” They don’t. It’s just that trailer parks are enormously frail and vulnerable when they do get hit.
Because “pluralism is not diversity alone, but the energetic engagement with diversity,” explains the Pluralism Project at Harvard on its website, “mere diversity without real encounter and relationship will yield increasing tensions in our societies.”
Rabbi Marx added, though, that there is a Jewish postbiblical view of God. In the biblical view of God, He is always intervening. He is responsible for our actions. He punishes the bad and rewards the good. The postbiblical view of God is that we make God present by our own choices and our own decisions. In the postbiblical view of God, in the Jewish tradition, God is always hidden, whether in cyberspace or in the neighborhood shopping mall, and to have God in the room with you, whether it’s a real room or a chat room, you have to bring Him there yourself by how you behave there, by the moral
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God celebrates a universe with such human freedom because He knows that the only way He is truly manifest in the world is not if He intervenes but if we all choose sanctity and morality in an environment where we are free to choose anything.
“Every technology is used before it is completely understood,” Leon Wieseltier wrote in The New York Times Book Review on January 11, 2015. “There is always a lag between an innovation and the apprehension of its consequences. We are living in that lag, and it is the right time to keep our heads and reflect. We have much to gain and much to lose.”
That is why I insist that as a species, we have never before stood at this moral fork in the road—where one of us could kill all of us and all of us could fix everything if we really decided to do so.
