Machine, Platform, Crowd: Harnessing Our Digital Future

by Andrew McAfee

We will try to convince you that because of recent technological changes, companies need to rethink the balance between minds and machines, between products and platforms, and between the core and the crowd.

1

There’s an old joke that the factory of the future will have two employees: a human and a dog. The human’s job will be to feed the dog, and the dog’s job will be to keep the human from touching any of the machines.

Among excellent companies a fundamental shift is taking place: away from long-range forecast, long-term plans, and big bets, and toward constant short-term iteration, experimentation, and testing.

These organizations follow the

computer scientist Alan Kay’s great advice that the best way to predict the future is to invent it. They do this in many small steps, getting feedback and making adjustments as necessary, instead of working in private t...

“This finding, that people will readily fabricate reasons to explain their own behavior, is called ‘confabulation.’

In fact, in one experiment, psychologist Sebastian Bobadilla-Suarez and his colleagues found that people were willing to pay in order to retain the ability to make a decision about allocating money, even though they knew they would receive more money overall if they let the decision be made automatically. People like having the power to decide.