Skynet is already here!
I wake up in the morning. I check my cell phone before getting out of bed. Look at the numerous Good Morning messages on my family group. Reply to some emails which were sent at god-forsaken 2 AM. Check out Facebook to see who liked the latest photos I uploaded. Look at a few videos of cute cats. Get out of bed and freshen up. See that it's a friend's birthday today. Book a venue for tonight's outing. Go through my daily chores while amidst constantly checking Facebook, WhatsApp, and countless such apps which govern my daily routine.
If you look at these seemingly independent events, you can't help but marvel at the levels to which technology has integrated itself into our lives. Devices are getting smarter by the day, if not faster. You do not need to depend on pesky, nosy bystanders and passersby to ask for directions, you are always connected to your friends and peers, you can hail a ride to go pretty much wherever you want, hell, you can even get a date by simply swiping right when you are standing in the ATM queue!
At the same time, it makes sense to ask how much have we given our lives up to these gadgets? We conducted a survey of about 140 people mostly in the 22-28 age group to share how they feel about their mobile phone usage. Here is the stat which I want to point your attention to:
About 80% of users depend on their mobile phones for professional use, of which about 23% say that they can't live without their phones even for 15 minutes! And this is quite logical, the apps and the hardware are designed such that users get addicted to using them even more. The "look and feel" of apps, the aural response to sounds (of pings and dings), the kinaesthetic qualities of the gamified environment - each and every aspect is designed to give us a dopamine high - a rush of hormones similar to falling in love, to the rush of winning in gambling! According to some studies, we touch our cell phones at a mind-boggling average rate of over 2500 swipes per day!
And this has the potential to screw up the lives of the so-called technology-natives, the cohort which arrives after the millennials which considers technology as their birthright. It is already extremely difficult to manage millennials. I can see that directly all around me - people browsing Facebook and WhatsApp in the middle of class and in the middle of meetings. While earlier businesses competed on appropriating their customers' money, then shifting to time, now it has migrated to appealing to their ever-shortening attention spans. And eminent speaker and thought leader Simon Sinek puts this out in a very sharp way:
While these sentiments suggest how this surge in technological dependence affects managing people, the bigger question to be asked is how does the increasing smartness of connected devices affect employment itself. And this is the same question that popped up when the industrial revolution or automation or even the internet age ushered in a dramatic increase in the standard of living.
The industrial revolution was characterized by mass manufacturing of products which; while replacing the erstwhile slow, skill-based craft processes, segmented the work content such that it enabled time and motion studies to train human beings to work like machines. It democratized the production process from the skillful to the trainable dexterous, and brought upon huge employment opportunities - the reduced cost of production brought more products within the reach of commoners which spurred demand which in turn increased employment. The deplorable routineness of life was depicted brilliantly in Charlie Chaplin's 1936 classic Modern Times.
As we moved towards automation, quite a few of these programmable tasks were made redundant with the advent of robots, who would work even in dangerous environments such as underwater equipment maintenance, welding in particular angles, and hazardous environments of the paintshop. Humans on the other hand shifted towards more challenging tasks such as design, shifting the emphasis from brawn to brain, and there came about a massive reskilling effort to train the workforce in work content which is let's say higher up the value chain. Computers were invented and quite a lot of work shifted to sophisticated IT.
As any industry, work content or work process would evolve, even computer based work content was segmented into the really brainy work such as designing products and the routine and mundane clerical work. The arrival of the internet broke down geographical barriers. And this enabled the low mental effort work to be shifted to low cost countries which were presented with the glorious Y2K opportunity. And as these countries developed, technology itself moved on at such a pace that we are now able to automate even the routine tasks involved in coding and developing new applications.
The pace of this technological advancement today is so high that we now have computers that can think on their own. Historical evidence, as demonstrated above, now suggests that any task that can be classified as modular, repeatable and predictable can now be left to automation, and humans will now have to move higher up the value chain towards jobs that demand creativity and art, jobs that require thinking and feeling - a level of human intervention that an uncaring machine can never possess.
But think again, is it really that difficult to teach a computer what humans perceive as pleasing? Can a computer be taught how to create art that can be appreciated by humans? This is the question that IBM has now set out to answer as its Watson creates a trailer for Fox's Morgan.
This leads us to think about the frontiers to which technology might actually replace humans in every realm imaginable. In fact, I personally believe that understanding man's greed for making money, technology has already started manipulating us to a level such that we ourselves shape technology to modify our behaviour - we design equipment that makes us addicted to them, we become dependent on technology, we become slaves, we, in our ignorance, give up our own will to learn. The last phrase might come as a shock - but research has shown that an increased dependence on something as routine as Google Maps reduces our brains' spatial recognition capabilities. Constant distraction through pings and dings changes the way we think by encouraging information to be little more than a fleeting short-term memory. Instead of retaining new details, our brains process the info and move on to the next tidbit. This impacts the capacity to see patterns.
Till now, we entertained ourselves through science fiction movies - that there might be a skynet which can think for itself and strive for world domination - that we might be living in the matrix as sentients look to destroy that last hope of human civilization. It is high time we start to ponder if we ourselves have inadvertently started to script our downfall. *horrifying background music*
***************
The gray text is taken from class slides used in Prof. Vasanthi Srinivasan's HRM course taught at IIM Bangalore.
If you look at these seemingly independent events, you can't help but marvel at the levels to which technology has integrated itself into our lives. Devices are getting smarter by the day, if not faster. You do not need to depend on pesky, nosy bystanders and passersby to ask for directions, you are always connected to your friends and peers, you can hail a ride to go pretty much wherever you want, hell, you can even get a date by simply swiping right when you are standing in the ATM queue!
At the same time, it makes sense to ask how much have we given our lives up to these gadgets? We conducted a survey of about 140 people mostly in the 22-28 age group to share how they feel about their mobile phone usage. Here is the stat which I want to point your attention to:
About 80% of users depend on their mobile phones for professional use, of which about 23% say that they can't live without their phones even for 15 minutes! And this is quite logical, the apps and the hardware are designed such that users get addicted to using them even more. The "look and feel" of apps, the aural response to sounds (of pings and dings), the kinaesthetic qualities of the gamified environment - each and every aspect is designed to give us a dopamine high - a rush of hormones similar to falling in love, to the rush of winning in gambling! According to some studies, we touch our cell phones at a mind-boggling average rate of over 2500 swipes per day!
And this has the potential to screw up the lives of the so-called technology-natives, the cohort which arrives after the millennials which considers technology as their birthright. It is already extremely difficult to manage millennials. I can see that directly all around me - people browsing Facebook and WhatsApp in the middle of class and in the middle of meetings. While earlier businesses competed on appropriating their customers' money, then shifting to time, now it has migrated to appealing to their ever-shortening attention spans. And eminent speaker and thought leader Simon Sinek puts this out in a very sharp way:
While these sentiments suggest how this surge in technological dependence affects managing people, the bigger question to be asked is how does the increasing smartness of connected devices affect employment itself. And this is the same question that popped up when the industrial revolution or automation or even the internet age ushered in a dramatic increase in the standard of living.
The industrial revolution was characterized by mass manufacturing of products which; while replacing the erstwhile slow, skill-based craft processes, segmented the work content such that it enabled time and motion studies to train human beings to work like machines. It democratized the production process from the skillful to the trainable dexterous, and brought upon huge employment opportunities - the reduced cost of production brought more products within the reach of commoners which spurred demand which in turn increased employment. The deplorable routineness of life was depicted brilliantly in Charlie Chaplin's 1936 classic Modern Times.
As we moved towards automation, quite a few of these programmable tasks were made redundant with the advent of robots, who would work even in dangerous environments such as underwater equipment maintenance, welding in particular angles, and hazardous environments of the paintshop. Humans on the other hand shifted towards more challenging tasks such as design, shifting the emphasis from brawn to brain, and there came about a massive reskilling effort to train the workforce in work content which is let's say higher up the value chain. Computers were invented and quite a lot of work shifted to sophisticated IT.
As any industry, work content or work process would evolve, even computer based work content was segmented into the really brainy work such as designing products and the routine and mundane clerical work. The arrival of the internet broke down geographical barriers. And this enabled the low mental effort work to be shifted to low cost countries which were presented with the glorious Y2K opportunity. And as these countries developed, technology itself moved on at such a pace that we are now able to automate even the routine tasks involved in coding and developing new applications.
The pace of this technological advancement today is so high that we now have computers that can think on their own. Historical evidence, as demonstrated above, now suggests that any task that can be classified as modular, repeatable and predictable can now be left to automation, and humans will now have to move higher up the value chain towards jobs that demand creativity and art, jobs that require thinking and feeling - a level of human intervention that an uncaring machine can never possess.
But think again, is it really that difficult to teach a computer what humans perceive as pleasing? Can a computer be taught how to create art that can be appreciated by humans? This is the question that IBM has now set out to answer as its Watson creates a trailer for Fox's Morgan.
This leads us to think about the frontiers to which technology might actually replace humans in every realm imaginable. In fact, I personally believe that understanding man's greed for making money, technology has already started manipulating us to a level such that we ourselves shape technology to modify our behaviour - we design equipment that makes us addicted to them, we become dependent on technology, we become slaves, we, in our ignorance, give up our own will to learn. The last phrase might come as a shock - but research has shown that an increased dependence on something as routine as Google Maps reduces our brains' spatial recognition capabilities. Constant distraction through pings and dings changes the way we think by encouraging information to be little more than a fleeting short-term memory. Instead of retaining new details, our brains process the info and move on to the next tidbit. This impacts the capacity to see patterns.
Till now, we entertained ourselves through science fiction movies - that there might be a skynet which can think for itself and strive for world domination - that we might be living in the matrix as sentients look to destroy that last hope of human civilization. It is high time we start to ponder if we ourselves have inadvertently started to script our downfall. *horrifying background music*
***************
The gray text is taken from class slides used in Prof. Vasanthi Srinivasan's HRM course taught at IIM Bangalore.
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