The Summer Series - Episode 3: AI-liberated from competition and performance race at workplace

Welcome to the resonate's Summer Series again. Hope you are enjoying your personal time this summer!

This series is meant to be a series of reflections on what we do on daily basis. The reflections taken from an external, disconnected perspective, so that it influences you to improve and evolve. Please enjoy with proper mental distance and hopefully a glass of Chardonnay in your hand.

Episode 3: AI-liberated from competition and performance race at workplace

The AI influence on our lives has clearly been a subject of interest and discussions all around the globe for decades. Today I take a perspective on the AI's influence from the angle of human relations at workplace. 

As we experience it these days companies look for highly performing individuals to be able to compete with their market competitors. This leads to creation of specific work environment in which high performers contributing to the competitive race are valued over any other type of workers. Here is my hypothesis: 

Performance of individuals will no longer be the most sought trait of individuals in the AI era. Employers will be looking for purely human traits that AI cannot replicate as human relations will be even more important than today.

And here is my thinking behind the hypothesis:

In the MIT Technology Review’s article titled Elon Musk’s Neuralink says it’s nearly ready for the first human volunteers, Elon says: Even under a benign AI, we will be left behind. With a high-bandwidth brain-machine interface, we will have the option to go along for the ride.

During an event in San Francisco yesterday evening, the startup unveiled a sewing-machine-like robot used to implant ultrafine flexible electrodes deep into the brain to detect neuron activity.

Imagine the times when AI is significantly more intelligent than human. And the fact of its dominance is widely accepted by individuals, societies and governments. These will be liberating times for many - individuals will not be the highest performers in the area of executing logical tasks in the Universe. Naturally, for some individuals the declaration will be painful and will take a form of: Not that I like it but I have to accept it.

In terms of intelligence, i.e. IQ, individuals will be assessed and measured as very similar and close to each other: the variation between 50 to 150 IQ points that spans the whole range of intelligence available for human beings will simply become a single point around the value of 100 on the wider scale of intelligence available for AI. What seems to be big differences among individuals today will be neglectable when compared to AI IQ power. Imagine AI systems with IQ on the level of 10^6. The Roger Waters post-war dream that We are all equal in the end will come true in this aspect :) 

What does this IQ equality mean to relations at the workplace and to hiring preferences of companies? Clearly the competitiveness and performance will no longer be in the center HR interest as AI will be dominating in this area. Employers will be looking for purely human traits that AI cannot replicate as human relations will be even more important than today. The more human one will be, the more chances s/he will have to get a job.

In this way the two cardinal traits of individuals sought for in the "Orange" evolutionary level of the workplace, performance and competitiveness, will no longer be in the center of employers’ interest. Many people will be able to quit the exhaustive game of corporate career race and will be able to relax, and concentrate on developing their personal humanity. People will have more reasons to live in harmony, focused on the welfare of their societies, local communities and the environment they live in. As a consequence the "Orange" evolutionary level will be left behind allowing workplaces and societies to evolve beyond IQ dominance.

What a liberating thread of thought!

The Summer Series - Episode 2: The ultimately depressing, or liberating?!, model of organizations

Welcome to the resonate's Summer Series again. Hope you are enjoying your personal time this summer!

This series is meant to be a series of reflections on what we do on daily basis. The reflections taken from an external, disconnected perspective, so that it influences you to improve and evolve. Please enjoy with proper mental distance and hopefully a glass of Chardonnay in your hand.

Episode 2: The ultimately depressing model of organizations

There has been an ongoing dispute which approach to evolution of companies is better: to reform current companies or to start building companies n.0 from scratch and let the current ones die out. 

Personally, I keep both options open :)) The key for me is that the companies as we know them need to evolve (see my other blog posts on why and the wider context). Since both of the above ways can contribute to the evolution I am supporting both of them in parallel. There is no need to choose a specific ways at that point on time. That would be premature optimization.

Anyway, if you are serious about organizational design and future of work than you definitely have your views on the topic and hence you are a part of this discussion. And since you are a part of this discussion you need to know and respect all of the existing points of view. It is easy to accept the constructive models that bring meaning to your work. It comes much harder, at least for me, to accept destructive models. Yet I have learnt the humility to familiarize with and accept all possible perspectives: it is fair in the first place and also helps me in limiting biases of my mind and thus develop personally. This blog post is a great example of such a case.

Today I want you to reflect on three inter-related concepts: The Gervais Principle and The MacLeod's Organization Lifecycle. These were introduced in the Ribbonfarm blog back in 2009 by Venkatesh Rao in his blogpost The Gervais Principle, Or The Office According to "The Office".

Read on carefully - these might be depressing models, you have been warned :)

The Gervais Principle is for me the ultimately destructive successor of the already depressing Peter's Principle:

Sociopaths, in their own best interests, knowingly promote over-performing losers into middle-management, groom under-performing losers into sociopaths, and leave the average bare-minimum-effort losers to fend for themselves.

The MacLeod's organization lifecycle is for me the ultimately destructive model of an organization lifecycle:

A Sociopath with an idea recruits just enough Losers to kick off the cycle. As it grows it requires a Clueless layer to turn it into a controlled reaction rather than a runaway explosion. Eventually, as value hits diminishing returns, both the Sociopaths and Losers make their exits, and the Clueless start to dominate. Finally, the hollow brittle shell collapses on itself and anything of value is recycled by the sociopaths according to meta-firm logic.

The Whyte school of management is for me the ultimately destructive school of management:

Organizations don’t suffer pathologies; they are intrinsically pathological constructs. Idealized organizations are not perfect. They are perfectly pathological. So while most most management literature is about striving relentlessly towards an ideal by executing organization theories completely, this school, which I’ll call the Whyte school, would recommend that you do the bare minimum organizing to prevent chaos, and then stop. Let a natural, if declawed, individualist Darwinism operate beyond that point. The result is the MacLeod hierarchy.

Personal journey

[I expect you to spend some meaningful amount of time on the above quotes]

Now a bit of my personal reflection and my personal journey so far. For most of my career I would qualify myself to the Clueless cast, and for the rest - to the Losers cast. And honestly for a long time I did not not know what to do about these concepts. I mean: How to take my efforts at work seriously? Where to seek for fulfillment?, etc. My mind was just clueless... :) I had been trying to ignore those, as my best way of dealing with the concepts, for most of the time, but they were coming back... 

I find the concepts deeply logical - the concepts are precisely formulated, elegant, models are coherent and based on purest logic. For most of the time I found them ultimately destructive. This summer I have found those concepts ultimately liberating too... 

They are liberating from meaning, from hope of contribution, from burden of the an expected outcome, from any long term responsibility towards any organization, etc. And in the first place the concepts are liberating from the mental frame of ability to contribute and expectation of fulfillment. The mental model was at the core of my feeling of being torn apart, yet I took a desperate attempt to stuck to it - I have always treated meaning and responsibility as the original reasons to engage with organizations. 

Now, being ultimately liberated by these concepts, I feel empowered to do what I trust is most appropriate and valuable for an organization at any particular time disregarding of what I am asked to do. And most importantly I feel empowered to stick to my skills, interests and values as the source of a fulfilled life. 

It feels like I came a long way from my initial understanding of my role in organizations (the Losers cast and the Clueless cast) through the shock of discovering alternative perspective, through negation of the "destructive" models, to rebuilding myself into a new mental model that actually leads me to personal liberation, empowerment and productivity. 

Now I belong to the Losers cast, and I feel good about it as I made my own sense of the concepts and re-calibrated my expectations, and so I am not torn apart anymore. Looks like a bit more self-aware Loser! :)

Manifesto for The New Economical Order

This is another post under the umbrella title of #resonateSummerSeries. Hope you are enjoying your personal time! I did enjoy mine and came up with the Manifesto for the New Economical Order this hot afternoon.

Being a big fan of Agile Manifesto, back from 2001, I think we need to leap ahead as the world needs us more than ever. We need to re-focus to the threats resulting from the ever-growing debt of human civilization.

When I think about the rescue paths for the mankind, it turns out the path leads through re-defining the purpose of the economy itself.

See the Manifesto for the New Economical Order @ https://www.resonate.company/newOrderManifesto

9th August 2020.