Category: Irregular ideas

Ernst Friedrich Zwirner and Richard Voigtel had a difficult job to do. They were architects and they were designing a cathedral that was to become the tallest twin spire church in the world and Germany’s most visited tourist attraction. And they were doing it in the middle ages with no computer aided design, engineering standards or heavy machinery.

Cologne cathedral was started in 1248 under the watchful expertise of Ernst and Richard. It was finished 632 years later in 1880, on this very day in fact, the 14th August.

Imagine that. Imagine working on something that you knew you’d never see completed.

Doing difficult things, like building cathedrals or addressing the world’s most most wicked and complex problems, takes time. Those problems, climate change, poverty, inequality, etc., etc., etc., existed before us and they will continue to exist after we have gone. There are no quick fixes.

And part of the reason these problems persist is that we don’t know how to design perfect systems. We don’t know how to create systems that interact intentionally with other systems. Every system designed by humans can be gamed by other humans for their own advantage, or creates unintended consequences, or just doesn’t address the issue it was supposed to. We don’t fully grasp how interconnectedness at scale changes the way systems behave, it’s beyond our little brain’s capacity to deal with. We’re just not smart enough.

We see these system problems everywhere.

The turmoil in UK politics isn’t the result of particular party candidates, although it’s easy to blame individuals we don’t agree with, and it isn’t the result of a particular political party, although we’re pressured to take sides and demonise the other side. Instead, there is a bigger system problem with national governance that is designed on principles of opposition rather than cooperation to reach the best solution, and confers more power on individuals than they are equipped to handle.

The issues in emerging technologies aren’t the result of particular blockchain protocols, although it’s easy to blame crypto-currency crashes on a greedy minority misusing technology for selfish ends, and they aren’t the result of the existential risk Artificial Intelligence poses, although there is an important ongoing ethical debate. Instead, there is a bigger system problem with different things changing at different rates and very few mechanisms in place to coordinate between them.

Taking a long view on what is to be achieved doesn’t reduce the urgency for action, but it changes the expectation on the results. If Ernst and Richard had set out to build something that could be completed in their own lifetime they wouldn’t have created one of the most impressive cathedrals in the world. Greatness takes times.

So, can we create systems like cathedrals? Can we intentionally take a long view, not expecting a few years in political office or new technologies to produce fully-formed solutions? Can we intervene in systems in small sensing ways, aiming to learn what does and doesn’t work, rather than expecting the roll out of a new policy or technology to fix the issues?

For us too, we can make our contributions, however small, be aimed at long-lasting impact. We may tend to focus our efforts on the short term, on what work we can complete this week, what result we can see this year, but everything we do are part of something bigger. In an intricately interconnected world, nothing we do has no effect.

We can build things that are built to last, built to outlast us.

The 1930’s was a tough decade. The US stock market had crashed and unemployment was rising. Political extremism was growing around the globe. These was civil war in Spain, Japan invaded China, and Germany attacked Poland starting World War II. But out of these times of adversity grew the modern technological world as we know it today.

In the same decade, Joseph Schumpeter, a political economist, fled Europe as the Nazi’s came to power and emigrated to the United States to take up the role of professor at Harvard University. Writing at the time of the Great Depression, Schumpeter developed ideas be believed could help the save the US economy. His thinking was about how new value could be created.

Schumpeter argued that the innovation and technological change of a nation came from the entrepreneurs or wild spirits. He coined the word Unternehmergeist, German for “entrepreneur-spirit”, and asserted that “the doing of new things or the doing of things that are already being done in a new way” stemmed directly from the efforts of entrepreneurs. An individualistic American culture loved the idea. That individuals didn’t have to wait for jobs to be created, that they could start their own companies and go on to disrupt entire industries was just the kind of rallying cry the believers wanted to hear.

One of Schumpeter’s most influential ideas was what he called ‘creative destruction’. It’s what we know today as disruption by start-ups in established industries. It’s the idea that generating new value often means replacing existing value. These ideas formed the modern view of innovation as first mover advantage and disruption of an incumbent by a newcomer as the keys to success.

We know now that the first mover into a new category is highly likely to fail because the category is too new, it isn’t established well enough yet to be sustainable. There are lots of examples of this in tech history. Facebook wasn’t the first social media platform but it became the most dominant. But still, the idea of getting there first in order to win persists in innovation.

Around about the same time, on the other side of America, Frederick Terman was teaching his class in electronics at Stanford University. Terman, who would later become known as the ‘father of silicon valley’, encouraged his students to start companies and later created the Stanford Industrial Park, where the University leased land to high-tech firm, creating a hotbed of innovation.

Schumpeter created the ideology, Terman created the infrastructure. Silicon valley tech firms adopted both. And over the last eighty-or-so years, ‘the silicon valley way’ has been the dominant approach to innovation and entrepreneurship. That philosophy is embodied by Facebook’s early motto of ‘move fast and break things’.

But we know now just how reckless this approach can be. Technology makes life better in the short-term for the people that benefit from it. The advances in sanitation, medicine, transport infrastructure, communication, etc., etc., make a huge difference to some people, but they make no difference to those that don’t get the technology. And the negative effects are also not evenly distributed. Often, those that don’t get the benefits get more of the consequences. Technological progress and growth for the sake of growth is not sustainable on a finite planet.

But this idea of innovation doesn’t stop there. The future is far bigger than the past.

Norbert Elias was another influential thinker from the 1930’s. He wrote on the development of sociology, and said that the society we live in today has not been designed. It’s an important point. No one in the first, sixth, fifteenth or nineteenth century was able to consider the decisions they made as shaping the twenty-first century. For the first time in history we’re able to think about how we might design the society of the future and how the decisions we make might affect those to come.

Humans have only been around for the past two hundred thousand years and in that time 109 billion humans have lived and died. 7.96 billion humans are alive today. Over the next 800,000 years, we can expect 100 trillion people to be born and lead their lives. To give us some idea of how big that future is, in a mere 50,000 years Niagara Falls will have eroded away, and we’re talking about sixteen times that, and in 200,000 years, the human species will be as old again as it is now, but that’s still only a quarter of the length of time we’re talking about. If nothing catastrophic happens in the mean time, then humanity has a long future ahead of it for a lot of people, and there’s a lot of technological innovation to come. The choices we make now shape this future for all those people.

The idea that all the people that may live in that future matter, morally speaking, as much as anyone alive today, is a core idea to the philosophy of ‘longtermism’. Philosopher William MacAskill, who coined the term in 2017, explains the view that “positively influencing the longterm future is a key moral priority of our time”. This means making choices about what to do in the present for the benefits they may bring in a distant unknown future. But it also means making choice to not do things in the present that could help a lot of people.

If you’re a silicon valley tech billionaire who believes in longtermism, do you spend your money raising a few billion living people out of poverty now or do you spend it on making humanity an interplanetary species for the trillions of people who will live in the future? Do you help the few or the many? Do you contribute to the present or the future?

Of course, we can’t know what anyone truly believes, or whether longtermism is just a convenient justification for doing what they wanted to do anyway, but it’s easy to see Schumpeter’s ideas of first mover advantage and creative destruction expressed all the way through how to innovate in an industry to the desire for the future expansion of humanity to other planets.

So, what would you do? Would you help the few billion people alive today at the potential cost of the trillions of tomorrow, or would you invest in innovations for the future to bring about the lives that might never exist otherwise, even if it means accepting the suffering of people now.

How would you design the society of the future?

Tough choice, huh?

Keira Ball has saved hundred’s of lives and will save many more in the future. After Keira was killed in a road traffic collision, her parents donated her organs to save the lives of four people. One of those she saved was nine year old Max Johnson. Max’s family successfully campaigned for changes to the law on organ donation in England to move from an opt-in system, where people have to proactively agree to be donors, to opt-out, where most people are assumed to agree but have the choice to not be a donor. That means seven hundred more people a year receiving donated organs. But why should a simple change make such a difference? Surely people know that organ donation saves lives and would want to agree to it regardless of how they are asked.

How things are designed helps us make choices. We aren’t always rational in our decisions, we don’t always make the best choice, but when things are well designed to make the best choice the easy choice we’re more likely to make it. Opt-out organ donation makes the choice more difficult by making people think about their own mortality and have to take the action of ticking the box on the form. Opt-in means you don’t even have to think about it now, you can make the right choice without having to do anything.

Researchers from the British Medical Council found that people in countries that use opt-in systems were up to 29 per cent more likely to be willing to donate their own organs and up to 56 per cent more likely to donate their relatives’ organs than those living in opt-in countries. That’s a lot of lives saved from designing the system to work in the way that most people want it to.

Behavioural economist Richard Thaler and legal scholar Cass Sunstein thought similar things about how systems are designed when they wrote their book about nudge theory. A nudge, they explained, is using positive reinforcement and indirect suggestion as ways to influence the behaviour and decision-making of groups or individuals. It involves altering the environment so that the automatic cognitive processes that we all rely on for quick decision making are triggered to do their desired outcome. Governments and organisations set up Nudge Units and applied the theory to get people to take the actions they wanted them to. Sign-up for pensions, buy chocolate bars, recycle. Anything it seemed, could be nudged.

And then, fourteen years after Thaler and Sunstein’s book, experimental psychologist Maximilian Maier and colleagues demonstrated how a new analysis technique on the previous research on nudge theory showed that actually, nudges have no effect on the choices people make.

Nudges don’t work. But good design doesn’t need to nudge. Good design isn’t about setting up the environment to trick people into doing something, it’s about making choices simple to understand and to easy to do. Opt-out organ donation doesn’t rely on indirect suggestion to influence people into agreeing, it helps people make an informed choice by default.

It turns out that influencing people’s behaviour isn’t as easy as we’d think. In 2016, Russia’s Internet Research Academy pointed it’s Twitter bots at the U.S. presidential election, causing panic that the outcome would be affected by a foreign power and that democracy was under threat. Researchers from the Polarization Lab at Duke University analysed the effect of the Twitter bots and found that they had only brief and minimal interactions with people and did not result in any changes in political opinions. So, perhaps the idea that we can all be influenced to change our political ideals, our shopping habits, and our health behaviours through social media, digital advertising and deceptive design patterns on websites just isn’t true. It takes a lot more than gentle persuasion.

If you want to influence the behaviour of lots of people, you have to be blunt about it. In 1935, a Nazi propaganda film called ‘Triumph of the Will’ was broadcast widely. Hitler believed that propaganda must have no element of doubt, it had to be unambiguous. Riefenstahl, the film’s director and producer, recounted the conversation he had with Hitler where Hitler explained he “wanted a film which would move, appeal to, impress an audience which was not necessarily interested in politics.” Adorn and Horkheimer, two Jewish philosophers who fled Nazi Germany, wrote about how broadcast television lead to the rise of fascism, and how ‘Triumph of the Will’ played a part in that, because it had such a mass culture effect of coalescing people around an ideology.

But propaganda like that doesn’t work in the 21st century. We don’t all watch the same film at the same time any more. There is no group experience. No sense of belonging or social pressure to join in with the group and believe what the propaganda tells us. And without that, there is no mass culture because there is no mass.

Modern digital media unwittingly broke the influence that mass culture TV had over large groups of people. Now, everyone can’t be influenced all at the same time with the same message. Each of our Twitter feeds are unique to us, so are our browsing history, our playlists and our purchase history. Personalised digital media doesn’t enable the same degree of influence as mass media because it cannot provide a group experience. It creates niche cultures where small groups of people share very narrow interests with others. Our personalised digital media experiences are shaped for us and only us, and we worry that it influences us to watch the latest series on Netflix, as if we weren’t going to do that anyway.

We won’t be nudged, we shan’t be moved.

If you were born before the year 2000 you might remember TV only showing programmes on a schedule, maybe you dialled numbers into a phone to make a call, and only those few people you spoke face-to-face to ever heard your opinions. If you were born some time after 2000, you were born into a world where digital technology changed everything.

Some people recognised this early on. Marc Prensky wrote about how the education system wasn’t going to be able to meet the needs of the young people, and he coined the terms ‘digital natives’ and ‘digital immigrants’ to explain why. He used these in describing the digital world as a country where those born into it thought, felt and acted in fundamentally different ways to those who came from the ‘old world’ of analogue thinking. To Prensky, and others such as Dr. Bruce Perry of Baylor College of Medicine, young people having grown up with digital technology all around them, and huge amounts of information coming at them all the time, thought, communicated, socialised, created and learned in fundamentally different ways. This was a discontinuous change in thinking patterns, they said, unlike anything that had gone before.

Digital natives live surrounded by digital technologies. Computers and the Internet are natural parts of their lives, they don’t need to familiarise themselves with the technology by comparing it to something else, it just makes sense to them. They take in information in random and disconnected ways and thrive on instant gratification and frequent rewards. And they see their place in networks and do not find the complexity and continuous flow of digital information to be problematic. Things changing at an ever faster pace is just normal for digital natives.

What feels ordinary to digital natives is novelty to digital immigrants.

To digital immigrants, information feels best received in a slow, step-by-step, linear fashion. They tend to think of the physical and digital as separate worlds. And they always have one foot in the past with a sense of nostalgia about reading printed books or being disconnected from the Internet.

Prensky was writing about education, so it’s easy to see why he would think of the difference between digital native and digital immigrants as being about age, and split between student and teacher. If, instead, we think about how ubiquitous digital technology affects people in all kinds of different situations and scenarios then age doesn’t look like a factor. Perhaps being a digital native is less about when someone is born and more about what experience they have with technology.

In fact, according to an article in the British Journal of Education Technology, there is very little evidence that young people are radically different in the ways they use and process information. And there many researchers who have critiqued the notion that age or generation is best way to understand the difference between those who tech-savvy and those that aren’t. Don Tapscott, who specialises in the role of technology in business and society, says that a “digital native is defined by exposure to, or experience with, technology”. People become digital natives by using more technology, in more ways, more of the time.

It’s not too late for those of us born before the twenty-first century to join the digital revolution. Being a digital immigrant is not fixed. Developing the mindset of a digital native is a matter of experience. The more you use digital technology, and the more things you use it for, the more you understand the concepts and applications of digital technology as an integrated part of life.

Take identity, for example. To digital natives, identity is more fluid than for digital immigrants. When digital immigrants project their ‘real’ selves into cyberspace, they want the things they put online to be associated with their real name, to represent some essential essence of who they really are, to have authenticity and status. To a digital native, interacting with the world (physical and virtual, because they aren’t separate) through a username, an online account can be dropped, changed, or a new one made in seconds. Their ‘identity’ is no more stable than an email address.

Or take ownership as a another example. Dr. Alec Couros, professor of educational technology & media, said, “the speed and ubiquity of social media complicate our ability to control our digital footprint, directly impacting our identities”. That’s a digital immigrant’s way of saying that once you put something online, you don’t own it, you don’t control it. Everything you put online can be easily copied, instantly shared, infinitely edited and is viewable by millions of people.

And privacy too, that’s another example. Couros also talks about how our online lives are “public by default, private by effort”. He means that, not only are social media platforms and digital technologies usually designed to share people’s data, even if they aren’t aware or might not want to, but that for digital natives the first instinct is to share and that keeping things private requires stopping and thinking.

So, when we say that digital technology affects everything in our lives, we mean everything. In the twenty-first century, everything we think, feel, say, do, buy, write, read, watch, listen to, is affected by digital technology.

Bill Gates wrote that new digital technology amplifies human potential. It’s effect could be as great as electricity. Or greater. The sooner we all become digital natives, the more we adopt a digital mindset and feel at home in a hyper-connected, on demand, real time networked, digital world, the more of that potential we can realise.

But even if we don’t, a hundred years from now the distinction between digital native or immigrant will be gone. No one will remember a time without the Internet.

“I heartily accept the motto, -”That government is best which governs the least;” and I should like to see it acted up to more rapidly and systematically. Carried out, it finally amounts to this, which also I believe,—“That government is best which governs not at all;” and when men are prepared for it, that will be the kind of government which they will have. Government is at best but an expedient; but most governments are usually, and all governments are sometimes, inexpedient.”

This is how Thoreau started his essay on what he termed ‘civil disobedience’. He had spent a night in jail for refusing to pay his state poll tax in protest against the institution of slavery, the extermination of Native Americans, and the war against Mexico. He makes the argument that citizens of a country have a duty to disobey rules and laws of a government when those rules and laws are unjust. To him, our moral authority stands above the legal authority of a government.

One of Thoreau’s answer’s to the problem was to disengage from a society he believed to be too political and to turn to self-reliance. But he lived in a time where that might have been possible. In today’s interconnected society none of us can be truly self-reliant. There are no longer cabins in the woods that we can retreat to when distancing ourselves. Today, our sense of place in society is less to do with our location and more to do with the systems that affect us. A footballer driving a Porsche through the streets of London has a very different sense of that place than the homeless person walking those same streets. They are both in the same place but the systems that affect each of them are different.

We have an ethical duty, Thoreau says, to be sceptical of government. I say we have an ethical duty to be sceptical of the systems of our society; political, philosophical, economic, educational, media, community.

Understanding systems is hard. The way we’re usually taught to understand something is to break it down into separate parts. Want to make a meal? The recipe breaks it down into a step-by-step process. Want to build a new piece of furniture? Follow the instructions. Want to learn to programme? Start with the basics and advance to more complicated things later. This is how we organise knowledge to make it more manageable. But understanding systems doesn’t work that way. If we break the system into parts we can no longer see how those parts interact and affect each other, and it’s the relationships between the parts that make it a system.

But there are some patterns for systems that can help us think better about them. In systems, distinctions can be made between and among things; things can be organised into part-whole systems; relationships can be made between and among things; and things can be looked at from the perspectives of other things. In an educational system, the classes are whole distinct systems and at the same time part of a system of other classes that make up a school. And schools are whole systems that are also parts of a educational system, which are affected by funding and policy systems. When one of the school systems, say the heating, changes it affects many other systems, such as how people behave and how the budget is spent. How the system of moving people between classrooms works can be looked at from the perspective of crowd movement and flow dynamics, or from the mental health and stress perspective. Systems don’t break down into recipes or instruction manuals.

And people are the uniquely weird parts of any system. We are made up of many systems, parts of other systems, affected by them all, but at the same we can be aware of the system and their affects, which means we are able to exercise our individual conscience that allows us to decide to disobey the systems. When a person works within a system they are part of that system, which is why to Thoreau the only answer was to disengage.

Did Thoreau’s night in jail change the system? No, of course not. The American government of the time carried on doing what it was doing. But writing about his thoughts on civil disobedience inspired Mahatma Gandhi when he was creating his concept of Satyagraha (non-cooperation). The idea of non-violent resistance helped to bring to an end the British rule over India. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was inspired by Thoreau and Gandhi. He adapted ideas about civil disobedience to the civil rights movement in the United States for the right to vote, desegregation, labour rights and other rights for people of colour.

In fact, it’s not much a stretch to say that ‘On the duty of civil disobedience’ was the bedrock for how protest and political activism are approached today. Thoreau didn’t affect the systems he was in, but his work affected the creation of entirely new systems for making the world a better place.

That’s the thing about doing work within systems; we can never know what change they might cause in another time and another place.

There is a need to directly fight injustice, of course there is, but any fight can only be conducted from within the system, as part of the system. We can and should also follow in the footsteps of Thoreau and do what we can to influence the creation of better systems in the future.

For an act to be civilly disobedient, it must involve some breach of law. For an act to be system disobedient, it simply has to involve a vision of a better future. We can all do that.

Samuel Finley Breese Morse was a painter in the eighteenth century. He painted portraits of solemn-looking men mostly, which perhaps without intending to, conveyed information about his world. You might know him better as co-inventor of the Morse Code. The code of dots and dashes replacing letters and numbers that he developed in 1838 along with Alfred Vail enabled information to be transmitted over the electric telegraph, which Morse had invented a few years earlier. International Morse Code was used in World War II and in the Korean and Vietnam wars, and by the shipping industry until the early 1990’s. The unmistakable beep-be-beeps of Morse code being tip-tapped across the world turned out to be a far better way of communicating information than paintings.

A hundred and ten years after Morse, Claude Shannon was publishing his theory of information. Shannon had already showed how the if/then logic of algebra could be represented as one’s and zero’s by opening and closing switches, laying the ground work for the modern digital computer. His latest work showed that all information channels have a maximum bandwidth that can’t be exceeded and that with the use of mathematics, a signal could be reliably received despite the noise that comes along with it.

This history of transmitting information tells us a thing or two about how we receive and process information ourselves. As the amount of information available to us is more than ever before and increases every day, we need to think seriously about our relationship with information.

You probably knew this already, but a zettabyte is a number with 21 zero’s after it. In 2020 the World Economic Forum estimated the amount of data in the world to be 44 zettabytes. And then Seagate, the data storage company, said that by 2025 there will be 175 zettabytes of data in the global datasphere. That’s a lot of data. More bits of data than all the grains of sand on earth or all the stars in the sky. More data than any human brain can handle.

Your brain can process 11 million bits of information every second, but your conscious mind can handle only 40 to 50 bits of information a second. That’s the limit of your bandwidth. Shannon tells us that we just can’t take any more than that. But that’s ok. We shouldn’t try to take in more information. More information is not the answer. Better information is.

Better information is more meaningful information. It’s the signal that you’re actually trying to detect among all the random unwanted noise that interferes with the signal. If you’re old enough to remember recording songs from the radio onto cassettes, then you’ll remember the crackly hiss and the DJ speaking over the start and end of the song that frustrated you. Compared to listening to Spotify streaming over broadband nowadays, it was an experience of low signal, high noise. Lots of what you didn’t want to hear, and not enough of what you did want. But that’s an easier situation to deal with because you very obviously know the difference between the signal and the noise. What about when all the information is high definition crystal clear? How do you tell what is meaningful and what isn’t then?

The answer might come from a quieter time, one with vastly less information. Back in the eighteenth century, Thomas Bayes, the English statistician, philosopher and Presbyterian minister, created a theorem that describes the probability of an event based on prior knowledge of conditions that might be related to the event. And now, in our complex, fast-moving world, we can take apply the same idea without even knowing how to do the maths.

The chances of our mental models of the world being right first time based on incomplete information is very low. We should accept that. Instead of trying the impossible task of filtering the information to give us the one true right answer, we should accept information that gives us some degree of confidence in what we understand, and we should know that we’ll probably need to update that opinion, and our confidence in it, when we get more information. This is Bayesian thinking. It’s about accepting that we can’t know for sure and that it’s ok to change our minds. It’s about thinking in probabilities.

In a world of information overload, our attempts to deal with all that data should not be to seek out the right information, and form one right opinion, and hold it forever. That’s a short-cut to being out-of-date and certainly wrong. Our world changes too quickly for that. Instead, we have to be open-minded. Open-minded about how correct the information we’re receiving is, open-minded about taking onboard new information from different sources, changing what we think, feeling more or less confident in our opinions, adding more information, ignoring things we previously thought correct.

This is how we reshape our relationship with information. No longer are we the seekers of the single truth, we are the receivers of information and we can choose whether we consider it meaningful or useless, signal or noise.

Lots of info, loosely held.

Wearing a checked shirt and with a neat apartment in the background, professor Anthony Klotz appears calm and confident as he gives another interview over Zoom. He’s an organisational psychologist and professor at Texas A & M University who studies employment. He coined the phrase ‘The Great Resignation’ in May 2021. Klotz said the Great Resignation describes how COVID-19 upended the centuries-old notion of what work is and how it should be done.

But the Great Resignation is about more than just people quitting their jobs, it’s about rebalancing the power relationship between the employer and the employee. And it’s about more than just the relationship between employer and employee, it’s part of a trend in re-examining the relationship between the individual and the collective in society.

When historians of the future look back on the early twenty-first century they’ll refer to it as the period where the individualism of the previous few centuries was challenged and reshaped society. How that’ll play out is anyone’s guess.

Those historians might read Wang Huning, a Chinese political theorist, who wrote about what he called ‘The American Crisis’ that arose from a focus on individualism. He observed that individualism leads to the destruction of social bonds and ultimately a nihilist sense of meaningless and disconnnectedness. He considers America to be based on individualism, hedonism and democracy and China based on collectivism, self-forgetfulness and authoritarianism. Opposite ends of the reshaping, perhaps.

The future historians might also consider the image of the cowboy in the old wild west and films like Rambo in the Reagan era to understand how American culture idealised the individual. But of course, not all individuals, only able-bodied, white, male individuals who demonstrate their individualism through conquering. Even if that kind of idealised individualism is horrible, the reality isn’t particularly pleasant either.

In our interconnected modern real life, individuals can’t be completely self-reliant. Devoid of social bonds with friends and family, they turned to the corporation for connection. Workplace culture replaced social life. Colleagues replaced friends. Pensions replaced having family to look after them in their old age. Company replaced family as what Aristotle called the ‘cell of society’s body’.

With the individual reliant on the organisation, the employer held the power. They could direct their employees to arrive at a particular place, on time, dressed a certain way, and following all the implicit rules of the workplace. This was what work looked like in many corporations all across the world as we entered the first couple of decades of the twenty-first century.

Juan Carlos Cubeiro, Head of Talent at Manpower Group and Mentor at the Human Age Institute, sees the change taking place. He says that, “in a world of same/same products and easy-to-replicate services, talent and people will become the most important aspect of business.” When organisations rely on the skills of people more than people rely on the organisation for a salary, then the power shifts in favour of the employee. This has been called the shift from capitalism (by which we mean the private ownership of the means of production) to talentism (the belief that having skills is more valuable than having money, especially in the form of capital). When people recognise this and the value of their skills, then it isn’t office jobs that are being reset, its the individual’s relationship with organisations that is being reset.

Huning noticed something else about the individualism of Western countries. He looked at how that individualistic spirit of wanting to conquer relied upon scientific and technological prowess. He concluded that many social and cultural problems tend to be thought of as scientific and technological problems.

This is the tech fix trap. We build technology to fix problems without seeing that it makes the problem worse. We build and use technology to bring us closer together but we don’t see how it separates others. Cars allow some people to visit relatives but roads divide neighbourhoods. Social media allows some people to connect with new friends but it amplifies the negativity and harassment directed at others. Video conferencing and virtual collaboration tools enabled some people to continue work when pandemic lockdowns disrupted the usual commuting pattern but it reduces the social connection others rely upon. Technology mediates so many of our connections with individuals and with organisations. It isn’t always the solution it may seem.

So, whether those future historians are looking at the shift in power between employer and employee or how individualism and collectivism differs between countries, or how technology affects the power shift, what they will surely notice that The Great Reset didn’t happen all at the same time for everyone. In fact, it happened slowest for those with the least power in society.

Seven hundred million years ago nature had a problem to solve. How to keep animals alive when all the other animals wanted to eat them. Evolution had created these new living things, and it had given each animal the means to power itself by eating plants and other animal. Now it needed to give them each a fighting chance so they could avoid being eaten.

The solution nature came up with has helped animals survive long enough to reproduce and for almost nine million different species to evolve, so it’s been pretty effective. But, like so many things, humans take a good idea and mess it up.

Nature’s good idea was bilaterality. Two sides to one brain. One side to drive the animal to search for food and shelter, the other side to watch for threats and be cautious. The left side of the brain can focus, it is interested in finding things, it enables a bird to spot a piece of grain among the grit or a twig for building a nest. The right side takes the wide view, it watches out for the danger of the fox and startles the bird to flight more quickly than analysing the specifics might do. If animals only had one or the other of these two sides to their brains they simply wouldn’t last long enough to evolve.

This asymmetrical design for brains stuck, and still exists today in every single animal with a brain.

In human brains, the right side maintains a broad view the world, and over a sustained length of time. It experiences the world as continuous, flowing, changing, and it comprehends metaphors and myths. It is how we understand art and poetry, how we sense the bigger picture. The left side has a narrow focused attention of the world. It sees tiny fragments and static snapshots of our experience. It only understands the explicit and literal, and gives us science and maths. Although asymmetrical, these two halves are designed to work together to provide as complete a picture of reality as any human could need.

And, what did humans do with these two necessary and complimentary ways of experiencing the world? We split them into two mutually exclusive binary opposites.

Since the Enlightenment of the 17th and 18th century, left-brained thinking with its rationality, science and technology came to be seen as the superior way of thinking. Like the bird finding grain and twigs, it offered a way to extract more resources from the world, but on overdrive. And wanting the power and control it represented, the white males associated themselves with rational thinking. Demonstrating left-brain thinking became a way to have power over other people and the world, claiming objectivity and the ability to reveal the truth. Right-brain thinking was downgraded as being just about feelings. It was associated with women, and with being emotional. Creative endeavours were less important, myths and rituals were dismissed as primitive story-telling.

Not allowing right-brain thinking to contribute to the way our society thinks prevented us from getting that bigger picture of what the resource extraction and chauvinistic power would do to the planet and society. This split in how we think, of choosing between opposites, and of choosing rationality, created the modern world as it is today. With all the technological marvels and advancements in society, and with the climate catastrophe and inhumane inequality.

Iain McGilchrist, the psychiatrist and philosopher, argues that we should move towards using right-sided thinking more. He says that left-brained rationality alone is insufficient, and that seeing only the “meaningless heap of stuff for us to exploit” provides a different version of the world that misses the “vast, richly complex, moving, flowing tapestry of meaning to which we are connected”. Using right-brain thinking, he says, “every individual has the capacity to unfold another facet of the infinitely complex whole that is this cosmos.”

But choosing right-side thinking over left-brain might not be the best way.

We might choose not one way over the other but to appreciate both for what they bring us. We could develop our capacity for allowing more grace and play in the way we experience the world, accept more of the sublime that defies explanation. But at the same time we could hone our rationality, get better at explaining how our world works. And we must accept the tension that arises between the two. That tension isn’t a bad thing, it’s part of the design, it’s how our brains are meant to work. It’s the interplay of the two halves that gives our brains their fullest power.

So, rather than seeking to use one way of thinking, we should allow ourselves to use all that our brains are capable of. Birds don’t differentiate between paying attention to searching out food and watching out for danger, they move effortlessly between using both sides of their brain. All of our brains are capable of all this too.

Maybe the myth of us only using a small percentage of our brains is some truism that there is so much more that we can do with our brains if we stop believing the narrative that we have to be one thing or another. We are either rational, logical thinkers or creative, emotional types but we can’t be both. We’re either good at maths or good at art, but never good at both.

We, as a society and as individuals, can be good at thinking in many different, complementary, conflicting ways. We can accept rational, narrowly-focused thinking and broad, creative, connected thinking. We must. Without thinking with both our left and right brains we will never be able to build a better future as everything we create is the result of our current left-brained bias.

We should go back to our roots and appreciate both sides of our brain for reshaping our thinking for the future.

“Where do potatoes come from?”, asked my 6 year old niece, in the way that 6 year olds do. Oooh, I thought, I know this one. “The supermarket”, replied her dad. And that was the end of the conversation, except in my head.

Actually, potatoes came from the Andes where they have been cultivated as a food source for thousands of years. European invaders brought potatoes back from South American, first to Spain and then Britain, and eventually the rest of Europe. Charles C. Mann, author and journalist, describes the effect potatoes had on Europe. He says potatoes provided more calories per acre than grains, could be grown on a large scale, and were easier to transport from farms to cities to feed the workers in the factories and the sailors on the boats, making them to perfect fuel for nations set on expansion. With potatoes on their plates, the European population exploded from 140 million in 1750 to 400 million by 1900. The steam engine, electric light and telephone were invented, among many many more technologies. And manufacturing output was greatly increased. It’s not a stretch to say that without the humble potato the industrial revolution would have never happened.

Producing potatoes has a lot in common with producing other physical objects, throughout the industrial revolution and today. We think about this production process as a pipeline with inputs at one end, a process of change, and outputs at the other end. A factory takes in car parts, assembles them, and out rolls cars. The process is efficient because the parts are interchangeable. One steering wheel is just as a good as another. It doesn’t matter which seat the car has, as long as it has one.

Potatoes are the same. When you buy potatoes from the supermarket you don’t care which potato you get. Every potato is unique but they are all similar enough for what you want to do with them as to make them interchangeable. It doesn’t matter whether you are making chips or shepherds pie, the pipeline gives you potatoes that can be used for either.

From the industrial revolution onwards, this was the dominant way of thinking about the creation of value; everything of value comes out of some pipeline that took raw resources and transformed them into something useful to you.

And then along came computers, the internet, data, and algorithms.

There are no platforms for potatoes. No silicon valley tech start-up is working on how to match each individual potato with it’s perfect steak or ideal chef. Because potatoes are standardised and interchangeable they don’t need platforms, pipelines work just fine.

Platforms are different to pipelines. They don’t like things to be standardised and interchangeable, they rely on the uniqueness of things they handle, and the promise of perfectly matching unique things with other unique things.

Dating apps are supposed to work this way. They match the individual traits and characteristics that make you special with your perfect potential partner’s characteristics. Ebay, Uber, Google Search, AirBnB, and many others, all platforms that enable you to find that potentially perfect thing to buy, car to ride in, website to read, place to stay.

The future of creating platforms relies on taking things that we once thought should be dealt with as a potato in a pipeline and dealing with it as we’d hope to find our perfect potential partner. To do so effectively will be to create alternative and additional value in society.

If someone stole your potatoes you might call the police. In the crime incidents pipeline, incidents are dealt with as if they are standardised and interchangeable. All crimes are responded to in this same way because the goal of the pipeline is to quickly and efficiently get the incident out the other end. So, the next available officer is assigned to your incident, they get to the scene of the crime and, if you’re lucky, they catch the potato pilferer red la soda -handed.

But if incidents of crime were dealt with by a platform, one that aimed at matching the uniqueness of the incident to the uniqueness of police officers, we might see different outcomes. The platform would consider real-time data about officers, such as how far away they are, how quickly they are likely to respond, how many incidents they’ve dealt with today, how difficult those incidents might have been and how they might have affected the officer, etc., etc., etc. It would contain historic data about the skills and experience the officers have built up over time, whether they’ve been successful at dealing with potato related incidents in the past. And the platform would consider data it has about the incident, the location, any patterns from other potato thefts. It would use all this available information to make the best match between officer and incident, because to a platform the best outcome results from the best match.

But if, after all that, your stolen potatoes weren’t returned you’ll just have to get some new potatoes.

James Plunkett, the author interested in how we might govern a digital economy, writes how the digital platform is becoming society’s dominant institutional form. He’s right. More and more platforms are replacing pipelines and becoming a part of our lives. How they affect us in ways we aren’t even aware of will shape our lives more and more. When you want a police officer right now, you might not agree with the platform’s decision to assign one who will take longer to get there because they dealt with a similar case yesterday, but you won’t even know that. Plunkett has also written about how platforms might come to mediate the relationship between the individual and the group in society, and in the case of the perfect potato pilferer, it’s easy to see how a shift in the matching algorithm could sway the decision in your favour, in the officer’s favour, or in what the platform decides is in society’s favour, all in search of the perfect match.

But we’re all in search of the perfect match too. The perfect government, perfect economy, perfect car, perfect place, perfect partner, perfect meal… perfect potato.

The promise platforms offer might just be too alluring to resist.

Neil Harbisson might have struggled to get a passport. The rules say passport photos can’t contain objects and Neil has an antenna. The antenna sticks out the top of his head and is wired into his brain allowing him to detect sounds, connect to Wi-Fi, and receive signals from satellites. Neil is a cyborg. He was the first legally recognised cyborg, which is how come his antenna is considered a part of him and so allowed in his passport photo.

Augmenting our bodies with technology is nothing new. The first internal pacemaker was implanted in 1958, using glasses to improve our eyesight started in the thirteenth century, and making tools goes back 3.4 million years. And nowadays many of us carry powerful data collecting devices in our pocket and wear sensing devices on our wrists. So in some ways maybe we’re all cyborgs.

The cyborg anthropologist, Amber Case, studies the symbiotic interactions between humans and machines. Her work considers how our values and culture are being shaped by having our lives increasingly mediated by technology. She studies the technologies that allow us to extend our physical selves, to go faster, remember more, hit harder, and the technologies that shape our mental and emotional selves. The former feels like it gives us an advantage, the latter seems to take something away from us. But Amber is positive about how our biology and technology is merging. She says that our technologies have shrunk time and space, that we can now stand on one side of the world, whisper, and be heard on the other side of the world. She says that our technologies don’t make us less human, they allow us to connect more in ways that make us more human. She says that our most successful technologies get out of the way and help us live our lives.

Mark Weiser said something similar. In 1991, he wrote a paper describing a vision of the Computer for the 21st Century. In it, he argued that the most profound technologies are those that disappear. They weave themselves into the fabric of everyday life until they are indistinguishable from it. He was right. When sensing technologies and the data they generate fade into the background of our lives so that we hardly even think about them, when we wear smart watches day and night, when we feel like we’ve lost a part of ourselves if we go somewhere without a mobile phone, then we are truly cyborgs. We are biological, technological, physical, digital beings.

Breaking down these boundaries between how we think about our biology and our technology, how we consider ourselves separate or connected, and to what and how, are themes Donna Haraway explored in ‘A Cyborg Manifesto’, along with considering the idea of the cyborg as a fusion of the physical and virtual. These are important philosophical questions.

Whereas we are aware of our physical selves because our senses show us our place in the world, the digital self exists because it is measured by a network of invisible technologies. Identity becomes not just about our sense of who we are in relation to others, but also about how we are measured, what data is held about us, what future behaviours can be predicted. If we think of our cyborg-selves as technologically enhanced humans, still mostly human but with more advanced tools, we may lose sight of how different we have become. We are a node in a network, connected to other nodes by the flow of data.

Realising and accepting we are cyborgs may be a transformative experience. It may encourage the construction of an identity fit for an increasingly partial, fragmented, contradictory world. No longer, ‘I, separate from the world’, but, ‘I, connected to the network‘. The question isn’t whether being cyborgs makes us less human, but about how interconnected we can possibly become.

So, carry your phone everywhere, wear your Fitbit or your Apple watch, generate the data, join the network, be a cyborg.

Your digital self is forging a path for the future of cyborgmanity.