WTF-Ch15.Pdf

wtf? Copyright © 2017 by Timothy F. O’Reilly. All rights reserved. Printed in the United States of America. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. For information, address HarperCollins Publishers, 195 Broadway, New York, NY 10007. HarperCollins books may be purchased for educational, business, or sales pro- motional use. For information, please email the Special Markets Department at [email protected]. first edition Library of Congress Cataloging- in- Publication Data has been applied for. ISBN 978-0-06-256571-6 ISBN: 978-0-06-269955-8 (International Edition) 17 18 19 20 21 lsc 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 WTF_9780062565716_5P_TM0815_cc17.indd 4 8/15/17 4:23 PM 15 DON’T REPLACE PEOPLE, AUGMENT THEM THESE ARE TWO SEPARATE QUESTIONS: WHETHER THE KIND of cognitive work described in the previous chapter can ever replace the mass employment in the factories of the twentieth century; and whether it can be well paid enough for the flywheel of prosperity to continue. In answer to the first question, let me simply say that it was incon- ceivable during the agricultural era that so many people could find employment in factories and in cities. Yet automation and far lower cost of production led to huge increases in demand for previously unavailable products and services. It is up to us once again to put people to work in fulfilling ways, creating new kinds of prosperity. The lessons of technology innovation remind us that progress always entails thinking the unthinkable, and then doing things that were previously impossible. As to the second question, it is up to us to ensure that the fruits of productivity are shared. The first step is to prepare people for the future that awaits them. From 2013 through 2015, I was part of the Markle Foundation Re- work America task force, exploring the future of the US economy. The question before the task force was how to provide opportunities for Americans in the digital age. One of the moments that stuck with me was a remark from political scientist and author Robert Putnam, who said, “All of the great advances in our society have come when we have made investments in other people’s children.” He’s right. Universal grade school education was one of the best investments of the nineteenth century, universal high school education of the twentieth. We forget that in 1910, only 9% of US children graduated from high school. By 1935, that number was up to 60%, and by 1970 nearing 80%. The GI Bill sent returning World War II veterans to college, enabling a smooth transition from wartime to peaceful employment. WTF_9780062565716_5P_TM0815_cc17.indd 320 8/15/17 4:23 PM don’T Replace People, AUgMenT TheM • 321 In the face of today’s economic shifts, there were proposals in the 2016 presidential election for universal free community college. In Jan- uary 2017, the city of San Francisco went beyond proposals and agreed to make the City College of San Francisco, its community college, free for all residents. This is a great step. But we don’t just need “more” education, or free education. We need a radically different kind of education. “If the students we are training today are going to live to be 120 years old, and their careers are likely to span 90 years, but their training will only make them competitive for 10 years, then we have a problem,” notes Jeffrey Bleich, former US ambassador to Australia and now chair of the Fulbright scholarship board. Advances in healthcare and technology, and the changing nature of employment, are compounding to obsolete our current educational model, which viewed schooling as preparation for a lifetime of work at a single employer. We need new mechanisms to support education and retraining throughout life, not just in its early stages. This is already true for pro- fessionals in every field, whether athletes or doctors, computer program- mers or skilled manufacturing workers. For them, ongoing learning is an essential part of the job; access to training and educational resources is one of the most prized perks, used to attract top employees. And as “the job” is deconstructed, the need for education doesn’t go away. If anything, it is increased. But the nature of that education also needs to change. In a connected world where knowledge is available on demand, we need to rethink what people need to know and how they come to know it. THE AUgMENTED WoRKeR If you squint a little, you can see the Apple Store clerk as a cyborg, a hybrid of human and machine. Each store is flooded with smartphone- wielding salespeople who are able to help customers with everything from technical questions and support to purchase and checkout. There are no cash registers with lines of customers waiting with products pulled from the piles on the shelves. The store is a showroom of WTF_9780062565716_5P_TM0815_cc17.indd 321 8/15/17 4:23 PM 322 • WTF? products to explore. When you know what you want, a salesperson fetches it from the back room. If you’re already an Apple customer with a credit card on file (and as of 2014, there were 800 million of us), all you need to provide is your email address to walk out the door with your chosen product. Rather than using technology to eliminate workers and cut costs, Apple has equipped them with new powers in order to create an amazing user experience. By so doing, they created the most productive retail stores in the world. As a design pattern, this is remarkably similar to one of the key business model elements of Lyft and Uber, discussed in Chapter 3. The Apple Store has nothing to do with on- demand, the map that most people use to understand these new platforms, yet it has a great deal in common with them as a lesson plan for constructing a magical user experience made possible by networked, cognitively augmented workers connected to a data- rich platform that recognizes its customers and tailors its services to them. The Apple Stores are also a testament to the truth that it is not technology itself that is transformative. It is its application to rethink- ing the way the world works, not inventing something new but apply- ing newly latent capabilities to do an old thing so much better as to change it utterly. Even the very first advances in civilization had this cyborg quality. The marriage of humans with technology is what made us the masters of other species, giving us weapons and tools harder and sharper than the claws of any animal, projecting our strength at greater and greater distance until we could bring down even the greatest of beasts in the hunt, not to mention engineer new crops that produce far more food than their wild forebears, and domesticate animals to make us stronger and faster. I remember once reading an account of the crossing of the land bridge between Siberia and Alaska that used a curious fact as part of its analysis of the possible date. It couldn’t have happened before the invention of sewing, the authors noted, which made possible the piecing together of close- fitting garments that allowed humans to live in cold climes. Sewing! Sewing with bone needles was once a WTF? WTF_9780062565716_5P_TM0815_cc17.indd 322 8/15/17 4:23 PM don’T Replace People, AUgMenT TheM • 323 technology, making possible something that had previously been unthinkable. Every advance in our productivity, getting more output from an equivalent amount of labor, energy, and materials, has come from the pairing of human and machine. It is the acceleration and compounding of that productivity that has produced the riches of the modern world. For example, agricultural production doubled over the hundred years from 1820 to 1920, but it took only thirty years for the next doubling, fifteen for the doubling after that, and ten for the doubling after that. The ultimate source of productivity increases is innovation. Abra- ham Lincoln, no economist, but an acute judge of the forces of human history, wrote: Beavers build houses; but they build them in nowise differently, or better, now than they did five thousand years ago. Man is not the only animal who labors; but he is the only one who improves his workmanship. These improvements he effects by Discoveries and Inventions. A discovery or invention only improves the livelihood of all, though, when it is shared. Consider one of the world’s most heralded inventions. Can you imagine the first woman (I like to imagine that it was a woman) who built a controlled fire? How amazed her companions were. Perhaps afraid at first. But soon warmed and fed by her boldness. Even more important than fire itself, though, was her ability to tell others about it. It was language that was our greatest invention, the ability to pass fire from mind to mind. In periods where knowledge is embraced and widely shared, society advances and becomes richer. When knowledge is hoarded or disregarded, society becomes poorer. The adoption of movable type and the printed book in fifteenth- century Europe led to our modern economy, a remarkable flowering of WTF_9780062565716_5P_TM0815_cc17.indd 323 8/15/17 4:23 PM 324 • WTF? both knowledge and of freedom, as the discoverers of the new could pass the fire of knowledge to people not yet born and to those living thou- sands of miles away.

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