Manager and Machine: The New Leadership Equation

"Humans have and will continue to have a strong comparative advantage when it comes to inspiring the troops, empathizing with customers, developing talent and the like.  Sometimes, machines will provide invaluable input but translating this insight into messages that resonate with organizations will require a human touch. No computer will ever manage by walking around and no effective executive will try to galvanize action by saying "we're doing this because an algorithm told us to". Indeed the contextualization of small-scale machine-made decisions is likely to become an important component of tomorrow's leadership tool kit" - Mc Kinsey Insights.

True, or not giving enough credit to machine learning?  Machine learning will never replace the physical sensation of a hand on a shoulder saying "good job", but it may yet drive more and more decisions in the C-suites making human decision-making less and less important or devalued.  Machine learning observes power laws of expansion and self-correction.  Most technologists are aware of this but fear prognosticating too far out because of it. Yes, they're right to be cautious in that regard, but perhaps they are not right in not sounding some human alarm. This message is fairly contrary to what I've been writing on this blog since its inception.  Thus far I have tried to continue to point out the human in human/tech interaction, the primacy, messiness and beauty of human limitations. I do, however, fear that we may get beyond that very soon, and in the blink of an eye, thanks to exponentially paced machine learning. If I'm right, then we'll need a new paradigm for "humanness", not for technology. We must be more than the adjuncts to machine learning, not because, a la sci-fi dystopias, of a fear that the machines will govern us. Rather, we should be concerned about what we will voluntarily give up to them.  

John Seely Brown and High Speed Trading

"There's potential for a lot of mayhem once bots are introduced on a wide scale, a researcher concluded. The research suggests that frictionless markets, run by rationally calculating bots, may not be the efficient economic panacea  some have hoped for. Social friction and "inertia" may usefully dampen volatility and increase stability. De Long and Froomkin even suggest that such frictionlessness might disable the "invisible hand". If not actually producing  good, at least the invisible hand prevents the pursuit of private interests from doing harm. Assumptuons which underlie the microeconomics of the invisible hand, DeLong and Froomkin conclude, fray badly when transported to the information economy". That was John Seely Brown in 2004, from his seminal book "The Social Life of Information" At the time he wrote, floor-based open-outcry securities trading was already under attack, but it was nowhere near the current state of massive automated  trading based on micromovements in the market. The automation of the markets has led to a premium not only for information (always at a premium) but for bandwidth and speed, neither of which contributes to transparency, stability or confidence in the markets. Recent SEC investigation into high speed trading can only help but point out these faults, regardless of what the result may be. High speed trading is not, at base, an information issue, but it is one in which the social context of information (faith in market integrity) matters tremendously. No one advocates for a return to the open cry floor trading days - but neither should we look at them as having nothing to teach us.

Richard Ogle's "Smart World" and Brian Arthur's "The Nature of Technology"

Richard Ogle's "Smart World" and Brian Arthur's "The Nature of Technology" make for an interesting pair of complementary reads.  Arthur's book is more straightforward and focused - an attempt to create a basic theory of the nature of technology. Ogle's ambitions are higher but not achieved - trying to synthesize network theory, complexity theory, behavioral economics and other disciplines into an overall theory of creativity. Although I think Ogle reaches too broadly and ultimately fails, an essential component of his thesis is correct.  He sees a "smart world" in the sense that we have placed so much technology into the world that the physical world around us is "smart" and thus enables space and thought to merge ("idea spaces" he calls the product). This means that when these idea spaces intersect, they are more "full" and thus the likelihood of a great creative breakthrough emerging is that much higher.  What's the connection to Arthur? Arthur's view of technology is that it is combinatorial - each technology sits on the shoulders of previous ones.  Thus our technologies consist of a host of sub-technologies, which in turn consist of more sub-technologies.  The combinatorial, recursive and complex nature of current technologies yields not merely a systems-oriented approach to technology but almost a biological one. Ogle looks at incredibly creative people, such as the painters Turner and Picasso, architect Frank Gehry and others and sees their genius in being able to smash together different idea spaces.  Ditto Arthur "What is common to originators  is not genius or special powers. Rather, it is the possession of a very large quiver of functionalities and principles". Ogle does not attempt a theory of technology per se, rather, he attempts one of creativity. In focusing more narrowly on technology, Arthur is more successful. He also gets to the heart of human concern about technology: "Since for all of human existence we have been at home in nature - we trust nature, not technology. And yet we look to technology to take care of our future - we hope in technology. Technology is the (human) programming of nature, the orchestration and use of nature's phenomena. So, in its deepest sense it is profoundly natural. But it does not feel natural. If we merely used nature's phenomena in raw form, to power water wheels or propel sailing ships, we would feel more at home with technology. But now, with the coming of genetic engineering, machine intelligence, climate engineering, we are beginning to use technology to intervene directly within nature. To our primate species, at home in a habitat of trees and grasses and other animals, this feels profoundly unnatural. This disturbs our deep trust. So we turn to tradition, environmentalism, family values, fundamentalism. Behind those reactions, justified or not, lie fears. We fear that technology separates us from nature, destroys nature, destroys our nature. We fear this phenomenon of technology that is not in our control. We fear we are unleashing some thing of disembodied action somehow taking on a life of its own and coming to control us. WE fear technology as a living thing that will bring us death."

Bingo. We are comfortable with "nature", which brings us earthquakes, tsunamis, mass extinctions and epidemics, but we are not comfortable with the technologies of water control, seismic engineering and vaccinations?  We are comfortable with people surviving as they did in the Stone Age - eking out a living on (barely) subsistence farming, but we fear GMOs that would increase crop yields and feed the planet? Sad sad sad.

Lessig, Lawyers and Free Culture

"I'm a lawyer..I believe  in the law. I believe in the law of copyright. Indeed, I have devoted my life to working in law not because there are big bucks at the end but because there are ideals at the end that I would love to live....The law should regulate in certain areas of culture but it should regulate culture only when that regulation does good. Yet lawyers rarely test their power, or the power they promote, against this simple pragmatic question: "Will it do good?"  When challenged about the expanding reach of such law, the lawyer answers "why not?" We should ask: "Why?" Show my why your regulation of culture is needed. Show me how it does good. And until you can show me both, keep your lawyers away". (c) 2004 Lawrence Lessig, "Free Culture:The Nature and Future of Creativity"

From the copyright page of such book: "The scanning, uploading and distribution of this book via the internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials".

Question - hypocrisy by Lessig, or proof of his point re: concentration of power in media companies?

For the record, this blog post constitutes political commentary/satire and is claimed as a "fair use" of such copyrighted materials. Zen/legal koan - is that last statement necessary?

PS - Lessig rules.

Julie Cohen's "Configuring the Networked Self" and the Poverty of "Legal Scholarship"

"Finally and importantly, in each of these literatures, the analytical constructs generated by liberal individualism are particularly seductive because the problems they address play out in the realm of "information". Information appears to be the ultimate disembodied good, yielding itself seamlessly to abstract, rational analysis. The networked information society appears to be the autonomous, rational, disembodied self's natural milieu, transcending the particularity of bodies, cultures and spaces with equal ease. That view is a  fallacy..Liberal individualism's commitments to immateriality and disembodiment make for a very poor model of self formation, online as well as offline."

There is the subject - law, medicine, architecture, poetry, etc. - and there is the "scholarship" of the subject. In theory (dare I use that word) there should not be a great distance between the two. In practice these days, the two never meet. The above quote is from a  dense book by legal scholar Julie Cohen, an expert in copyright and privacy law. You'd never know by reading this book that Ms. Cohen is a legal scholar, since the book cites perhaps half a dozen cases and statutes, tops. When I was a kid, law scholarship collected all the cases and materials on an area and tried to develop overarching theories about what the cases and their trends meant.  Nowadays, legal scholarship is top-down: begin with a theory borrowed from social science or philosophy, and apply it to the environment in which law operates. What do you get? "Law" books that are utterly useless to practitioners, law review articles in which professors speak only at each other and are only read by each other, and a culture of "scholarship" that has removed law students from an appropriate technical and practical  framework and placed them in a social science mediated Wonderland in which their studies have no relevance to actual practice. I have loved philosophy longer than I loved law, and appreciate that once in a blue moon a social science scholar may have something interesting to say that may actually change the way I see something or do something.  The problem is with prose (and analysis) such as that of Ms. Cohen above - it seems more apt to a seminar on Heidegger than to a courtroom or legislative chamber. When law professors so remove themselves from the actual law-creating milieu, when they fall for the "siren song" (such as it is) of sociological analysis, you end up with verbose blather that enlightens no one, least of all law students "studying" this material.