In a time of chaos, broaden your strategic thinking
Welcome to a world that’s impossible to understand. You’re bombarded by indicators, but you don’t understand them all — events you didn’t see coming and whose consequences you can’t anticipate. Intellectual property rules have been shattered: your resources and output no longer really belong to you, and other companies can use them however they want. No, it’s not the beginning of a bad futuristic novel. It’s just a description of the world we’re heading towards with the advent of the Internet and artificial intelligence. And it’s this new universe that Weinberger invites us to visit in Everyday Chaos. Are you ready for the trip? Your first step, perhaps, should be to put everything you think you know to one side, because it’s not going to be of much use to you.
Will you always need to understand? #Complexity
Deep learning is revolutionizing prediction, delivering a degree of reliability and accuracy that is beyond the reach of traditional human resources. Deep Patient, for example, can advise you to take medicine to prevent you from falling ill even though you haven’t shown any warning signs. Paws can be used to help rangers find you if you’re thinking about poaching in a national park. And several companies now offer AI systems that can determine the sex of chickens when they are only a couple of hours old (so that males, which are harder to fatten up, can be “discarded”). The most remarkable aspect of these AI tools is their ability to self-organize so they can learn. Their designers “told” the tools what to look for and fed them with petabytes of data; but they didn’t explain how to use the information, because they do not know themselves. For humans who have been brought up to believe there is an explanation for everything, that we can understand why events happen and that we can cause or stop them, the rise of these autonomous and impenetrable digital oracles may seem destabilizing. We will have to revisit our predictive models1 in the near future, and devise new decision maps not based on known facts but on indicators.
Are you looking to stay one step ahead? #Inanticipation
Excerpt from Business Digest N°299, September 2019
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