Digital Disruption – A Cautionary Tale of Creation & Devastation
A few weeks ago a 19 year old girl in France chose to live broadcast her suicide by throwing herself under train using a live video streaming app. If that wasn’t disturbing enough consider the responses of the watchers after the girl announced that she was about to kill herself: ‘That’s better’ said one ‘We’re waiting’ said another. As the live stream went on it got continuous likes!
Just in case you’re still curious – yes the girl did die.
This tragic and deeply disturbing incident as well as various jihadist apps and mayhem-recipe websites highlights the power of technology to create as well as destroy.
The Good, the Bad and the Ugly of the Digital Disruption
‘No man is an island’ wrote John Donne, the 17th Century English poet.
Well if old John tele-ported to 2016 he would be in for a bit of a shock. Because at the individual level the digital revolution is creating a breed of people who are ever less dependent on and connected to other people. In fact if you are enabled with a smart device you can pretty much live all by and within yourself. In effect digital enablement is creating human islands – the nuclear family is reducing down to the nucleus. At the other extreme however the same enablement is also creating borderless communities that continuously collaborate and support creating knowledge, livelihoods and value.
No good deed – it is said – goes unpunished. And the digital revolution is no exception.
So with the Good come the Bad and the Ugly. So here are a few ‘Technostradumus’ (yes, yes I know there’s no such word, but you know precisely what I mean!!) projections (couldn’t bring myself to write ‘prophecies’) about the potential impacts of the digital revolution:
- Technology will continue to boogie to the cadence of Moore’s Law (the Good) however it will increasingly outpace the capabilities of organizations and people (the Bad) and will substitute instead of supplementing labour (the Ugly)
- Economic wealth will increase significantly (the Good), but its major beneficiaries will be an ever decreasing minority (the Bad) and the value gap between the high and low skilled will continuously widen (the Ugly)
- Internet has created a borderless world (the Good), however, it has also infected and disenfranchised cultures (the Bad) and catalysed radicalization (the Ugly)
- Information is now easily accessible and available (the Good), however, it is often manipulated (the Bad) and even weaponized (the Ugly)
- Communities created by social media has given voice to the individual (the Good) it has also however, empowered radicals (the Bad) and incubated terrorists (the Ugly)
Technology like atomic energy is power. And just like atomic energy it has the ability to constructively disrupt and destructively devastate. And as usage and applications become more and more numerous, simplified and ubiquitous the potential benefits and dangers multiply exponentially.
So When We Said Computer & Robots Will Take-over the World You Laughed….Right?
The speed at which technologies are developing and converging and impacting every niche and nuance of life is sometimes next-to-impossible to grasp – especially by an average human mind like mine. So here’s an example that will – hopefully – create an appropriate context:
In 2004, a class of students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology were asked to define a set of uniquely capable human capabilities that could never be replicated by technology. They came up with the following attributes:
- Autonomous Mobility & Fine Motor Control
- Language & Complex Communication
- Pattern matching & unstructured problem solving
So let’s see in just over a decade where technology has progressed compared to the unique human capabilities that the MIT students thought could never be replicated by technology:
Interacting With the Physical World
- Fine & gross motor control
- Vision & other senses
Language
- Voice Recognition
- Natural language Processing
- Creating Narratives
Problem Solving
- Answering unstructured queries
- Rule base analysis
- Pattern recognition and classification
Applications such as Siri, Cortana, Google Now and Nuance provide voice and language Recognition
Lionsbridge / Skype provide language translation –for instance you can speak in English on Skype and the recipient can hear your words in a language of his /her choice
Applications such as Native Science and Automated Insights author thousands of stories and news reports daily.
Baxter & Sawyer – The Future of Blue Collar?
A survey by the Boston Consulting Group found that 37% of firms with over $1 billion in sales and 48% of firms with over $10 billion in sales plan to return at least some production to the US. Two of the reasons for this semi-about-turn are Baxter and Sawyer – examples of how automation and robotics are changing not just manufacturing but a wide range of major industries including Healthcare, Retail, Hospitality and Business Processes.
So now let’s meet Baxter and Sawyer
Baxter is a basic manufacturing robot that can load/unload material and sort them according to a set of pre-designated logic.
Sawyer is more sophisticated and can tend to machines; test circuit boards and other precise tasks that are impractical to automate with conventional robots
Baxter costs $ 25 K; Sawyer 29K. They can work 24x7x52 –i.e. 8760 hours per year. That’s an hourly rate of $2.85 for Baxter and $3.31 for Sawyer. And they are going to get cheaper…faster…..add more capabilities
OK – Now for Some Good News
A decade ago, it took Apple two years to sell 1 million i-Pods. Then came the i-Pad, which sold 80 million units in its first two years and 130 million in the next two years.
The Smartphone population in India is expected to cross 650 million by 2019.
Today, a device is no longer a piece of hardware that can perform certain functions…
It is an encapsulation of experience and is designed to be an integral part of your life…
Watch anyone with a Smart Device and you know how it’s become their virtual focal point….
Walk into a restaurant and watch a couple sitting next to each other staring intently not into each other’s eyes but most likely in to their Smartphone displays!
It goes further. Facebook has a VP of Analytics Monetization. They use advanced analytics to deliver micro-targeted prospect segments to businesses. One of my colleague’s wife started a wedding catering business…she provided segmentation filters to Facebook and almost instantly had access to a target database…
Then there is the Tesla Model S&X sedan.
Sometime in October 2015, when the car owners were fast asleep every S&X model was remotely upgraded with self-driving software with the auto-pilot enabled in the morning.
HCL, one of India’s leading technology majors, launched the world’s first ever public interview on Twitter in 2014. Dubbed as the “coolest interview ever,” it aimed attract best-in-class global talent. The campaign generated 88000 applicants from 60 countries creating a unique talent acquisition benchmark. It attracted website visitors from 160 countries, media coverage worth $1 million and became the most followed IT Company in the world – all at a total cost of $1500.
Another example of digital power is Aadhaar –the world’s largest digital identity platform. This unique system is enabling efficient disbursement of welfare measures, information and education. Latest government figures report savings to the tune of Rs. 17, 360 crores in the last five and half years. Aadhaar is enabling more and more Indians to participate in the country’s economic growth and progress through multiple digital interfaces. Co-incidentally (or perhaps not!) HCL is the Managed Service Provider for the Aadhaar project
Digital Disruption – A Worrying Conclusion
Hundreds of years an English king called Canute stood on beach and ordered the waves to go back –they didn’t. So nothing will stop the next wave of digital advancement to roll over us. With every wave there will be greater benefits that will impact ever larger numbers of people. But with every wave our dependencies on technologies will increase along with the dangers. And as far as I am aware there are no plans in place of Disaster Recovery!
Sources
Erik Brynjolfsson & Andrew MacAfee (Race Against the Machine)
Mala Bhargava (Business World)