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CHAPTER 1

The Man-Machine paradox

It is 06.05 a.m. on 5 January 2030 . . . The day begins for Julie:

Julie wakes up at exactly the optimum time to maximise her sleep, wellbeing and energy, to a vibration in her neck from her embedded wellbeing monitor. Some ambient music fills the room, bathed in soft purple swirling lighting. The smell of freshly brewed coffee percolates upwards from the kitchen. These are things she chose in her psychological contract with Rover. In a few minutes, coffee, water and fruit slices are brought to her by Rover, her personal robotic assistant. It’s time for Julie’s early morning wellbeing session, led by her ever-faithful 24/7 digital guide, who has already ironed her underwear, run a bath, organised her bag for the day, checked her travel schedule, confirmed her appointments and so on.

Rover also monitored Julie’s vital signs and adjusted her personal exercise routine around her expected physical activity during the day, to maximise her balance of mind, body and soul. Rover is, of course, a robot and makes rational decisions based on an aggregation of big data about what’s best for Julie’s work, life and play. However, Rover has also integrated humanity by taking on board Julie’s own personal values within the decision-making algorithms that Rover uses.

We are seeing the earliest signs and signifiers of a world where man and machine have switched roles, with driverless trains, 3D printing, self-service shops, smart cities, smart homes, smartphones and drones. We can already measure our vital signs to improve our vitality and receive live updates on life-threatening conditions to help us live long and prosper. However, the transformation towards our love affair with machines is not exactly new. We perhaps began to notice the difference as long ago as 1822 with Charles Babbage’s invention of the difference engine. Since that time, we have had the enigma machine, The Casio FX77 and many more devices that have enabled us to do ever more complex things. Many more things are still to come in our enigmatic relationship with machines via The Internet of Things, which promises to have 50 billion devices connected to the Internet by 2020. Innovation consultancy Arthur D. Little report that any technology innovations that enhance people’s time to spend on higher-level Maslow needs and that reduce or remove the need to focus on the lower level needs is a good innovation. We will increasingly have the ability to separate the things that satisfy us from the things that we have to do. It is entirely feasible that we will have time to enjoy those things in life that we do purely for their intrinsic value, such as arts and crafts. Perhaps, like Julie’s example in 2030, we will use machines to clear the space and time for us to enjoy such things. Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD) CEO Peter Cheese points out that we see the emergence of different economic models in some sectors, for example in agriculture and transportation. These shifts are driven by technology and geopolitics: “The departure of farm workers is driving the introduction of mechanisation. In transportation the UK currently has a shortage of lorry drivers but this is producing calls for automation rather than more lorry drivers”.

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The economist Larry Summers pointed out that, whereas the availability of capital used to enhance labour, it could now displace labour. One only has to look at the automotive industry to see a glimpse of the future for these other sectors in terms of how automation has affected jobs. As well as technology, geopolitics is driving change. For example, in construction, agriculture, health and hospitality, where there has been easy access to low-cost labour, there has been little incentive to look at automation, but this has now appeared on the agenda in the wake of an uprising of popularism across the western world. From coal mining to data mining we can envisage a number of future scenarios in our love/indifference/hate affair with man, woman, machines, robotics, artificial intelligence (AI) and official stupidity.

War of the Worlds

In this dystopian view, humans battle it out with machines and all lose the value of each others’ contributions. Like the film of the same name, it is a zero sum game for all concerned or a nil-nil draw in football terms, with dramatic consequences for humanity, humility and technology alike. Despite this being a lose-lose game for all concerned, we humans love a little drama in our lives, so War of the Worlds is not a completely unlikely scenario, especially in some business sectors, where it can be seen as a battle for supremacy that will at least appeal to some alpha males and females.

Planet of the Apes

Humans decide to work without machines. This is an impoverished retro world in which humanity slides backwards overall. In football terms this is one-nil to the humans or an ‘ignore’ strategy. Although it sounds unlikely as a scenario, we already see attempts to ignore the march of automation in terms of the arguments about driverless trains in the UK and, to a lesser degree, road transport. Railways have the advantage of having rails so the destination and journey is already pre-set to some degree. There are also already examples of driverless trains, for example the Docklands Light Railway in London. As I write, we have experienced a series of lengthy strikes by the staff of Southern Rail over the gradual erosion of human presence on their trains. The argument revolved around whether the trains would continue to have an onboard member of staff, although it was presented as a health and safety issue to the general public in terms of who was responsible for shutting the doors. This is verging on a War of the Worlds strategy by the unions rather than an ignore strategy. It is, however, certain that technology will not go away from such occupations and the unions would do well to think about what humans can contribute to people’s lives on transport systems rather than attempting to stop the onward march of technology.

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Road transport is more difficult in some ways as the landscape is more random, with pedestrians, cyclists, obstacles and the lack of what railway people call a ‘permanent way’ on most roads. There are currently concerns about the idea of having convoys of lorries on our motorways with the trailing driverless vehicles connected by Bluetooth. As an aside, I can understand the concern over the connectivity, having travelled widely and been repeatedly told that conference centres have Bluetooth speakers for my music, which then cease to work in every place from Dublin to Dubrovnik. Until a technology can be shown to be fail-safe why not use a good old wire? Sure, it does not matter that much when the risk is not that your music will not play at a seminar, but it does if you might kill someone on a motorway. However, the wider point is that the technology will eventually be made to be fail-safe, so never mind my occasional blue language over Bluetooth! So, returning to the issue of driverless cars and lorries, recent research from You Gov bears witness to our Planet of the Apes scenario:

This outlook is mirrored in views about convoys of lorries connected by Bluetooth, with 64% believing that this development would make roads more dangerous and with 46% believing that it would kill an entire industry. While technology marches on, we can see in this example what Twiss said, that technology is always impeded by social evolution. When evolution is actually perceived as a threat, we can see how there may be a rocky road to implementation.

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We have seen a less belligerent form of Planet of the Apes in the return to various crafts, where human ingenuity and the personal touch are seen as more valuable/authentic than machine efficiency. Such nostalgia can co-exist with the efficiencies that can come from machines where people are prepared to pay a premium price for handmade products and services from craft beer to craft work.

Attack of the Clones

Machines not only augment human function, they mainly replace it, but without the human systems in place for us to enjoy the leisure time that this creates. We live easy yet unfulfilled lives as a result. In football terms this is one-nil to the machines as they replace entire jobs once performed by humans. Some observers have predicted that the technological singularity will signal the end of the human era around 2040, as superintelligence advances at exponential rates. We have not exactly been attacked by clones up till this point except in the movies, but just notice the quiet revolutions in areas that we take for granted. Your switchboard operator is digital, your lift operator is electric and some receptionists are now electronic. The Attack of the Clones scenario seems fairly unlikely, yet we already see how automation can de-skill jobs, such as car manufacture and agriculture if the people doing them do not step up to new levels to profit from augmentation. The choice is in our hands. All that needs to happen for this to become reality is for humans to decide to recline in their sofas and watch the world go by.

As Winston Churchill might have said in Attack of the Clones,

“We will fight them with our synapses. We will fight them with our neurones. We shall never reprogram”.

The Man (Woman) Machine

We work in an integrated way with machines, using them for what they do best and deploying human skills when they are of greatest advantage. As a result we live easier, more fulfilled lives. The epilogue I wrote for this book is informed by The Man (Woman) Machine, hereafter referred to as the Man-Machine for convenience and in deference to the Kraftwerk album of the same name. This is one-all draw in football terms, a win-win or ‘cobotic’ approach. This approach is already established in use within certain high-tech professions such as surgery, electronics, pharmaceuticals and opticians, so it is not a work of science fiction.

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I spoke with Matt Bonam and Neil MacKillop at Astra Zeneca about their approach to working in an integrated way with machines. In particular, what advances in AI can offer us in terms of improving health across all three of Astra Zeneca’s therapeutic areas: respiratory, oncology and cardiovascular. The dialogue was remarkable. Matt’s unit aims to combine new digital technologies with products to help people and physicians better manage when and how medications are used in terms of their impact. This helps patients to optimise their adherence, their self-management and interaction with the physician. The development was triggered in 2012 when the team realised that digital technologies had become robust enough to revolutionise data collection and transmission. It became possible to collect data in real time and provide insights back in real time. This has enabled us to develop a much better approach to more personalised medicine: the right dose; right treatment; delivered at the right time.

Patients are traditionally supported by seeing a physician at intervals and would be asked, “How have you been?” Their doctor’s effectiveness is predicated on what the person can remember and what they are prepared to tell the doctor. What has changed is our ability to passively collect information about the patient, thus eliminating problems of memory or willingness to disclose information.

In the future, Matt and Neil pointed out that Astra Zeneca will have the ability to bring together the individual’s data with anonymised information from the population they sit in. This will revolutionise what we are able to do for the patient’s healthcare. This will allow the prediction of what will happen to them over the next few days. For example, for respiratory patients who exacerbate for COPD and asthma, the impact of that exacerbation could be life changing. The ability to look at data from an individual will save people’s lives. In cardiac failure, Astra Zeneca aim to be able to predict a stroke or a heart attack 48 hours in the future, which offers the opportunity to take preventative action. “We will soon be able to more accurately predict the right dosage for the individual patient, taking into account their weight, health and metabolism with impacts on efficacy and reductions in side effects.”

However, Twiss pointed out that technological revolution is always impeded by social evolution factors. I asked Matt to comment on the barriers to adoption and his answer was refreshing when compared with many people who attempt product push:

We do not start with the technology, we start with the problem. If you are going to start with cool tech, unless you are a Steve Jobs, your technology is unlikely to diffuse into a crowded marketplace. Some of the technology used to enable better medication adherence is one example. If we are asking someone to ingest a microchip every day and the patient must weigh this up in terms of benefit-risk. If for example you have had an organ transplant your social contract may well be different than someone with a less critical condition so it all depends on a number of factors.

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We are navigating several hurdles with our approach. Privacy and security of data are crucial for patients, especially if they fear that the data will be used to penalise the individual, e.g. elective surgeries, insurance premiums. Data loss and impact of data loss must be weighed against the positive stories of lives saved/transformed by the technology. It is about having a contract on fair use of data and we take that very seriously. It is our job as leaders to make wise decisions that harmonise the opportunities that exist between man/woman and machine.

Brain Based Enterprises offers a view that the win-win posture is both desirable and achievable. Reaching this will not be a simple affair, nor is it likely to be a linear journey in all areas of our life and it is already apparent that these are not discrete choices in some areas of business and life. Barack Obama summed up the challenge well in his departure speech: “The next wave of economic dislocations won’t come from overseas. It will come from the relentless pace of automation that makes a lot of good, middle-class jobs obsolete.”

To engender harmonious collaborations and mergers between man, woman and machine will require us to answer some extremely difficult questions:

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Nostalgia ain’t what it used to be

In considering a future society in which machines are omnipresent and integrated into everyday life, in some cases quite literally under our skin, it is very easy to be seduced into a dystopian future, where man and woman are enslaved by machines in a real-life version of Attack of the Clones. Indeed, while writing this book, King Filip of Belgium issued a warning that the digital revolution was contributing to a growing gap between the individual and government. Many of our seismic shifts in terms of unrest in the western world are not so much connected with Donald Trump and Brexit, but by deeper seated anxieties as people begin to see fundamental changes happening to their jobs, livelihoods and communities. President Trump’s victory and the United Kingdom’s surprising vote to leave the European Union were partly fuelled by a sense of paradise lost and a perception that our futures were controlled by others, alongside various promises to restore a sense of control to the people.

This came home to me when I was invited to attend a private viewing of a Bob Dylan painting and sculpture exhibition. What struck me was how Dylan had captured a lost industrial age, and ‘nostalgic landscapes’ such as coal mining, car factories, steel works, art deco cafés, heartbreak motels, Zephyrs, Zodiacs, signs of the Zodiac and so on. Yet, such retro-futures are unlikely to return given the inevitability of technologically driven change and the onward march of Moore’s Law. In case you are not familiar with this, Intel co-founder Gordon Moore predicted in 1965 that the number of microchip transistors etched onto a microprocessor would double every two years. This also meant that computing power would double every two years. Moore’s Law appears to be slowing yet his basic principle holds good. However, the Man-Machine paradox does not have to be an either/or affair, like War of the Worlds. In other words, nostalgia ain’t what it used to be.

The crucial differentiator is how we respond to the machine age and how we manage to resolve the paradoxes of man, woman and machines. Brain Based Enterprises offers strategies and practices that will help you maximise the upside of the Fourth Industrial Revolution. That said, we all have to rethink exactly what we expect and how we intend to adapt in order to thrive in an age where AI drives disruptive technological growth with dramatic impacts on what we call civilisation. Rather than drowning in fake nostalgia let us begin by considering how we get through this thing called life.

What do you want from life?

‘What Do You Want from Life?’ – The Tubes

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Psychedelic punk poets The Tubes shone a satirical light on our hopes, dreams, foibles and fantasies with their dystopian rock anthem ‘What Do You Want from Life?’ You ought to check the song out to appreciate the full value of the rant at the end, which was decades ahead of its time. Yet their title is an incredibly good question for anyone trying to focus their energies and skills into what they do for a living and from life in general. I asked a beautiful woman the question. What she said took me by surprise:

I want to feel confident in my own skin, improve my education and have the emotional intelligence to protect myself from self and other’s criticism. Aside from that, I want to do a job that makes me feel valued, be paid well enough for it to enable me to give some of my time to things that matter. At the end of my life, I’d like people to be able to say that I left the planet in a better state than when I arrived in some ways. My footprints should be light on planet earth but purposeful.

I was expecting her to give me a list of consumer products! Well, actually I am only joking about such an obviously sexist and ageist assumption about my wife, yet this story rather points to our perverse views about happiness and how some of these are only skin deep. The question of what do you want from life is hard enough for many people to answer in the present moment, even harder if you attempt to answer it some time into the future. Perhaps it is a little easier to consider the question “What do we get from life?” In the western world we tend to get an education, some basic promises about health, a job with sufficient income to have some kind of life and so on. Some of us enjoy greater levels of wealth and therefore the potential to live a richer life while others must satisfy themselves with inner riches. Paradoxically the research on happiness shows some correlation between a rise in material wealth and an overall decrease in happiness. The CIPD report that a surprisingly high number of those earning more also say that money worries have affected their job performance. For instance:

In Dialogue III of this book we visit Gareth Jones at Chemistry, a 21st-century recruitment agency that has developed the tools to help people get better answers to the question “What do you want from life in 2030?” Is age a factor in all this?

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The millennial fallacy

There is a popular belief that millennials are somehow genetically different to Generation X/Y and that this somehow requires us to redesign work to meet their needs, wants, whims, foibles and fantasies. It would be quite remarkable if a species had fundamentally changed across a single generation and quite contrary to any ideas about evolution, bringing new meaning to Planet of the Apes. Talking with millennials I think we might have mistaken cause and effect and confused biology with psychology, sociology and anthropology here. Certainly socioeconomic factors surrounding work have changed, with greater uncertainties in career tenure, constant churn in jobs, a major recession and changes in the employment relationship and the ‘psychological contract’. In some cases millennials conclude that loyalty to an enterprise is at best transient and not worth the trade. This, rather than ‘genetic modification’, might more adequately explain their desire for sabbaticals, job-hopping and what appears to be mere compliance to an enterprise over commitment.

Anthropology also plays its part in terms of how tribal behaviour affects expectations and behaviour at work; in other words millennial behaviours might simply be part of the latest ‘corporate fashion’. In the gig economy, with low wages and ‘start-stop’ project-based work without commitment, pension contributions, holidays, sick pay, etc., some millennials are willing to trade other non-financial elements of the reward-recognition package. This might explain why some people claim that millennials crave constant instant approval via references and other recognition tokens such as awards, as these help such people manage their careers on LinkedIn etc. The need for approval might, therefore, be nothing to do with fundamental ego problems, just the social recognition that references say more than your CV in a connected business world. To suggest that these changes are down to fundamental biological factors is, therefore, to miss the impact of some other ‘ologies’. In short, we have not changed genetically, but our circumstances have. Some millennials I speak with would love the idea of a job for life, if an enterprise could be found that nurtured their talents in the way that I experienced in my time spent at The Wellcome Foundation. Such places are much harder to find these days.

So, we do need to think about what people want from work and life and maybe these things are not so far different from those of other generations. In a recent survey 74% of staff surveyed said they wanted more freedom in their roles and 34% said their work was overly regulated. Paradoxically, computers and more structured processes at work, driven by algorithms, can restrict the freedoms that many people crave in doing their jobs. One only has to experience phoning a bad call centre where management have structured the work and held on to discretionary power in such a way that frontline staff are unable to do anything other than repeat pre-scripted responses, causing frustration all round. This approach dehumanises and is evocative of the Planet of the Apes approach we discussed earlier.

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Although the Man-Machine age might well offer a utopian future, CIPD CEO Peter Cheese pointed out that the bridging period could well be painful and difficult. An examination of any of the scenarios around the future of work, even the most positive, involves a large degree of redundancy of people who then need to have transferable skills. The big challenge will come in the next 20–30 years. We could end up with greater inequalities in the medium term without a properly managed approach and this will call on our best efforts in leading and managing people. This is not a factor of age, it is a factor of aptitude, willingness to learn and flex your knowledge, skills and experience into different career choices.

Cheese points out that we are already seeing the signs and drivers of what life will be like in 2030 for millennials:

Our education systems will need to change radically to address these changes and we look at alternatives to the upload-download model that remains resilient but irrelevant in our current education system. Aside from this we will need to prepare people to be more adaptive to apply skills to different situations. Continuing Professional Development is not a nice-to-have in the Man-Machine age and we will all need a PSP or Personal Sanity Plan which balances head (IQ), heart (emotional intelligence; EQ) and soul (spiritual intelligence; SQ), rather than just focusing on professional skills and knowledge.

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So, does this mean that we are pursuing the wrong things or do we need to reframe what we mean by happiness in the 21st century? Some of the taken-for-granted things of life are under review and it seems certain that our ideas about wealth, health and happiness are likely to be challenged in the Man-Machine age. We might, for example, have to become comfortable with the idea of not having a job for some parts of our life. We might have to find purpose in ways other than work. Perhaps we might have to get off money and material things as the hallmarks and opiates of personal progress and status in the world. Maslow’s triangle could become inverted in such a world where self-actualisation is the main activity of life, with basic needs for food and shelter met for all.

In contemplating the myriad changes we might have to consider, the notion of “Money for Nothing” is one such idea. One of the pressing questions that we must answer is “How will we live long and prosper in a world where many of us do not have access to money through the thing we have called work?” Elon Musk proposes a universal basic income for all, a concept already being discussed and trialled in Switzerland, Finland, Canada, India and the Netherlands. A form of universal income has already been in operation in Alaska since 1982 where every person was given $1022 in 2016 as a basic income and the idea is not itself new, having been proposed by Thomas More via his book Utopia in 1516. However, this is not going to be easy to do in a connected world. For example, some countries’ healthcare and education are paid for by private money, so this is a complex issue. It is in essence a ‘VUCA or wicked problem’. We must understand and be able to navigate Volatility, Uncertainty, Complexity and Ambiguity if we are to thrive in the Man-Machine age. We need to be able to navigate the VUCA world to be effective as a Brain Based Leader.