by David Weinberger

The articles in this collection look forward from where we are. Grounded in current realities, they point to technologies that business leaders and managers need to be considering now to see how they might be useful, threatening, or perhaps transformative.

But imagine instead that we are looking backward at today from some distant-future vantage point. In this light, these articles also reveal to us how we’re thinking about technology these days.

The most obvious point is that when businesses think about technology today, they’re usually thinking about digital, connected technology first—AI, blockchain, 5G, connected products—and not about, say, the remarkable advances in genetics, medicine, energy, and—we hope—climate engineering that are likely to transform our lives in the coming years. That’s surely not because those disciplines are less important than the digital realm. Rather, our current focus points to some fundamental facts about business. To start, it reminds us that the work companies do is relational and connective. It is about people collaborating to offer products and services, about reaching customers and users, and about the way those users then interact with the business and other users. That’s true of virtually all companies, whether based in technology or not.

The overwhelming importance of the type of digital connected technology we now take for granted also makes clear the extent to which businesses have come to embrace the chaos of life, work, and markets. Back in the old days, we thought we could reduce our business practices to relatively simple maps of processes, and we were confident we could manage and control our potential customers by managing and controlling the information we gave them. Now that anyone can connect with anyone else, it’s become manifest that if you look closely enough, everything is an exception because everyone is a unique individual and every circumstance is new. In practice, this means that it will always remain a mystery why last week readers clicked on your ad with the yellow background 2% more than the ad with the green one.

That perhaps explains why the word disrupt makes so many appearances in this book decades after the Internet first rumbled and then exploded into the world: Disruption continues to be an accurate description of the way we move forward these days, for the Internet has disrupted not only our old ways of doing things, but even our idea of how progress works.

Now AI—especially machine learning—is beginning to reveal our world in a new way. Machine learning systems generate models from data that are as complex as they need to be in order to produce accurate results. These models don’t suffer from the human need to reduce complicated situations to a handful of broad strokes of causality and influence that we can understand and rely on. Instead, businesses are learning that they can gain solid benefits by allowing the machines to go hog wild in discerning complex data correlations. This is enabling businesses to see more clearly, and to acknowledge more thoroughly, the messy chaos in which we all live.

We used to think that progress was a relatively low slope headed up a long mountain, with occasional steep steps marking an invention of consequence. But overall, progress was slow, steady, and incremental. Now, as the articles in this book show, progress is about blowing up the entire slope and the mountain it climbs.

“AI is disrupting every industry,” says Kane Simms before focusing on the particular AI-enabled technology promised in the article’s title, “How Voice Assistants Could Change the Way We Shop.” “Artificial intelligence has disrupted every area of our lives,” say Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic, Frida Polli, and Ben Dattner in “Building Ethical AI for Talent Management.” In “5G’s Potential, and Why Businesses Should Start Preparing for It,” Omar Abbosh and Larry Downes point to 5G connectivity as an enabler of disruption, a “revolutionary technology” that will “make possible the kind of disruptive applications that usually leave both investors and users salivating.” David Furlonger and Christophe Uzureau, in “The Five Kinds of Blockchain Projects (and Which to Watch Out For),” maintain that blockchain technology could pack a disruptive punch to some of the largest institutions in the world and the trust relations they’re based on.

All these authors understand that with great disruption comes great risk. For example, the title of Bhaskar Chakravorti’s contribution asserts an issue—“Why It’s So Hard for Users to Control Their Data”—the premise of which is that our privacy is challenged by our new technology. Stuart Madnick addresses a particularly frightening danger in “How to Safeguard Against Cyberattacks on Utilities.” Sara Wilson’s concerns are also obvious in the title of her article—“The Era of Antisocial Social Media”—which then lays out a panoply of ways businesses can help stitch the social fabric together.

Even articles that are overall enthusiastic about the tech they are discussing point to sobering issues. Lauren Golembiewski in “How Wearable AI Will Amplify Human Intelligence” wonders about the displacement of human jobs by digital automation. Rather than overhyping the latest tech, Darrell Rigby, Mikey Vu, and Asit Goel tell us in “Four Questions Retailers Need to Ask About Augmented Reality” that AR may promise more than it eventually delivers.

But one concern comes up over and over: how to maintain our humanity as the digital environment increasingly wires itself into our nervous systems. The authors of “Building Ethical AI for Talent Management” advise us to invest in the human expertise that is uniquely able to spot and cultivate talent. In “Learning to Work with Intelligent Machines,” Matt Beane points to the shadow learning engaged in by employees who are so determined not to be deskilled by our new technology that they’re willing to break the rules … for which the author salutes them.

None of the authors of these articles let their interest in technology overwhelm their interest in humans. In “Can Biometrics Predict a Viral Marketing Campaign?,” Jacob Jones, Matthew Gillespie, and Kelsey Libert remind us that virality is not a property of the content that goes viral but is due to the response human beings have to it. Thales Teixeira in “A Survival Guide for Startups in the Era of Tech Giants” points to great and compassionate customer service as a potent competitive advantage. Lauren Golembiewski in her article on wearable AI sees this technology as an amplifier of human intelligence, enabling us to do jobs that robots can’t … at least for now. Bhaskar Chakravorti’s piece on the user control of data begins by asking companies to grant their users digital agency in order to engender a respect for human agency itself. Sarah Wilson, when looking for ways to overcome the antisocial nature of too many social networking technologies, emphasizes the importance of human intimacy for our work lives as well as in our personal lives and finds ways to achieve that with digital media.

These concerns about maintaining our human values arise because we recognize that while we build our machines for our purposes, and we ultimately control them, our relationship with them is far more complex. Ask musicians where their hands end and where their instruments begin … and where the music comes from. As the philosopher Martin Heidegger wrote in the early 1950s, “Technology discloses the world”—it reveals the world in one aspect or another. The Internet revealed it as connected, linked, without boundaries, and full of differences. Now machine learning is disclosing a world made of particularities, each affecting everything else at the same time. A world containing hidden signs and signals. A world that is far beyond our capacity to fully understand or predict.

The articles in this collection will guide you toward some of the most important technologies and questions now at hand or coming toward us quickly. They each address one aspect of an intertwined whole that is bigger than we can imagine and that is both frightening and immensely hopeful.

In this, as much as in their insights into their particular topics, they reflect the current state of our world.