It is claimed that the digital economy will eventually obviate the need for people. Why use a high maintenance sensitive carbon life form with undisclosed loyalties when you can use new technology for a fraction of the price and management overhead?
It’s a no-brainer. The race to deliver more for less is accelerating this.
But there comes a point when every organisation has basically automated everything and therefore the race to the bottom is over.
Therefore the only option is to start racing back up the value chain. And this is where people become important again. But this time the people are not compliant corporate cogs but highly creative artists; people who are a nightmare to manage but are in effect organic idea generators.
And once you start hooking these people up together using collaboration technologies you have an innovation engine that will differentiate your organisation from the rest.
So ironically in a digital economy people become more and not less important. But these people really are ‘talent’.
Very interesting article.
The dangers of digitising and programming 'logic' into everything - taking out the error-prone 'human interface' - was highlighted during the stock market crashes of 2008 (and previously).
In order to prevent a complete financial meltdown, traders had to resort to pulling the power cables on their automated trading programmes.
All this brings images from my youth of Kubrick's "HAL" and Sellar's "Dr. Strangelove" back into sharp focus.
Scary indeed.
Posted by: Mark Law | January 19, 2012 at 05:03 PM
Interesting, in deed!
Posted by: Lucas Nevada | January 25, 2012 at 08:55 AM