FOCUS
The pace of change has never been this fast, yet it will never be this slow again
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time traveller to your era would kill them). Even somebody retired for a few years and adrift from contemporary work mores would be shocked by this density of information, activity and action. Yet this is completely normal to most of us now.
Complexity
Allied to density is the complexity of life and work in 2018. Again, take an average worker in an average job and think about how many information sources they are trying to juggle, how many steps there are in the process they are executing, how many stakeholders need to be consulted, how many reports need to be generated, how many accounts need to be reconciled. Now think about a superstar hedge-fund manager, a video game developer, a commercial jet pilot, a CGI film maker, a reinsurance portfolio executive, a national security analyst. The complexity of these jobs – the information that needs to be sourced, managed, integrated, analysed, leveraged – is a far cry from the jobs that Richard Scarry would have outlined in his What Do People Do All Day? children’s book from just a generation ago. My job – as I’m sure is true for most Dialogue readers – is far more complicated than it was just a few years ago. I work with teams of people all around the world – we schedule meetings (for mutually inconvenient times) – with different cultural attitudes and expectations. I need to juggle much more information than ever, and need to be au fait with developments far beyond the walls of head office, let alone my home office. My clients – as are yours – are more demanding and unforgiving than ever. The stakes are higher. Bad decisions have greater ramifications. Disruption is a greater and greater reality. Life – and work – has never been less simple. Hence why, as an aside, so many people from Marseilles, to the aforementioned Manchester, to Mason, Ohio, have a deep nostalgia for the past: for less complicated times.
Speed
In the 1990s, the chief executive of the software company Oracle, Larry Ellison, had an infamous dictum – the 24-hour rule – that made it clear that if you didn’t respond to an email within 24 hours you’d be out of a job. In 2018, that seems quaint. Twenty-four hours? If you don’t reply to an email within 24 minutes nowadays you’re considered a loser – a B-player in an organization that only hires A-players. The acceleration of modern business life is so extraordinary as to be almost invisible. Because we are the proverbial frogs in the pan of heating water, we find it hard to comprehend how much faster work – and life – occurs than it did just a few years ago. Information travels around the
world in a fraction of a second. Ideas spread from San Francisco to Singapore as fast as they do to Sacramento. People fly from Sydney to Beijing for a lunch meeting and then turn around and go straight back home. In James Clavell’s wonderful series of books about the first Europeans in Asia (Shogun, Tai-Pan etc) the world record in 1848 for the fastest journey from London to Hong Kong is set at 59 days. Now that’s a 15-hour flight. Many people understand the meaning and significance of Moore’s Law in computer hardware. Far fewer, I wager, understand the significance of the speeding up of every aspect of the modern world. And yet this speeding up – this exponential curve we are in, which shows no sign of faltering – is unprecedented across the long arc of man’s existence. As Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau put it at the World Economic Forum in January 2018, “The pace of change has never been this fast, yet it will never be this slow again.”
The algorithm of change
Topol’s insight of how AI will allow radiologists to see more data (the pixel biopsy), integrate that with other information sources (‘multilayered data’, in his medical vernacular), and make faster decisions, is 100% transferable into any and every discipline and business process one can imagine. Density, complexity and speed are all set to be turbocharged by new AI and machine-learning capabilities. ‘Datascopes’ will allow your business to see more data, integrate it with other data, and make decisions faster than ever. And, in doing that, open incredible new opportunities for commercial growth and levels of employment. In What To Do When Machines Do Everything, a recent book I co-authored with Malcolm Frank and Paul Roehrig, we argue – counterintuitively to some – that in ten years, employment levels in the Western world will be higher than they are today. For some people that’s a headscratcher. But in our vision, as in Topol’s, AI is the next generation of tool that – as tools have always done – allow people to do things faster, easier and more proficiently that they could without tools. AI and automation will only have a net negative effect on jobs if – and this is a huge ‘if’ – we can’t find new things to do. Dr Riddell’s microscope allowed people a panoply of new things to do – thank heavens. Our new tools – in medicine and every other industry – will allow us to grapple with a world that is denser, more complex, and faster than ever before. From that algorithm (Dn x Cn x Sn) emerges the future of all our work. Leeches need not apply. — Ben Pring leads Cognizant’s Center for the Future of Work and is a co-author of the book What To Do When Machines Do Everything Q3 2018 Dialogue