The incredible power of analytics—the ability to run queries against many types of data and make real-time decisions—has been widely applauded for helping new companies emerge and old companies find new markets and new ways of generating revenue growth.
But there’s also a growing chorus of voices raising the alarm that all is not well in the kingdom of big data; that the newfound intelligence and speed of analytics could be pushing many people out of jobs. It’s the stuff of science fiction, but presented as almost ineluctable facts.
Erik Brynjolfsson, the noted Massachusetts Institute of Technology economist and author, last month told McKinsey Quarterly:
In fact, the dirty secret of economics is that it’s possible for technology to make the pie bigger—and that’s exactly what it’s been doing. Record wealth. But at the same time there’s no law that everybody’s going to benefit from technology. Some people, even a majority, may be worse off.”
In response to this coming downsizing armageddon, Yale University economist Robert Shiller (of Case-Shiller Index fame) has suggested we develop “livelihood insurance” for people whose entire professions become obsolete.
A recent Oxford University research paper goes so far as to predict that 47 percent of U.S. jobs will be replaced by some form of robotic or artificial intelligence.
That probably includes a large number of people who have made decisions based on their knowledge and past experience.
It’s almost enough to make you long for the good old days when mice were only mammals, you made decisions with your gut, and great music crackled and hissed from diamond-tipped needles skating nimbly across black platters.
In fact, my wife and I recently bought a mid-1970s stereo system by German audio equipment maker Telefunken—once the ultimate in home stereo systems. Although its brand name lives on today, in the world of music-listening devices, it’s defunct-ken.
We know that the quality of music played through today’s enhanced speakers and headsets is far superior to that produced by vacuum tubes and needles. But we bought this piece of classic audio dynamite regardless, then rescued a bunch of LPs at a flea market ($1 for David Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust!) like so many mongrels from the pound. We refurbished the turntable with authentic parts and wiped the records clean of fingerprints and dirt.
Then we cranked it up and placed the analog needle on the petroleum-based disk. And guess what? The sound was exactly as we had remembered—and nowhere near as rich as the same tracks I still play on my MP3.
Digital is superior to analog in every way but one—our mid-twentieth century sensibilities. Yes, we listen to music on our smartphones and use playlists off Pandora, but gramophones, like people, still have a role. Call it nostalgia in this case, or in the real world of business and jobs, a crucial partnership.
The likes of Brynjolfsson and his co-author Andrew McAfee in Race Against the Machine say we’re doomed to obsolescence. The rub is that, according to them, we’re doomed even if we do buy into the new digital world, because technology is displacing humans in almost every industry at an unprecedented pace.
But there’s another side to this argument—a more sanguine view of the future that allows for humanity and, yes, a bit of analog in the mix.
There’s a misconception that the merging of human and artificial intelligence (sometimes referred to as the Singularity) means the robots will destroy mankind. But according to Ray Kurzweil—the futurist and inventor who popularized the term with his book, The Singularity Is Near—the truth is quite the opposite. “Artificial intelligence will reach human levels by around 2029. Follow that out further to, say, 2045, we will have multiplied the intelligence, the human biological machine intelligence of our civilization a billionfold,” he tells PBS NewsHour. “Our thinking will become a hybrid of biological and non-biological thinking.”
In other words, human thinking will be augmented and dramatically enhanced by this mind meld. Our spigots won’t be turned off.
In 2014, however, humans can’t plug extra compute power into their neocortexes, which is why there’s so much angst expressed by Brynjolfsson, Shiller, and their ilk, as businesses seek to avail themselves of superior processing power, sometimes at the expense of humans.
Retailers have for decades been at the forefront of this race to analyze data and provide customers with suggestions in real-time, so it was interesting to hear from Simon Hay, CEO of UK-based retail analytics firm dunnhumby. He says that while analytics are useful tools, data can still be manipulated by people—which is where experience and human intelligence come in. “There’s still a role for intuition,” he says.
That’s true whether you’re sitting in your cubicle at work or coming down the backstretch at 200 mph. In San Francisco last week during Oracle OpenWorld, Paul Sonderegger, Oracle Big Data Strategist, participated in a panel discussion about the use of analytics in automobile racing. Sonderegger noted that while racing teams gather literally millions of data points about their cars during the course of a race, from time spent at pit stops, to metrics about braking, turn velocity, and acceleration, those data points can be put to productive use only if members of the pit crew and the drivers are able to execute in the physical world. “It’s a marriage of data with an in-the-moment feel for what you have to do… It’s the coming together of the technology and the people. You can’t separate the two,” he said.
That’s the real answer to the doomsayers: yes to all forms of intelligence, artificial and otherwise. And it’s worth bearing in mind that there hasn’t been an obstacle our species hasn’t been able to overcome with, dare I say, a dash of human ingenuity.
