You say you want a revolution?
Sarah Jons 
There is a revolution coming, if Googles chairman Eric Schmidt is to be believed
There is a revolution coming, if Googles chairman Eric Schmidt is to be believed. Not the sort that Russell Brand hankers after (or as the Guardian puts it rather well:The comedian’s desire to lead a global revolution is undermined by his smug, shallow manifesto).
But a revolution none the less. At Davos 2014, Schmidt warned that the constant development of new technology will put more and more middle class people out of work. Before you through down your laptop, smash your tablet and trash your smartphone, (and have a glass of Sancerre) it’s worth remembering that human workers survived the earlier industrial eras of steam, electricity, the telegraph, micro-chips and globalised media. We continued to work because with every new level of automation, new jobs are created that replace those that are lost.
You say you want a revolution, well, you know / We all want to change the world / You tell me that it’s evolution, well, you know / We all want to change the world / But when you talk about destruction / Don’t you know that you can count me out / Don’t you know it’s gonna be all right..
Seth Godin once said that if you can’t describe your position in eight words or less, you don’t have a position. Tom Peters’ version is R.POV8, which stands for Remarkable Point of View in 8 Words or Less. Tom Peters & Seth Godin try this:
Don’t you know it’s gonna be all right ?
Peters’ discusses the need for organisations to declare their position in the market in simple, clear and compelling terms . His R.Pov8 is really Excellence, always and only needs one symbol – a Pantone #032 (red) exclamation point. I think it fits him perfectly.
Here is my R.POV8: Inspiring people to be amazing every day. But here is the big problem – we are just not satisfied. Not satisfied with life, our jobs or our technology. Certainly not with the technology we have at work. Recent figures show only 39 percent of employees in Germany are satisfied with the technology that they are provided with at work, according to a recent Forrester survey. The picture is only slightly better in the UK with 53 percent satisfied. It is this technology expectations gap that is leading not only to disgruntled employees, but lost customers across of lots of industries. Tom Peters often uses the phrase ‘white collar revolution’ (WCR). Like so many of his predictions, the idea of a revolution transforming the world of the white collar worker, in much the same way as blue collar work had been in the preceding decades, has now become a mainstream concept. So how does this work?
Let’s look at something else that is amazing: your smartphone. However if you ask it to do something and it doesn’t have an ‘app’ for and it just sits there. Just plain dumb. The smartphone up until this month needed programmers to write apps. The WC revolution I am talking about is the one inspired by Google’s secretiveDeepMind. DeepMind Technologies to be exact, is a London-based artificial-intelligence firm acquired by Google this year for $400 million. It revealed last month that it is designing computers that combine the way ordinary computers work with the way the human brain works. Excellent as I am a huge fan of neuroscience and technology and this smells of convergence. They call this hybrid device a Neural Turing Machine (NTM).
Turing is of course back in the news again, with the new film staring Benedict Cumberbatch. Here is the film’s R.POV27:
Genius British logician and cryptologist Alan Turing helps crack Germany’s Enigma Code during World War II but is later prosecuted by his government for illegal homosexual acts.
The ‘Turing test’ is the test of a machine’s ability to exhibit intelligent behaviour equivalent to, or indistinguishable from, that of a human. In the original illustrative example, a human judge engages in natural language conversations with a human and a machine designed to generate performance indistinguishable from that of a human being. The big ‘hope’ with the new NTM is it won’t need programmers and will instead program itself. DeepMind’s solution is to add a large external memory that can be accessed in many different ways, which Turing realised was a key part of ordinary computing architecture, hence the name Neural Turing Machine. This gives the neural network something like a human’s working memory – the ability to quickly store and manipulate a piece of data.
DeepMind’s breakthrough follows a long history of work on short-term memory. In the 1950s, the American cognitive psychologist George Miller carried out one of the more famous experiments in the history of brain science. Gorge Miller I have written about often as his ‘Law’ inspired the ‘my toaster talks to me’ problem about capacity to examine ‘what something might be true of..’
Miller was deeply interested in the capacity of the human brain’s working memory and set out to measure it with the help of a large number of students who he asked to carry out simple memory tasks. His conclusion was that the capacity of short-term memory cannot be defined by the amount of information it contains. Instead Miller concluded that the working memory stores information in the form of chunks and that it could hold approximately seven of them.
Neural networks, which make up half of DeepMind’s computer architecture, have been around for decades but are receiving renewed attention as more powerful computers take advantage of them. The idea is to split processing across a network of artificial neurons, simple units that process an input and pass it on. These networks are good at learning to recognise pieces of data and classify them into categories.
The longer term impact of DeepMind could be massive, prompting some doom-sayers and non rational observers to warn (again) of job destruction at a faster rate than new jobs can be generated with mass middle class unemployment leading to social unrest. As Google’s leader notes, the rise of automation as nothing short of a second industrial revolution. He believes the way work is conducted will be radically different in the future as many human tasks are automated by algorithms and computer services.
Schmidt’s call for a debate is a timely reminder that all these things also have the potential to create new levels of human value and better lifestyles for people. Technology replaces humans in many ways but new opportunities are created to exploit these technologies too. The White Collar Revolution is coming. Whether your country’s economy is now recovering from the global recession or is still bumping along the bottom, or slipping back into the gloom, the WCR gives a new perspective. A remarkable point of view, that could change the world. A new era of work is upon us and new types of work will emerge to exploit the new technologies that we will use.
Bring on real Excellence and the White Collar Revolution!
Don’t you know it’s gonna be all right .
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