Special from HR Tech Las Vegas
From the abject terror of riding in a driverless car, to the pleasure of cows being milked by a robot milker, the second machine age is affecting everything, including HR, says Andrew McAfee, principal research scientist, Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
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McAfee, who shared his thoughts at the HR Tech conference, held recently in Las Vegas, is coauthor of the recent New York Times bestseller, The Second Machine Age, and also, Race Against the Machine and Enterprise 2.0.
In 2006, the thought was that there was a large gap between us (humans) and “digital stuff” in the tech world. If you could describe it, if it was repeatable, you could give it to the computer. What was the sustainable advantage of human labor? People are good at nuances. Attempts to get computers to deal with nuances were failures.
One example from 2006 of what machines couldn’t do was drive a car. Recently, McAfee pestered Google for a ride in their driverless car. He says the reaction to the experience is in three stages (like the five stages of dealing with grief):
1. Abject terror. How can I be trusting this machine to navigate traffic with me in the car? (20 seconds)
2. Passionate interest. Very quickly, the terror fades and interest takes over. Where are the sensors, how does it know where the lanes are? (20 minutes)
3. Mild boredom. The driverless car drives like we were taught in driver ed, says McAfee; it never speeds, never brakes suddenly, never accelerates quickly.
So why are people still driving? These automated cars still can’t master all circumstances, he says.
The important message is that this development was supposed to be in the future. Tech is overturning our expectations.
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Another example of complex communication: He showed an example of a Forbes Earning Preview. The report is credited as being written by “Narrative Sciences.” That’s a machine, McAfee says. Given a body of data, the software will write the story. It can change voice, provide an arc to the story, and when asked to do many similar stories (for example, 200 earnings reports), it will vary the presentation.
When IBM’s computer, Watson, beat the Jeopardy! champions, it was a convincing demonstration, McAfee says. Ken Jennings, the winningest Jeopardy! player ever, said afterwards, “I for one welcome our new computer overlord.”
The important takeaway is that these aren’t the only areas where this is going to happen.
Machines—The Cows Like Them
We also need to be more comfortable with our machines, McAfee says. Three examples of what is happening:
- Robot milkers. When farmers started using robot milkers, they expected that they would get more productivity, but they hadn’t predicted that the cows would like it—and when cows are happy, they give more milk.
- Robot call centers. IBM is starting to deploy Watson-based call centers.
- Pathology. Digital pathologists are outdiagnosing human pathologists in some areas.
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Outsiders
Finally, we need to get better at respecting outsiders, McAfee says. One thing you never hear is “Our industry is like every other industry” or “Our company is just like every other company.” No, CEOs always say, “Our company is special and unique.” This thinking leads to relying entirely on insiders, and that’s not good, McAfee says.
One company had 276 teams, and the consistent winners were the teams that were made up purely of academic geeks.
In tomorrow’s Advisor, McAfee discusses geeks and HIPPOs, plus we introduce the free interactive webinar sponsored by Halogen Software, Best Practices in Goal Management.