Daniel Suarez makes a very cogent case that robotic weapons and drones could be a slippery slope to autonomous war unless we have treaties similar to those on nuclear arms proliferation and chemical weapons. He argues that such weapons put too much power into too few hands – and could easily be used by criminals.
From TEDGlobal: As a novelist, Daniel Suarez spins dystopian tales of the future. But on the TEDGlobal stage, he talks us through a real-life scenario we all need to know more about: the rise of autonomous robotic weapons of war. Advanced drones, automated weapons and AI-powered intelligence-gathering tools, he suggests, could take the decision to make war out of the hands of humans.
“There was considerable mouth-dropping from publications such as The New York Times at initial reports this week that NSA programs are gathering both telephone records and information gleaned from large tech companies like Google and Microsoft. But as those reports have settled in, reactions have gotten more complex.
One intriguing line of thought came from David Simon, a Baltimore Sun crime reporter turned TV writer who created, among other projects, the acclaimed HBO show The Wire. Literally named after police surveillance tactics, The Wire largely exists as a critique of the failures of government institutions — especially the way the government investigates and responds to crime.
In a lengthy poston his own site, Simon argues that the sheer breadth of the information being collected by the NSA means that very little of it is actually being looked at; it’s being put into a database to be used later in ways that will more seriously raise privacy concerns and implicate policy.
“That is tens of billions of phone calls,” he argues, “and for the love of god, how many agents do you think the FBI has?”
Simon posits that what will determine whether these programs are illegal, unconstitutional, discriminatory or otherwise privacy-violating will be what happens to this data and what decisions are made about how to use it. If they abuse the information, he says, the problem will be the abuse, not the possession of the data, which is a horse both (1) out of the barn and (2) of a different color from targeted eavesdropping.
But for a lot of us, this certainly had the feeling of sharp, strange intrusiveness, and as is often the case, very real discomfort came out through semi-dark jokes like the ones NPR’s Andy Carvin collected under the hashtag “#CallsTheNSAKnowsAbout.”
“I rarely answer my mother’s calls the first time she tries to reach me,” offered one reader. “Sometimes Grandma and I have long, uncomfortable pauses,” offered another. We envisioned the NSA reading our e-mails, looking at our status updates, and seeing that we haven’t called the dentist like we said we would.
This was it, in the popular imagination — some supercomputer of intrusive eyeballing come to life, a combination of Skynet and HAL 9000 and the guys on Law & Order who can improve the quality of a bank surveillance video until they can make out the logo on your underwear through your pants.
But would we really care? Would the growing number of people who willingly share so much of what they do on Twitter and Facebook and Foursquare be horrified that the government could, in theory, look at a database of their phone calls? If you spend your time posting, “Here’s a map showing where I am, a list of people I’m with, a description of what I’m doing, a picture out my window, a list of the companies I buy from, a list of political causes I support, three articles I just read, and my review of the movie I just saw and where I saw it,” what are the odds that the existence of a database saying your phone called this other phone for 4 minutes and 19 seconds will shock your conscience?
The way we live now, we use our data as a currency. Maybe we should, maybe we shouldn’t, but we do. In fact, any time you appear to be getting something for nothing, there is an excellent chance that you are paying in part with your personal information. Store loyalty cards give you discounts, which you get in return for overlooking or accepting that someone now has (or could have) a history of everything you’ve ever bought”.
This recent post from Matthewcaught special attention, as it addresses why “sociology” and study of societal trends seems to have a left-leaning reputation, and “economics” appears “right leaning”. The recent influence of “behaviourial economics” seems to start to redress this, perhaps?
What has this all got to do with Business Leadership? Well, Leaders need to be concerned with social organization and culture just as much as they are about economics if they are to help their organization and its people grow and prosper.
Yet too many see this as a “soft” (“leftie” and non-capitalist) subject.
Matthew’s blog helps to explain why and what we should do about this.
“According to Wikipedia,Herbert Spencer, the Victorian polymath whose achievements include being the founding father of British sociology:
‘…. recognised three functional needs or prerequisites that produce selection pressures: they are regulatory, operative (production) and distributive. He argued that all societies need to solve problems of control and coordination, production of goods, services and ideas, and, finally, to find ways of distributing these resources’
These three social needs line up reasonably neatly with the three forms of power (and ways of thinking about power) which I have derived from cultural theory and other frameworks; respectively hierarchical power, individualistic power and solidaristic power.
Like most sociologists up until the sixties, Spencer started from the question of how societies function and adapt. But forty years ago, or so it seems to me, a disastrous and mutually reinforcing split occurred in the social sciences. On the one hand, the core assumption of sociological theory came to be that society was a system of oppression and domination, practiced by the ruling class, and/or white people and/or men, and/or heterosexuals using a range of forms of economic and social control.
On the other hand, economics came to be dominated by the assumption that markets function perfectly and guarantee the enhancement of human welfare.
As a consequence of this split, sociology became overwhelmingly a discipline of the left while economics became the science of the new right. Yet just a few years before this divide, functionalism was the most powerful school of sociological grand theory whole economic students were conventionally taught Keynesian lessons about the inherently dysfunctional nature of unmanaged markets.
Behavioural economics had already started to dent free market functionalism before the credit crunch came along and, in the immortal understatement of Alan Greenspan, revealed a ‘flaw’ in free market doctrine. If economics can rediscover market instability and even perhaps recognise gross inequality as a reflection of power and policy choice not simply the blind genius of the market, could sociology rediscover an interest in society as a functional system?
Given the generally downbeat way we talk about our society and its prospects, not to mention our current economic problems, this may seem unlikely. Yet social pessimism is arguably as much a symptom of our current ways of thinking as an accurate reflection of the what is happening in the world. As I have written before, distinguishing a trend from a cycle is the alchemy of social analysis, yet standing back from our current cyclical travails there is a strong case to be made both that societies are capable of solving hard problems and that most of today’s challenges are in fact the consequence of past successes.
If I had time I would create a Twitter account which every day published an uplifting fact about progress in the world or just in our own dispirited country.
Yesterday, I could have selected the evidence that most young people have gone a long way to shedding the sexism, racism, homophobia and disablism which their parents harboured and their grandparents wore with pride.
Today, I could focus on the extra years of healthy living now available to most of us and tomorrow, perhaps, remind the naysayers that not only are children in aggregate better educated than at any time in history but it even seems that as a race we are becoming more intelligent.
I was at P&G 22 years, and have known every CEO personally since the early 1980s. So the news that A.G. Lafley is coming back to replace Bob McDonald (who is retiring) is of particular interest. It’s also an interesting (future) Leadership case study.
Wally Bock wrote a great post on A.G.’s return, pointing to thoughtful articles on the subject.
“Thomas Wolfe warned us that You Can’t Go Home Again. F. Scott Fitzgerald said that “there are no second acts in American lives.” But we keep trying anyway. Sometimes it works out and sometimes it doesn’t.
In “Boomerang Bosses,” the Economist noted that Penney did something similar about a month ago. I wrote about a similar phenomenon in “Return to Founder” six years ago.
The fact is that we know that some CEOs can go home again and succeed. Think Steve Jobs. But there are no guarantees. You have to analyze the people, the situation, and the challenges. Here are three articles to help you sort them out in Lafley’s case.
“Taking the post holds risks for the 65-year-old executive. Since stepping aside almost four years ago, he has retained a rock star reputation as one of America’s most lionized corporate chieftains. Now his legacy will rest on whether he can turn around P&G, an iconic company that brought the world Tide and Pampers and yet has failed to adapt to changing circumstances. Lafley’s second stint recalls the successful comebacks of former leaders from Steve Jobs to Starbucks Corp.’s Howard Schultz. Yet for every Apple Inc. or Starbucks, there’s a Dell Inc. or Yahoo Inc., where Michael Dell and Jerry Yang respectively failed to reverse sagging fortunes”
“If there are rock stars in corporate America, Lafley is one of the biggest. He was to the 2000s what Jack Welch was to the 1990s, the CEO who most embodied the business zeitgeist of the decade (at least until the financial crisis came along). At a time when innovation and design-driven product growth were the mantra of executives everywhere, Lafley’s “the consumer is boss” motto made him the poster boy of the era, heralded on magazine covers and showered with awards. The hero worship wasn’t undeserved: During his tenure, he transformed the company, more than doubling sales and the size of P&G’s brand portfolio.”
* Larry Page – when a company becomes a verb, you know something special is happening. This is a biography by Victoria Yates.
* Big Data – Big Choices .. but what happens to the Pilot? Mick is working a lot on the organizational and leadership impact of the Big Data revolution – and a summary of where things stand seems in order.
Seth described permission marketing like this in a 2008 blog post:
“Permission marketing is the privilege (not the right) of delivering anticipated, personal and relevant messages to people who actually want to get them.
It recognises the new power of the best consumers to ignore marketing. It realizes that treating people with respect is the best way to earn their attention”.
I was at a P&G Alumni Conference this past weekend. Obviously P&G is one of the world’s great marketing companies. One of many subjects that we discussed both in formal session and informally was “where marketing is going”.
It seems to me that, in the age of social media, Seth’s idea has never been more appropriate.
Then I read more about this image by Karina Nurdinova which was inspired by Banksy. The use of an iconic shape is rather Warhol-esque. So this combines pop and street art.
(There is a bit of controversy, by the way, about whether Banksy’s rant about advertising is excerpted from his 2004 book Cut It Out and was plagiarised or inspired by Sean Tejaratchi circa 1999. There’s a great 2012 post by Sean that clears this up).
What has this all to do with leadership? Well, two points.
First, respecting customers is essential at all times, but never more so in the social media era. Permission marketing is still the key.
And, second, the arts can never be controlled – but they must be listened to by business and its leaders. I wonder what Coca Cola’s reaction to the graphic is?
“To look at this another way, I offered this summary.
Tiny Data + Unstructured Data = Big Data
Tiny Data means data from a single source in a structured format which, whilst it may in a huge quantity, is actually limited in its complexity.
Unstructured Data means exactly that – no fixed database format or coherent structure. Think of messages sent on Twitter, images uploaded to the web, Facebook posts and likes, phone calls, customer service calls and so on.
“Big Data” combines the two. Only now are technologies becoming available to combine and make sense of these different sources – and most importantly turn the analytical results into useful insight and action plans.
I gave the example of looking at someone’s Facebook timeline, and noting that they tend to like wearing blue but never orange. If you are a clothing manufacturer, and knew that fact, wouldn’t that help you make more appropriate offers to that potential customer? And if you could match this insight against the customer’s purchase records over time, wouldn’t that give a richer insight into their behaviour?”
I also spent time with good friend Chris Meyer. He had talked at the event on some of the key points from his latest book “Standing on the Sun“, around the major changes facing capitalism.
We were talking about the leadership changes at P&G in the past couple of days, and were debating the role of the leader. The link by the way is to an HBR blog post featuring Rosabeth Moss Kanter.
Chris made a great point.
Big Data and its application will increasingly allow us to automate processes (and even decision systems) in organisations. Today, the leader is effectively the pilot of an organization, steering it in a certain direction, and making changes as needed. The pilot drives the decision processes. But in the world of Big Data, what’s the role of the pilot when decision processes are automated?
I am currently writing about the organizational impact of Big Data, with the first installment hopefully to be published later this year.
You have probably read about Google Glass – I thought this video demonstrates a very practical use for teaching. And as teaching is part of leading, one wonders how leaders will use Glass.
“Take a bike ride down the 27-kilometer Large Hadron Collider — thanks to a lucky Google Glass winner, whose ride-along video premiered Friday during TEDxCERN.
Andrew Vanden Heuvel always dreamed of being an astronaut; he ended up becoming a pioneering online physics teacher. So when he was selected to be one of the first to try out Google Glass, he knew exactly what he wanted to do: travel to Switzerland, go to CERN (aka the European Laboratory for Particle Physics), check out the Large Hadron Collider and beam the live footage back to a classroom.”
There seems to be two fundamental strategies to use the insight from “Big Data” and turn it into useful insight and business decisions – Customer Centricity and Innovation Networks, both of which I have written on before – and will do so in future.
One point I would like to stress here, though, is the definition of “Big Data” itself. There wasn’t one that I could find that proved completely satisfactory, as most address the technology aspects and challenges and ignore the organizational implications. So I offer this:
“Big Data” is
complex: comes from multiple sources – structured databases and unstructured social
analysable: it must be captured, processed, analysed & visualised
useful: insight must create decisive action
pervasive: it impacts everyone – changes everything in the organization’s processes
To look at this another way, I offered this summary.
Tiny Data + Unstructured Data = Big Data
Tiny Data means data from a single source in a structured format which, whilst it may in a huge quantity, is actually limited in its complexity. The CEO of Visa Europe, Peter Ayliffe, is the President of the CMI – and he agreed that even the databases held by Visa are, with this definition, “tiny”.
Unstructured Data means exactly that – no fixed database format or coherent structure. Think of messages sent on Twitter, images uploaded to the web, Facebook posts and likes, phone calls, customer service calls and so on.
“Big Data” combines the two. Only now are technologies becoming available to combine and make sense of these different sources – and most importantly turn the analytical results into useful insight and action plans.
I gave the example of looking at someone’s Facebook timeline, and noting that they tend to like wearing blue but never orange. If you are a clothing manufacturer, and knew that fact, wouldn’t that help you make more appropriate offers to that potential customer? And if you could match this insight against the customer’s purchase records over time, wouldn’t that give a richer insight into their behaviour?
Of course, it raises privacy issues. I will explore this and related ideas in future posts, and in particular the Leadership and Organizational Change implications of this “Big Data’ revolution.
“Tom has given more than 2,500 speeches in the last 30 years. He knows what it’s like to face a crowd, whether it be friendly or skeptical. As his own toughest critic, he’s never been completely satisfied with his performance.
While he has offered pointers here and there, he’s never written at length about speaking until now. We are fortunate that he has overcome whatever trepidation he may have had to tackle this topic.
You’ll find in the document below extensive advice and practical wisdom about speaking from a man who has spent most of his life on a stage, trying to share knowledge and spur action. Whether you give speeches for a living or on occasion, and even if you don’t but you want to understand what makes a great speaker, read this piece.
Then put it aside and read it a few months from now. It will change both how you speak as well as how you listen.
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