Human/Machine: The Future of Our Partnership with Machines
Daniel Newman /Olivier Blanchard
Kogan Page INSPIRE (July 2018)

The Decisive Competitive Advantage of “Big Brother/Big Mother/Big Butler” collaborations

According to  Daniel Newman and Olivier Blanchard, humans come up with a concept (WHAT) and purpose (WHY) and design machines that can produce the given result faster and better than humans can. In a word, HOW. Paper clips, my example.  Also, making copies of books such as the Bible. Or picking thousands of acres of cotton.

Newman and Blanchard: “As a species, we solve problems. That’s hat we do. We didn’t evolve an opposable thumb because we needed it to swing from branches. We evolved an opposable thumb because we manipulate objects with precision while we solve problems in the imperfect world around us. Put a human anywhere in the world, and they will build a shelter, make a tool, fabricate a trap, dig a well, and eventually customize their environment to be more comfortable, safer, and more efficient than it was when they first landed.”

There are hundreds of examples of this process in the New England colonies during the seventeenth and eighteen centuries.  Settlers could not succeed or even survive without constant enhancement of tools as basic as a stick. “For its thousands of different uses, a stick is just a stick. [And for all its thousands of different uses, a wheel is just a wheel. But attach four of them to a box…] The inexhaustible nature of human ingenuity notwithstanding, a stick has its limitations…Tools are tools. Tools are invented by humans to solve problems that they are not able to solve on their own.”

Given that, “The new technology revolution currently underway is no different: humans are simply finding better and more clever ways of enhancing themselves and their environment. The objective isn’t to replace humans or displace them, but to build new tools   with which to do things faster, better, with less effort, and ideally at a lower cost.”

Newman/Blanchard introduce three categories or archetypes of “BIG” technologies on which to focus: Big Brother vs. Big Mother vs. Big Butler. More specifically:

Big Brother is a concept introduced by George Orwell  in his classic work, 1984, published in 1949. Since then, there are “myriad cultural references to one of its central entities, ‘Big Brother.’ And anyone familiar with the  spectre of Big Brother will probably have a visceral understanding of the threat that entity represents to individual freedoms, privacy and personal security.” Its relevance to the use and abuse of technology in the age of digital privacy — online and offline — “should be evident.”

Big Mother “refers to technologies that may well be well intentioned but are perhaps overbearing and intrusive, like an overreaching, overzealous parent…Big Mother applications’ aim is to take care of you without necessarily asking for your permission. An application that shares your environmental preferences with a hotel ahead ovf your arrival, for instance, to make sure that the temperature is to our liking, would be an example of a Big Mother technology use.”

Big Butler “represents technologies that are entirely dedicated to serving human users, on their terms, with no intrusions, no breaches of privacy and very few pain points. Big Brother  is the ideal of the three technological archetypes because it aims to strike the perfect balance between the benefits of smart automation, the management of data security (and user privacy), and intuitively harmonious integration of smart technologies into our everyday lives.”

All this is thoroughly discussed in Chapter Two.

I commend Daniel Newman/Olivier Blanchard on the abundance of valuable information, insights, and counsel they provide. This book will be of special interest and value to those whom Alvin Toffler had in mind 35 years ago (in Future Shock) when asserting that “the illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn.”

Obviously, the ultimate value of the book will depend almost entirely on how well a reader absorbs and digests the material, then selects and applies what is most appropriate to their needs, interests, resources, concerns, values, and objectives.

I also highly recommend  three other sources:

Paul R. Daugherty and H. James Wilson’s Human + Machine: Reimagining Work in the Age of AI (2018)

Thomas H. Davenport’s The AI Advantage: How to Put the Artificial Intelligence Revolution to Work (2019).

Arthur I. Miller’s The Artist in the Machine: The World of AI-Powered Creativity (2019)