| I'm just delighted that someone else read Feyerabend, Popper and Kuhn. I would add Giddens and even Graeber to that list, both are disruptive in their own way. About 25 years ago I adopted anthropology as a lens to investigate behaviour of tech companies and teams. It's not let me down. The most important thing I got from Feyerabend, Graeber and Sylvia Ashton-Warner was the invitation to colour outside the lines (though few but my mother would suspect Ashton-Warner of anarchic thought...) I just finished reading Lowey's autobiography "Never Leave Well Enough Alone." A ripping yarn if you're hip to mid-century descriptions of design, martinis and trains. Lowey's most famous slogan (repeated in design schools everywhere) is MAYA : Most Advanced Yet Accessible. In other words... as a designer, you have to make something the client can recognize as a solution to their problems but advanced enough to justify the expense of upgrading. I bring it up because I fear we have confused the two... being accessible and being advanced. While I'm happy to point out some of the advantages of AI, I should also mention we're letting the tail wag the dog. We've spent fourty-fifty years with a model of technology growth requiring increasingly greater returns on falling marginal real returns. The difference between the benefit of technology between 1940 and 1950 was immense. Similar for the increased benefit brought about by the increase from 1950 through 1960. But the benefits between 2016 and 2026 are less about productivity improvements and more about finding more people to borrow money from. What if we have eaten all the low-hanging worker-productivity fruit? What if every increase in worker productivity requires increasingly greater capital investment and that investment yields increasingly smaller margins? Is it time to reconsider Schumacher's argument in "Small is Beautiful" ? Is it time to work smarter rather than invest bigger? All these thoughts are offered without evidence, but also without a foregone conclusion of their outcome. I will be at the library, BLS website and local startup office collecting data. |