Are we mistaking information overload for accelerated disruptive change?

This was the last weekend before school reopening for new session. The Saturday started with the annual “back to school” ritual of buying new software (text books), storage devices (notebooks, folders) and writing instruments (pens, pencils, brushes). Good summer reboot hopefully has allowed the mind to get de-cluttered. My teenager is all set for the new year at school. And I have just been informed that this year, the school is appointing a new teaching staff exclusively to help with BYOD!

While electronics appears to be taking over, why do we still see kids excited about stationaries, decorating the covers of their notebooks, personalizing it? There is hardly a single electronic item in any of the shopping baskets. If everything is going electronic at school and everywhere, why do we still have the crowd here? What is getting children excited about the new stuff, and parents re-living their childhood.

This trip to local stationary and craft material store prompted me to take a pause and rethink about the change, and presumed invasion of electronics and artificial intelligence and how do we handle it, without giving up being human? 

Everyone feels that the world is changing and changing very fast. Internet or bookstores, we will find endless articles on the topic of “Change”, written both by established voices and those who want to ride the wave of change to get established. In this turbulent ocean of buzz words, I tried to pick-up one key symbol that is universally being used as the measure of change. And I think that one word will be – Information.

“Information” has come to symbolize change. The scale, speed, consumption and outflow of Information is being used as the KPI as well as measure of success, whether it is imparting change or adopting change. While our reduced physical activity is pushing us to consume less and less of the food calories, our appetite and metabolism for consuming information calories is increasing every day, and with every new generation. Homo Sapiens over the years have certainly evolved in their ability to consume and process information, more so in the last half-a-century than ever before, or so we would like to think.

And so progress in information technology is being equated with Darwinism style evolution of humanity.

It’s not a new idea. It’s Moore’s law from 1965 when Gordon Moore observed that the number of transistors in a dense integrated circuit doubles every two years. As the density of registers and transistors increase, the amount of data in the world is doubling every two years. Coupled with the rise of extreme levels of connectivity (more than 4 billion people are now using the internet, 24 x 7), and smart machines and systems generating more information on the top of base information– we can understand why the term "disruption" is basically about the information flood.

So where is the problem?

The challenge is the perception created by this information overload ( or information pollution?). It is promoting the idea that because we are able to get more information, and more analysis, the world is changing fast and becoming unpredictable. It is generating fear by providing greater insights, and statistics. It is showing us patterns which may or may not be relevant. It is preventing us trying to say anything meaningful about the future (what if it changes tomorrow?). And it discourages us from learning from the past ( can it still be relevant?)

The idea of exponential change is simply not true. Yes, the world is changing. But change is not accelerating any more than it did in the past. They said that change was accelerating in 1900.They said it in 1920. In 1940, in 1960, in 1980 and in 2000. The literature of 19th century thought change was incredible when first generation mechanization was introduced, and when early 20th century saw the advent of news-agencies and more people came to know what is happening in other parts of the world, within hours and days.

What we appear to be doing now is that we’re fetishizing the second derivative. We’re getting too preoccupied with the rate of change, and maybe that is making us miss out on the fundamentals of work, business and life which actually may not be changing that fast.

Maybe they were right to think that the level of transformation was extraordinary in the 19th century. Scientifically, between Darwin and Einstein, we saw a huge change in how we perceive the world. And technologically, the speed of information changed completely with the telegraph. That’s the biggest transformation one could imagine in the world of information. Before the telegraph, information travelled at the speed of a horse. And the web hasn't done that as yet. It has just made telegraph cheaper, more accessible and self-serviced in new avatars of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp. The web is yet to have a big transformative impact beyond the realms of information. For example, If we think of physical transport and how we move things around, then that technology has hardly changed for 30 or 40 years. We still have the same aircrafts, and we still transport our goods in big ships. Yes, we now have much more “information” about the objects in transit and able to track it. We couldn't yet make Concorde fly again!

So, why do we love to propagate the story of exponential change. Why do we continue to think that change is accelerating? There are multiple reasons for it.

1.     Psychological aspect: We today have 3 generations at work. While the new millennials drive the change, their parents (Generation X) and grandparents (Baby Boomers) feel that the world has gone mad. It simply feels like exponential change to them, specially generation X which has seen a stable period post-cold-war .

2.     Inability to manage intangible assets: The assets of information age have moved from being tangible goods to intangible software and services. The old models of economy, asset-value, currencies and even taxation rules were built for tangible things that has geo-physical bound states. For example compare a software with automobile. A software takes lot of money and time to produce the first working copy. But subsequent ones can be mass produced at an insignificant fraction of the cost and can be streamed, copied or moved thousands of miles and sold and consumed anywhere. These are challenging administrators, law-makers, consumers and entrepreneurs alike and creates a fear of systems falling apart and disrupting world. We are trying to force-fit new age goods and services to old operating models.

3.     Possible business reason: Change is a way to challenge organisation and to create motivational energy. Businesses love to invoke the idea that the world is changing faster than ever before. If everything remains more or less the same, then why should people pay attention or money? We all love the “ new” and “improved” mark on the old soap bar.

4.     Position in the current Industrial revolution-cycle S curve: At this moment in time, we’re arguably in the middle to near peak of the Fourth Industrial Revolution S curve. During a period of frenzy, such as the current one, things do change at a higher pace than in other periods. Our current middle position on the change S curve nourishes the idea that revolutionary change is coming, and that it’s going to turn the business world upside down

However, in reality change is not exponential. There are periods of frenzied activities, and there are the quiet periods, when the current frenzy will stabilize and new one will start the evolutionary cycle. Something ( with the benefit of hindsight) we witnessed post 1960’s till about middle of 1990’s. That is when people and industry took the foot off the pedal, moved to cruise mode or a pause, reconciled the losses, and consolidated the gains. I do not mean an economic recession. Many important developments have happened during the pauses. Examples are nuclear energy, spread of television, space explorations and long strides in communications. It laid the foundation for Internet and personal computing. These pauses are the periods where the real gains of the development are delivered; and sows the seeds of new S curves.

While we all try to keep up with the current flood of information lakes and data oceans, there is no need to get unduly concerned about the change or rate of change. I actually think we should spend more time asking questions like: What happens when there’s a next pause? Pauses are as important as periods of acceleration. The real work takes place in the pauses. The most important thing is not the rapid evolution of robotic technology, but its application for the next 30 years or so in various facets of daily life.

The fundamentals of learning, knowledge acquisition and business have not really changed. The requirements and demands are fundamentally the same. Supply chains might have got upgraded and we now have greater availability and democratization of information and data. Right now most of us are trying to understand these new capabilities at our disposal – AI, ML, robotics, miniaturization…- what they are, how they work, what they will mean, etc.

But soon these technologies will lose their luster, and we will enter a pause – my crystal gazing says maybe in another 4-5 years. That’s when the real and boring work begins – when the initial tech appeal is long gone. The winners of tomorrow could very well be those who can avoid getting hyped up with the current information pollution and meticulously develop their core strengths and are willing to play the long game, getting their basic techniques right.

Are you game for it?

Inspirations and Bibliography:

1.     Desjardins, Jeff. “10 Skills You'll Need to Survive the Rise of Automation.” World Economic Forum, www.weforum.org/agenda/2018/07/the-skills-needed-to-survive-the-robot-invasion-of-the-workplace

2.     Gates, Bill. “Not Enough People Are Paying Attention to This Economic Trend.” Gatesnotes.com, www.gatesnotes.com/Books/Capitalism-Without-Capital

3.     Wichmann, Jonathan. “Our World Is Changing – but Not as Rapidly as People Think.” World Economic Forum, www.weforum.org/agenda/2018/08/change-is-not-accelerating-and-why-boring-companies-will-win

4.     Singh, Bhanu, and IDG Contributor Network. “Solving for Serverless: How Do You Manage Something That's Not There?” Network World, Network World, 9 July 2018, www.networkworld.com/article/3287648/lan-wan/solving-for-serverless-how-do-you-manage-something-that-s-not-there.html

5.     Harari, Yuval Noah. “Yuval Noah Harari on What the Year 2050 Has in Store for Humankind.” WIRED, WIRED UK, 14 Aug. 2018, www.wired.co.uk/article/yuval-noah-harari-extract-21-lessons-for-the-21st-century

6.     Cartoon image from: https://www.slideshare.net/rcaulder/sabre-mobile-webinar