How Shepards and UPS got me thinking about Augmented Intelligence
I believe in augmented intelligence over artificial intelligence
This is not a new concept. Shepards have been doing this for centuries - the close relationship between humans with their dogs gives humans augmented hearing and scent capabilities.
Just like shepards, human are augmented by a technological counterpart. The system of their interactions form an augmented intelligence.
A modern day example is UPS. The human driver and his tech-enabled delivery van. Their partnership creates efficiencies that impact and scale. The machine helps with trivial problems like route planning and optimization. The human helps with open challenges like navigating the complexities of cities and customers. Together, the deliveries per day has risen from 80 to 130, raising company share value from USD$89 (Jan2016) to USD$134 (Jan2018).
In these systems, I liken the role of technology to cruise control - it helps us maintain system equilibrium and optimize outcomes. It assures dependable implementation by reducing the variability of human error.
Like the shepard, our role as system architects is crucial. When an organization says "optimization", what are its ideal outcomes? What are its inputs, outputs and boundary spaces? How should the parts interact? Who does it impact?
As someone who shapes these systems at Digital Matter, I believe we have a crucial role to ensure that system outcomes are desirable for organizations and beneficial to society. We provide services that enable organizations to operate with highly optimized systems for construction coordination. This often means the disruption of traditional workflows. How we can work with "old school" wisdom in an evolutionary - not revolutionary manner - is a question we tackle everyday. By integrating the kernals of wisdom from the "old school" and operationalizing it using technologies that scale, it means that everyone - regardless of experience - benefits.
For more creative inspiration to the week ahead, here is a fun 15 minute podcast that inspired this post: