Archive for the ‘Books’ Category
People in the Computer
I just finished reading The Turk: The Life and Times of the Famous Eighteenth-Century Chess-Playing Machine, which Dean lent to me to read on the plane. Like lots of history novels, it’s chock-full of interesting facts and tales, and a large amount of it is written with the benefit of years of hindsight (which always makes the writer look much smarter).
For those of you who aren’t familiar with the story, it revolves around a mechanical “automaton” that apparently could play chess. In its 200 year lifespan, it played against (and beat) world chess masters, and chess aficionados, including Napoleon Bonaparte and Benjamin Franklin.
Now there was obviously no computing power around in the late 1700′s to effectively program a machine, so The Turk (named for its oriental robe and turban) had to use some other kind of mechanism. Hidden inside the cabinet was a human chess player, with a second chessboard, who was ‘watching’ the game, through an elaborate mechanism involving magnets and levers. The Turk was, in effect, a conjuring trick.
The thing that made the Turk remarkable, and that led it to be the talk of the courts of Europe in the 1700′s was the notion that it could somehow ‘think’, and react to the moves made by it’s human opponent. The prospect of thinking machines held amazing promise for the future.
Nowadays, computers can play chess, and often extremely well — using a brute-force, compute all the possible moves approach to the chessboard. Now, this is impressive, but it’s not thinking. It’s much more mechanical and rigid than the way a human thinks about the problem. Add to that, the notion that all of these chess-playing rules have to be programmed by an army of human programmers to start with.
So, the Artificial Intelligence of the future is still there — in the future. Tasks requiring repetitive manual labor may have been replaced by robotic machinery, but the knowledge worker isn’t losing their job to thinking computers any time soon.
Even with the amazing advances in software, in search analysis and indexing, computers are really only good for two things — doing math, and remembering stuff. If you need information, you may well be able to find it through your enterprise software. But if you need the analysis and counsel that adds value to that information — maybe we could dare call it ‘knowledge’ — you need to connect with the most sophisticated thinking machine you will find in your organization — another person.
And that’s why social software is so important. It’s a lot like the Turk. Sure, It looks like the computer is helping you out — but really, there’s a guy hidden inside the cabinet…
Review: The Myths of Innovation
The most discouraging thing about running a startup is how long it takes to start up. Maybe that’s why I found The Myths of Innovation by Scott Berkun such a great read. He systematically demolishes common misconceptions about how ideas get to market. Just skimming some of the chapter headings made me feel better:
The Myths of Innovation
- The Myth of Epiphany
- The Lone Inventor
- There is a Method for Innovation
- People Love New Ideas
We’ve absorbed these myths into our culture because they make entertaining and memorable stories, but innovation rarely works that way. Edison had a team of reasearchers working for him and trial-and-error was his primary means of refining ideas. The advertising industry owes much of its existence to the difficulty of getting people to try new products and services. Sometimes it takes years for a new development to reach consumers, as was the case with 3M’s laughably weak glue formula eventually becoming the blockbuster Post-It note.
It’s good to be reminded of these counterexamples. The idea is often the easy part. It’s the execution that’s hard.
Review: Here Comes Everybody
We’re big fans of Clay Shirky. We cited his work twice in our Seminal Articles for Enterprise 2.0 post. So naturally his new book, Here Comes Everybody, was required reading.
Here Comes Everybody
To summarize the book in one paragraph, Here Comes Everybody is an exploration of the effect of the Internet on society. Clay’s central thesis is that the Internet and related technologies have dramatically lowered the barriers to information sharing and group formation. As a result, new sorts of social groupings have emerged and many previous assumptions about organizations have been overturned. The effects of this are subtle and pervasive, and modern society is just beginning to adjust to the new logic of group structure and dynamics.
Two examples of these new kinds of groups include the open source movement and flash mobs. He also discusses the communities that form around Web 2.0 sites like Wikipedia, Flickr, Facebook, and Twitter.
There key difference between these groups and organizations established without the new technologies is cost. Prior to the Internet, coordinating a group of people to do anything imposed relatively heavy costs. It took time, money, and effort to coordinate and direct people. But those costs have fallen dramatically in recent times. Where before you needed funding, offices, employees and experts to build complex software, write encyclopedias, or collect and organize a photo exhibition, you can now do so with volunteers working in their spare time.
Not all of these groups succeed, of course. Most of them don’t produce anything of lasting value. But since the cost of forming these groups is so low — requiring just a “Promise, Tool and Bargain” to get started — it leads to massive experimentation. With low barriers to entry and a large enough scale, trial and error emerges as a viable strategy. It leads to innovations that in the past would never have passed institutional muster.
Here Comes Everybody is a thought-provoking read. The explanations are clear, the anecdotes well told, and the analysis hits close to the mark. Others, notably Nick Carr, have taken issue with Clay’s enthusiasm for his subject (read their ongoing debate on britannica.com) but I found it helped knit the book together. You can’t understand the changes happening to the Internet and society today without understanding the viewpoint of technologists and technophiles like Clay Shirky. A lot of us are caught up in the Internet revolution, and we’re determined to follow it as it unfolds.
The Millenial Bug
One of the recurring themes at E2.0 Last week was the notion of Generational Adoption. It’s the idea that Baby Boomers, Gen X and Gen Y all had an innate relationship with various ways of working, and that these different work habits are a major factor in the adoption of new technology. Jay Hariani at the e2.oh blog has a nice wrap up of the generational adoption meme. Since then, Ross Mayfield, Jeff Nolan, and Larry Dignan have all chimed in, with various cases for and against.
I was lucky enough to share a drink last week with with Rob Salkowitz, Author of Generation Blend: Managing Across the Technology Age Gap, who was presenting at the E2.0 conference. I haven’t read Rob’s book yet, but In the wake of our conversation, I am definitely going to check it out. (Venkat’s Review over on RibbonFarm is also a good read).
The Millenials Are Coming is the new Y2K Bug
I have big problems with using the generational argument to drive adoption of Enterprise 2.0. It feels like another vendor-inspired bogeyman designed to convince companies to buy heaps of software they don’t need. (Install our compliance software or Sarbanes-Oxley will get you!)
The notion that the millennials are going to “demand” some kind of “Facebook” to do their work is just plain rubbish. Think about when you joined the workforce. What exactly did you demand?
When I first left school for the workforce, I wasn’t in a position to demand anything. It took me five years of working within the system before I realized which parts were broken. And it was only because I’d put in the time working within the system that I was trusted to actually influence things a bit.
Generational change happens gradually. There’s not going to be some giant “MySpace Revolution” where “The Kids” take over with their externally hosted collaborative tools. Instead, these people will join the workplace as wide-eyed and impressionable new starters, and they’ll do their best to work within the framework that they are given with the tools that are allocated to them. Then, slowly, their own ideas will become part of the way people work, including their favorite tools and technologies.
Sure, the generational issue is interesting from an anthropological perspective. It’s indicative of a lot of things, most notably progress in society. But as a call to arms for business to rush out and spend cash on some new-fangled social media tool for your enterprise, it leaves a lot to be desired.
(But hey, what would I know. I’m just a disgruntled Gen X’er who has no respect for authority, right?)
