Why The Future Of Technology Is Always More Human

Peter Drucker was the quintessential management visionary.” He was often decades ahead of his time, developing concepts like knowledge worker  and management by objectives long before they were on anybody else’s radar. It was for good reason that the corporate elite hung on his every word as if they were supplicants getting an audience with an ancient oracle.

Yet when he first met Thomas J. Watson, IBM’s now legendary CEO, Drucker was somewhat taken aback. “He began talking about something called data processing,” Drucker recalled, “and it made absolutely no sense to me. I took it back and told my editor, and he said that Watson was a nut, and threw the interview away.”

We tend to think in linear terms and expect current trends to shape the future. Yet what we don’t see are the nascent ecosystems forming out of our field of vision. Things connect in nonlinear ways until some crucial link triggers a genuine inflection point. That has less to do with technology or economic trends and much more to do with how humans solve problems.

Electricity’s Productivity Problem

In 1882, just three years after his legendary development of his light bulb, Thomas Edison opened his Pearl Street Station, the first commercial electrical distribution plant in the United States. By 1884 it was already servicing over 500 homes.

Up till that point, electric light was mostly a curiosity. While a few of the mighty elite could afford to install generators in their homes — J.P.Morgan was one of the very first — that was beyond the means of most people. Electrical transmission changed all that and in the ensuing years much of the country was wired up.

Yet as the economist Paul David explains in The Dynamo and the Computer, electricity didn’t have a measurable impact on the economy until the early 1920’s — 40 years after Edison’s first plant was built.  The problem wasn’t with electricity itself—Edison quickly expanded his distribution network as did his rival George Westinghouse—but a lack of complementary technologies.

At first, the major application for electricity was electric light, which had a limited effect. To truly impact productivity, factories needed to be redesigned and work itself had to be reimagined. Later, household appliances like refrigerators and washing machines were invented, expanding electricity’s reach and productivity would soar for another 50 years.

The internal combustion followed a similar path. The automobile actually had limited economic impact in the age of the corner store. It was through the development of the supermarket—and later the shopping mall and the category store—that first made the new mode of transportation economically important.

Clustering ecosystems

One of the key inventions arising out of electricity was the family radio and it quickly became the highlight of every American living room. If you wanted to laugh along with Jack Benny or Groucho Marx, the radio was your front row seat. Orson Welles thrilled—and terrified—audiences with The War of the Worlds and when the great Bambino called his shot at the 1932 World Series in Chicago, the fans back in New York heard it on the radio.

At the center of this quaint history was New York’s Radio Row. Sure, there were lots of places where you could buy a radio, but none like Radio Row. It was the type of place that makes cities innovation platforms, with shops not only selling electronics, but also spare parts to hobbyists, repairmen and even fledgling electronics businesses.

Radio Row was an unseen human hub for the technological revolution that was then taking place much like, as Steven Johnson explained in Where Good Ideas Come From, coffee houses did during the Enlightenment era. Later the Homebrew Computing Club would play a similar role incubating digital technologies in the early days of Silicon Valley.

In Regional Advantage, UC Berkeley’s AnnaLee Saxenian explained how the cluster of microcomputer companies around Boston drove the technology forward in the 1960s and 1970s, but then gave way to an even more powerful cluster in Silicon Valley. In her next book, The New Argonauts she showed how that ecosystem then helped lead to other clusters in places like Taipei, Bangalore and Tel Aviv.

What’s important to understand is that these ecosystems are about more than just technology. They also include talent and information. It’s not just research labs and production facilities that lead to innovation, but also happy hours after work, neighborhood meetups and Little League games that help to circulate ideas.

Emerging Ecosystems

Today, if you look around, it becomes clear that there are a number of ecosystems emerging around key technologies such as synthetic biology, quantum computing and energy storage. These involve venture funded startups, government agencies and large corporations, all investing in nascent technologies that have transformative potential.

Consider quantum computing. In addition to initiatives from major companies like Google, IBM, Intel,  Microsoft, and Honeywell, the US government has created a National Quantum Initiative. There are also venture-funded startups like Rigetti and IonQ as well as a myriad of companies pursuing related technologies such as software development and quantum cryptography.

In some cases, the ecosystem is largely organic, such as the North Carolina Research Triangle. In others, such as Manufacturing Institutes and Joint Center for Energy Storage Research (JCESR), the government takes a leading role in helping to form the ecosystem. In still others, like IBM’s quantum network, private organizations work to form their own.

These are the modern incarnations of New York’s “Radio Row,” and if you want to know where the next big thing will emerge, looking at where ecosystems are forming is a great place to start. Edison’s invention of the electric lightbulb didn’t create a revolution in productivity in the 1880s, it was the secondary inventions that came four decades later that truly changed the world.

Building Human-Centered Ecosystems

Bill Gates recently wrote that, “The development of AI is as fundamental as the creation of the microprocessor, the personal computer, the Internet, and the mobile phone.” Yet the unspoken problem is that none of those technologies, except for the Internet, had a significant impact on productivity. In fact, since 2005, we seem to be caught in a second productivity paradox.

In 2016, while researching my book Mapping Innovation, I noticed that we were entering a new era of innovation, which became the title of the last chapter. That’s largely become true, we are on the precipice of leveraging a number of new technologies including, along with artificial intelligence, things like quantum computing and synthetic biology.

Yet as we have seen clearly throughout history, it is ecosystems, not inventions that truly change the world and we are the crucial missing link. It took the redesigning of factories to make electricity impactful and the reorganization of retail to make the automobile a transformational technology.

Whether these new technologies have an impact depends more on us and how we put them to use than any details about the technology itself. Using large language models to dump more crap on the Internet, will not get us far, just as our newfound ability to shape the genetic code will not fix our broken healthcare system.

The future of technology is always more human and that has never been more true than today.  As Todd McLees points out, it is on human skills and human behaviors that we must focus to tackle the challenges ahead.

Greg Satell is Co-Founder of ChangeOS, a transformation & change advisory, an international keynote speaker, host of the Changemaker Mindset podcast, bestselling author of Cascades: How to Create a Movement that Drives Transformational Change and Mapping Innovation, as well as over 50 articles in Harvard Business Review. You can learn more about Greg on his website, GregSatell.com, follow him on Twitter @DigitalTonto, his YouTube Channel and connect on LinkedIn.

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