‘Bionic’ means Humans and Technology not just working with each other but augmenting and even integrating to supercharge our outputs. There are three obvious ways this could happen:
- Robotic exoskeletons and human/robot hybrids
- Software and applications augmenting human intelligence
- Techno-diversity where technology becomes part of our diversity quotient.
We need to move from a goal of automation to a mindset of augmentation.
NOTE: The book referenced in the video is David McCandless, “Information is Beautiful”. See his excellent website: https://informationisbeautiful.net
TRANSCRIPT
Welcome to ThrowForward Thursday, my name is Graeme Codrington. Today, let’s go back to the past to see how they thought about the future so that we can go to the future and think about today. Did you get all of that? Well, let me take you there.
Depending on how old you are, if I reference the 6 Million Dollar Man or Robocop, maybe you know where I’m going. These were a TV series back in the 1970s and ’80s and a movie franchise in which people were injured near death and then put back together with robotic parts. They were made bionic. That is the word I want to focus on today.
The concept of a bionic person, half machine, half human, has been around for a long time. But our team at TomorrowToday believes that the concept of bionic, bionic businesses and bionic people, is a key to being ready for the next few years and into the 2030s. We need to build bionic businesses., and we mean three specific things by that.
The first, I suppose, is similar to Robocop and the $6 million Man, and that is that we can actually physically integrate with robots and machines. So we can have an exoskeleton put on top of a human, and that gives them extra strength and endurance, and this will obviously be used in manufacturing, factory-type environments, and construction environments. Sadly, of course, it will also be used in the military to give soldiers superhuman strength and endurance.
So there are applications of integrating humans and machines, and of course, that also involves not even physically integrating them, but them working alongside each other. Toyota, for example, was amongst the first factories to realise that the goal of automating your factories completely may be a reasonable goal to try and attain, but you get more value and more benefit when you let the machines and the robots do what they can do and depending on what you’re trying to achieve, there are different answers to that.
But let’s say, for example, you’re trying to fit a heavy panel onto a car. Then getting the robot to pick up the panel and move it roughly into the right space. Well, that’s a perfect thing for the robots to do. Then a human being can come along and do the fine-tuning and the adjustments. Then you can get a robot to do spot welding. Apparently, robots can do much better welding than humans can because they don’t have any shakes or any imperfections in the way that they do that. But apparently, again, human beings are much better at seeing and verifying that the final look and finish is perfect.
So, I’m sure this will change in different environments, and I’m sure over the years, robots will get better at what they can do. But certainly, for the foreseeable future, it seems as if getting humans and robots to work together makes more sense than trying to completely automate. So that’s the first part of Bionic, is the physical side of things.
I suppose if you’re working in an office environment, you would want to ask then which parts of what happens in an office might be valuable to automate. Some of these robots and some of these automation systems can be quite expensive and so is it really valuable? Is it worthwhile, having an automated coffee machine that makes coffee just the way everybody likes it and delivers it to them via a robot? Or can you use your current service staff to do that? I suppose those are decisions you need to make, both in terms of a cost-benefit and also what vibe you’re going for in the office.
The second way in which we could become Bionic is, of course, in the more, let’s not call it a virtual space, but it’s not physical. It’s the space where we are using applications and I suppose these days, then we would want to talk about AI. You know what I believe about that? It isn’t really AI yet, it is more IA. It’s not artificial intelligence, but it is intelligent assistance. And we have to go through the same way of thinking about what is it that a machine can do better, what is it that an application or a large language model can do better than humans?
And that comes down simply to when you are wanting to do something that has been done by many, many, many different people in many different circumstances over time. And when all of those people have done it, they’ve largely done it in exactly the same way. Then your IA, your Intelligent Assistance or Large Language Model Systems, are ideal for doing that because you are not looking for innovation, creativity, new thinking, or something unusual. You are literally looking to copy the mean, the regression to the mean, the average approach that thousands of people might have taken.
And in that environment, it makes a lot of sense to be bionic, to let the applications, the software, do what the software can do, but then let the human come into the system. A really good example of this. It comes from a wonderful book called “Data is Beautiful” and there’s an old TED Talk, but one of the most watched TED Talks that is linked to that same book. And you can look it up called “Data is Beautiful”.
And this was the early days, this is about 15 years ago, the early days of infographics, and the book and the TED Talk was arguing that people actually perceive insights. We make sense of things rather through graphics and through what we see rather than through numbers and charts. I mean, your top actuaries make sense of numbers, but the rest of us need a little bit help. And so, putting large data sets into visual representations helps us to make sense of them.
So, AI is pretty good at making data sets more visible, turning them into graphics, but it’s not very good at finding meaning in those graphics unless the meaning already exists. Unless thousands of people already know what the meaning of the data is, and then large language models can go and access their engines and tell us what everybody else has thought. But if we’re looking for new meaning and new insights, let the machine create a data set that we can observe as humans, let humans bring the meaning, the insights, and the new ideas from that. So, there’s your second way of being bionic.
The third way of being bionic might be surprising to you. And that is that we need to recognise that bringing technology into our space has the same characteristics as engaging with diversity. Many people, I think, feel a little bit, let’s call it diversity fatigued at the moment, I don’t think we should be, but unfortunately, DEI has become a little bit of a culture war issue with some people using it to say that it’s an excuse for mediocrity and so on. I don’t believe that at all.
I think that diversity is an asset that should be nurtured, and having a group of people with different worldviews and different opinions is a wonderful way to boost creativity and innovation and a wonderful way to get more resilience and adaptability out of your team, all those good things. And I think that we need to bring the same mindset that we bring to bringing new people into our network and our system and listening to their insights.
We need to bring that same mindset to how we bring technology into our space, embracing a different approach, seeing how it impacts us, allowing it to inform and engage with our existing cultures and systems, and then handing things over to it if appropriate. So just a different way of thinking about how we engage with technology and how we build a Bionic business.
This is our future and the faster we engage with the ideas of Bionic and begin to use this understanding, moving away from automation to augmentation as the goal. If you believe that what’s going to happen next is that we get rid of a whole lot of people and replace them with machines, I think you have misunderstood the moment in history that we find ourselves in.
Yes, there is some room for automation, but I think that’s a dead-end path that will lead you to a few quick gains in cost efficiencies but will end in tears. And I think that building a bionic business that augments human ability with machine capabilities is the real path to the future.
Welcome to the future in which we have bionic people working in bionic organisations building a bionic world. As always, thank you for joining me in the ThrowForward Thursday. Hope you enjoyed this one, a little bit more philosophical, and I will see you next week in the future, again.
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Graeme Codrington, is an internationally recognised futurist, specialising in the future of work. He helps organisations understand the forces that will shape our lives in the next ten years, and how we can respond in order to confidently stay ahead of change. Chat to us about booking Graeme to help you Re-Imagine and upgrade your thinking to identify the emerging opportunities in your industry.
For the past two decades, Graeme has worked with some of the world’s most recognised brands, travelling to over 80 countries in total, and speaking to around 100,000 people every year. He is the author of 5 best-selling books, and on faculty at 5 top global business schools.