The Humachine

Humankind, Machines, and the Future of Enterprise

Nada R. Sanders, John D. Wood

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780429671203
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Processo decisionale
• Index: Business

There is a lot of hype, hand-waving, and ink being spilled about artificial intelligence (AI) in business. The amount of coverage of this topic in the trade press and on shareholder calls is evidence of a large change currently underway. It is awesome and terrifying. You might think of AI as a major environmental factor that is creating an evolutionary pressure that will force enterprise to evolve or perish. For those companies that do survive the "silicon wave" sweeping through the global economy, the issue becomes how to keep their humanity amidst the tumult.

What started as an inquiry into how executives can adopt AI to harness the best of human and machine capabilities turned into a much more profound rumination on the future of humanity and enterprise. This is a wake-up call for business leaders across all sectors of the economy. Not only should you implement AI regardless of your industry, but once you do, you should fight to stay true to your purpose, your ethical convictions, indeed your humanity, even as our organizations continue to evolve. While not holding any punches about the dangers posed by overpowered AI, this book uniquely surveys where technology is limited, and gives reason for cautious optimism about the true opportunities that lie amidst all the disruptive change currently underway. As such, it is distinctively more optimistic than many of the competing titles on Big Technology.

This compelling book weaves together business strategy and philosophy of mind, behavioral psychology and the limits of technology, leadership and law. The authors set out to identify where humans and machines can best complement one another to create an enterprise greater than the sum total of its parts: the Humachine.

Combining the global business and forecasting acumen of Professor Nada R. Sanders, PhD, with the legal and philosophical insight of John D. Wood, Esq., the authors combine their strengths to bring us this profound yet accessible book. This is a "must read" for anyone interested in AI and the future of human enterprise.

1

THE FOURTH INDUSTRIAL REVOLUTION

Previous industrial revolutions liberated humankind from animal power, made mass production possible and brought digital capabilities to billions of people. This Fourth Industrial Revolution is, however, fundamentally different. It is characterized by a range of new technologies that are fusing the physical, digital and biological worlds, impacting all disciplines, economies and industries, and even challenging ideas about what it means to be human. The resulting shifts and disruptions mean that we live in a time of great promise and great peril.

Professor Klaus Schwab, Founder and Executive Chairman of the World Economic Forum, author of The Fourth Industrial Revolution¹

The business plans of the next 10,000 start-ups are easy to forecast: Take X and add AI.

Kevin Kelly, founder of Wired and former publisher of Whole Earth Review²

“Deep Blue” Blues

It was 1997 and Garry Kasparov was the greatest chess player in the world. At the age of twenty-two, he was the youngest ever undisputed World Chess Champion. He had been beating chess-playing computers since the 1980s and had just prevailed over an early version of IBM’s supercomputer Deep Blue a year earlier. Now he was going for a rematch.

Garry went into the match confident. He was considered unbeatable. Now in front of a global audience, playing the fateful second match with Deep Blue, Garry was becoming visibly frustrated. He fidgeted and shook his head, waiting for his opponent’s next move. After only nineteen moves, the audience saw Garry jump up and race away from the board. He had just been beaten by a machine.³

The match against Deep Blue put Kasparov in a philosophical mood⁴:

I got my first glimpse of artificial intelligence on Feb. 10, 1996, at 4:45 p.m. EST, when in the first game of my match with Deep Blue, the computer nudged a pawn forward to a square where it could easily be captured. It was a wonderful and extremely human move … Humans do this sort of thing all the time. But computers generally calculate each line of play so far as possible within the time allotted … So I was stunned by this pawn sacrifice. What could it mean? I had played a lot of computers but had never experienced anything like this. I could feel—I could smell—a new kind of intelligence across the table. While I played through the rest of the game as best I could, I was lost; it played beautiful, flawless chess the rest of the way and won easily. Later I discovered the truth. Deep Blue’s computational powers were so great that it did in fact calculate every possible move all the way to the actual recovery of the pawn six moves later. The computer didn’t view the pawn sacrifice as a sacrifice at all. So the question is, if the computer makes the same move that I would make for completely different reasons, has it made an “intelligent” move? Is the intelligence of an action dependent on who (or what) takes it?

Did the triumph of Deep Blue over the GOAT human chess player signal a “superhuman” level of intelligence in game-playing artificial intelligence (AI)?

A special-purpose chess-playing algorithm is extremely limited: “It plays chess; it can do no other.”⁵ We are well-advised to bear in mind the extraordinary narrowness of artificial intelligence—even when rising to a superhuman level in one area of mental endeavor, that excellence does not necessarily translate into any other area of mental activity.

Yet, let’s not forget the unique and singular focus and ruthless resilience of artificial intelligence when it is playing to its strength: Deep Blue does not get overcome with emotion when encountering an outrageous move by its opponent. In Kasparov’s words, “Had I not melted down during game two and resigned prematurely, none of this would have mattered. Not only was the early resignation my fault, but allowing it to ruin my composure was the real fatal mistake.”⁶ Absent extreme heat, computers do not “melt down” under mental strain or emotional stress.

What if we could combine the labile generality of human intellects with the power and rigor of narrow AI?

Like an adamantine needle, artificial intelligence is currently as narrow as it is rigid. AI, like Deep Blue, suffers from a “lack of a purpose beyond its narrow goal,” which is set out by its programmers.⁷ Another way to frame this is, “Expertise does not necessarily translate into applicable understanding, let alone wisdom.”⁸

Nonetheless, this was a revolutionary moment—the beginning of the world seeing the capability of thinking machines. The IBM supercomputer Deep Blue was a machine capable of processing over 100 million positions per second, nothing any human could do.

Kasparov’s Law: Triumph of Process

In the fallout of the Deep Blue match, Kasparov was motivated to analyze the potential interactions, and collaborations, of human and machine thinking: “What if, instead of human versus machine, we played as partners? My brainchild saw the light of day in a match in 1998 in Leon, Spain, and we called it Advanced Chess. Each player had a PC at hand running the chess software of his choice during the game. The idea was to create the highest level of chess ever played, a synthesis of the best of man and machine.”⁹

The results of this experiment were both predictable and surprising. Predictably, humans with access to machine support were less likely to make tactical blunders, because the computer would analyze potential moves and countermoves with speed and accuracy surpassing human ability. This, in turn, freed up the human player to deploy mental bandwidth on strategic analysis and creative ideation, instead of using precious (that is, far more limited) brainpower doing labor-intensive computations of the various permutations on the board. Even Kasparov, who was perhaps unparalleled among chess players for his powerful and accurate calculations (relative to other humans), lost a competitive edge under these conditions.¹⁰

Computers compute; when human competitors both have access to computers, the human with greater computational power loses his edge, as the computer has an equalizing effect along that dimension. As a consequence, when aided with machine computation, the human with greater creative and strategic skills will tend to prevail, all other things being equal.

Another foreseeable result was that the teams that combined amateur chess players with ordinary computers prevailed over a superhuman chess-specialist computer with no human teammate. “Human strategic guidance combined with the tactical acuity of a computer was overwhelming.”¹¹

However, as the “Advanced Chess” tournament came to a climax, something remarkable occurred. Based on the foregoing, you would be forgiven for betting that the champion of the Advanced Chess tournament would be a grand master (among the greatest human chess players alive) partnered up with a high-powered chess-specialist computer. You would be wrong.

The winning team was actually composed of two amateur chess players who deployed three ordinary computers simultaneously. The champions were amateurs Steven Crampton and Zackary Stephen, “chess buddies who met at a local club in New Hampshire in the US,” who “had spent a few years honing their skills at the game,” but still “had day jobs and were effectively unknown in the world of competitive chess.”¹² Steven and Zackary entered the freestyle tournament up against no less than “several teams of grandmasters aided by computers.”¹³ Based on historical precedent and the merits of the competitive playing field, they should have lost. But they didn’t, thanks to a unique method.

Steven and Zackary happened to have developed a database fed with over four years of data of their own personal strategies. This database showed “which of the two players typically had greater success when faced with similar situations,” so they knew when to defer to their teammate and when to take the initiative.¹⁴ They also fully utilized the rules allowing for the use of personal computers running optimization algorithms for any given arrangement of the board they happened to find themselves in.

The secret ingredient to the success was, according to one of the players, “We had really good methodology for when to use the computer and when to use our human judgement, that elevated our advantage.”¹⁵

The shocking outcome demonstrated that “certain human skills were still unmatched by machines when it came to chess and using those skills cleverly and co-operatively could make a team unbeatable.”¹⁶

We contend that the results of the Advanced Chess tournament are instructive well beyond the realm of chess. Kasparov’s own takeaway from the surprising results actually provides a major theme for our book: “A clever process beat superior knowledge and superior technology. It didn’t render knowledge and technology obsolete, of course, but it illustrated the power of efficiency and coordination to dramatically improve results.”¹⁷

In what has become known as Kasparov’s Law, we can formulate the insight as: “weak human + machine + better process was superior to a strong computer alone and, more remarkably, superior to a strong human + machine + inferior process.”¹⁸

One of the objectives for this book is to elucidate what this “better process” looks like at the enterprise level. Even chess enthusiasts can appreciate that this type of human + machine cooperation is not limited to chess and extends from diagnostic medicine to manufacturing. How can ordinary (“weak”) humans combine ordinary (“weak”) machines to achieve extraordinary results? By using a better process. That process is laid out in Chapters 7 and 8. We do not need to be geniuses or have access to quantum computer power in order to achieve extraordinary results. We simply need to follow Kasparov’s Law.

Using ordinary people and ordinary machinery, combined with the right process, we can create the extraordinary—the Humachine. That is the goal of this book.

The New Kid in Town

While the forecasts of the extent of blue-collar and white-collar professional displacement by machines vary in magnitude, they all share the same insight: the machines are coming for human jobs of all kinds. We may call it the silicon wave, as computerization, bots, autonomous machines, and so forth gobble up human jobs. At each successive interval of machine innovation, more and more jobs appear to be “low-hanging fruit,” easily susceptible to displacement by machines. The silicon wave promises to cause a flood of biblical proportions, leaving behind a world transformed, no less profound than the changes wrought by the onset of electricity.

Research shows that while automation will eliminate very few occupations entirely in the next decade, it will affect portions of almost all jobs to a greater or lesser degree, depending on the type of work they entail.¹⁹ Unless forbidden by law, no job is sacrosanct—a machine could theoretically displace any job.

Could a robot be President of the United States? These days, it would appear nothing is too controversial for that office. The US Constitution, Article II, Section 1 provides that, “No person except a natural born citizen, or a citizen of the United States, at the time of the adoption of this Constitution, shall be eligible to the office of President; neither shall any person be eligible to that office who shall not have attained to the age of thirty-five years, and been fourteen years a resident within the United States.” At first blush, we cannot elect a robot to be the President because a robot is not a “natural-born citizen.”

However, we need just a little bit of interpretive wriggle room to get there. Does the word “born” include “assembled”? If yes, then a computer that is “Made in America” is “born” in the USA.

Can we pass a law that grants citizenship to a robot? The humanoid AI bot christened Sophia has already been granted citizenship by Saudi Arabia, so we know that robot citizenship is possible.

Therefore, a robot assembled in the USA and granted citizenship by law, that has been in existence for no less than 35 years and which has been within the territorial limits of the USA for no less than 14 years, could theoretically run for the office of the President.

Not that President Tron would be guaranteed a strong chance of successfully navigating the political landscape, but in theory it is poss...