Navigating the Future of Work, Sensemaking, and Co-Existence

Back in 2014, I received a kind invitation from a newly met colleague (who became a long-lasting friend), Dr. Daniel Kraft, to present at his Exponential Medicine conference on the West Coast. Daniel has an impressive background — physician, scientist, innovator, and someone who trained for the U.S. astronaut program. His conference brought together medical practitioners and scientist pioneers interested in helping at the edge of “what’s next” when it comes to medicine.

The closing keynote presentation and discussion that I gave at Daniel’s 2014 Exponential Medicine focused on three things:

1. The increasing number of devices, be they internet of things (IoT) devices or other automatic appliances online (2013 was the year that the percent of bot traffic exceeded the percent of human traffic online)
2. The challenge of humans making sense of all those devices and the information they would produce — as well as protecting privacy and personal freedoms (2013 also was the year that there were the same number of devices online as there were humans on the planet, about 7.1 billion each; projections suggested that in about two years the number of devices would double while the number of humans would not — and sure enough by 2015 we saw about 15 billion networked devices online vs. only 7.3 billion people on the planet).
3. The way forward would require us to think about how machines could aid — not replace — humans in making sense of all the information streams, which mean thinking about artificial intelligence to aid governance (AI back then including advancements in neural networks and how they might be able to overcome some of the earlier limits of expert systems and decision support systems from the past.

I asked at the time, what it might mean if we were able to take Kant’s Categorical Imperative which, at its most simplified form is akin to the Golden Rule of “Do unto others as you would have them do unto you (note: this maxim does seem to have different versions of such a general principle across almost all human societies) — and update it for our digital era, specifically:

Do unto others as they give permission and informed consent to have done unto them?

Essentially this would recognize that as technologies continued to be more widespread in adoption and affordability — aka, democratized — we would also need to think about how we could ensure people were safe from machines doing things to either their digital or physical personas without their consent and that normal hierarchical systems of protection would be strained to keep up with the sheer pace of change happening. (Note: for folks interested more in what this future might entail, I suggest taking a lot at VERSES’ idea of using spatial web standards, via the IEEE, for a better approach to AI governance).

This included an envisioned era where it would become much easier to produce things at the biological level too including synthetic compounds and more. For the biological side, I pointed to how silver lining in clothing can help remove some aerosolized compounds around a person which might help prevent people from being exposed to things without their consent — as a small example of what the future might include.

Fast Forward to the Present

Also, while at Daniel’s Exponential Medicine in 2014, I met Vinod Khosla and discussed cloud computing with him. At the time, I had parachuted into a role as CIO of the FCC and was working to modernize and to remedy the fact that they had more than 200 different legacy systems, average age more than 10 years old, that were increasingly consuming more than 85% of their budget just on the operations and maintenance of these legacy systems — a challenge that mean less and less money was available to update and modernize these systems, let alone build anything new. I also had concerns that any legacy system more than five years old, let alone ten years old, would be hard to security against increasingly semi-automated and automated threats. So, we had an imperative to move to cloud computing — and that’s exactly what we started in 2014 with a larger leap by the agency in 2015 to move systems off-prem to either public cloud or private cloud hosting.

Vinod’s take was that I should only move to a single vendor, the dominant cloud provider specifically. It was an interesting take and one informed I’m sure by his seasoned Venture Capitalist experiences. My reply was in some cases we could not go direct from a legacy system — say one built in legacy Sybase — to a pure public cloud solution. In some cases, we would have to move off-prem (itself a major lift to disconnect from potentially long-forgotten interconnections with other systems) to private cloud host that would move modules of the historical system to modernized components as we moved forward.

In some other cases, we wanted to go to a Software as a Service model — not either Infrastructure or Platform as a Service — because then we would not have to maintain a heavy code base. This was before the formal concept of “low code/no code” arose, however even then there were nascent signals of a trend that made since for the government because our code base was not secret sauce or IP to be protected, our business was to serve the public and the work of the nation. So, by going to SaaS and updating past processes in a modern cloud solution, we lightened the longer-term tail of maintaining a system.

Looking to Possible Futures Ahead

All of this leads to our now, in 2023, where yes indeed we’ve seen the continued rise of networked devices on the Internet as well as the number of humans. The good news is we passed about 50% of humanity having access to the Internet in late 2018 — an event that coincided with good friends Vint Cerf (who is around this month in 2023 is now celebrating his 0x50th birthday for those familiar with hexadecimal notation, or 80th birthday for those more familiar with regular decimal notation), Mei Lin Fung, Marci Harris, Ray Wang, Lord Tim Clement-Jones, Sir Tim Berners-Lee and several others assembled for Our People-Centered Digital Future celebration in December of 2018.

Just recently I did a United National General Assembly panel discussion with several others discussing the more challenging side of bots.

Specifically, the challenging news is we still have not developed good strategies to address all the non-human bot traffic and devices out there — some of which are either for good purposes or benign purposes — some of which are for not-so-good ends including phishing, looking for ransomware targets, trolling or bullying, or other bad activities to harass and, tragically, threaten in some cases people. We’ve seen bots do this for local election workers in the United States. We also have seen bots do this towards women serving in public office — which is neither right nor something we should permit to happen.

I also saw it myself in 2017 at the aforementioned agency when we saw a flood of 23 million-plus comments that clearly were not all human that resulted in a denial of resources to actual humans wanting to leave comments, something that took until 2021 for the New York AG to fully research and conclude of the 23 million, 18 million were from non-authentic human origin on both sides of the political aisle. Back in 2017 and later when I was with Vint Cerf and Mei Lin Fung’s non-profit People-Centered Internet coalition in 2018, there were some pundits who claimed nothing happened or there was no evidence (despite the sheer “patterns of life” that could not be explained by human activities alone) — however as a non-partisan civil servant now with the People-Centered Internet, I didn’t have the same voice as some of those pundits and thus I did my best to keep calm, carry on, and do what I could to help shape a better future for others.

This led to a kind invitation from the Boston Global Forum, through another friend Tuan Nguyen, inviting me to give the AI World Society Distinguished Lecture at the United Nations on UN Charter Day in 2019 on the topic of Technology, Data and the Future of the United Nations that again considered the three part interaction among (1) ever-increasing number of autonomous devices, (2) the challenges of human making sense of information from all these streams — as well as protecting privacy, and (3) whether we could see responsible Artificial Intelligence approaches that would aid and augment humans striving to navigate this landscape ahead.

In parallel to these events, I started in late 2017 with Singularity University (SU) as a faculty member leading the charge at the intersection of governance, disruption, and impact — something that back in 2014 was not something SU was focused on, however by 2017 it was clear that technology would need all sectors to work together on figuring out updates to and novel forms of governance to make sense of the intersection of devices, human sensemaking, and AI. This included both keynotes as well as Executive Education sessions with Fortune 500 and world leaders on the topics of the Future of Work, upgrading Governance for an Exponential Era, and similar topics.

The Future of Work and the Future of Professions

One of my central thesis back in 2018–2020 was that the Future of Work could be beneficial to humanity if we figured out a way to help everyone work less — and that we have experienced such changes before in transitioning from the need for humans to be vigilant 24/7 against threats to their family and farms to societies where there were some protections and stability and so now folks could be farmers and still work long days (12 hours or more) yet not have to worry about such threats. Then there was the transition from farming to working in industrial settings — still very long hours and it wasn’t until labor laws that the length of time that could be worked and who could work (limiting child labor) arose. Finally for some parts of the world the supposed five-day workday and “office hours” for some — which even now has uneven distributions between some people working very long hours still or even two different jobs vs. others working less hours or working one or more “gigs”.

As for what paths may exist for societies ahead, a Future of Work involving some automation or semi-automation of human tasks — to including pairing humans with machines for better outcomes together — could result in less time working if we could figure out how to make sure this wasn’t lopsided in the distribution of labor. At the time, and even now, such a working less doesn’t necessarily mean people being out of a job because if you look at what happened with the computer animation industry — when computer special effects first arrived there were pundits that thought it would put human animators out of work, whereas in reality the field has grown almost 10x since and continues to grow at a fast clip.

Also, in considering the Future of Work, we also would need to recognize what’s known as the “Unemployment Effect” that has been documented in humans — we humans thrive better when we have a sense of purpose. Losing a sense of purpose can result in harmful behaviors at personal, family, and community levels.

Which is why it is with some chagrin that I read a recent Wall Street Journal article that had Elon Musk and U.K. Prime Minister Rishi Sunak discussing these same topics from 2018 and 2019. Musk seems to have pivoted away from AI being the doom of humanity (something I previously have written about as embodying similar themes from the 1890s and 1900s Gilded Age redux) to a supposed Age of Abundance that will require very little work from people.

On one hand, such a view from Musk matches some of what Singularity University used to espouse, that we were entering an Age of Abundance — minus certain things like real estate where not everyone can live with top-of-the-hill view of the San Francisco Bay (virtual reality aside), etc. On the other hand, the governance questions remain on navigating such a potential transition. This was something I raised with Singularity University back in 2014 and again in 2017–2020 and even now, namely how will we bridge among businesses, the public, and governments (be they local governments or national ones) in such a period of transition. Narratives about abundance, while on the one hand better than narratives of doom and gloom, usually gloss over the messier questions of:

• How can we think about the different stakeholders associated with such a seismic shift involving autonomous devices and more?
• How can we address the “pacing problems” of the ever-changing technological landscapes relative to human communities and societies?
• How can we balance existing civic institutions with what might need to be new forms of networked collaborations necessary to work across communities and geographies on these issues?

In closing, I approach the future with pragmatic optimism — in some respects it’s interesting to see the zeitgeist of the moment catch-up with conversations Daniel Kraft, Vint Cerf, and others were having over the last decade.

On the other hand, the human collaboration and human co-existence (because ultimately that is what governance is, how do we co-exist in a state that is not war or anarchy) remain largely unanswered and I’m not sure any one person or organization can answer them all. It will take all of us working together on these issues — and at the exact time where it’s getting difficult to sort out authentic information from inauthentic disinformation and/or bot-generated synthetic information and activities. I also will be candid,

It could be that such moments finally create the imperative to work together (vs. ignore) on these deeper, collaborative issues. I certainly hope so.

As always, please free free to both repost and share. Comments, thoughts, and feedback welcomed — onwards and upwards together!