The juices with the clockwork orange
A book just came out. Talk to my robot, Ma The androids make juice with “a clockwork orange?", which in a simple and facetious way addresses a topic of great current and importance in the world of the cyber sphere: communication between humans and machines and vice versa. The two authors, Beppe Carella and Fabio Degli Esposti are two insiders from the world of ICT and technological innovation, but their research and their interests go well beyond this specific area. Music, art, literature, philosophy and history organically enter their cultural horizon and, together with an unusual knowledge of the world of technology, create an interpretative synthesis of our time that is difficult to obtain with sectoral and single-disciplinary approaches. From this synthesis emerges a sort of metadiscipline that the authors summarize in Communication, understood not only in its theoretical value, but as a daily practice to be implemented at all levels in relationships, particularly if implemented in cyberspace.
Communication is the ability to understand, process and use effectively and translate into relationships the data that the surrounding world produces incessantly. Even the brilliant Israeli historian Yuval Noah Harari, who avails himself of a wonderfully interdisciplinary study of the contemporary world, speaks of a new phase of human civilization founded on Dataism, also understood as an organized social model destined to take the place of capitalism. Harari paints this perspective more as dystopian than as utopian, but the game is still very open whether we will go in one direction or the other. Our two authors are more relaxed and optimistic about the challenge of robots and dataism to human civilization and its legacy, precisely because they are humanist technologists and see this last adjective as hegemonic even in the narrative of the future.
The two authors write in the presentation of the book:
“After the fire and the wheel, the digital; here is a revolution that could help us live in a better world or plunge us into a deep depression. And it's not even a revolution, or a transformation... It's a real "metamorphosis". You wake up not transformed into a "huge Kafkaesque filthy bug" but more likely into mutants who must learn to communicate in new and different ways.
That's what's the point, communicate differently. Create a new narrative. We asked Beppe Carrella and Fabio Degli Esposti to illustrate a series of posts of their intriguing theses and we are now pleased to publish the first one.
Lto the need for networking
We all know that to "work well" and "last" you need to keep fit. But do we know what it means to "keep fit" for a company, for a group?
In the age of the web, for an organization, keeping fit means being permeable to new things, innovation, the desire to continually get involved, in practice creating connections. Connections with all those around us (customers/suppliers/partners/friends and others...) to make our participation alive in the activities in which we are involved. Ultimately, we want to connect our brains with all those who want to become, together with us, real added value. And the brain is working è ciò which makes the difference between being considered "commodity" e "value". So let's concentrate our efforts and put ourselves forward to be... connected.
Why? Because we are convinced that organizations live in communication, are consolidated in "conversations": board meetings, sales meetings, planning processes, focus groups, task forces, staff meetings, stand-up meetings, conventions, descriptions of products, audit interventions, client meetings, retrospectives …
During our lifetime we learn a series of alphabets in order to access knowledge. This is how we learn the alphabet of letters to learn to read and write, that of numbers to do arithmetic, the alphabet made up of seven notes to write and read music, that of colors for pictorial art and so on. Virtually every activity corresponds to an alphabet that must be learned and then forgotten; understanding begins when the single signs are no longer important but the whole of these which make explicit a meaning.
A destiny of global interconnected people
Today under the heading "communication" we find everything: the exchange of genetic messages, the non-mechanistic interpretations of cybernetics and of the general theory of systems, certain aspects of the theory of automata and nervous structures, the quantitative approaches of information science , studies of the rhetoric of cinema, journalism, the various fields of public relations, advertising, marketing. Indeed, “communication”, “information”, “means of communication” are words that acquire different meanings depending on the context in which they are used. For a journalist, information is the account of a fact that he himself has been able to observe or verify. The means of communication, in this case, are the different supports that the journalist uses for his work, precisely the media.
We live in a world where the perspective is to have a global interconnection, where the importance of the weak ties, where everything lives in the network. Conversations generate interaction, exchange, proposals, new ideas and innovation.
The success of a company depends precisely on the type and quality of these conversations and interactions, on the ability to make them manifest and share them with your internal and external audience. In short, to be connected by all possible means to our world of customers, suppliers, employees, shareholders,… It is vital that these conversations are transparent and “open to the public”.
Complex organizations work and are successful only if a network of effective communications is "magically" generated regardless of the official organizational structures. Go fill those "communication holes" which over time risk becoming structural, is a managerial exercise that produces value.
The key component of communication is not the how, but the what; communicating should always have a purpose, to prevent communication from turning from an exchange of information, concepts, ideas into an indistinct background noise. A meaningless blob. In practice what we are all actors and sacrificial victims.
The communication between man and man, between man and machine, between machine and machine. Paradigms change rapidly.
Communication and fusion with technology
Not all aspects related to communication are necessarily related to technology, to the new frontiers relating to software developments, to the most advanced algorithms of artificial intelligence. There are complex and long-analyzed "human" states that are an integral part of a future model of communication.
All this, even more so, makes sense when it comes to man-machine “fusion”. The theme of how much artificial intelligence can condition, up to manipulate, the human being and consequently the way of communicating in the future, is one of the themes that most stimulates the emotional sphere of men.
Here is the thin thread that binds us, starting from the Paleolithic with the first drawings in the caves to a "tomorrow" that has now become a "real today" in which robots are becoming the substitutes for our Smartphones. The thread is called "to communicate". Communicate because man is already confused and complicated when he communicates; if he doesn't communicate he is a superfluous and often boring animal.
Then there is a real moral of the evolution of the media, which is always respected: when a new media imposes itself on a previous one, this does not mean that automatically the old media disappears. Rather it means that the old media could be pushed into a niche where it outperforms the new and where it can survive and thrive.
We come from a reality where for over a century the dominant images of technology have been industrial: the extraction and exploitation of natural resources, the mechanization of work through the assembly line, the bureaucratic systems of command and control, favored by vast institutions and impersonal. Now the new means of communication, which continue to evolve at astonishing speed, are an excellent test bed to test the ability to adapt to the new scenarios that are rapidly forming around us.
The Internet will increasingly seem like a presence to relate to rather than a place to move, ie the famous cyberspace from the eighties; it will be a constant and unnoticed presence, like electricity: always present, always around us and controlled.
For those living in 2050 it will be easy to think how incredible it would have been to have lived in the early 2000s; it was a world without limits, without frontiers. Every opportunity was ready to be seized.
Change is discontinuity
One often gets the feeling that research is ahead of science fiction. We realize that building new and better forms of relationship with machines is not a task that technologists can carry out alone, but requires a multidisciplinary effort that brings together different professional figures, such as psychologists, computer scientists, sociologists, designers and artists .
All changes as a result of evolution have involved constant and slow adjustments. Then the acceleration of changes caused profound transformations in our way of life, but i biological changes they have not had the time to follow and gradually adapt to these times and stay in line. This aspect is decisive in the evolution of man. Communications are not out of this complex mechanism.
The boundaries between past, present and future have become much less defined and one gets the feeling that temporality slips much more easily between one boundary and another. The past is increasingly present and easy to understand, if only because everything is available on the web where information that was once difficult to recover can be found. To give an order of magnitude, in the early 90s to be able to do what is done today with a smartphone, we would have needed a machine as big as a room, basically one of NASA's mainframes.
Dialogue with machines goes beyond technology
The most fascinating thing about the future is that it is almost never a line of continuity with the past, indeed very often it is a completely detached straight line, which follows a new and not yet traced trajectory and still to be drawn. The light bulb, let us remember, was not a fantastic evolution dshe candle…
One often gets the feeling that research is ahead of science fiction. We realize that building new and better forms of relationship with machines is not a task that technologists can carry out alone, but requires a multidisciplinary effort which brings together various professional figures, such as psychologists, computer scientists, sociologists, designers and artists.
Needless to say, the dream for communication is to arrive at a man-machine interface that uses natural language. In the future of the Internet, the "voice" and virtual assistants will dominate above all. Our behaviors are, without us realizing it, continuously remodeled when a new technology is introduced and used by many people.
When the first books appeared it was assumed that people would no longer speak. It is as if our future could open up to different and unexpected fronts like a firework. Who will have a chip under the skin and will interact with the surrounding world, who will have a robot at their side in daily life, who will sit on the sidelines and not want to be part of the information game, who will stay at home and get paid for the data they produce.
Without forgetting that the real factor conditioning the future of communication is the credibility of the information and its reliability.
Don't be afraid
Communicating and communicating will be increasingly decisive, regardless of the method and tool used. What are the real fears? What are the unknown areas and areas that we don't know how to explore. Do they still exist? Or are there many hidden ones and no one knows how dangerous?
Who knows if man will be afraid of the unexplored territories of technology and innovation, or if there is great curiosity and therefore finger on the map indicating where to go to investigate, as it is still unknown territory.
This will last and make sense even when the washing machine will talk to us recommending the best washing program, the personal robot will interrupt our speech to have its say, the self-driving car will send the group of distracted cyclists to hell on our behalf.
We will talk about this in the next posts; unless our robot writes them directly…
Beppe Carrella, currently senior business advisor in Sinfo One (Parma) and lecturer in some Italian and foreign universities. A past as CEO in international companies in the ICT world. In 2013 his book Provocative thoughts was considered among the ten most important books on the subject of human resources by the prestigious American magazine "hr.com". With goWare he published Pinocchio. Leadership Without Lies (2017) and Don Quixote. Near-Win Leadership (2018). In preparation the third volume of the series: Hamlet. A leader without leadership.
Fabio Degli Esposti, Milanese, three children, born in 1960. A career entirely in the world of information technology. A long experience as a consultant in the airport world where he has accumulated such experience as to become ICT director of the Milan Airports. The passion for technology and innovation, which coexists with that for literature and music, binds him to Beppe Carrella, with whom he shared Talk about it with my robot, But androids make juice with "the clockwork orange ?”.
