The distinguished scientist Ray Kurzweil contends that machines will surpass human processing capability, and thus become the most significant intelligent force on Earth. This dramatic change, he believes, is imminent.
“The intelligence that will emerge,” he wrote, “will continue to represent the human civilization, which is already a human-machine civilization. This will be the next step in evolution, the next high level paradigm shift.”
An expert on artificial intelligence was asked what the world would be like when machines are smarter than people. His response, “I’m not smart enough to know the answer.”
The evolution of how businesses are organized and managed has been much slower than the evolution of technology. Changes could be characterized more as tinkering and fine tuning than revolutionary surges forward. It is clear that this will not get the job done.
"Experienced managers rely on hunches, recognize patterns, and draw intuitive analogies and parallels to other seemingly disparate situations."
It is time to step back and reexamine the way business is done in order to catch up with science and technology and stay in step going forward. The problem is, business leaders tend to be rational.
Einstein once said, ?I never discovered anything with my rational mind.? He said he discovered the principle of relativity by imagining himself traveling on a light beam.
Accepting the fact that they are not Einstein, business leaders can nonetheless try to free up their thinking and intuitive gifts, recognizing that their companies will soon be impacted by changes of almost unimaginable magnitude?for better or for worse.
Peter Senge characterized this challenge as systems thinking. In the Fifth Discipline he wrote, ?As managers gain facility with systems thinking as an alternative language, they find that many of their intuitions become explicable. Eventually, reintegrating reason and intuition may prove to be one of the primary contributions of systems thinking.?
Senge says experienced managers do not figure out complex problems entirely rationally. “They rely”, he wrote, ?on hunches, recognize patterns, and draw intuitive analogies and parallels to other seemingly disparate situations.?
