Change Of System
Lenses for our journey
Some change occurs within an existing system, delivering efficiency, optimisation, adaptation, incremental change.
Other types of change simply invalidate a system. They make what came before abstract, irrelevant, diminished below the point of effect, or simply occluded by what has emerged.
When considering the human and AI future of work, this may be one of our lenses.
Is a given thing in a state of evolution, or failure? Can what we are examining truly ‘become’ the new, or do we need to consider an alternative?
History may inform us, but equally may be an unreliable witness: if AI is truly paradigmatic (and this is a question we will need to circle around, time and again), then it may not provide any valid lessons.
Horse gins gave way to watermills, which in turn gave way to steam engines: this was an evolutionary path. Succession within a function. There was no level of efficiency or new technology that could have adapted the old. But phrenology (determining personality traits by the shape of your head) did not ‘evolve’. It collapsed.
In navigation, the sextant was entirely abstracted by GPS. The function survived (need to navigate), but the system collapsed. You cannot incrementally transform a sextant into GPS.
Miasma theory, that disease came from ‘bad’ air: that collapsed. The system was invalidated because it never did what it claimed. Germ theory was not ‘better bad air detection’, but rather an entirely different causation.
Often it is unclear, in the moment. Photography did not kill portrait painting, but it did redefine its function. No longer was it ‘capturing a likeness’, something a camera could do better. Not it became interpretive, or about the ‘making of a unique mark’ on the canvas.
In the future, how will we view the following: performance review, organisational learning, strategic planning, human resources, management, offices, jobs, leadership?