There’s a place for heart in times driven by technology
Thomas L. Friedman
Software has started writing poetry, sports stories and business news. IBM’s Watson is co-writing pop hits. Uber has begun deploying self-driving taxis on real city streets and, last month, Amazon delivered its first package by drone to a customer in rural England.
Add it all up and you quickly realize that Donald Trump’s election isn’t the only thing disrupting society today. The far more profound disruption is happening in the workplace and in the economy at large, as the relentless march of technology has brought us to a point where machines and software are not just outworking us but starting to outthink us in more and more realms.
To reflect on this rapid change, I sat down with my teacher and friend Dov Seidman, CEO of LRN, which advises companies on leadership and how to build ethical cultures, for his take.
“What we are experiencing today bears striking similarities in size and implications to the scientific revolution that began in the 16th century,” he said. “The discoveries of Copernicus and Galileo, which spurred that scien- tific revolution, challenged our whole understanding of the world around and beyond us — and forced us as humans to rethink our place within it.”
Once scientific methods became enshrined, “the French philosopher René Descartes crystallized this age of reason in one phrase: ‘I think, therefore I am.’” His point “was that it was our ability to ‘think’ that most distinguished humans from all other animals on earth.”
The technological revolution of the 21st century is “forcing us to answer a most profound question — one we’ve never had to ask before: ‘What does it mean to be human in the age of intelligent machines?’”
The answer, Seidman said, is the one thing machines never will have: “a heart.”
Our highest self-conception needs to be redefined to “I care, therefore I am. I hope, therefore I am. I imagine, therefore I am. I am ethical, therefore I am. I have a purpose, therefore I am. I pause and reflect, therefore I am.”
Seidman reminded me of a Talmudic adage: “What comes from the heart, enters the heart.” Which is why even jobs that still have a large technical component will benefit from more heart. I call these STEMpathy jobs — jobs that combine STEM (science, technology, engineering, math) skills with human empathy, like the doctor who can extract the best diagnosis from IBM’s Watson on cancer and then best relate it to a patient.
Economies get labeled according to the predominant way people create value, Seidman noted, so, the industrial economy, he noted, “was about hired hands. The knowledge economy was about hired heads. The technology revolution is thrusting us into ‘the human economy,’ which will be more about creating value with hired hearts — all the attributes that can’t be programmed into software, like passion, character and collaborative spirit.”
It’s no surprise that the French government began requiring companies on Jan. 1 to guarantee workers a “right to disconnect” from technology when they are not at work.
Leaders, businesses and communities will still leverage technology to gain advantage, but those that put human connection at the center of everything they do will be the enduring winners, Seidman said: “Machines can be programmed to do the next thing right. But only humans can do the next right thing.”