The biggest surprise for me at the I4J conference was a budding consensus for the contrarian view that innovation doesn't mean more jobs. Voiced sub rosa in the opening moments, it became a bit of a groundswell as people discovered like-minded attendees.
You've seen this countless times -- someone holds, quietly, a view that they know is orthogonal to the mainstream, and they really don't voice it, they just whisper it to a 'trusted' colleague in a surreptitious manner. But then the colleague says, "you know, I think so too, and so does XXX". Hummn, and XXX is across the room.
The next thing you know, XXX is accosted, and the two grin a few minutes later. Then, one of the three takes a moment in a Q and A session to 'toss out an idea' -- and voila, a new mood sweeps through the room.
So it happened here. I can't name XXX or YYY, because of those Chatham House rules. But old hands in the room, and there were quite a few, nodded knowingly, some even saying that this was the Automation Fear of the fifties that gave rise to the Beatniks. One might demur that this is a bit far-fetched, but certainly the spector of computers replacing us has been around.
Herb Simon gave a fabulous talk in San Francisco in the late 1970s as a follow-up to his 1965 book, The Shape of Automation for Men and Management. His point was that professors were more apt to be automated out of a job than bulldozer drivers, a point that did not sit well with the audience.
But the conversation topic wouldn't go away at I4J. And by the end, there was considerable pessimism about the bifurcation of America, with the middle class continuing to be eroded badly, much as the last decade as done. The booklet cited by a couple of people, which I found both edifying and a bit obtuse, was the monograph from the Communications and Society Program at the Aspen Institute, "Power-curve Society: the Future of Innovation, Opportunity, and Social Equity in the Emerging Networked Economy" published in Feb 2013.
John Gray and Fernando Flores wrote a small (48 pp) challenging book in 2000, "Entrepreneurship and the Wired Life: Work in the Wake of Career" that is available on-line. See www.demos.co.uk
I followed that with a keynote talk at IHRIM in spring 2001, with the lead paper in the IHRIM Journal, Volume 5, #2, April-Jun 2001, pp. 13-24. IHRIM manages to control their publication so that no one can read it unless you spend $71.50 per year for a membership, which is a little short-sighted, but hey, they probably need the money. I may search for my copy and put it on the website one of these days.
Gray and Flores found an audience in England, but not the US. And my talk, to several hundred folk, was considered "too provocative" for Human Resource managers to raise w their CEOs.
And even Andy Grove's prescient and provocative piece in Business Week (July 1, 2010) drew scorn from pundits at Forbes, and surprisingly from Vivek Wadhwa, the provost at Singularity University. Vivek was at our table at I4J, and on re-reading his Viewpoint rebuttal to Grove's article, I have to say that Vivek is 'on-target'. The problem with Vivek's espoused view is that it puts too much faith in entrepreneurship, and completely ignores the point about intrapreneurship, which in my view has been driven out of American companies by Harvard Business School teachings and Wall Street quarterly-results focus.
So, one could be pessimistic, or maybe, as I am, optimistic because now the elephant in the room is finally being exposed. We've got a better chance of designing a successful outcome if we're agreed on what the problem is.
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