Our inability to govern the proliferation of increasingly powerful, technology-based services is sure to bite us in the ass — perhaps more quickly than we know.
There’s always a ‘shiny new thing’ in technology, the latest being OpenAPI’s ChatGPT. Talk about a chatbot on steroids…
ChatGPT is artificial intelligence that writes for you, any kind of writing you like – letters, song lyrics, research papers, recipes, therapy sessions, poems, essays, outlines, even software code.
CBS News, AI experts on whether you should be “terrified” of ChatGPT
The rapid acceleration of artificial intelligence is creating a very slippery slope that can move a company from delivering outcomes to actually shaping them—and this goes beyond managing the customer experience to managing the customer.
“It’s no longer simply about ubiquitous computing. Now the real aim is ubiquitous intervention, action, and control. The real power is that now you can modify real-time actions in the real world. … This phase represents the completion of the new means of behavior modification, a decisive and necessary evolution of the surveillance capitalist “means of production” toward a more complex, iterative, and muscular operational system. It is a critical achievement in the race to guaranteed outcomes.”
– The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 2019 by Shoshana Zuboff
Service management needs to mature quickly, not just to provide more and better services, but to get on to far more important issues. I am not at all sure about business’ quixotic quest for guaranteed outcomes. In an age where social networking spreads disinformation, this seems like a dangerous mix.
Companies are not people. In many ways we need to get back to that Values card approach and bring more than our values card to the meeting. Each of us bring different perspectives and it’s this diversity of thought which helps find the truth.
Do I trust the technical community to govern themselves? HELL NO! But given the state of our politics I certainly don’t trust our legislatures either. It’s takes everyone to roll that ball uphill, and in fact it always has.
Not to be a ‘downer’ but the truth is we’ve been burning our social capital for decades:
“When people lack connection to others, they are unable to test the veracity of their own views, whether in the give or take of casual conversation or in more formal deliberation. Without such an opportunity, people are more likely to be swayed by their worse impulses….”
– Robert Putnam (2000) Bowling Alone: The collapse and revival of American community, New York: Simon and Schuster: 288-290
In Bowling Alone, by Robert Putnam, “Putnam warns that our stock of social capital – the very fabric of our connections with each other, has plummeted, impoverishing our lives and communities … we sign fewer petitions, belong to fewer organizations that meet, know our neighbors less, meet with friends less frequently, and even socialize with our families less often. We’re even bowling alone.” That was in the year 2000.
The pandemic and work from home have made this even worse. Add a little disinformation into the mix and it’s not too difficult to understand why we seem to have an ‘us’ versus ‘them’ mindset on almost every issue.
Technology and AI included.
But all is not lost.
“We’re braver than we believe, stronger than we seem, and smarter than we think.”
– Christopher Robin
The heart of service management — or anything else for that matter — lies in who we are. I hope we don’t forget that occasionally this requires us to slow down, to meet face-to-face, to really understand each other.
Don’t forget, slow & steady wins the race.
Much of this post taken from Rolling Uphill