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>On the business side, there is an widespread unwillingness to acknowledge that technical people may be better placed to make decisions than businesspeople. Ma

>On the business side, there is an widespread unwillingness to acknowledge that technical people may be better placed to make decisions than businesspeople. Maybe acknwledging this would mean losing their jobs. Buisness people have mortgages and children and they probably don't like the idea of having their job replaced by a robot. It is important to remember that the admin/money-side people are not playing the game that they tell the operations people they are playing. They want to keep their jobs, accrue power and money, they don't really care about AI or sales, those are just tools for their own game.

jasondigitized 6y ago
“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.” - Upton Sinclair
thu2111 6y ago
They said technical people, not robots. Perhaps a subtle distinction ;) Agree totally with the latter part though. In vast swathes of the business world, technology is not perceived as a way to gain a competitive advantage but rather something between an interesting novelty and an annoyance. The problem is there's a cultural expectation that you be "innovative" which tends to be treated as a synonym for deployment of computer-related technology upgrades (although of course it doesn't have to mean this). But to people who have no intrinsic interest in technology, there's no real way for them to actually innovate. They just don't know where to start. So they latch on to trends they read about in the Economist or NYT on a truly massive scale. They spend days or weeks making PowerPoints about the transformative potential of blockchain, IoT or AI. They take a few programmers who are kicking around but seem bored and allocate them to an "innovation lab" where they putter around making prototypes and having fun but never impacting the business in any way. This ticks the box labelled "we are innovative" without requiring anyone to think too hard, learn anything new or take any risks, all things that the generic unskilled graduate managerial class in our society hate doing. And of course technology upgrades are risky. When run by non-technical people they tend to go wrong in spectacularly expensive and mysterious ways, so a lot of business executives would rather pull their own teeth out than plan a major IT upgrade. This is partly why tech firms exist as a concept. As for AI, you can't replace most of these jobs with AI because their outputs are undefined to begin with. And to be frank, my observations over the years has been that a lot of these jobs appear to be undefined in order to enable a form of cultural stuffing. If you're a non-technical executive you wouldn't want your nice business to end up filled with geeks playing board games and aggressively proving other people wrong now, would you? Better keep them diluted by hiring lots of PMs, "operations specialists", "customer analysts", "business insight teams" and so on. That way you can meet your diversity numbers and be surrounded by like-minded people.

jasondigitized 6y ago

“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.” - Upton Sinclair

thu2111 6y ago

They said technical people, not robots. Perhaps a subtle distinction ;) Agree totally with the latter part though. In vast swathes of the business world, technology is not perceived as a way to gain a competitive advantage but rather something between an interesting novelty and an annoyance. The problem is there's a cultural expectation that you be "innovative" which tends to be treated as a synonym for deployment of computer-related technology upgrades (although of course it doesn't have to mean this). But to people who have no intrinsic interest in technology, there's no real way for them to actually innovate. They just don't know where to start. So they latch on to trends they read about in the Economist or NYT on a truly massive scale. They spend days or weeks making PowerPoints about the transformative potential of blockchain, IoT or AI. They take a few programmers who are kicking around but seem bored and allocate them to an "innovation lab" where they putter around making prototypes and having fun but never impacting the business in any way. This ticks the box labelled "we are innovative" without requiring anyone to think too hard, learn anything new or take any risks, all things that the generic unskilled graduate managerial class in our society hate doing. And of course technology upgrades are risky. When run by non-technical people they tend to go wrong in spectacularly expensive and mysterious ways, so a lot of business executives would rather pull their own teeth out than plan a major IT upgrade. This is partly why tech firms exist as a concept. As for AI, you can't replace most of these jobs with AI because their outputs are undefined to begin with. And to be frank, my observations over the years has been that a lot of these jobs appear to be undefined in order to enable a form of cultural stuffing. If you're a non-technical executive you wouldn't want your nice business to end up filled with geeks playing board games and aggressively proving other people wrong now, would you? Better keep them diluted by hiring lots of PMs, "operations specialists", "customer analysts", "business insight teams" and so on. That way you can meet your diversity numbers and be surrounded by like-minded people.