WTF? summary

From Google to Amazon, Foursquare to Lyft, user-based platforms have proven immensely successful and lucrative. But what if you applied this model to other structures?

Let’s find out with the help of Amazon, which is structured around many two-pizza teams – a phrase the company coined to refer to a team small enough to be fed by two pizzas. Each team has the freedom to pursue its own goals, and has a specific customer in mind, even if that “customer” is within the company.

The platform model may be the new face of technology, but it wouldn’t exist without algorithms. So how exactly might these affect business structures? Well, they’ve actually already begun influencing traditional business hierarchies. Indeed, Amazon’s two-pizza teams may well have been inspired by algorithms, considering how similarly they function.

Like these teams, some algorithms independently monitor and regulate their own efficiency through what is known as a fitness function. They produce smaller programs to approach specific goals in different ways, and can then assess their efficiency and delete those that don’t perform as well, keeping only the best in service.

When you think of rogue AI, you might imagine HAL9000 in 2001: A Space Odyssey or Skynet in The Terminator. But you can rest easy once the credits roll because these are a long way from reality. Right?

Well, there are actually rogue algorithms already operating, and some of them are right under our noses.

From bank tellers to ticket offices, you’ve probably seen the effects of automation, or at least heard somewhere that machines are taking our jobs. But is this actually happening?

To some extent, yes. We’re currently unable to find new forms of work as fast as we’re making others obsolete. In the twentieth century, an economist called John Maynard Keynes referred to this as technological unemployment, and it’s responsible for much of our apprehension about technology.

During the early nineteenth century, British weavers in Nottinghamshire intentionally destroyed many of the new machine looms that had recently been introduced because the machines were threatening their traditional craftsmanship. The weavers were following the example of the folk hero Ned Ludd, who’d supposedly done the same years earlier. This is actually the root of the word Luddite – someone who opposes technological changes.

Their concerns were justified, and the new technology led to widespread unemployment, as described by John Maynard Keynes. But Keynes, speaking metaphorically, went on to describe this period of worker redundancy as “growing-pains” rather than old age – and, sure enough, employment did eventually bounce back.

The world will continue to change, thanks to the development of new technologies. But what will either limit or liberate you is how you approach the new, and whether you’re willing to work with, rather than against, it.

A good place to start is by no longer applying old regulations to new technologies. A lot of the conflict between regulators and technology companies comes from the fact that certain rules just don’t apply anymore.