Thinking Differently with Rod Collins

As new technological innovations, such as the Internet of Things and artificial intelligence move us further into the Digital Age, we will come to a digital fork in the road. Which path we choose will likely make the difference between whether we create unhealthy surveillance states or highly evolved human networks that promote both healthy individuals and healthy societies.

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As the Internet of Things and artificial intelligence become an ever present reality in our day-to-day lives, we will be faced with an existential choice about how we organize our societies that may very well determine whether we will live in the most authoritarian centralized social structures the world has ever known or whether we create a highly evolved human society by embracing a very different way to design how we socially organize ourselves.

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NTSB teams don’t filter data to fit their theories; they adapt their theories to fit the facts. They understand that the laws of physics have no regard for the egos and the opinions of experts overly invested in their own thinking. This understanding could greatly improve our social discourse if Big Tech could learn to adopt the mindset of the NTSB.

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Today’s business leaders face a daunting and unprecedented challenge: The world is changing much faster than their organizations. If business leaders want their companies to survive and, more importantly, thrive in a fast forward world, they will need the courage to adopt new habits based on radically new ways of thinking and acting.

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Rules are important because they serve as guideposts for reliable social interaction. Rules are practical tools for maintaining order in complex societies. But there are times where the rules should be superseded by a higher principle, especially when you are reasonably sure that it’s the right thing to do and where there’s a clear principle at stake that would be harmed if the rule was followed.

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What if the tech companies redesigned their algorithms to identify what’s most important to differing perspectives by honoring the principle that all voices matter, hearing all points of view without prejudice, and integrating the best elements of all perspectives into innovative breakthrough solutions that could move us beyond our differences? Social media companies have the opportunity, through their digital social platforms, to curate our collective intelligence to produce higher order solutions that no one perspective could ever craft.

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What would happen if blockchain were the systems structure used by social media? Perhaps we would have the opportunity to revive the hacker ethos of the creative subculture that guided the original pioneers of the digital revolution, and hopefully, leverage this revival to build a better and more collaborative world.

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One of the great ironies of the digital revolution is how social media platforms have managed to divide us into a collection of fractious tribes that are wholly incapable of even basic compromises. This fomenting tribalism has become troublesome as mutual accusations of bias among all the various clans have justified a plummet into a lack of basic civil behavior. How is it that technological innovations that held so much promise for broadening human horizons have instead amplified the worst attributes of human nature? But more importantly, what can we do to restore the promise?

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Today, rather than being a model of an innovative company, Google appears to be regressing into one of the most authoritarian companies the world has ever seen by  succumbing to the temptation of centralized power and embracing the worst aspects of bureaucratic behavior. In its regression, the company has left behind its once famous motto as it engages in one of the most evil acts that humans can inflict upon each other: the censorship of the voices of those who think differently.

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Our theme for this new season is reviving the promise of the digital revolution. Over the past few years, we have witnessed a breakdown in our social discourse that has been accelerated by the expansion of social media into our day-to-day lives. Instead of building new and innovative ways to bring us together, Big Tech has managed to drive us apart into fractious tribes. Over the next ten episodes, we will explore what went wrong with the Digital Revolution and what we can do to restore its promise.

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