3 DIGITAL TRANSITION

This book is not about technology, but technology is an essential tool to make possible the ideas and the dreams that are discussed. We live in an increasingly technological and digitized world and sometimes one may have the impression that technology is driving our choices rather than serving them. Why did Jeff Bezos and other mega rich develop a technology that allows them and other wealthy individuals to joy-ride around the earth? Because they can. They can do it financially, for some reason it is socially acceptable and , primarily, it is technologically feasible. Ou society is full of technological solutions in search for problem. In this chapter, I will look into technologies, essentially information Technologies, that have the potential not only to impact our way of living, but also to become a support of deep intentional change in our social structures. It is important to acquire a basic knowledge of those technologies, if we want to have a chance to turn them as a tool to achieve the change that our societies need rather than an instrument to control our lives (Kavenna 2019; Zuboff 2019)
If one really would like to tell the story from the beginning, the digital transition begun in the Sumerian period with the invention of numbers. Presumably, numbers were introduced as a tool to facilitate bookkeeping in commercial transactions. Recording transactions have been and remain an essential driver of the development of innovative communication tools, including the invention of writing. Much more recently, blockchain itself, one of the elements of the digital transformation that is carrying the most promise of a deep impact on the way we trade, is a modern upgrade of a classical bookkeeping process introduced in the middle age.
Technological innovation is bringing significant changes in the way we produce and deliver services. It is not only going to change the way we create products and services; it will also impact profoundly the way we work, the way we interact professionally and the way we make decisions. In other words, it will change the very fabric of our organizations. The actual technologies impacting each specific sector will vary significantly across industries. I want to focus on, three main technological trends not only because they are likely to affect most organizations, in particular from the managerial perspective that I am interested in exploring, but also because they teach us something deep about our future and they can become tools of empowerment or tools of deeper surveillance. The thre themes are :

• Artificial intelligence
• Blockchain
• Quantum computing

In this chapter, we will have a more in-depth look at those critical technology trends that will affect organizations and management. It is essential to always keep in mind that, while technology may drive innovation, its adoption is more related to culture, habits and in general to resistance to change than to actual technological challenges.[^7]
The objective here is not to give a detailed or precise account of those themes. There are many books that do that much better than I could. What I am trying to do is to offer some reflections on the impact of those technologies and on how we can leverage to intentionally drive change.

3.1 Artificial Intelligence

Artificial intelligence has been teasing the public for several decades now and has reached a commercial value in the last few years. Some are beginning to predict the approaching moment when AI will achieve capabilities surpassing those of the human mind, a point in time sometimes called the “singularity”. Ray Kurzweil, sets this point in time at 2045 (Galeon and Reedy 2017)Hal, the computer of “2001 a space odyssey” (Kubrick 1968) is probably the first fictitious character of AI widely known to the general public. Among the many human-like skills of Hal, like advanced reasoning and lip-reading, there is mastery of chess. Indeed, in 1997 a real computer, IBM’s Deep Blue, achieved a significant milestone in the development of artificial intelligence by beating the world chess champion, Garry Kasparov.

There are many kinds of artificial intelligence. One fundamental notion widely adopted is referred to as machine learning. It consists of mimicking the way our brain functions by creating a layer of computing nodes that functions like our neurons in a way that they can provide an answer to a specific question. For example such networks of neuron-like components, also referred to as a neural network, can be arranged in a way that it will identify types of flowers from a set of pictures. The system learns to identify flowers by processing a collection of images where the correct answer is provided, and is subsequently capable of identifying additional photos. Machine learning represents a form of nonlinear programming which is profoundly different from the traditional algorithmic programming and opens the way to unprecedented development.

A significant milestone for the progress of Artificial Intelligence that yet to be achieved is called the Turing test. Turing was a mathematician and computer scientist that also pioneered research in artificial intelligence, and in 1950 proposed that a human evaluator of natural language conversations would one day be unable to tell whether he is having a discussion with another human being or a computer.

With Hal, Kubrik created an icon that the current Alexa, Google and other assistants have eventually brought to the general market, even if considerably less powerful. Interestingly, a couple of years before Kubrik’s movie, a 17-year-old student publicized the notion of Artificial Intelligence by playing in a TV contest, “I have a secret “,(Time n.d.). a short piece of music composed by a computer he had built himself. The student, Raymond Kurzweil, then moved on to become a successful engineer and was the principal inventor of the first CCD flat-bed scanner, the early omni-font optical character recognition, the first print-to-speech reading machine for the blind, the first text-to-speech synthesizer, the first music synthesizer capable of recreating the grand piano and other orchestral instruments, and the early commercially marketed large-vocabulary speech recognition.(“About Ray Kurzweil” n.d.) He is now head of engineering at Google and a celebrated advocate of the singularity.

3.1.1 A brief History of Artificial Intelligence

The evolution of Artificial Intelligence presents a fascinating mix of fiction, and research, to the point that one may wonder which of the two has been driving the other.

The term “Artificial Intelligence” was coined by John McCarthy in 1955 for the occasion of the first conference on the subject that he organized in Davenport (McCarthy et al. 2006).

Even before then, Alan Turing set a goal to be achieved by a “thinking machine”, which is to fool a human being into believing to be conversing with another human being, the already mentioned Turing Test (Turing 1950). The test has never been passed by a computer yet, and the transcripts of the yearly contest of the conversations between the human judge and the programs can be quite humorous. While performing seemingly elementary tasks like sustaining meaningful small talk appears to be an elusive goal, AI computers have scored impressively well in specific tasks, like beating world champions (humans) at games like chess or Go.(Schultebraucks 2017) (Smith et al. 2006). Interestingly, in playing a game of chess, the strategy part of making decisions on which element to move next turned out to be a relatively approachable problem for AI. What is still much more challenging is designing a mechanical hand that can actually identify and gently grab and move a chess piece on the chessboard!

In fact, artificial intelligence can mean many things, and it is difficult to agree on what it relates to exactly, since it involves terms like “intelligence” or “understanding” that may have vastly different meanings to different people. Two aspects of AI that are relevant in general are Autonomy and Adaptivity. Autonomy is the ability to execute tasks in a given environment without constant human intervention and Adaptivity is defined as the ability to learn from experience. It is important to understand that the context in which autonomy and adaptability are considered, may be extremely constrained. One can design an AI program that is capable of and becomes increasingly good at classifying pictures of flowers, but would be totally unable to process pictures of vegetables.

To clarify what we are talking about, let’s give some definitions that may come useful in the course of our discussion. When we talk about Artificial Intelligence we are talking about a sub-field of Data Science which is a term that covers several disciplines including machine learning, statistics, data storage and so on. Machine learning is a notion that often appears when talking about artificial intelligence, and it describes systems that are capable of improving their performance at a given task by drawing on repeated experience and processing of increasingly large sets of data. Deep learning on the other hand is a subsection of machine learning where the notion of depth refers to the level of complexity reached by the mathematical models and the increased computing power used. Robotics on the other hands refers to building and programming robots in a way that they can operate in complex real-world scenarios we will come back to robots in the next section. Discussion on the media of Artificial Intelligence are usually a varying mix of all the above.

Artificial intelligence carries wonderful promises for making everybody’s life easier and more productive, offering, for example, effective medical screening at an unprecedented low-cost. At the same time, it represents the arena for a global competition in the dominance of future markets. While this does not directly impact organisational management it is impossible to ignore the two players are emerging in the Global competition For leading the world in the AI field , China and the US (O’Meara 2019) , leaving Europeans with their fragmented markets and lack of a continent wide strategy in politics and economics, well behind in the race. With the current geopolitical context, this raises serious concerns regarding the implementation of AI for the benefit of major corporations or to support social control of undemocratic governments. Ethical issues are critical (“International AI Ethics Panel Must Be Independent” 2019) and the G20 statement signed in June 2019 (G 2019) , while stating a number of reasonable principles, it does not even attempt at setting any form of accountability on the subject. While China and the US compete fiercely for the AI market dominance, where is Europe? A recent McKinsey report concluded that “Europe is adding an AI gap to its digital gap”[^8](Bughin et al. 2019)

3.1.2 Data Science , Ai and other

3.1.3 Artificial vs Collective intelligence

3.2 Blockchain

To introduce blockchain, we go back to the basic notion of accounting, since blockchain can be defined as a ledger on steroids. Accounting is a primary business activity aimed at keeping records of transactions. Without proper accounting procedures, commerce would be impossible and, as such, has been carried in some way for thousands of years. As we have seen, the need for proper recording of transactions is at the origin of such fundamental concepts like numbers and writing: blockchain may end up confirming the trend. Maintaining ledgers to account for transactions has been carried for a long time. As a matter of fact some very first examples of writing, like this Sumerian tablet of 3100 BC were made to record transactions. Indeed one can argue that writing was not invented for literature but for accountancy.(“The First Writing: Counting Beer for the Workers - Google Arts & Culture” n.d.)

The most significant historical advancement of accounting upon which modern accounting is still based, is the introduction of double-entry bookkeeping, Formalized by Luca Pacioli, a Franciscan Friar collaborator of Leonardo da Vinci in his mathematics textbook “Summa de arithmetica, geometria, proportioni et propotionalità”, published in 1494 in Venice.

The great idea behind double-entry bookkeeping is to record each entry into equal and corresponding sides, labelled as debit and credit. If at some point the sum of credit for all accounts is not equal to the sum of debits of all accounts, then there must be an error somewhere. Double-entry accounting is an error detection tool, but, as anyone who has been doing some accounting will confirm, finding the error may still be a challenge. While the process is very robust, it is still relatively easy to tamper the books, and the system works on the base of some level of trust on the person or the organization that is keeping the records. For example, we place our money in a bank because we believe we can trust it to maintain an accurate trace of our transaction. Large firms run large accounting departments, and the law requires that the accounts are audited by other, independent firms to provide a general trust that they are truthful. Several scandals have proven that this system is far from being foolproof. For example, the Enron scandal of 2001 resulted in the dissolution of both the energy company, and it’s auditing and accounting company Arthur Andersen, one of the world’s largest auditing companies.

3.2.1 Cryptography

Before explaining more in detail what blockchain is about, we need to introduce some notions of cryptography.

The word cryptography brings immediately to mind exciting stories involving spies and the exchange of secret messages. Indeed, one of the better-known stories regarding cryptography is the decoding of the Enigma machine during World War II that allowed the Allies to decrypt German secret messages exchanged by radio. Alan Turing whom we already mentioned in the context of artificial intelligence, played a crucial role in cracking the Enigma Code. You can find out more about the story by watching Morten Tyldum’s “The imitation game” (Tyldum 2014).

Cryptography involves scrambling a message, the “plaintext” using a given procedure, called the encrypting key. This results in a scrambled text, the “ciphertext”, that no one can read without knowledge of the encrypting key.

Imagine I am on holiday in Barcelona and I want to send an encrypted postcard to my friend. My plaintext could be:”Greetings from Barcelona “. A very naive encryption key could be simply replacing each letter with the following letter in the alphabet. The ciphertext would then look like: “Hsffujot gspn Dbsdfmpob”. If I told my friend about the encryption key before leaving, he would have no problem retrieving my message.

Besides the fact that it uses a trivial encoding key that even the most unskilled cryptographer would easily crack, the main problem of my cryptography technique is that one has to use the original encryption key to decode the encrypted message. In other words, I must have arranged beforehand to send the encrypting key to the recipient of the message. Moreover, if I keep sending messages encrypted with the same key, it will become increasingly easy to break my code. The German army faced the same problem during the war, and they addressed it by developing a very complicated procedure, at the heart of which was the Enigma machine. You can find out the whole story from the film already mentioned.

In the 1970s a new revolutionary approach to encryption was introduced based on the use of two keys, uniquely related to each other, that take the form of very long numbers. One key is used to encrypt the message but cannot be used to decrypt and the other one that can decipher it. In this case, my friend would keep one key private while distributing copies of the other one, called the public key. When I want to send my encrypted postcard to my friend, I would create the ciphertext using the public key. Anybody can access my friend’s public key, but they can not use it to decrypt my message. Only my friend can decrypt it using a private key.

Using this technique , one can do a number of things:

1. Sign a document
2. Identify a person uniquely, while keeping its identity secret
3. Certify a document has not been tampered with
4. Transfer secretly sensitive information

(Lakhani 2017)

(Brant Carson, Giulio Romanelli, Patricia Walsh, and Askhat Zhumaev 2018)

(Livestorm n.d.)

3.2.2 How blockchain works

Blockchain and the currencies built upon blockchain rely heavily the possibilities mentioned above, which is why they are also called cryptocurrencies.

Banks ensure safety by centralizing the information and keeping it secret. What are the mechanisms that generate trust in the blockchain? Blockchain adopts a strategy that is precisely opposite: distributing the data as widely as possible and ensuring full transparency of all transactions while maintaining the anonymity of the users. All this is done with an intensive use of cryptography to ensure that the information has not been modified and that the identity associated with the transaction is guaranteed even if anonymous.

All transactions are recorded together in a block, and the blocks are linked sequentially in a long, unique, immutable and public chain. This chain is the blockchain, and everyone can follow online all the transactions that have been taking place. For example, at … you can see and open new blocks as soon as bitcoin transactions are recorded. Similarly you and follow back the chain of the trade up to the original when NS started the first 50bitcoins. As of xxxx there were 18 million bitcoins in circulation, for a very volatile monetary value of around 60 billion €. To achieve this without a central controlling agency blockchain relies heavily and in many ways on cryptographic technologies. This information is not stored in a single server but is replicated around the world between servers, called miners, who permanently ensure that all copies are identical.

Blockchain is not automatic record-keeping, but mutual trust. Blockchain is to trust what AI is to reasoning: in the same way that AI tries to digitize our reasoning, BC attempts at digitizing trust.

It is interesting to note that, while we have a picture of the inventor of double-entry bookkeeping, we have no idea of the identity of the individual or group of people who invented blockchain.

3.2.3 Impact of Blockchain

Blockchain has the potential to revolutionize many aspects of our life, but the societal changes required by its adoption are so profound that it will probably take some time. A bit like the adoption of TCP/IP, the foundation of the Internet. Invented in the early 70’s, for many years it fuelled supported globally one application: email. After many years of adoption by technology companies, TCP/IP gained global public use with the advent of the World Wide Web in the mid 90’s creating the base of a broadly distributed economy: a 30 years journey(Iansiti and Lakhani 2017)

(Long 2018)

3.3.1 Some Physics concepts

In everyday life, we usually do not resort to detailed calculations or deep philosophical concepts to make our current decisions. When making decisions, each of us responds to a unique mixture of moral, self-interest, rational and emotional motivations, and we feel that our aspirations are the expression of our freedom. We may be frustrated in those aspirations by some constraints. Maybe we do not have the financial means to achieve our desires, or we leave in a country where those desires are against the law. In reality, the education we received, the schools we attended, the social relationships we maintain profoundly influence our understanding of the world. We all develop what is called a world-view (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worldview that is a sort of map that helps us navigate in our life that is determined by our background, upbringing, education, social standing and, of course, also but only partially, our reflections. Depending on how strongly we believe that elements of that worldview are essential, we may seek the company of people who have similar worldviews and join a religious, political or social group that actively promote them. Some of us may develop a worldview at odds with the society around us. Still, if one looks at the broad picture, we are more likely to adopt one that is compatible with the one with people close to us than not. Research shows that worldviews have a evident geographical distribution that globalization has not yet wholly averaged out (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inglehart%E2%80%93Welzel_cultural_map_of_the_world.

Worldviews also evolve with time. In the past centuries, Europeans elites convinced themselves they represent the height of civilization and considered colonialism and slavery just as another way of carrying business. Colonialist and slave merchants may have been revered as benefactors to their home communities and received honour and fame for their good deeds. BLM activists and demonstrators toppling statues honouring them are a clear example of the emergence of a world-view where enslavement can in no way be associated with the notion of being a decent person worth honouring.

Among the components that constitute our world-view, at least in westernized developed countries, is the reliance on scientific paradigms. In handling the coronavirus crisis, most governments claimed that the scientific approach was the main driver of their decisions, and referred systematically to the deliberations of scientific committees.

Ad a much deeper level, notions of scientific thought permeate our political, financial and professional organizations. Classical economic builds upon on the idea that humans are rational agents trying to optimize their benefit. Our companies replicate on a mechanics metaphor of devices that achieve results through a clear command and control method. Paradoxically the paradigms that contribute to this world view correspond to 17th-century science, that reached its apex at the end of the 19th century. This mechanistic paradigm, associated with Newtonian Physics, proved so successful that Albert A. Michelson, in 1894 stated: “… it seems probable that most of the grand underlying principles have been firmly established … An eminent physicist remarked that the future truths of physical science are to be looked for in the sixth place of decimals.” ( The End of Science (1996), by , p. 19. A few years later, Einstein’s papers triggered the quantum revolution of physics, of which we have not seen the end more than a century later.

Would it be possible that the new scientific paradigms offer us better metaphors to build a worldview that is appropriate to complex and rapidly changing knowledge society that the Newtonian paradigm? Many believe so, and to understand why we need to delve into some the underlying principles

Let’s review in a discoursive and quite unrigorous but hopefully not too incorrect form some of the basic notions of Quantum Physics.

For starters, have a look around you and activate your senses and your consciousness. You can split your reality is in an internal and an external world. The inner world is made of your thoughts and relates to your consciousness, your agency and your emotions. The outside world, the physical reality around you, is well separated from your inner one and is conveyed to you through your senses apprehending objects or waves. Objects are everything you can touch are made of matter. Waves are, for example, the sound you hear or the light you see. Anything you interact with from the outside world will be either an object or some form of wave. Waves need some form of support or medium, and once we understand how they work, we can exploit them and do valuable or cool stuff. For example, we can surf sea waves, or we can watch a TV show broadcasted through electromagnetic waves.

Objects and waves have pretty different behaviours. For example, if you take a slice of pizza, and then another one, you invariably obtain two slices of pizza. This is quite cool, as it would be annoying to take a second serve on your plate only to find it empty. But this can happen with waves! If you add two waves, you can obtain a more massive wave or no waves at all. This effect applies to noise cancellation headphones. By generating a sound that represents the exact opposite vibration of the ambient sound, your ears hear perfect silence. Everything I mentioned so far is pretty trivial, but Quantum Physics takes it apart.

If you take an object and break it in smaller and smaller parts, you will reach a point where it takes characteristics that correspond to being a wave. And similarly, if you take light, a form of electromagnetic wave, and dim it softer and softer, eventually it will assume some object-like behaviours, and we will refer to it as a photon. This binary behaviour is called the** complementarity **principle.

That is already pretty eerie, but it gets better. The separation between your inner and outer worlds is not so clear-cut any more. Acquiring knowledge of the physical world may impact some of the properties of that physical world. For example, if you measure the position of a moving object, say a car, you automatically loose information on the speed at which it is moving. This blurring is not happening because you somehow modified the motion of the vehicle by doing the measurement. For Quantum Physics, the car is not in a precise position and does not have an accurate velocity. It simultaneously occupies a diffuse region, rather than a specific place, and is cruising with an extended range of speeds rather than a single one. Measuring one of speed or position automatically and irreversibly blurs the other. This effect goes under the name of the uncertainty principle. Do not try to use this argument to spee while driving and then dispute the speed ticket with the police, though! The variation is microscopically irrelevant when referred to an object as big as a car. It becomes noticeable only at dimensions below the size of an atom. Even if such effects are only noticeable at tiny distances, it is still pretty weird that the law of nature should behave in such a counterintuitive way. Weirdness is almost a technical term in Quantum Mechanics, to the point that one of its founders, Niels Bohr, declared: “Those who are not shocked when they first come across quantum theory cannot possibly have understood it.”. Many Physics Nobel recipients echoed this same statement over the years.

But the weirdness does not stop here! As we have seen, microscopic objects, usually called particles, do not have an actual state; the values of the properties that define them spread over a range. This fuzziness also exists for values that may only take discrete values. For example, if you have a wall and a tennis ball, the ball can be on one side of the wall or the other. In Quantum Physics, if you smash the ball, or rather a very small particle, against the wall with enough energy, it will be at the same time on both sides. Only when you check with a measurement to see where it is, it will materialize on one of the two sides. We used the wall to define a characteristic that is clearly “this” or “that”. In quantum mechanics, many variables can only take discrete values ( 1/2 , 1 , 2 … etc) which is the very reason it is called “quantum”. Take radioactivity: radioactive elements decay when a specific property takes a quantum jump. Until you measure their status, though, they are at the same time in both situations: decayed and not decayed. This is the foundation of the famous paradox of Schrodinger’s cat, where the poor kitty is at the same time dead and alive. This effect is called superposition of states.

If you are not yet confused, consider the following. You can have pairs of particles, say a and b. that share a property in such a way that the sum of the two values is 0. You may have a=1/2 and b = -1/2 or a=-1/2 and b=1/2. In both cases, a+b = 0, but you do not know which of the two is 1/2 and which is -1/2. It turns out that, following the superposition principle, both states are existing at the same time. Now, separate the two particles, even by millions of Kilometers if you wish. Once you measure one, invariable a measurement of the other gives the opposite result. Do you think we went from weird to spooky? Well, Einstein thought so and dismissed this effect, called entanglement, as “spooky action at a distance.” He was never convinced by Quantum Mechanics on the grounds, as he said, that “God does not play dice”.

Still, all the effects that we have mentioned have been measured with the most incredible precision and are the foundation of quantum computing. What it means about nature is still unclear, and physicist eventually decided to accept the spookiness as long as the calculations are right. So far, all the attempts to build a deterministic explanation of the fundamental laws of nature have failed. Everything behaves as if the surrounding matter is in multiple states at the same time and randomly takes one form or another only when we bother to check it through a measurement.

3.3.2 How a quatum computer works

3.3.3 A quantum basew worldview

So far, we looked into some aspects of innovation related to digital technologies. The discussion on quantum computing, in particular, lead us to an exploration of domains that extends way beyond computing, where quantum concepts can offer us a new perspective to understand and manage societal evolution. This is not to say that quantum physical processes are at the base of social interactions. While quantum computing builds on the direct implementation of quantum physical processes, in contrast, quantum social sciences or quantum economics use quantum concepts as an analogy to define new paradigms. We will see that drawing analogies from modern physics rather than classical physics can be inspirational and open new perspectives when we address the subjects of consciousness and Collective Intelligence.

A change of worldview can change the world viewed(Mendizza 2021, 44)

3.4 Diffusion of digital innovation

Both the digital transition and the quantum transitions will bring disruptive innovations in many aspects of our lives and within our organizations. The internet was initially a network of nodes transferring information in Cyberspace among computers controlled and managed by individuals or organizations. In the new paradigm that we have seen, the emerging internet become a network of nodes that can collect, analyse, and process information and act in the real world. We can go back to what we discussed in terms of patterns of technology adoption and see how the model of network disruptive innovation diffusion works in this context.

<table>
<tr>
<td><strong>Substitution</strong>
<p>
Retailers gifts cards
</td>
<td><strong>Transformation</strong>
<p>
Self executing smart contracts
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td><strong>Single use</strong>
<p>
Bitcoin
<p>
Quantum computers solving specialized problems
</td>
<td><strong>Localization</strong>
<p>
Private online ledgers
</td>
</tr>
</table>

Bitcoin can be an example of a_ single-use_ application, similarly to how email was a single-use application built upon TCP-IP. Bitcoin is the first example of a single-use application built on the blockchain. Private online ledgers give localization examples that all types of organization are developing on the blockchain. Other examples of localization are offered by dedicated artificial intelligence applications that deployed to replace a straightforward process.

Substitution can be provided, for example, by Robots that offer company in retirement or provide research from their services at hotels. Self-executing smart contracts can represent emerging examples of transformative steps. Such contracts link trust built on blockchain to the information collected via the internet of things and take actions automatically on a specific previous agreement.

The innovation potential of the technologies that we have discussed is far from exhausted. It has just started deploying its effects, and for the reasons we have mentioned so far, we can expect exponential impacts on our lives and our organizations.

The introduction of a growing number of new technologies in the workplace may be fascinating, but at the same time raises questions on the future of work, like :

• How are we going to work?
• Where are we going to work?
• How are we going to manage work?

The latter being the main topic here. One key question that raises increasing concerns is whether there will be jobs available for everyone at all, and the connection between employability and education is becoming ever more critical. Increasingly, knowledge will be crucial to job security, not just at the personal level, but at the national and global societal levels. As we can see in this table from OECD, almost 50% of jobs that require less than secondary school level are likely to become automated. At the same time, the potential for automation decreases with the level of education needed in the job.

We are likely going to witness waves of automation in the job market. Currently, 70% of jobs can be at least augmented, that means that 30% of the tasks associated can be automated. Moreover, 25% of today’s jobs today can be automated which means 70% of the task associated with those jobs can be automated and already 5% of current jobs are entirely automated. Over the next decade, the fraction of fully automated job will probably raise to 40%..

In the following sections, we will look at how human beings are positioning themselves in a context where they increasingly interact with anew social actors, whether its gig workers or artificial intelligence bots. Will also consider what organization can do to optimize their structures and management. The prospect of massive digitization and job automation rises raises several critical questions like

• How can we manage a mixture of human being and artificial intelligence bots?
• What are the key differences that will make human nature more attractive for a job position?
• Will this result in a decrease in jobs available, or will it generate several new jobs that that will offset the job losses?
• What mechanisms of regulation will be available in a fully automated society if it is based on profit optimization?
• Will the achievement of the 17 UN goals of sustainable development be facilitated or impaired?

To a large extent, many of those questions relate to the type of society we want to build and to whether we want to be active participants in the design of a new social organization. It is not the objective of this book to provide the answers to those questions. I would rather like to offer some tools that may help each organization to search for its best responses to the unique challenges it is facing. In the final, application chapter, for example, I will introduce a platform tool that combines the power of strong AI and quantum-based social analysis and to understand the complexities of multi stakeholders environments composed of heterogeneous actors.

3.5 Models

We all have models of the world around us. Often a global mental model is called a worldview.
The power of computer is that it allows to create artificial models , that we can run
Careful with mechanistic approach
System dynamics vs agentd based modeling

4.1 The growth of consciousness

Modern society is the result of multiple from the industrial revolutions, themselves triggered by scientific and technological progress. We have already noted how this, in turn, influenced our understanding of the society in a mechanistic world view. According to this picture, society consists of independent individuals who interacts within the constraints of social structures with the intention to maximize their benefits, expressed exclusively in financial terms. We can picture it as a gigantic interconnected machine, where the money is the only driving force.
While this picture may be a reflection of the mechanistic understanding of nature, things are by far not so simple in the physical world. The current description of nature involves multiple types of forces and science has been struggling for over a century to find a theory that encompasses them all. Possibly we should bring more complexity in our description of society and acknowledge that increasing GDP should not be the only objective of the government and maximizing value should not be the sole objective of companies. We need to integrate consciousness and intentionality to change the world in our understanding of social and economic relations.
Elias points out that Erasmus highlighted tnat order to be courteos one needed to pay attention to others and their motives.(Elias 1978, 67) Similarly, now emerges the need , fo being civilized, to pay attention to the impact of our individual and collective actions.THis was a long process, that took centueirs (sect 7)

4.2 The emergence of the conscious consumer

Published as a LinkedIn

In September 1970 Nobel laureate Milton Friedman wrote an article for the New York Times magazine titled “The social responsibility of business is to increase its profit”. He explained that an executive is an employee of the owners of the business who has the responsibility to conduct the business in accordance with the owners’ desires, presumably about making as much money as possible, while abiding by the general rules of society. Distracting corporate resources to achieve social responsibility goals was the same, according to Friedman, as levying a tax on the owners of the business, its customers or its employees and choosing to allocate it to a purpose that none of those stakeholders had explicitly approved of. He specifically mentioned that making expenditures aimed at reducing pollution beyond the amount corresponding to the best interests of the Corporation or required by law, to contribute to the social objectives of improving the environment would be unacceptable.
Fast-forward 45 years. The 2015 Nielsen sustainability survey(“Nielsen Global Sustainability Report” 2015) reported that sixty-six percent of consumers say they are willing to pay more for sustainable brands—up from 55% in 2014 and 50% in 2013. A more recent report finds that sales in fast-moving consumer goods, like chocolate, coffee or bath, grow two and a half times faster for products that are labelled sustainable (Nielsen 2018a). In other words, today even Milton Friedman would have to admit that a corporate executive should take into account sustainability and social responsibility in order to maximize the business profits.
What happened in the last 50 years is that the separation between our role as “consumer” and our role as “citizen” has considerably faded. Individual economic decisions are traditionally regarded as separate from values and commitment as citizens. As citizens, we are expected to care about public good and collective welfare, while as consumers we are expected to be driven by rational decisions to maximize the benefit we extract from our purchases. This boundary separating consumer and citizen, obvious in the mind of Milton Friedman, is now slowly crumbling. The act of consuming is becoming infused with moral, ethical and political characteristics that pertain to our notion of citizenship, local or global. The emergence of a conscious citizen-consumer making purchasing choices related to the sustainable development of the world community has been observed by social scientists and marketers alike, the latter pragmatically noting, to quote the Nielsen research, that “Sustainable shoppers buy the change they wish to see in the world”. This approach has moved from consumers to investors, with a growing number of ethical, sustainable and impact

4.3 The importance of consciousness

As Norbert Elias says, “we are accustomed to distinguishing two spheres, “economics” and “ political” “ (Elias 1978, 303) . This separation has emerged through centuries of the civilization process and has, among other things, the great advantage of shielding us from violence by establishing a public monopoly of force. This separation results also in the assumption that economic power is an abstract concept, isolated from the consequences of the acquisition of wealth. The classical economics abstraction of human beings as economic agents is the symbol of this separation. Human beings however, are more complicated than just profit optimizing agents, and this should apply also to economics and social sciences. Our consciousness of the impact of our actions drives our choices, including purchases and financial decisions. The notion of consciousness is crucial at many levels. It is at the same time the most important aspect of our life and one of the concepts that most escape scientific inquiry. As Descartes pointed out ( Cogito ergo sum) it is pretty much the only aspect of our life that we can take from granted, as everything else, including the physical world, could potentially be a figment of our imagination. At the same time, if we try to define and understand consciousness we need to use it, and we are drawn in an apparently inextricable self-referential line of thought, that we will not try to disentangle here.
Consciousness is at the crossroad of the scientific and the metaphysical discourses and the “Western”, predominantly materialistic and “Eastern”, spiritually oriented, philosophies. Oriental philosophy, in particular the Buddhist tradition, used the mind to explore the mind, while western tradition used it to explore the physical reality. When the scientific approach and instruments are turned towards the exploration of the mind, surprising alignment emerges between scientific and introspective methods.
Should the notion of consciousness apply only to individuals, or does it make sense in the organizational context as well? Are companies supposed to respond to the consciousness of their consumers by developing consciousness-friendly products, as they would produce faster or more comfortable cars? Or are they supposed to participate in a sort of collective consciousness and develop products because they genuinely believe they have a positive impact on the world? In this second approach, intentionality to impact society becomes the driver of the organization, while financial returns become a mere consequence of the achievement of those goals. At the heart of this change of paradigm lies the notion of meaning. A mechanical system does not need a meaningful purpose to continue to execute its functions. A conscious system can hardly do so without explicitly identifying and articulating a more profound meaning for its actions.
The awareness of human-generated climate change, highlighted by multiple scientific studies over the past decades, has certainly been one of the triggers of a growing sentiment that we share a common home. This home takes the form of the only planet we can live on. The scientific community is at the forefront of the movement to denounce the menace we are facing unless serious actions are promptly taken to massively reduce the impact of human activities on the environment. On Nov 5th 2019 11 000 scientists jointly signed a paper in BioScience to warn once more the world population at large and the governments in particular, that unequivocally planet Earth is facing a climate emergency (Ripple et al. 2019). Yet at the same time the disconnect between the urgency of the situation and the ability to adopt an adequate response is highlighted by the decision of the US government to withdraw from the Paris agreement (The Washington Post 2019) with its bland commitment to contain the world raise in temperature. [^10] This decision has been reverted by President Biden, but the episode, lasting several years, illustrated how fragile societal commitment to address the challenge still is.
In the Bioscience article the authors point to 5 areas requiring urgent action : energy, short-lived pollutants, nature, food, and the economy. Among the simple guidelines they recommend, it is striking to see the request to eliminate subsidies for fossil fuels. It is hard to believe that in the face of the climate emergency, subsidies, and tax cuts to promote fossil energy are still widespread. Indeed a simple search on the internet shows that annual direct subsidies to the fossil fuel industry are estimated at $20 billion in the US and 55 billion euros in the European Union (Piccirilli Dorsey, Inc n.d.) (Erickson et al. 2017).
We have been warned, yet again. Is anyone in charge listening?
Yet the system is such that our everyday behaviour is still erratic when confronted with its consequences and most individuals, like governments and political leaders, also still seem oblivious to the situation that is facing us. It is sufficient to have a look at our closets. The apparel industry exerts a disproportionate and mostly unnecessary toll on our natural resources(McFall-Johnsen 2019):
Like governments and individuals, organizations today are also oblivious to the consequences of their actions, and are still largely designed and managed on the mechanistic paradigm. The consciousness of the players is focused around ego-systems and bridging the gap between the reality of the ecosystems and the fragmentation consciousness of the ego-systems is probably the major challenge in today’s leadership (Scharmer and Kaufer 2013, 68)
We need a new sense of civilization, that includes not just our behaviour, but also the impact of our collective behaviour on our ecosystem. . As noted by Elias, there are no indication in history that the civilization process has been brought in in a rational way. It happened unplanned, over centuries. It did not happen, however, without some type of order(Elias 1978, 365). The question is if in our ever mmore rapidly changing world, this civilization process can be accelerated to match the challenges posed by hstical development. Consciousness can also be a powerful defense against the threats of an ever more pervasive control techniques adopted by digital corporations to orien our e behaviour. As say Zuboff, “people who harness self-awareness to think through the consequences of their actions are more disposed to chart their own course and are significantly less vulnerable to persuasion techniques.“(Zuboff 2019 chap 10,III)

4.4 What is consciousness

see consciousness

Consciousness is an area of inquiry that has so far eluded scientific scrutiny. While there are many approaches to describe it, it is undoubtedly one of the most elusive concepts subject to human analysis and understanding. Some even believe that scientific progress is possible by excluding consciousness from the domain of scientific inquiry (Goff, 2019). Take, for example, the notion of sound. If a tree falls in the forest and no living animal is around, does it generate a sound? It will, for sure, create vibrations in the air, that, if someone had been around, would have resulted in the sensory experience of sound. The scientific inquiry focuses on the vibrations, while the notion of sound rests in the subjective experience. While we can objectively define the impact of air beats on our ear and the nerve signals it generates, we have no way to know what is the experience of another person to the same sound. We can only assume it’s similar to ours, but we really have no way to experience what someone else is experiencing. There is a disconnect between our understanding of the physical world that surrounds us and our personal experience of it.

This disconnect is somewhat disturbing when we realize that we have built social systems( states, governments, financial constructs, etc..) mostly inspired by a mechanistic world-view. A world-view that largely ignores our experience, emotions, feelings and agency, in other words, our consciousness. At the same time, our worldview filters and colours our perceptions (Schlitz, Vieten, and Miller 2010, 19). Personal development is as a lifelong dialogue between our consciousness and our current world-view, with a constant interrelated evolution of both.

A defining moment of the development of a collective consciousness of humankind is the “earthrise” picture taken by Anders during the Apollo 8 mission. Photographer Galen Rowell defined the photo as the most influential environmental photo ever taken “(Gordon Sullivan, Robert; Various; Parks 2003) Indeed it helped the emergence of the ecological movement: James Lovelock’s Gaia theory, whereby the planet regulates its conditions like a living organism, was published the next year, the first Earth Day was celebrated on 22 April 1970, and Greenpeace was created in 1971 (Orrell 2018).

“Global communications have made global and integral consciousness a widespread possibility” (Wilber 2000, 34)

4.5 Stages of Organizational Consciousness

Consciousness is not a stationary property of individuals or groups: it evolves through lives, and it has presumably developed through evolution. For example, Piaget, among many scholars of cognition, has identified several levels of cognitive development from the child to the adult. (Mcleod n.d.)
Frederic Laloux in his book “Reinventing organizations, a guide to creating organizations inspired by the next stage in human consciousness” (Laloux 2014 02 20)has been applying the notion of growing levels of consciousness stages to map the evolution of organizations. He has identified 5 stages of organizational consciousness, that he labelled with a name and colour.
The reactive-infrared.
The first stage identified by Laloux is when humankind used to live in small family-based bands between 50 and 100 000 years ago with no organizations and no defined form of leadership. This level corresponds to a world view where the ego is not fully formed, and there is a little distinction between the self and the environment. It is equivalent to the consciousness stage of a newborn.
See also huner gatherers egalirtarianism (chap1 Wilson 2010) and thennotion that animal groupsntend to have a dominant leader mentioned there
Magic magenta
The next stage corresponds to the transition to tribal life that took place around 15000 years b.c. with a limited organisation where the elders used to hold authority. It corresponds to a worldview where the ego is not yet totally formed. Still, the person can handle complexity even if there is a little comprehension of cause and effect and limited abstract capability, In corresponds, in term of human evolution to a stage before a couple of years old.
Impulsive red
This stage corresponds to the transition to proto-civilization about 10000 BC. The corresponding world-view shows a fully formed ego, well-defined organizational roles with unstable but intense, possibly brutal, hierarchy. There is a formal leadership that can be defined predatory, and the archetype of this stage is the wolf pack.
Today street gangs, small businesses with a dominant boss-founder are still operating at this consciousness level. This type of organization can be very effective at grabbing short-term market opportunities, irrespective of their legal standing, but will struggle in defining, or even understanding notions like log term strategic planning
Conformist Amber
The next stage corresponds to the transition to State and Civilization that took place around 3 500 BC. It corresponds to a world-view with clear notion of cause and effect and the ability to project into the future. There is an understanding of others, and while the hierarchy is strong and rigid, a set of laws clearly define the relationships within the organization. The archetype of this level is the army, with a leadership style that can be defined as paternalistic and authoritarian. This type of organization introduced the ability to project into the future, the creation of clear and stable processes and the ability to scale from small to substantial organizations like empires. \
Currently, armies, religious institutions, government agencies, public school systems, and universities are still along the lines of Amber organizations. They often operate on the hidden assumption that there is one right way of doing things, that the world is (or should be) immutable, and that lifelong employment should be the norm. When the world changes, they find it hard to accept the need to change and adapt.
Achievement Orange
Starting with the renaissance and the development of scientific thought the enlightenment and eventually the Industrial Revolution a new worldview has evolved where it is acceptable to question authority to find a better solution. This type of organization is competency-based, and its archetype is a machine with a goal-oriented leadership. The breakthrough brought by this approach are innovation accountability meritocracy, and most modern global corporation operates under those assumptions.
Pluralistic green
More recently, we have witnessed the emergence of a world-view more sensitive to people, promoting fairness equality and corporations are valued. Organizations operating from this perspective adopted the archetype of the family and a leadership style leaning towards consensus. The breakthrough provided by this type of organization has been empowerment, a culture driven by values and purpose and inclusivity of a diversity of stakeholders.
Nonprofits, NGOs, and social ventures typically adopt a green perspective., but it is also found increasingly in the corporate world, where people have come to realize the importance of “soft” aspects of management. Green organizations often strive to inspire their employees to do great things, leading them to outperform more traditional command-and-control organizations Southwest Airlines, Ben & Jerry’s, and The Container Store are well-known examples of this approach.
Evolutionary teal
According to Laloux the next level of organizational consciousness corresponds to Maslow’s self actualization level, where the ego is not prominent anymore and the organization as well as its components pursue the objective of a life well lived, without search of power or success, but of the realization of the organizational purpose. Financial reward may come, but only as a validation of the achievement of the purpose
Looking at the evolution of organizations according to Laloux we see the now familiar plant of acceleration in innovation and these days we have a mixture of Green Orange Amber and even red organizations interacting with each other. Teal organizations represent a tiny fraction of the current diverse, but the approach is becoming more common and tools are and procedures are available for organizations to them what to explore this

4.6 Consciousness and evolution

(“Evolution of the Heart” 2021)

4.7 Quantum physics and consciousness

One of the themes of this book is the notion that over time, society tends to act from higher levels of consciousness. These levels of consciousness, or development, also apply to the general social constructions and impact the structures we use to build our organizations, including in particular the companies in which we work. Another important theme is that the 4 petals are entangled with each other.

From the very beginning of its development, quantum theory has been linked to the notion of consciousness and the subconscious. In a letter he exchanged with Carl Jung, Wolfgang Pauli, one of the founders of quantum physics, noted:. “Complementarity in physics…has a very close analogy with the terms ‘conscious’ and ‘unconscious’ in psychology in that any ‘observation’ of unconscious contents entails fundamentally indefinable repercussions of the conscious on these very contents.”(Pauli and Jung 2001, 185). Pauli and Jung actually went much further exploring connections between the new worldview afforded by quantum physics and the understanding of the Psyche. Pauli for example identified quantum and relativistic notions like energy-mass equivalence or the splitting of spectral lines as archetypes related to a collective unconscious that predates the discovery of quantum phenomena (Pauli and Jung 2001, 179, appendix 3).

As we have seen, physical states are described by wave functions that collapse upon the execution of a measurement. The notion of measurement is vague and anthropocentric, but has been linked with consciousness. (Chalmers and McQueen 2014). For our purposes, we do not need to reach a conclusion on the mind-body problem or the physical connection between wave function and consciousness. It suffices to note that relationships are possible, and we feel encouraged to explore the potential of the quantum world-view to provide a useful tool to understand the world.

Can we use quantum mechanics as the base to define a new world-view that is more appropriate to understand and process the complexities and the entanglements of modern life? For example, Classical economics, that draws inspiration from the Newtonian World-view, considers economic actors as rational decision-makers with the objective to maximize their utility. There is no place for indeterminacy and consciousness.

4.8 Diffusion of consciousness in organizations