The ability to innovate in order to participate in the 4th industrial revolution.
Emilio Sassone Corsi
About a decade ago, an important study by Prof. David A. McCormick of Yale University School of Medicine, an internationally renowned neuroscientist, made it clear that human brain is able to acquire information in an analogue way, process it in both an analogue and a digital way and transmit it from one synapse to another predominantly in an analogue way. In short, it seems that digital thinking is not predominant in our brain. Our brain does not limit itself just to digital thinking, as a computer does, but it does a lot more, and that is probably why it is so difficult to investigate its actual functioning and try to reproduce it in a machine. On the other hand, maybe this is also why our brain does so many things but it frequently makes mistakes that a machine would probably not do.
Despite the differences between human, analogue and carbon-based brain and a digital and silicon-based computer, for some time management consultants have been theorizing a simile between the organization of the human body and that of a company. In this simile, it is clear that the CEO is located in the brain; one might say that the voice relates to the sales organization and the ears may be the marketing support.
Proceeding with this simile, someone supposes that Finance is the heart because it pumps the energy (blood / money) throughout the body, arms are the management structure, hands and legs are operational activities.
Someone goes on even further with this simile and designs an organization that can evolve as the human being in the process of the selection of species.
After all, the fourth industrial revolution is a way of rethinking the organization of a Company in terms of a single living organism entirely connected to all its parts: a kind of Gaia as imagined by Isaac Asimov in the extraordinary trilogy of the “Cycle of Foundation”.
Digital thinking and information are the vital lymph that ensure the Company’s existence, life and growth. This information flows across all departments of the Company by coordinating individual activities within the Company and interacting with the external world directly exchanging information and products. The Company internal and external production chain becomes a unique pathway that manages all processes synchronously and therefore “just in time”. IoT-based pervasive systems enable the control of processes, actions, movements, whether made both by humans within the organization and by other systems or robots. In many situations, it is nowadays impossible to distinguish whether the origination process is carried out by a man or a machine basing on results: we can only focus on the adequacy of results in terms of ways, times, costs and benefits.
An intelligent system, probably of mixed human/artificial nature (Carbon / Silicon) is the company’s control center that allows it to make the most appropriate decisions whenever needed.
The mix of human and artificial activities is an indicator of the major or minor automation of business processes.
Examples of organizations that are experiencing the fourth industrial revolution are all around us.
Amazon is a logistic company whose integrated process of order acquisition, product retrieval and distribution is so automated that in some warehouses there are only robots that run far and wide picking up products and bringing them to an operator, still human, that will pack the product and put it on the rollers, so that it will be delivered to the supplier. However, this last human phase is also disappearing and could be soon replaced by robots bringing the package to a drone that delivers it directly home.
Tesla has a plant in Nevada where it produces, together with Panasonic, the world’s most famous electric cars. The production chain is fully automated: CAD drawings (made by Carbon-based beings) come in and the almost completely finished cars (made by Silicon-based beings) come out.
Airbnb is a fully automated platform that allows the demand and supply of hospitality to meet. Silicon-based beings connect Carbon-based beings who wish to spend a vacation or find a comfortable and convenient place to sleep. The Airbnb Company is a completely virtual company, a platform designed by a scattered group of very clever software developers who keep optimizing it and making it more flexible and user-friendly. In just a few years, Airbnb has overwhelmed the tourism market and today has a capitalization that exceeds $30 billion. It is an extraordinary example of a new business model: the so-called Exponential Organizations, theorized by the Canadian Salim Ismail, Executive Director of Singularity University. These are organizations that can grow rapidly thanks to the predominance (in quantity and value) of robots over humans.
Experiencing the fourth industrial revolution means moving along these complex but extremely fascinating scenarios, where changes are sudden but often devastating. Are we ready to sail these seas? What is needed to survive and succeed? It’s hard to say. The key to success is continuous innovation, anticipating needs, being ahead.
And how will it end? Here too, you have to be inspired by science fiction, which has already foreseen everything. An already anticipated scenario by the great Isaac Asimov is a robot capable of doing all that the human being does today, not just trivial manual activities but also any intellectual activity. There are already robots that can almost completely replace an attorney. It is likely that pretty soon there will be robots capable of writing poetry, drawing on CAD, imagining, dreaming, creating and procreating. There is no limit to their ability. Well, at that point, Silicon-based beings will completely replace Carbon-based beings in all their activities. Having no need to be fed with vegetables, pasta and meat, but only with electricity, and not having the need to breathe, they will be able to face even long lasting interplanetary and interstellar journeys. They will dominate not only the Earth, but the entire Universe. Carbon-based beings, that is us, will undergo extinction because of obvious uselessness but we may say we will have created a new species of living beings. And that will be the fifth industrial revolution, the first of the new Silicon-based species.
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This article has been written as a contribution to “Paper # 32: THE QUALITY IN THE SOFTWARE LIFE CYCLE – Guidelines for applying the ISO 9001: 2015 standard to the software processes of the digital organization” as published by Of the AICQ Committee for “Quality of Software and IT Services”.
