A Great Curated Quote About Humans and Technology.
“The Factory of the future will have only two employees, a man and a dog. The man will be there to feed the dog. The dog will be there to keep the man from touching the equipment”
-Warren Bennis (American Leadership guru 1925-2014)
This quote is perfect right now given the overwhelming amount of interest and obsession with AI. I have always felt that this quote is the Zen of AI.
There are two general groups or schools about AI. Those that are fascinated and those that are fearful. I think that is a good thing. I stand primarily in the fascinated camp as it can be the technology that helps to unleash the greatest amount of human potential in history. It is, already, the third technology of transformation in modern history: the moveable-type press, the Internet, and AI.
More on this topic in some near-future columns
Back to the quote.
Bennis is often regarded as the organizational guru whose work led to the lessening of hierarchy in the modern corporation. This quote of course is the ultimate destination of that effort. The proverbial man and dog.
To quote from his Wikipedia listing:
"His work at MIT in the 1960s on group behavior foreshadowed -- and helped bring about -- today's headlong plunge into less hierarchical, more democratic and adaptive institutions, private and public," management expert Tom Peters wrote in 1993 in the foreword to Bennis' An Invented Life: Reflections on Leadership and Change.[1]
Management expert James O'Toole, in a 2005 issue of Compass, published by Harvard University's John F. Kennedy School of Government, claimed that Bennis developed "an interest in a then-nonexistent field that he would ultimately make his own -- leadership -- with the publication of his 'Revisionist Theory of Leadership'[4] in Harvard Business Review in 1961."[5] O'Toole observed that Bennis challenged the prevailing wisdom by showing that humanistic, democratic-style leaders are better suited to dealing with the complexity and change that characterize the leadership environment.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warren_Bennis
Even if you are not interested in leadership, I strongly suggest you listen to the human and life insights of Bennis below. “Generous Company”