In the best tradition of dualism, of course they're both right – and anyone who follows only one of these paths will regret the loss of the other's opportunities.
People with business problem ownership and insight can now contribute more directly to the solution, making themselves more valuable – and probably solving the problem better than someone else who's trying to read the tea leaves of a specification, but doesn't know the context.
Even so, at the same time, people whose purely technical skills were once the foundation of a well-paid job may find themselves becoming as quaintly anachronistic as the village letter-writer.
Of course, that's not a new problem: as Doppelganger blogged three years ago, the letter-writer's 20-year career plan needed to be rethought around the mid-1400s, and Norbert Wiener saw this coming 63 years ago, but the problem is no less stressful merely because it's not new. As Bill Bonner at Agora Financial observed last year, a layoff is a temporary interruption in the need for what you do; when the job simply disappears, that's not just a difference of degree, but something much more fundamental.
But wait, there's still the other path at our original fork in the road: the one that leads, not to less human involvement, but to more. One of the things that we're already seeing, as the Chatter collaboration facility spreads throughout organizations, is unexpected expertise: comments from people whose job titles massively understate the breadth of their potential contributions. They're not just moving faster: they're changing the shape of the space in which they move.
This reminds me of articles I was reading forty years ago about the shift, on aircraft flight decks, from pure autopilots to "flight directors" – which indicate to the pilot the optimal maneuvers to follow a specified course, but leave it to the pilot to match those indications with appropriate input to the controls. When something unexpected happens, the pilot using a flight director is already "in the loop" and needs much less time to grasp the situation. To zoom out and look at a somewhat bigger picture of aviation excellence, Burlington Northern Air Freight used to have a slogan that said "People, not planes, deliver."
What's the connection between flying an airplane and following a co-worker on Chatter? First, it's getting easier to make things fully automatic. Second, it's smart to automate what can be automated, and it's a critical priority to shift the people thereby freed from tedious tasks into more productive pursuits. But third and most important, it's essential to recognize which situations are still handled best by wetware – and to use the cloud's resources to connect more brains, not fewer brains, to those problems.
In the best tradition of dualism, of course they're both right – and anyone who follows only one of these paths will regret the loss of the other's opportunities.
Sometimes, the blogosphere hands you a perfect Yin-Yang pair of complementary ideas. On the one hand, a SETI searcher suggests that machine intelligence may be much easier to find than biological intelligence; on the other hand, GigaOM infrastructure guru Derrick Harris suggests that human intelligence, scalably and economically delivered ("Labor as a Service"), might be one of the cloud's most important offerings.
