Irving Wladawsky-Berger

How is the Real America Doing?

Listening to cable news, talk radio, and our heated election campaigns, you might quickly conclude that the US is going to hell, that the best days of America are behind us and that the country is unraveling right in front of our eyes.  To a greater or lesser extent, these sentiment are to be expected in a presidential-election year, when the out-of-power party always argues that things are bad and getting worse.  But for the last several years, the apocalyptic sentiments are coming not only from most on the right but from many on the left as well.

Beltway Washington is going through a particularly polarized, volatile phase, as has sometimes been the case through the country’s history.  Moreover, the amplifying effects of social networks and 24/7 information channels make it even harder to find common ground and get anything done.

But, what’s going on beyond the beltway, - in cities and towns across America?  Beyond the surreal world of Washington politics, is the country truly falling apart?  How are Americans faring, despite the hard times so many have been going through?  What’s going on in the real America, where real people live and work and where the proverbial rubber meets the road?

Anticipating the Future of the IT Industry

How can we best anticipate the future of a complex, fast changing industry like IT?  Which hot technology innovations, - e.g., artificial intelligence, the blockchain, cloud computing, - will end up having a big impact and which are destined to fizzle?  What can we learn from the IT industry’s 60-year history that might help us better prepare for whatever lies ahead?

A major way of anticipating the future of any economic or social entity, - be it a company, industry, university, government agency or city, - is to explore and learn from its history.  While there’s no guarantee that historical patterns will continue to apply going forward, they might well be our most important guides as we peer into an otherwise unpredictable future.

I’ve been involved with computers since the early 1960s, first as a student at the University of Chicago, then in my long career at IBM, and subsequently through my relationship with a number of companies and universities.  I’ve thus had a ringside seat from which to observe the journey the IT industry’s been on since those early days.

Let me share some of my personal impressions of this journey through the lens of three key areas, each of which has played a major role throughout IT’s history, and will continue to do so well into its future: data centers, transaction processing, and data analysis.

The MIT Inclusive Innovation Competition

About three years ago, MIT launched the Initiative on the Digital Economy (IDE), a major effort focused on the broad changes brought about by the relentless advances of digital technologies.  As its website explains:

“While digital technologies are rapidly transforming both business practices and societies and are integral to the innovation-driven economies of the future, they are also the core driver of the great economic paradox of our time.  On one hand, productivity, wealth, and profits are each at record highs; on the other hand, the median worker in America is poorer than in 1997, and fewer people have jobs.  Rapid advances in technology are creating unprecedented benefits and efficiencies, but there is no economic law that says everyone, or even a majority of people, will share in these gains.

The future of work and jobs is one of the major areas being addressed by IDE.  What will the workforce of the future look like?; Where will jobs come from in the coming years?; Will the nature of work be significantly different in the digital economy?; How can we accelerate the transformation of institutions, organizations, and human skills to keep up with the quickening pace of digital innovation?

To help come up with breakthrough answers to these very challenging questions, IDE just launched its first annual Inclusive Innovation Competition.  The competition aims to identify, celebrate and award prizes to “organizations that are inventing a more sustainable, productive, and inclusive future for all by focusing on improving economic opportunity for middle- and base-level income earners.” 

The Coming Robotics Revolution

Hi, Robot: Work and Life in the Age of Automation, reads the Hamlet-inspired cover of the July, 2105 issue of Foreign Affairs.  The clever cover highlights the issue’s main theme, artificial intelligence and robotics, - a set of technologies that some fear could one day threaten our very existence. 

As its introductory article reminds us “new technologies have been revolutionizing the world for centuries, transforming life and labor and enabling an extraordinary flourishing of human development.  Now some argue that advances in automation and artificial intelligence are causing us to take yet another world-historical leap into the unknown.” 

Speculations about a future radically transformed by technology are nothing new.  But, with AI and robots seemingly everywhere, the concerns surrounding their long term impact may well be in a class by themselves.  Like no other technologies, AI and robots force us to explore the boundaries between machines and humans.  Will they turn out like other major innovations, e.g., steam power, electricity, cars, - highly disruptive in the near term, but ultimately beneficial to society?  Or, will we see a more dystopian future, as smart machines increasingly encroach on activities requiring intelligence and cognitive capabilities that not long ago were the exclusive domain of humans?  Opinions abound, but in the end, we don’t really know.

What’s the Value of a Liberal Arts Education in Our 21st Century Digital Economy?

A few years ago, I came across a very interesting article about the efforts of Roger Martin to transform business education.  At the time, Martin was the Dean of the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto.  He had long been advocating “that students needed to learn how to think critically and creatively every bit as much as they needed to learn finance or accounting.  More specifically, they needed to learn how to approach problems from many perspectives and to combine various approaches to find innovative solutions.”

“Learning how to think critically - how to imaginatively frame questions and consider multiple perspectives - has historically been associated with a liberal arts education, not a business school curriculum, so this change represents something of a tectonic shift for business school leaders.”  Achieving this goal would require business schools to move into territory “more traditionally associated with the liberal arts: multidisciplinary approaches, an understanding of global and historical context and perspectives, a greater focus on leadership and social responsibility and, yes, learning how to think critically.”

Similarly, in a 2006 report, the National Academy of Engineering called for reforming engineering education.  “New graduates were technically well prepared but lacked the professional skills for success in a competitive, innovative, global marketplace.  Employers complained that new hires had poor communication and teamwork skills and did not appreciate the social and nontechnical influences on engineering solutions and quality processes.”