Machine dreams

Since the Industrial revolution began more than 200 years ago -- and the forms of organization it spawned -- society has been wary of turning men into machines.  In our own age, the concern now has to be turning machines into men, as evidenced in an article in the new Atlantic by Brian Christian entitled "Mind vs. Machine".

In his article, Mr. Christian talks about the annual Turing Test, named for Alan Turing, one of the founders of computer science who, in 1950, devised a test to determine whether machines can think. Christian explains:

"Instead of debating this question on purely theoretical grounds, Turing proposed an experiment. Several judges each pose questions, via computer terminal, to several pairs of unseen correspondents, one a human 'confederate,' the other a computer program, and attempt to discern which is which. The dialogue can range from small talk to trivia questions, from celebrity gossip to heavy-duty philosophy—the whole gamut of human conversation. Turing predicted that by the year 2000, computers would be able to fool 30 percent of human judges after five minutes of conversation, and that as a result, one would 'be able to speak of machines thinking without expecting to be contradicted.' "

While Mr. Turing's prediction has not yet come to pass, it's getting closer to reality, as the story explains in very amusing detail.

What's interesting to us is the technologists' view that a machine's highest achievement would be to match human intelligence. Meanwhile, many of us in the world of companies and institutions still think of machines as the ultimate template for human performance.  We think in "models" and reduce the living organisms that are organizations to flow charts and data drill-down.  We merge, and re-engineer, and re-brand with abandon.

Fortunately, despite this dark scenario, there are leaders who are able to imagine and relate to the real people who make and consume their products.  Ken Olsen, for example, whose recent passing we noted the other day, once hauled his entire management team into a warehouse for a day of uncrating, assembling and starting up the company's computers, just to put themselves in the shoes of their customers. Legendary figures such as Sam Walton, Walt Disney or Robert Woodruff never confused humans with machines.