A fragmentary post today, spurred by something that Marc shared: an article considering trends in project and knowledge management. As i was reading it, i took three notes:

Free roaming Story Engines – browsing and synthesising

Itinerant Connective Engines – opening up spaces and conversations

Adversarial Integrity Engines – generating oppositional narratives and semiotic squares to explore

My mental image was somewhat steampunk: these Engines shuffling around the halls of the empire, sniffing out narratives, constructing stories, and carrying them into strange spaces. Semi autonomous and semi intelligent Engines, collecting, connecting, fragmenting.

This is probably right if viewed from a perspective of a paradigmatic shift in capability: there is what we can do within the existing system (methodologies, talent, software enablement etc), and then there are the things that fracture or shift the paradigm itself (the opening up of new capability, new languages, new dynamics of collaboration etc). These three things speak to the latter world: an Organisation as Hybrid, Organisation as Cyber, or Organisation as Blended.

Partly this ties into how one views AI: from an intellectual or factual perspective, or from a rather pragmatic one. Intellectually, and functionally, we are a distance from arguing that generalised AI is possible at all or that it can be creative. Pragmatically, if it looks like a dog and barks, put it on a lead.

Under this approach, if it enables us to take the same inputs, within the same structure, and create competitive advantage, then it’s passed the test.

One could follow this line of thought to the logical outcome: from blended to fully automated. Will we end up with these Engines taking root and simply setting up their own Organisations? Conceptually, why not?

We could see a tipping point where ‘Organisations’ become more fluid, self forming and dissolving to need, within a broader pool of capability, held in emergent collective structures, some human, some not.

That’s not a specifically dystopian view: indeed, i may share it as a utopian one. Freed from the shackles of ownership, infrastructure, and place, perhaps humans can themselves find evolved purpose.