Author: jmarmorstein

What if the truest antecedents of today’s all-encompassing mega-platforms aren’t the monopolies of industrial capitalism, but rather the Gesamtkunstwerk of Modernist art movements? This could be important because we come to understand new phenomenon by mapping them to the familiar, and we stand to miss important aspects of GAFA (Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon) if we focus solely … Continue reading The Dream of Everything: GAFA and the Gesamptkunstwerk

My cultural reference point for the robot uprising/singularity/becoming-data of our age is still Star Trek’s Borg .  Long before The Matrix, Star Trekpresented humans as captive cells in a cyborg totality.  The Borg offer both the seductive vision of perfection and the rational arguments for homogenization at scale.  If these aren’t persuasive, though, no matter: resistance is futile.  Most of … Continue reading Resistance, Futile or Inevitable? Saving Our Children From Assimilation

Ari Warshavsky’s title of his piece on chatbots–“Human But Not Too Human”–is telling.  His emphasis isn’t on bots replicating the human.  Instead, he suggests that there’s a hazard in being “too human.”  To Warshavsky, realizing the potential of chatbots requires we optimize them for the task-at-hand, rather than passing them off as human. “In the spirit of the Turing … Continue reading The Turing Test, Part II: Letting Bots Be Bots, or Humanist Psychotherapists

Alan Turing is one of those geniuses whose moment emerged decades after his death.  Yet even as our estimation of Alan Turing’s contributions and brilliance continues to grow, the legacy of his eponymous test is more complex.  A staple among journalists pitching stories about bots and AI’s encroaching on the human, the test itself doesn’t hold up very well to scrutiny.  It’s … Continue reading The Turing Test, Part I: The Imitation Game, Masquerade, and the Uncanny

We often get confused when we talk about what machines know about us and how they learn it.  This confusion can originate in our tendency to attribute magical powers to machines.  But processing speed and power that defies our imagination isn’t the same as consciousness or intelligence.  Projecting autonomy and agency on machines is still … Continue reading Imitating, Learning, Dreaming: Machines, Conscious and Unconscious

Product managers and software developers once wrote requirements documents that read like more like technical specs than like anything connected to human needs.  Agile development changed that, demonstrating that a more user-centric approach led to better software.  Agile frames requirements as user stories, where an actual action by an actual user guides development work (e.g., “User can leave … Continue reading Agency, Automation & Reciprocity, Part II: Who’s Stealing Whose Jobs?

SOMETIMES TALK ABOUT TECHNOLOGY TAKES ON AN EITHER/OR QUALITY IN A BOTH/AND WORLD. We can’t seem to decide whether technological breakthroughs have ushered in an era of unprecedented human freedom and vitality, or whether we’ve enslaved ourselves to algorithms that direct our movements and dose our neurotransmitters? Has our economic well-being been stolen by the tech oligarchs of a … Continue reading Agency, Automation & Reciprocity, Part I: Lanier, Rushkoff, O’Reilly

My friend and colleague Simon Western is the author of influential books on coaching and leadership, founder of the Analytic-Network Coaching System , and President of ISPSO .  In a recent update he sent out the the ISPSO membership, Simon wrote: I was working with a global leadership team in an internationally renowned high-tech company… and was struck by how receptive they … Continue reading The Persistence of Psychoanalysis in the CyborgOrg, Part II

At first glance, the relevance of a psychoanalysis to organizational dynamics might seem to diminish as technologies replace humans in those dynamics.  Processes are automated; projects are tracked in apps; activity is measured with wearables; ROI is calculated by CRM’s; forms autofill, paychecks direct deposit, and many of us go weeks without seeing our colleagues … Continue reading The Persistence of Psychoanalysis in the CyborgOrg, Part I

IF YOU’RE AN AMERICAN CYBORGORG, THE TERRORISTS MAY HAVE ALREADY WON. The CyborgOrg lives in the cloud. This isn’t metaphorical, or marketing hyperbole about a business trend. Housing the flesh of its employees has become an afterthought. Work from home, from a coffee-shop, from a squat like WeWork…   No matter, because you’re working in … Continue reading The Surveillance Contagion: Is There Such a Thing as Safe SaaS?

Sometimes rough data can take the form of outliers emerging from the natural course of the human experience—our diversity of cultures, histories, economies, belief systems, etc. When humanity coexists in our cosmopolitan era, smoothing data threatens to erase this texture, elide minority populations, and pathologize nonconforming behaviors.  In this sense, rough data is the pebble … Continue reading The Rough and the Smooth, Part II: Outliers, Scale, and other Dynamics

Part I I’ve been a runner long enough to have learned to estimate paces and distances with very little help from verifiable data.  I even got good enough that teammates would trust me with pace-making during workouts and races.  But when I first heard of GPS watches, I immediately saw their potential to revolutionize the … Continue reading The Rough & the Smooth, Part I: Bias in Quantification, Optimization & Efficiency

One aspect of identity where we’re stubbornly pre-post-human—where our physical body in physical space remains stubbornly operative—is in matters of citizenship. Though it’s easy to argue that the digital identities we’re plugged into—social networks, avatars, online communities, financial portfolios, etc.—are more consequential than our physical location, try telling that to the Syrian refugee floating in … Continue reading Digital Citizenship, Dissociation, Discipline

Trust me when I tell you that I’m not one for cyber-hype.  I was over the whole cyborg-thing before there even was an Internet.  Nearly three decades ago, my fellow undergraduates wrote endless bad papers on Blade Runner, and I just wondered if I was missing something. Perhaps it was better with a little weed—“What … Continue reading The First World CyberWar