Abstract
The future is hidden from all, but careful analysis of the past and of the emerging trends can lift some of the fog that shrouds the horizon. With that in mind, the goal of this chapter is to peer into the future through the prism of the currently emerging bio-info-electro-mechanical symbiosis, which is perhaps the clearest telltale sign of the next era in the continuing story of human development. With that as the general goal, this closing chapter begins by examining the implications of the emerging human-machine interweaving, especially as it regards the ongoing transition from doing (automation) to thinking (creative ideation) to, finally, being (artificially enhanced cognition). In that general context, the long-standing notions of ‘education’ and ‘intelligence’ are re-examined as conduits to organizational value creation, framed in the context of the idea of transcendent creativity.
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Notes
- 1.
It was known as the known as ‘gyroscopic automatic pilot’; Sperry is also credited with developing the artificial horizon, which is still in use today.
- 2.
The same applies to biological development; in fact, the idea of punctuated equilibria, as developed by Gould and Eldredge, was meant to address numerous inconsistencies (and the resultant leaps of faith often embodied by the famous ‘missing link’ notion) between the slow and steady evolution postulated by Darwin’s theory and fossil-based evidence.
- 3.
The very abbreviated argument presented here is not meant to suggest that the wisdom of the great thinkers of antiquity had no impact at all, but merely that it had no immediate advancement-related impact. For instance, the ideas of Plato and Aristotle were rediscovered centuries later, as for a long time, especially during the Middle Ages period in Europe, they were painted as pagan heresy (even if two of the greatest Christian theologians, Augustine of Hippo, also known as Saint Augustine, and Thomas Aquinas, quietly ‘repurposed’ Plato’s ideas of abstract forms into core parts of Christian doctrine, most notably the Holy Trinity).
- 4.
As clearly exemplified by Copernicus, who drew radically different conclusions from what was commonly available data, all such generalizations are subject to some notable exceptions, which is why human-generated conjectures are characterized as being ‘typically’, meaning most of the time, rooted in prior beliefs.
- 5.
Commonly attributed to Abraham Maslow and his hierarchy of needs, first proposed in his seminal 1943 paper ‘A Theory of Human Motivation’, the term and the idea of ‘self-actualization’ can actually both be traced to Kurt Goldstein’s 1934 book titled The Organism: A Holistic Approach to Biology Derived from Pathological Data in Man.
- 6.
While a deeper investigation of the difference between ‘discovery’ and ‘creation’ of knowledge falls outside of the scope of this book, it is at least worth mentioning that the said distinction hides some rather weighty philosophical considerations, not the least of which manifests itself in the fundamental incommensurability of the positivistic (i.e. there are absolute truths waiting to be discovered) and relativistic (i.e. no knowledge claim is absolute as all claims are shaped by individual perspectives) viewpoints. The implied philosophical mindset that guides the reasoning outlined throughout this book aims to bridge the gap between the ‘fixed’ and ‘relative’ perspectives on knowledge by asserting that some knowledge is absolute, as evidenced by mathematics being the de facto universal language of science (e.g. the value of π, which is the ratio of the circumference of a circle to the diameter of that circle, is about 3.14 for any circle, anywhere and everywhere), while other knowledge is relative in the sense of being at least somewhat shaped by cultural, historical or other perspectives.
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Banasiewicz, A. (2021). The Future?. In: Organizational Learning in the Age of Data. EAI/Springer Innovations in Communication and Computing. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-74866-1_10
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-74866-1_10
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