The challenge of triple A
By Alfons Cornella

In his book, A Whole New Mind, Daniel Pink tells us that the survival of a business depends today on its ability to do something that a (cheaper) workforce in another country cannot do, that computers cannot do faster, and that satisfies the need for transcendence in an age marked (in the developed world) by abundance (excess). Pink has named three demons, the “triple A”: Asia, automation, and abundance. So, in a market of excess, we need to propose emotion, attitude, meaning, transcendence, style, more than mere efficiency. The practically inexistent cost of communication means that today we can work with companies in any part of the world. And machines have advanced so much (remember Deep Blue’s triumph over Kasparov) that the question we really need to be asking is whether they will end up dispensing with us.

Pink says that in order to prosper in this new context framed by the triple A, we cannot limit ourselves to using only the analytical capabilities of the left side of the brain. We need to learn how to condense the results of combining them with the intuitive abilities of the right. We need to learn to multiply analysis (rationality) by imagination (the emotion of ideas), and to better exploit the right side of the brain and our ability to combine and hybridise elements in new ways, to determine patterns for generating new ideas. This is something that a purely analytical brain, like a computer, still cannot do.

In other words, we need to exploit the fact that we are human – a curious circumstance in a world of increasing automation where total efficiency is the norm. An imaginative economy based on human emotions. The business of multiplying imagination by technology.

In a future of perfect machines, humans will still be necessary, because we are capable of bringing expert criteria (intuition and experience, which allow us to resolve problems that don’t have a routine solution), and because we know how to use complex communication (the abilities of persuasion, seduction, and conveying passion that some people have). Humans have achieved things throughout history that a robot (at least a first-generation robot) could neither understand nor do.

The Homo Next, the human who’s coming, is somebody who has no fear of technology, and who knows that the differential human value comes from no other source than humanity itself.