My talk at Velocity 2015 Optimized Business Day. I talk about the imperative to use technology to empower workers, not replace them. This isn't just for highly paid knowledge workers. Finding ways to put everyone to work productively is one of the great challenges of the 21st century. Bonus: a great segment from Steven Vincent Benet's poem John Brown's Body.

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It’s Not About Technology
Tim O’Reilly
Velocity
May 27, 2015
The title of this talk is lifted from Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address, by way of the Code for America mission statement, but it’s a great way to think about one of the most important problems facing technologists
today.

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If you take a flat map
And move wooden blocks upon it strategically,
The thing looks well, the blocks behave as they should.
The science of war is moving live men like blocks.
And getting the blocks into place at a fixed moment.
But it takes time to mold your men into blocks
And flat maps turn into country where creeks and gullies
Hamper your wooden squares. They stick in the brush,
They are tired and rest, they straggle after ripe blackberries,
And you cannot lift them up in your hand and move them.
It is all so clear in the maps, so clear in the mind,
But the orders are slow, the men in the blocks are slow
To move, when they start they take too long on the way -
The General loses his stars, and the block-men die
In unstrategic defiance of martial law
Because still used to just being men, not block parts.
From Stephen Vincent Benet, John Brown's Body
As most of you know, it was Memorial Day on Monday, and because of that, my friend Nat Torkington sent me this marvelous quote from Steven Vincent Benet’s poem about the US Civil War, John Brown’s
Body. It is a bit dark to start this way, but the quote is so perfect that I wanted to share it.

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In this fast-paced event, you'll hear from business and IT leaders who are
successfully reinventing their organizations to boost profits and create a
culture of optimization, performance, and continuous delivery. You'll learn
how to use IT-driven innovation to respond quickly to opportunities,
reduce time-to-market, and gain a competitive advantage over
businesses that follow more traditional practice.
I wanted to start with Benet because of the promise that we made you in the marketing for this event.

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That could easily be misinterpreted to think we are going to teach you to build the 21st century equivalent of a workplace like this, where people are cogs in the machine.

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Esther Kaplan’s chilling article in the March 2015 issue of Harper’s Magazine explores just what that kind of world looks like in the 21st century. She describes the instrumented world of work, from UPS and low
wage retail and service jobs to Odesk, and highlights how fine grained monitoring of work can be used to create enormous efficiency and profitability gains, but at the cost of building a culture of fear. Data
analysis is used to “optimize” shifts on behalf of the company, while making them intolerable and disempowering to workers. Full article: http://populardemocracy.org/sites/default/files/
HarpersMagazine-2015-03-0085373.pdf

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This
seems
to
me
to
be
a
really
interes0ng
contrast
with
services
like
Ly7

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and
Uber,
which
use
data
to
empower
workers.
These
are
s0ll
low
wage
jobs
-­‐
not
great
jobs
by
many
standards
-­‐
and
they
lack
many
protec0ons
of
tradi0onal
employment.
Yet
the
workers
I’ve
talked
to
tend
to
love
them.
They
find
them
far
beEer
than
their
previous
jobs
or
alterna0ves.
Why?

8. Lyft driver dynamic view of passenger
concentration by neighborhood
@conference @timoreilly
Data exposed to workers, not just
managers
Most importantly, workers have agency:
they choose when and how long to work
Uber “surge pricing” makes a market to
match supply and demand
Data exposed to workers, not just managers
Most importantly, workers have agency: they choose when and how long to work
Uber “surge pricing” makes a market to match supply and demand

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I’ve been thinking a lot about the issues raised in books like Erik Brynjolfsson and Andy McAfee’s Second Machine Age and Martin Ford’s Rise of the Robots, which warn that AI and robotics are on the verge of
taking away even complex white collar jobs. But this isn’t an inevitability. Technology can be used to upskill workers, and create new jobs, not just to take them away.

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Most
of
us
have
probably
experienced
this
from
the
passenger
side.
Both
passenger
and
worker
are
augmented
by
our
smartphones
and
GPS,
given
abili0es
that
we
didn’t
have
before.
And
in
the
case
of
workers,
it’s
allowed
a
vast
expansion
of
the
workforce.
In
London,
you
used
to
have
to
pass
a
test
called
The
Knowledge
to
become
a
cab
driver.
It
is
generally
considered
one
of
the
hardest
exams
in
the
world.
Now,
anyone
with
a
GPS
can
do
the
job.
Technology
need
not
just
replace
workers,
it
can
augment
them.

11. Text
@conference @timoreilly
and
You’ve
probably
seen
the
Microso7
Hololens
demos,
with
examples
of
how
the
headset
could
be
used
in
fields
from
architecture
to
medicine.

12. Text
@conference @timoreilly

13. Text
@conference @timoreilly

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This is technology used to give workers super powers
Dick Tracy: 1946 Star Trek: 1964
This kind of superpowers. Our phones used to be the tool of superheroes.

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“a culture of optimization, performance, and continuous delivery”
When we talked on the website for this event, we talked not about technology but about building “a culture of optimization, performance, and continuous delivery.” Our industry is an
industry not just of technology, but also with a culture that emphasizes and rewards certain things.

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Think about open source software, for example,

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or devops

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“The secret to high performance and
satisfaction—at work, at school, and at home
—is the deeply human need to direct our own
lives, to learn and create new things, and to do
better by ourselves and our world.”
These are poster children for the kind of culture that Daniel Pink talks about in his book Drive. He says
“The secret to high performance and satisfaction—at work, at school, and at home—is the deeply human need to direct our own lives, to learn and create new things, and to do better by ourselves and our
world.”
This is the culture we aspire to in our companies. It should be the culture we bring to non-technology customers as well.

19. @timoreilly
“even in low-cost settings, leaving employees
behind—with bad jobs—is a choice, not a
necessity. Drawing on more than a decade of
research, Ton shows how operational
excellence enables companies to offer the
lowest prices to customers while ensuring
good jobs for their employees and superior
results for their investors.”
And this kind of quest for autonomy, mastery, and purpose shouldn’t be restricted to high end knowledge workers. Zeynep Ton, a professor at MIT’s Sloan School of Management, says, in her book The Good
Jobs Strategy, “even in low-cost settings, leaving employees behind—with bad jobs—is a choice, not a necessity. Drawing on more than a decade of research, Ton shows how operational excellence enables
companies to offer the lowest prices to customers while ensuring good jobs for their employees and superior results for their investors.”

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Technologies can treat people like Steven Vincent Benet’s
wooden blocks, or they can recognize, anticipate, and take
advantage of their humanity.
Technologies can treat people like Steven Vincent Benet’s
wooden blocks, or they can recognize, anticipate, and take advantage of their humanity.

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This is the great challenge of the 21st century
This is the great challenge of the 21st century. I hope you will take it up with pride, and that today’s sessions will give you tools to tackle that challenge.