Discussing the Multitude At the 10th Global Peter Drucker Forum

European Straits #83

Dear all,

On November 18, 2016, I was on stage in the Aula der Wissenschaften in Vienna as part of a panel moderated by the Financial Times’s rising star Sarah O’Connor. The event was the 8th Global Peter Drucker Forum, and the topic was technology and its impact on the quality of jobs.

The widespread assumption back then was that technology was turning work into a new precariat. It brought wages down and deprived workers of their economic security. It was the adverse agent of change—with all those robots, artificial intelligence, big data, machine learning algorithms, and crypto protocols imposing the pace of innovation onto the global economy. By contrast, we humans appeared as the dispensable victims in a world eaten by software. Technology suggested strength, rigor, predictability, power, and profits. Humanity, on the other hand, seemed to be more about weakness, messiness, uncertainty, costs, and being sidelined in a more digital economy.

It doesn’t help that the world of technology…