Computers are Dead. Long live Computers.

February 25, 2009 by admin.

Daniel Pink, a bestselling author of business and technological books has announced in his latest book, A Whole New Mind, that the Information Age is dead. It has been replaced with what Pink calls “The Conceptual Age.”

The idea is this:  The simplest Information Technology (IT) activities have been outsourced to Bangalore, India, China, El Salvadore, the Philippines, and even Viet Nam. And rightly so. Why pay someone $60K annually to write elementary code a machine could be taught to write? In fact in the book Pink mentions a company, Appligenics, that has come up with a system that can write in one second the amount of code a developer would take all day to write (about 400 lines).

So there’s really no need for the kind of coder we had in the 80’s and 90’s. Been there, done that.

What Pink is driving at is much more interesting, and a space that I’ve lived in for a long, long time. He talks about people who think with both their right and left brains. Coders, engineers and bean-counters are highly left-brained: analytical, systematic, project-management oriented. Nothing wrong with that, but it’s only half of the equation, heck, maybe only one-quarter of it.

But that’s not where the innovation lives! Innovation is when, like in the 1939 movie Babes In Arms Mickey Rooney and Judy Garland, desperate for extra money to help their parents, note that an empty barn would be a great place to hold a (paid admission) song and dance show. “Hey!” Rooney cries, “We’ve got the barn, we could have a show!”

Imagine a smelly old horse barn. Straw, horse puckies, mud, buckets, tack, run-down wooden stalls. Could you look into a barn and imagine a throng of people dressed in their evening finest, listening to a full big-band and the Rooney/Garland powerhouse belting out songs? Um, probably not.

But that’s exactly what Pink is talking about. What is needed today are people who can see connections and syntax. You Tube is a great example. Someone had a digital camcorder, shot some film and said “Hey, we’ve got this here barn, we could have a show!” (Translate: “Hey, this thing is pretty cool! Wouldn’t it be great if we could set up a web site and allow anyone who wants to the ability to upload videos? We’ll probably get some amazing content!”

And they did. In a short time they sold the whole thing to Google for tons of cash, and retired.

The problem is there aren’t many people who seem to have the ability to look at a barn and see a show. I blame this on the state of education in America. It has to do with the complete lack of training people have been given in this area. It’s the direct result of really crappy educational practices that are linear and myopic, not holistic at all.

Unfortunately, until this situation is rectified, the innovation will occur only by the lone wolves of the world: The Mickey Rooney’s of today, if you will. Those who dare to throw the friggin’ box away–to hell with thinking outside of it!

Pink goes on to enumerate what he calls “the six high-concept high-touch senses [that] can help develop the whole new mind this era demands:”

• Not just function, but also design
• Not just argument but also story
• Not just focus but also symphony
• Not just logic, but also empathy
• Not just seriousness but also play
• Not just accumulation but also meaning

People who live in that space where design and technology meet, those who take risks, who see blends and mixes, who understand how two (or more) things connect when others may not be able to see–these are the people who will be wildly successful.

I have a lot of students in my classes who operate almost entirely out of their left brain, or their right, but very few who are able to transcend left- or right-brain-ness and operate within the nexus of conceptuality. I really try to work on my students to understand and value the notion that we’re done with the Information Age, and we’re moving into a completely, radically, new place.

I guess the place to start with that is 1939 and then move forward from there.

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