I’m a huge Asimov fan, and am constantly amazed at how he was able to have a perspective of the future on multiple fronts. I was reminded of two of those recently thanks to their application (of sorts) in contemporary scenarios.
First, Hari Seldon‘s (pretty much the foundation of Asimov’s Foundation series) psychohistory, which was able to make general predictions on the future behaviour of large populations using history, sociology and statistics. The easy contemporary connection is big data and predictive analytics.
Second, a short story written by him called ‘Profession‘, (do read) in which every person’s profession is based on an analysis of his/her brain, and no choice is given to the person in this matter! In India, we seem to be already there even without the analysis!
Collectively, these two made me think of employment, and on a related note, education. The thought was that with so much of data available on education and employment, we should be able to create ‘tests’ to compute the interest and aptitude of individuals at a very early age. What this would aim to do is to eliminate the herd education that currently exists. Instead, children would learn things that help them in a profession for which they have the intent and interest, using say, a combination of traditional classrooms and MOOCs. Also, this would no longer be one part of a life cycle, but a continuous process – helping the individual thrive in a dynamic environment.
If you remember, LinkedIn was my representative for ‘L’ in the ‘change imperative‘ deck. That was because I felt that it had the data and the vision to be the catalyst for this kind of a change. I was very happy when it underscored this faith with the fantastic ‘future self‘ experiment, in which they identified the future professional self (5 year time frame) of LinkedIn user Kurt Wagner – another user Mussarat Bata – using various data points!
LinkedIn hasn’t really built this as a public tool, but just imagine the possibilities! A platform that shows people the possibilities which take them closer to their ‘purpose’. (remember ‘The Evolution of Work and the Workplace‘?) I sincerely hope to see this in my lifetime. 🙂
until next time, live and learn
[…] Technology: Internal collaboration tools and their potential is something we discuss often, it can also be useful in collecting and acting on real time feedback, but let’s take a look beyond that. In what I thought was a fantastic application of big data in this context, (even before the term became hot) Google, in 2009, had used an algorithm to find out which of its employees were likely to quit. Recently they were trying to answer if working at Google increased people’s life span! But the point is that while the world is racing to understand consumers to pitch their products/services better, it might be a good idea for ‘Human Resources’ to use data to truly understand the resources they are dealing with. Of course, there are privacy and ethics challenges involved, but if the organisation is transparent about it, and the intent is clear, it would be useful for everyone concerned. ( I could link it to the LinkedIn & Labour post) […]