BEYOND HOPE AND DESPAIR: DEVELOPING HEALTHY COMMUNITIES IN AN ERA OF INTELLIGENT TOOLS

Powerfully and importantly, the narratives about the benefits and costs of the technologies will affect the speed and breadth of the deployment of intelligent tools. [...] The greatest impact of the technologies on society will, arguably, be through the reconfiguration of business models and the resulting employment choices and consequences of the newly conceived business strategies. [...] This can be distinguished from the long-standing business practice of off-shoring and outsourcing practiced through an array of service providers.xiv Although the actual scale and dimensions of the impact of platforms on work remain unclear, the significance, power, and consequences of the platforms and platform- based companies are expanding dramatically. [...] In a real sense, we take the original ingredients of the era of intelligent tools and the digital revolution more generally—computing power, big data, and cloud and networks—add the algorithms of the machine learning, neural network approaches, and stir. [...] The assertion is that the story line in business discussion – not just the formal financial analysis – but the narrative storyline of what creates advantage, the narrative of business models and effective work organization, will help shape the choices and deployment of the tools and the user interfaces.