Metaskills- Five Talents for the Robotic Age Page 9

  The success of the Katrina Cottages has led Cusato to design a 1700-square-foot version, called a New Economy Home, in the same traditional style. She sees it as an antidote to the “McMansion,” the feature-laden but inauthentic architecture of the 1990s that exudes all the charm of a checklist. “Let’s see. Extra-tall portico, check. Multilevel roofline, check. Round-top windows, check. Marble foyer, check. Fully wired media room, check. Spacious exercise room, check. Large master bedroom with enormous bath, check. French country kitchen with granite counters, walk-in pantry, professional-grade appliances. Check, check, check.”

  Yet when all the boxes are checked, one feature is still missing: the feeling of being part of a community. Cusato hopes to remedy this situation by promoting an alternative vision for living, one that gets people out of the house and into the neighborhood. Would you really need your own cinema, exercise room, lavish kitchen, and large yard if you had theaters, gyms, restaurants, and parks all within walking distance? Would you really need the “look of wealth” if your house had architectural integrity and fit nicely into the neighborhood? “The checklist is only necessary in the void of design,” says architect Cusato.

  Naturally, there will always be home buyers who measure taste by the square foot, and developers and architects willing to cater to them. Knowing what buyers want does take a certain level of empathy, but it’s a fairly narrow definition of the concept. What a buyer wants may not be what the community wants, or even what the buyer needs.

  Empathy, like morality and responsibility, spirals outward as it grows. It starts with caring for oneself, expands to include one’s family, then friends, then community, then region, then nation, then the world and all of nature. The highest level of empathy takes all these circles into consideration. The metaskill of feeling, the ability to draw on human emotion for intuition, aesthetics, and empathy, is a talent that’s becoming more and more vital as we move into the Robotic Age. It’s the ability to connect deeply with people through vicarious imagination, or “putting yourself in another person’s shoes.”

  Daniel Goleman, author of Emotional Intelligence, says that technical skills are merely an entry-level requirement for most jobs. What lifts some people to the status of stars are their social skills. A UC Berkeley study followed a group of PhD students in science and technology over a 40-year period. It turned out that EI abilities “were four times more important than IQ in determining professional success and prestige by the end of their careers.” People with EI often exhibit highly developed interpersonal skills such as team building, leadership, conflict resolution, selling, communication, and negotiation. You can be as brilliant as you like, but if you can’t connect with people, you’ll be relegated to the sidelines.

  We find ourselves caught in the upward sweep of technological progress, with all the complexity and novelty this entails. Yet the deep desires of human beings don’t change much at all. We still want to laugh, to feel pleasure, to love and be loved, to express our thoughts, share our feelings, see and be seen, and finally make a small contribution to the arc of history. It’s not business—it’s personal. Those who understand this are the ones we reward with power, the ones we want as leaders.

  I’m not saying there’s no room for technology in the realm of personal interactions. It’s just that our technology needs to come from a place of empathy and not from a place of fear, greed, or laziness. It has to make personal interactions more personal, not less. CRM and VRM and PRM are early attempts at organizing business relationships, and will someday evolve into valuable tools for bringing customers and companies closer.

  Today the big chain bookstores are either on the ropes or down for the count. Meanwhile, many of the little shops are still in the ring, bobbing and weaving with thoughtful product selections and strong customer ties. Customers do want the warm touch, and are willing to support businesses that give it to them. They’re also willing to support businesses like Amazon and Zappos, whose online transactions, though mediated by technology, manage to be personal and empathetic.

  On what do you bias your opinion?

  I’ve just spent the last seven chapters persuading you that the emotional brain is the key to success in the Robotic Age. Now I’m about to tell you the opposite. Your emotions are just as likely to trap you, blind you, and turn you into a bigot. There’s a popular homily, “Seeing is believing,” which suggests we’re more likely to put our trust in hard evidence than in hearsay or gut feeling. This is wishful thinking most of the time, because, thanks to the workings of the emotional brain, we’re actually more likely to see what we believe than to believe what we see. Psychologists call this phenomenon confirmation bias.

  Confirmation bias is a tendency to prefer evidence that fits what we already believe, blocking out any “inconvenient truths” with a mechanism known as perceptual defense. So our view of reality is not so much a product of what we can perceive, but of what we do perceive. Our perceptions are filtered through a mesh of beliefs, norms, values, and narratives that shape our mental models of the world. In a recent study of 8,000 respondents, people showed that they were twice as likely to seek information that confirms their beliefs than to consider evidence that contradicts them. In other words, it seems we’d rather lie to ourselves than change.

  I decided to test this hypothesis on a cab driver on the way to a conference in Florida, where I was due to give a talk. “Hot today,” I said. “You think this is what they mean by global warming?”

  “I don’t believe in global warming,” he said.

  “You’re a global-warming denier?”

  “I am,” he said. “It’s just a bunch of scientists protecting their grant money.”

  “I read that the number of scientists who go along with global warming is something like 90%. How many scientists do you think there are?”

  “I don’t know—maybe a million,” he said.

  “And you think almost a million scientists are getting grant money to study global warming?”

  “Yep.”

  Undoubtedly, his beliefs fit a narrative borrowed from talk radio and conservative cable. But think about the number of assumptions that would have to be true to support the cab driver’s view. First, the findings of many of the world’s top scientists would have to be inferior to his personal intuition. Second, global governments and foundations would have to be supplying a half-million grants for global warming alone. Third, the scientists who received grant money would have to be corrupt or gullible. And fourth, the mainstream media would have to be involved in a massive cover-up. While one or two of these assumptions might be true, all four would take a miracle of cooperation.

  Yet confirmation bias is not restricted to cab drivers and conspiracy theorists. Take a look at Research in Motion, the highly successful company that introduced the BlackBerry smartphone. The BlackBerry took off because it made communication between executives and managers easier and more mobile. As soon as the product gained wide acceptance in the marketplace, the company put its head down and started manufacturing BlackBerrys like there was no tomorrow.

  When tomorrow did come in the form of the Apple iPhone, RIM denied any real threat. The mental model they held onto was that the BlackBerry was a serious corporate phone, and the iPhone was a trendy consumer device. They couldn’t see that the same kind of design, marketing, and development network that appealed to consumers might appeal to business people as well. By the time they figured it out, they were so far behind the curve that Apple was able to steal their business in broad daylight. The company’s two CEOS hired marketer Keith Pardy away from Nokia to turn the brand around. But they couldn’t accept his assessment of the situation, so they blocked his moves at every juncture. He and two other marketing executives quit the company in frustration.

  In the center of the Campo dei Fiori in Rome stands a statue of Giordano Bruno, a philosopher who was burned alive on that very spot in 1600. His crime? Claiming that the sun couldn’t possibly be orbiting the earth, that
it must be the other way around. This was heresy, according to the Roman Catholic Church, and when he wouldn’t retract his claim they lit the fire.

  Galileo Galilei also claimed the sun didn’t orbit the earth, but he was careful not to insist on it, thus managing to avoid the stake. It took the Vatican 400 years to apologize for its minor astronomical error. Each year the Italian Association for Freethinking celebrates Bruno by inviting the mayor of Rome to say a few words in front of the statue. If you listened to one of these cautious speeches, you’d think Bruno died from a car accident rather than a church decree. The Vatican, after all, is right across the river from the Campo dei Fiori.

  When we have a “religious belief” in something—a cause, a course of action, or even a brand—our decision-making process becomes that much easier. Our emotional brain is happy with this state of affairs, because it prefers to make decisions that feel right. They feel right because we’ve trained our brain through constant repetition, like training a dog to sit, come, or heel. The difficulty occurs when a situation calls for a trick we haven’t learned, such as designing beautiful phones when we’ve only had practice designing expedient ones. Concerning the emotional brain, the lesson is clear: Be careful how you train your inner dog.

  Confirmation bias is not always self-inflicted, since it’s built into the fabric of culture. Anthropologist Bloomer describes culture as a seamless web of beliefs, all working together so they seem natural, universal, even unquestionable. “Culture is the most prominent nongenetic influence on human perception,” she says. It gives us acceptable ways to attribute meaning to experience.

  Culture produces stories that bind people together, allowing them to function as a team, a family, a group, a company, a community, or a nation. Stories are helpful when they make our lives easier, but harmful when they keep us from the truth. Nearly a century ago, newspaper editor Walter Lippman used the word “stereotypes” to describe the easily digestible narratives used by media to make sense of events. “We define first,” he said, “and then we see.” Today we should have a similar distrust of sound bites, glib statements that have the ring of truth—“truthiness,” to use comedian Stephen Colbert’s word—but discourage deeper investigation.

  Lawrence Lessig, author of The Future of Ideas, observes that a given culture is defined not by the ideas people argue about, but the ideas they take for granted. “The character of an era hangs upon what needs no defense,” he says. “Power runs with ideas that only the crazy would draw into doubt.” The “taken for granted” is the test of sanity, while “what everyone knows” is the line between us and them. Once we identify with a culture or an ideology, our rationality can easily become a liability, allowing us to justify almost any belief. When we argue from a strongly held belief, we tend to put our feelings first and reasons second, gathering our evidence like stones to throw at each other.

  The artist Goya fretted that “the sleep of reason produces monsters,” meaning that unchecked emotions can lead to nightmare behaviors. Yet the sleep of emotion also produces monsters. Without emotion, we would have no access to the part of our brain that gave rise to the Golden Rule or that lets us make difficult decisions quickly. We think of sociopaths as people who can’t control their emotions, but it’s actually the opposite. Sociopaths are people with damaged emotional brains. Every decision they make is coldly rational, designed to serve themselves without regard for others. Obviously, we need both reason and emotion to navigate the world. They’re like two sides of a pair of pliers that let us grasp ideas and create knowledge.

  In his book, The Big Questions, economics professor Steven Landsburg talks about an impromptu survey he conducted in the lunch room of his department at the University of Rochester. He asked a group of six PhDs to explain how water gets from a water heater to a shower. Six out of six believed that a pump was responsible for the feat. “No plumber shares this misconception,” says Landsburg. “On the other hand, the world teems with plumbers who think protectionism will make us prosperous. When it’s important to get things right, we try to replace our beliefs with actual knowledge.”

  To replace beliefs with knowledge is not an easy task. Emotion by itself won’t get you there, and neither will simple reasoning. The only path to profound knowledge, the kind of knowledge you’ll need to make a difference in the Robotic Age, is proficiency with systems thinking. Systems thinking, along with its more technical cousin, cybernetics, is not well understood by most people, but its principles are lurking in the language of Western culture, and are right up front in the philosophies of Eastern culture. In the simplest sense, systems thinking is the ability to contemplate the whole, not just the parts. It’s the metaskill I call seeing. Seeing let’s you hold your beliefs lightly as you seek deeper truths about the world and how it works.

  For PhDs: The heater keeps the water hot and under constant pressure all the way to the tap. Turning the tap releases the pressure so the hot water flows from the showerhead.

  SEEING

  The tyranny of or

  Most people can’t draw what they see. When they use a pencil to transfer an object or a scene onto a sheet of paper, they tend to draw not what they see but what they know. Or at least what they think they know. So a sketch of a face ends up looking like a Cubist sculpture, and a drawing of a street scene looks like primitive folk art.

  Optical, or naturalistic, perspective doesn’t come naturally. It requires a trick of the mind, in which you use your executive brain to override your beliefs. Instead of looking at a subject as a three-dimensional person, place, or thing, you mentally flatten it out to two dimensions, focusing only on the relative distances and relationships among lines, edges, angles, and shapes.

  “Oh, I see,” your eye says. “In flattened space, the distance between that corner and that line is about half the distance between that edge and that point”—even though your knowledge of the three-dimensional world tells you something quite different. By constantly measuring the relative distances between points in two-dimensional space as you go, you can bring the drawing into some semblance of visual realism. The trick lies in overriding your beliefs, biases, and mental models—temporarily—through rigorous, rational discipline.

  However, the human mind doesn’t like discipline. Discipline is hard work, exacting a cost in time, energy, and ego while we’re learning. It’s much easier to make our decisions quickly, go with the flow, and not expose ourselves to failure. In the West especially, we prefer decisions to be multiple choice rather than open and ambiguous. And when they are open and ambiguous, we try to shrink them down to a size we can deal with. The mind likes simple choices, and it loves a choice between opposites. “Either/or” propositions are so prevalent we hardly question them.

  But we should.

  Our preference for simplistic either/or propositions—good or bad, right or wrong, conservative or liberal, friend or foe, us or them—blinds us to the deeper questions we need to address if we’re to survive beyond the 21st century. In many developed countries, including the United States, either/or is baked into the political voting system through a simple choice between opposing parties. It’s a direct extension of popular sports, in which two opponents battle for supremacy, and fans choose sides based on beliefs, feelings, and allegiances. In the two-party system of government, winning becomes a substitute for progress.

  Sociobiologist Rebecca Costa observes that, from a historical perspective, civilizations based on opposition eventually face gridlock, and finally collapse. Her book, The Watchman’s Rattle: Thinking Our Way Out of Extinction, presents the Roman, Mayan, and Khmer empires as vivid examples of our biological tendency to prefer simplistic solutions. “When we are presented with only two choices, we often choose the less objectionable option, which in effect becomes decision by default.” She explains that choosing between two extreme options doesn’t work for highly complex problems such as global recession, poverty, war, failing education, or the depletion of natural resources, since it forces
the brain into choosing which instead of what.

  With complex problems, either/or propositions tend to be false dichotomies. A false dichotomy is a logical fallacy in which a situation seems to have only two alternatives, when in reality others are possible. Some everyday examples:

  If you’re not with us, you’re against us.

  If you favor charter schools, you’re against public schools.

  If you’re for gun control, you’re against personal freedom.

  If you’re a capitalist, you don’t care about the environment.

  If you support abortion rights, you must be anti-life.

  If you want universal health care, you want socialism.

  If an idea is new, it must be risky.

  Those of us who accept false dichotomies can easily be manipulated by unscrupulous leaders in government, business, religion, and other institutions. All we need is a simple choice between two unequal alternatives, one obviously good and the other obviously bad, and boom!—decision made. Our beliefs have been confirmed, and no further reflection is necessary. Meanwhile, society heads toward gridlock as both sides of the dichotomy dig in their heels.

  When two sides attack a problem, the problem is no longer the problem. The problem is the sides. As long as there are two opposing sides, there’s no possibility of progress, only compromise. Politics, goes the conventional wisdom, is the “art of compromise.” Unfortunately, this is true. With dichotomous decisions, there are only three possible outcomes: win-lose, lose-win, or compromise. None of these is optimal, and all can lead to gridlock.