AI as cultural reset: Corporate is a tired organisation concept

A business organisation is a strategic action by various parties to achieve diverse but overlapping objectives. Each participant needs sufficient skin in the game to stay engaged. Don’t mistake ongoing passive participation as affirmation of your strategy and values.

Thus wage labourers, who are exploited, engage in the wage relation in the context of their life strategies and the society they live in. Real wages have been declining for decades. That has not been bad luck, but rather by design, policy and ideology.

The capital owner/ representative engages the wage labourer in a legal and free relationship while exploiting that person. In the past 4 decades the top to average income ratio has jumped to preposterous scales. In the same role from the same social cohorts leaders are ‘earning’ 100+ times the average employee wage. The same leader proposes their rewards are justified by referring to the market for his/ her labour, plus their legal right to any surplus produced by the collective efforts of the organisation.

The state regulates and in the past 40+ years has overseen the decay of the ‘fair wage’ bargain. In the UK, voters will enter into a time of debate in preparation for the coming general election in 2024. In that debate ‘leaders’ will indulge in hegemonic language to deny the impoverishment of the majority.

The respective parties will post narratives publicly claiming their truthfulness and decrying the deception/ dishonesty of their opponents.

The general public, or at least a significant proportion, will expect all of the parties to be deceptive and to promote dishonest descriptions of their records and policies.

Is this a sustainable model of human organisation? No!

This observation is not a peculiarity British issue, but a generalised one. The details differ in each ‘society’.

It seems we must dismantle the current paradigm completely while acting in sincerity to create new organisational models.

A cynical interpretation might ask who is there to vote for in the Westminster election? No party offers a platform to refresh the settlement between ‘the people’ and the political infrastructure.

The question, is in denial of the fact, that it is not the parties, but the system itself that is corrupt and exhausted.

Let it crash and burn!

Let us evolve a new model(s) of organisation that refreshes the social bargain, implied by the collaborative efforts required. Can that be achieved by the same hegemonic culture that denies the facts and promotes punishment as a remedy?

It seems crash and burn is inevitable. It is also implicit in this angle of criticism, that ‘the political’ or the ‘machine’ political is the only terrain of relevance. I suggest that this juxtaposition of the political as ‘the’ terrain of social change, is itself historical and constitutive of the decay in our current model of organisation.

Hegemony road stopped at the cliff edge! End of the Corporate design.

Humans once had no central power infrastructure and the evolution of such structures should be explanatory. They have contributed to our evolutionary trajectory but they are not the essence of our social organisation.

Which of us is not stained with the errors/ tactics of self-preservation or opportunism. Our modern model of organisation was once a shining example of positive social expression to which a majority adhered. It was not perfect, but we forgot that imperfect aspect.

The regulated society is an historical phenomenon to be understood and learned from. Over time we saw the development of hegemonic cultures and mechanisms. These were fetishised into the only model of society (Machiavelli and Gramsci). That fetish is the barrier to new paradigms being grown as experiments in new sustainable organisational forms.

Moreover in our hegemonic history, we denied the failings, we persecuted the whistleblowers and critics. Thus, we behave with virtue and venality in our participation, we produce the success and the dysfunctional outcomes.

The corporate model of organisation is the hegemonic design par excellence. The corporate model is a business concept, but increasingly adopted by non-business communities such as the 'public sector'. It combines high intensity focus on brand awareness and communication in parallel with high intensity focus on standardising of product design and order fulfilment. In essence over promote the offer as a bespoke design with highly personalised content; but under-deliver the standard of performance with conservative and commoditised design.

Our designs and experiences are live and 'always-on'. This means there is a constant feedback loop feeding into the model in flight. Within the confines of the corporate model we attempt to 'engineer' new ideas and designs but they are always dragged back by the rentier goal of minimising use value and maximising asset returns. Asset led strategies do not sustain solid innovation they destroy innovation eventually. Once the product life cycle is peaked there is only harvesting the value via asset sweating.

In the evolution of our social organisation we may in this new time of change, absorb the learning that we are our own authors of dysfunctional experiences. We can and do create our own outcomes, 'good and bad'.

We should accept that this is our legacy. Furthermore we should expect that we will likely create more dysfunctional experiences even while trying to shed the past. If that is the case then accepting that everyone should be made aware and engage on that 'risk taking' basis. In this way we can avoid pretending commodity healthcare or commodity education is fit for purpose.

We need to envision something fresh and believable. The hegemonic approach is a posture that most people have seen through and are willing to ditch. We all need to be open to a fuller participation in how we organise ourselves.

This is the ‘self-managed model of organisation’. It is not a prefigured design but a recognition of our limits as a social species in designing and building models of organisation while in flight as simple earthlings.

War is our current legacy, our heritage. War is not leadership but the failure of leadership. This is the crash and burn thesis live in flight. It measures our failure to address the underlying dynamics of production and reproduction as a species. We are currently beset by a minority of colourful but grotesque leaders.

The commodity culture of our social system means most people want benefits but won’t participate in the hard work of collaboration and community.

There will be survivors from the current melee, whom I have no idea. It is obvious to say the rich and the powerful. In the past they have occasionally lost out if the masses exert themselves.

They burn palaces not hovels in the tumult of revolution. The state burns hovels as punishment.

AI augurs a new human outlook

The ‘new’ human is now equipped with AI, the capacity we have developed for capturing and processing data. AI is a much overused but still useful reference. For me it means full strength integration and automation of systems with cognitive and physical capabilities. It portends the society we have read about in Sci-fi books or witnessed in movies.

It is important to understand that we created that capacity assigned to AI, in our evolutionary efforts and that indicates to me there is a species level reason for that.

It might be argued having released data from the confines of matter and energised the capacity of non- human systems to act on that data we must as humans react to that context.

In simple terms we already recognise that as individual human beings we may no longer need to ‘work’ or ‘work in the same mode’ as conceived in the industrial era.

AI also engenders an analysis of data that we could not achieve as individual beings, that we can access with AI derived knowledge. We can only become ‘machine like’ to sustain our relationships and a new model of organisation will be needed to express that.

There is positivity in the potential of AI but fear in the likely consequences. Hubris and curiosity inform the first; fear and vanity inform the latter. In time we will settle with a ‘balance’ of the two.

Emotion is not threatened by AI, as is often claimed, but it is challenged to learn and develop. Emotion is a supreme energy form which we do not understand analytically but we do sense.

It’s is our emotions that drive our desire for success as beings. It is our emotions that seek good for all. AI has exhausted or matched our cognitive capacity. It is our emotional capacity that will expand our use of AI.