\u201cEvery few hundred years throughout Western history, a sharp transformation has occurred\u201d, Peter Drucker wrote (http:\/\/blogs.hbr.org\/2014\/10\/what-peter-drucker-knew-about-2020\/<\/a>) in 1992. Today\u2019s great transformation is being driven by digital technology. We are on the verge of a new epoch of smart computers that MIT\u2019s Andrew McAfee and Erik Brynjolffsen describe as the \u201cSecond Machine Age\u201d. Drucker himself imagined this revolution as \u201cthe shift to a knowledge society.\u201d But it\u2019s actually an information technology revolution – the artificially intelligent new world of the Internet of Things, self-driving cars and IBM\u2019s Watson.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n So how does this digital revolution change our lives? What does it mean for us as managers, workers and, above all, as human beings?<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Many believe that today\u2019s great digital transformation offers the opportunity for a rebirth of economic creativity. Indeed, David K. Hurst calls for a \u201cRenaissance\u201d (http:\/\/blogs.hbr.org\/2014\/05\/is-management-due-for-a-renaissance\/<\/a>) of management techniques – a shift away from what he describes as the \u201cscientific practices\u201d that took hold in the late 19th and 20th centuries toward more \u201ccreativity\u201d, \u201cinnovation\u201d and what it means \u201cto be human\u201d. Johan Roos, The Dean of J\u00f6nk\u00f6ping International Business School (JIBS) concurs with Hurst, also calling for a \u201cRenaissance\u201d (http:\/\/blogs.hbr.org\/2014\/07\/the-renaissance-we-need-in-business-education\/<\/a>) \u00a0in business education, to what he calls a \u201chumanity minded\u201d education.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Some management theorists appear seduced by contemporary technology\u2019s potential to empower our humanity. Drucker Institute Executive Director Rick Wartzman stresses (http:\/\/blogs.hbr.org\/2014\/10\/what-peter-drucker-knew-about-2020\/<\/a>)\u00a0 that today\u2019s knowledge economy requires a \u201cchange in the human condition.\u201d Richard Straub and Julia Kirby call (http:\/\/blogs.hbr.org\/2014\/05\/better-management-could-spur-a-new-era-of-economic-growth\/<\/a>) for a \u201chuman centered view of productivity\u201d which will produce \u201cextremely high returns\u201d. While Didier Bonnet and George Westerman call for the birth of what they call \u201cdigital masters\u201d (http:\/\/blogs.hbr.org\/2014\/09\/we-need-better-managers-not-more-technocrats\/<\/a>) \u00a0who \u201ctake charge\u201d of the human energy in the workplace.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n But here\u2019s the problem with all this faith in a renaissance of the human in our knowledge society. As the economist Tyler Cowen argues, the increasingly central economic relationships of the Second Machine Age will be between artificially intelligent machines and their human programmers. Whereas the key economic relationship in the 19th and 20th century mass workplace was between managers and workers, that will be replaced in the 21st century by the relationship between digital masters and machines like IBM\u2019s Watson.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n Digital technology, Deloitte\u2019s John Hagel III tells us (http:\/\/blogs.hbr.org\/2014\/10\/turn-the-pressures-of-technology-into-potential\/<\/a>) , \u201cis full of paradox\u201d. And the central paradox of our second machine age is that managers must rediscover their \u201chumanity\u201d in order to manage intelligent machines. Management\u2019s definition of what it means to be human must, therefore, like everything else in our digital age, be radically transformed.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n The idea of humanity is about to be radically disrupted. We are what computers aren\u2019t and perhaps can never be. Rather than a rebirth, it\u2019s actually a reinvention of what it means to be human.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Tomorrow\u2019s brave new world will be whose \u201chumanity\u201d will be employed to manage increasingly intelligent machines \u2013 artificially intelligent devices that Nick Bostrom (http:\/\/www.nickbostrom.com\/<\/a>), the director of Oxford University\u2019s Future of Humanity Institute, fears will eventually become our master. It\u2019s a tragic paradox. As McAfee and Brynjollfson acknowledge, the great scourge of our digital age is the unemployment of the old middle class \u2013 doctors, lawyers, engineers and – whose labor is being disintermediated by intelligent machines. Average is over, Tyler Cowen reminds us, in an economy where digital masters will manage computing devices and the rest of us will be servants to this tiny new elite. It\u2019s an age in which humanness might survive \u2013 but will be focused on managing artificially intelligent machines rather than other human beings.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n Richard Straub and Julia Kirkby, in wanting to place \u201chuman work in opposition to machines\u201d (http:\/\/blogs.hbr.org\/2014\/05\/better-management-could-spur-a-new-era-of-economic-growth\/<\/a>), believe that we can still carve out an autonomous space for ourselves in the digital age. Such optimism, I\u2019m afraid, while noble, is a 19th century reading of our 21st century predicament.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n