Sometimes a simple story is all it takes to capture complex issues, or so it seems. Take this one. A few years ago, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg lost a game of Scrabble to a friend’s teenage daughter. “Before they played a second game, he wrote a simple computer program that would look up his letters in the dictionary so that he could choose from all possible words,” wrote New Yorker reporter Evan Osnos. As the girl told it to Osnos, “During the game in which I was playing the program, everyone around us was taking sides: Team Human and Team Machine.” The anecdote was too delicious to ignore, seeming to capture all we (think we) […]

One early evening a few weeks ago I went for a walk in the streets of Vienna. I was there for a gathering of Human Resources executives, the third conference I have attended this autumn in which a central theme was the “technological revolution” and its implications for employment, education, and lifestyles.   An hour earlier, while on a panel, I had answered some audience members’ tweets—sparking a minor controversy. Did reading from that tablet on stage enhance or diminish my humanity? Did it make me more connected or disconnected? I was still mulling over it when a row of benches on a side street distracted me.   I turned down it, pulled by a […]