Future Work, Part 3: Motorcycle Messengers | April 9, 2017 Snippets

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Social Capital

6 min readApr 10, 2017

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Over the past few weeks of Snippets we’ve talked about the future of work, motivation, and humans’ role in the future of productivity. This week we’re double clicking into one particular aspect of this discussion: where, precisely, do humans have the upper hand over machines?

A story from fifteen years ago may be illuminating here. In 2002, the United States Armed Forces conducted a simulated war game exercise called the Millennium Challenge 2002, the outcome of which revealed a great deal. The goal of MC02 was to test and validate the military’s embrace of digital communication, precision tactics, and a dogma known as network-centric warfare based on synchronized intelligence. The Pentagon played the role of the United States, represented as “Blue Team”, while its unstated foreign enemy, “Red Team”, was commanded by Marine Corps Lieutenant General Paul Van Riper.

In what has now become a famous account, Van Riper’s Red Team established an asynchronous, Guerilla-style communications network which made use of radio silence, motorcycle messengers and World War II-era lantern signals to communicate in a way that utterly stymied the Blue Team’s 21st century information processing system. Not only was Red Team un-traceable, but they learned much faster too: Van Riper’s forces quickly overwhelmed their more sophisticated adversaries, causing such casualties to Blue Team that the game was suspended and re-started by Central Command with more narrowly defined rules of how Red Team was “allowed” to wage warfare. Red was forced to turn on their antiaircraft radar, communicate by radio, and act in other ways that conformed with Blue Team’s starting assumptions. The remainder of the exercise proceeded in a heavily scripted and pre-ordained manner, with Blue Team’s eventual triumph ostensibly demonstrating America’s military prowess and infallibility. But anyone who witnessed what actually happened on day one understood the truth of the matter: Blue Team did not really win. In fact, it wasn’t even close.

Last year in their always excellent newsletter Breaking Smart, Venkatesh Rao and Grace Witherell helped frame this story for us in terms of strengths and weaknesses of synchronous versus asynchronous communication. As they explain, Blue Team’s insistence on perfectly synchronized contact that made full use of their technical prowess crippled them from the start, especially when pitted against an adversary who understood the power of loosely coordinated, asynchronous action. They write: “Humans are of very low value as cogs in a machine doing identical things in interchangeable ways, on the same clock, on the basis of identical kinds of training to graded levels. That’s for robots. Humans are most valuable when they have high autonomy, and are able to play to their unique strengths and histories, particular sensitivities, op-tempos, and patterns of privileged information. The idea of “wisdom of the crowds” in fact rests on humans having diverse, unique private knowledge bases. The madness of crowds kicks in with synchronization and imitation.”

(Illustration by Grace Witherell in *Breaking Smart*)

So what does this story have to do with the future of work? One can argue that war games are an entirely different situation from the coming human vs. machine labor showdown, but there are important similarities. There’s an important zero-sum nature to the problem, in the sense that we will be competing with non-human minds and other machines over the privilege of being hired to fulfill the jobs-to-be-done of consumers. Compare the two assertions below:

Blue Team will definitely win MC02 because of massive technical superiority, scale, and superior intelligence.

AI will definitely take all of the jobs because of massive technical superiority, cost, and superior intelligence.

Many of the human jobs that emerge in the future will be Motorcycle Messengers of various kinds. Sure, they’re inefficient in a narrow sense. But by being loosely organized and un-coordinated in a way that is highly potent and valuable in the real world, many of these Motorcycle Messengers will compete for jobs against the robots and win. Efficiency and engineered sophistication doesn’t always prevail; in fact, the more messy and real-world the situation, the more likely it is that organic, disorganized efforts will win the day by surprise. Sooner or later, humans will find themselves as the Red Team. If restrict our imaginations to the inevitable outcome of technological domination, it’s only natural for us to worry about an overpowering Blue Team victory. But the real world has very different ideas.

On being world-class:

What it takes to be a self-driving leader | Raj Nair, Ford CTO

How Teacher Xu, a former pizza delivery man, became China’s greatest angel investor | Shai Oster, The Information

Mike Trout, the best player in baseball, doesn’t want to be a superstar | Michael Baumann, The Ringer

Smashing bottlenecks:

“A force of nature”: Luhan Yang is hellbent on solving the organ shortage with designer pigs | Sharon Begley, STAT

Quantifying the performance of the TPU, our first machine learning chip | Norm Jouppi, Google Cloud Platform

Energy shifts and consequences:

Renewable capacity statistics 2017 | International Renewable Energy Agency

Mercedes hastens electric car shift as combustion era fades | Elisabeth Behrmann, Bloomberg

Australian electric grid operator predicts half its customers will have home battery storage by 2035 | Jason Deign, GTM

Hawaii rooftop solar installations tumble after net metering changes | Robert Walton, Utility Dive