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| Category: Business |
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| About the Book | |
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Advancing technology and globalization are feeding the growth of organizations of unprecedented size, power, and superiority. These hyper-beings radically alter the environment for businesses, governments, militaries, workers and citizens. Cunning competitors, these vast human-machine systems are becoming the Earth’s dominant new species. A hyper-being can combine thousands of human brains and bodies with millions of computer-based brains and robotic effectors into vast networks that monitor and coordinate activities at all scales, everywhere, around the clock. These superior beings will dominate large niches indeed. We humans have few attractive options. We can find a role functioning within them or find a tiny niche for ourselves that’s outside their ecosystem. The only prudent thing for us to do is to race into the future, seeking a rewarding position, as a valued supplier of needed capabilities aboard one of the biggest, fiercest, most dominant creatures ever imagined: a 21st-century hyper-being. Hyper-beings evolve really fast. Because they compete in a world where bits control reality, natural selection speeds their rise to dominant positions. Data and memes travel at the speed of light. Of all creatures, hyper-beings process these bits most rapidly and effectively. Bits today largely control money, power, and influence. Capital moves at the speed of light, from one account to another, from one nation to another, chasing the highest possible returns. Those highest returns increasingly result from efficient thought and agile configuration, the province of hyper-beings. This book explains how hyper-beings use a superior thinking process, called efficient thought, to achieve competitive supremacy. Practitioners of efficient thought continuously employ and improve their superior knowledge, which they use for modeling how things work, how to plan effective missions, and how to analyze results. Hyper-beings are assembled as distributed intelligent systems, recursively composed of collaborative networking modules each embedding efficient thought. The book addresses readers interested in modern global organizations. It addresses undergraduates and graduates in political science, economics, business, computer science, military science, management and information systems. Executives need this book to understand how to create effective problem-solving and learning processes in their organizations and how to enable them through appropriate information systems. These concerns become especially important in very large organizations, where the costs of failure are measured in billions of dollars. The book is especially relevant for top managers in large government, military and public sector agencies, because these people lack a roadmap for creating high performance organizations and information systems. Although the book presupposes no technical prerequisites, it does provide suitable material for both undergraduate and graduate level courses. It explains how people and information technologies combine to create new forms of behavior, thinking, and organization. This understanding should provide a framework for readers to contribute in various ways. For example, the book provides architectural guidance for constructing systems, for implementing learning processes, and for balancing human and machine capabilities. It identifies threats and opportunities created by the new environment in which hyper-beings thrive. There’s not much opportunity for life-long secure employment anymore, as just one example. However, individual entrepreneurship will be well rewarded. There’s also plenty of opportunity to reap profit from ownership in dominant hyper-beings. Hyper-Beings announces the arrival of a new era shaped by new dominant players. It provides a guidebook for readers who’d like to anticipate and adapt.
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| About the Author | |
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Rick Hayes-Roth is a Professor of Information Systems at the Naval Postgraduate School. He teaches the “capstone” course on strategies for information superiority. Previously, he was the Chief Technology Officer for Software at Hewlett-Packard. Before that, he was Chairman and Chief Executive of two Silicon Valley companies which he co-founded. |