Service System Evolution in the Era of AI

Tom Malone’s perspective in “Superminds” seems most well thought out to me – it is a very service science oriented perspective, since organizations were the first superminds. See: https://sloanreview.mit.edu/article/how-human-computer-superminds-are-redefining-the-future-of-work

Malone TW (2018) How Human-Computer ‘Superminds’ Are Redefining the Future of Work. MIT Sloan Management Review. 2018 Jul 1;59(4):34-41.

A few thoughts….

(1) For some reason, I prefer the word “People” rather than “Humans” for noun usage – unless “human” (adjective) is used in something like Human Factors or “Human-side of Service Engineering” – so “human” as an adjective is fine, but as a noun it seems better to use the word “people” to me.

(2) Service systems and cognitive mediators can be defined/introduced as “dynamic configurations of resources (people, technology, organizations, and information) connected internally and externally by value propositions to other service system entities. Every service system entity has a focal decision-making authority that is a person. For example, even in a business there is the CEO, and for a nation the President.” The progression from tool to assistant to collaborator to coach to mediator in AI systems is the progression of both capabilities (models) and trust (earned). For example, who do you trust today to make certain decisions on your behalf? Your doctor, your lawyer, your spouse? Someday people will trust their cognitive mediators to make certain types of decisions on their behalf. BTW in governments with president, congress, and supreme court, you can see the dimension of time in decision-making outcomes, the president is for fast decisions, the congress allows more debate for longer term decisions about what laws to make and what to invest in, and supreme court is for really long term decisions that reflect reaffirmations or changes in the cultural values of a society. Governments are cognitive systems with hidden, partially visible, and explicit/recorded case-based decision-making as cognitive forms, supported by organizational structures. Governments are also service systems because they have “rights and responsibilities” both to their citizens as well as to other governmental entities with which they interact. The evolution of cognitive system entities and service system entities are intertwined, and Haluk Dermirkan and I have proposed studying them from a service science perspective in terms of AEIOU Framework (Abstract-Entity-Interaction-Outcome-Universals). The speed of decision-making between different types of entities (people, AI) is something to watch as new configuration of resources unfold, as new composite types of cognitive system entities and service system entities.

(3) All service system entities are cognitive system entities, but not all cognitive system entities are service system entities. The difference boils down to “rights and responsibilities” which relates to societal norms, and individual accountability (ability level of local cognitive resources). A service system entity is a cognitive system entity with rights and responsibilities. Not all cognitive system entities have rights and responsibilities. Just as children, elderly, animals, and yes, even some early AI systems, may have some cognitive abilities, the cognitive abilities have to reach a certain level in a large enough populations of those entities before the societal or business decision is made to give those entities rights and responsibilities. When an entity is given rights and responsibilities, the individual entity can be held accountable for its actions, rewarded or punished – and therefore, increased cognitive abilities leads to increased accountability – which can lead to rights and responsibilities of an entity, with which they can become the focal decision-making resource/authority in a service system entity.

(4) To understand the impact of organizations (first) and later AI (second) on the evolution of the service system ecology, one has to understand localized and distributed service systems. Organizations shifted the expertise from people into distributed organizations (this required specialization, increasing the concentration of expertise in individuals, while simultaneously increasing the diversity of types of expertise in the ecology). Enter AI to simultaneously reverse and amplify this trend/evolutionary force. AI has the ability to concentrate general expertise into local entities, like smartphones. So while organizations created service supply chains of expertise flows between specialized entities, AI allows the reconcentration of general expertise in a local form (effectively reversing the need for some types of organizations). Imagine a family farm with service robots that know how to repair themselves for example. The evolution of service systems has gone from local to global, and in the era of AI, there will be a double re-invention of both local system and global systems with AI.

(5) So in summary, as Tom Malone suggests in “superminds,” cities, businesses, and other types of organizations of people where the first super-minds. From a service science perspective, the types of service systems with many people were the first types of superminds, families, tribes, cities, etc. Now we are entering the era of AI, and AI systems (entities) can (someday, in decades ahead) become superminds as well. This represents the miniaturization of superminds, so at once they can become local again, as well as continue to grow a distributed, global form.

(6) So “service systems and innovations for business and society” is going into an new evolutionary mode powered by AI technology innovations.