Harnessing the Crowd in the Age of the Machine

Description

Of the three main trends shaping the business world -- machine, platform, crowd -- MIT research scientist Andrew McAfee believes the crowd is the way to leverage human knowledge, expertise and enthusiasm for innovation. In this interview, he unpacks six core principles for harnessing the crowd to develop something significant. Vitally, though mediated by technology, crowd-based co-creation still relies on the best human abilities -- an important point to bear in mind amid growing fears of machines' vastly superior computing power. He doesn't foresee machines replacing humans, but rather sees a rebalancing between minds and machines, between products and platforms, and between the core and the crowd. In the future, human abilities, excellent goods and services, and strong organizational capabilities will likely remain essential to business success.

Keywords

Airbnb Alibaba AlphaGo Artificial intelligence clear outcomes crowd crowdsource Data Erik Brynjolfsson Facebook Fan Hui GE Appliances geeky leadership GNU General Public License Google DeepMind Karim Lakhani Kentucky Kevin Boudreau Lee Sedol Linus Torvalds Linux machine machine intelligence Massachusetts Institute of Technology Microsoft Windows MIT noncredentialism Opal Nugget Ice Maker openness platform prototype self-organization slack Tom Goodwin Uber University of Louisville verifiable and reversible contributions