AI can’t replace Traditional Values

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For the past few weeks I have been working with a group of international insurance executives. Of course we have been talking about technology to improve the customer experience, cut cost and reduce risk. There’s been a big focus on AI, advanced analytics and blockchain – those topics are the zeitgeist of the moment.

Questions and answers:

• Better customer care – isn’t the answer surely AI?
• Better payment and document management – isn’t the answer surely blockchain?
• More effective insurance businesses – perhaps a combination of AI and blockchain, with a few other technologies thrown in?

You get the message. But don’t we run the risk of what is sometimes called ‘technological solutionism’, that is, thinking that ‘technology is the solution to everything’?

The Washington Post reporter Brian Fung was one of the first to describe the trend of using a technology to fix or solve a real-world problem as “solutionism.” It wasn’t a new concept. He was echoing the earlier words of Evgeny Morozov whose personal ‘mission’ was to convince us that digital technology can’t save the world. The solution to world poverty, he argued, did not rest in an algorithm or a microchip.

He also argued against the concept of what he calls ‘internet centricity’, and against the fact that ‘we are living through unique, revolutionary times, in which the previous truths no longer hold’. ‘Just another thing’, he infers. It rather blows a hole in this ‘New Era of Data’ thing, doesn’t it?

Our desire and commitment to use technology seems to have reached some sort of tipping point. Don’t we all now believe – and continue to repeat, like in some sort of echo chamber – that technology provides ‘the only answer’ without sometimes thinking about what is really ‘the question’. Isn’t it time to stop, and to think?

I don’t think that its’s simply a question of feeling that we’ve become victims of effective marketing by technology companies, even if it’s an interesting angle. But I do wonder if we’ve been swept away by some sort of tsunami of hype rather than considering it through the issues adequately.

Let’s be clear, there’s a technological reality about all this. We know ( or at least are led to believe) that a Machine Learning Algorithm can operate in 100 dimensions, whereas the human brain is used to operating in 3 dimensions, or at best in 4 dimensions. How possibly can humans compete?

The past weeks have, for me, had a strong technological element but also have been combined with broader issues such as leadership, culture, business models and operational agility. Without also taking these into account, is technology anything more than just one part of the overall equation?

Can effective customer service and care exist without technology? Of course they can. Did customer respect and responsiveness exist before the Internet of Things? Of course it did. Shouldn’t we recognise that technology in its many forms is there to reinforce established practices of customer (and human) respect and service rather than to replace them?