Harvard Business Review - The Year in Tech, 2021: The Insights You Need From Harvard Business Review

1. Technology is revealing the world in a new way.
2. by David Weinberger
3. Opportunities and challenges for the fastest-growing technology since the smartphone.
4. by Kane Simms
5. Retailers have made huge investments, but beware tempting gadgets.
6. by Darrell K. Rigby, Mikey Vu, and Asit Goel
7. Poorly designed algorithms will exacerbate hiring bias, not fix it.
8. by Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic, Frida Polli, and Ben Dattner
9. Starting one because of FOMO is never a good idea.
10. by David Furlonger and Christophe Uzureau
11. Tech is moving trainees away from learning opportunities and experts away from the action.
12. by Matt Beane
13. Its not just faster internet.
14. by Omar Abbosh and Larry Downes
15. Neurometrics help us get a clearer view into the minds of consumers.
16. by Jacob L. H. Jones, Matthew Gillespie, and Kelsey Libert
17. New devices will be the primary means by which individuals interact with the world.
18. by Lauren Golembiewski
19. The emergence of digital campfires.
20. by Sara Wilson
21. Users concerns arent reflected in their behaviors.
22. by Bhaskar Chakravorti
23. What we risk by not imagining the unknown.
24. by Stuart Madnick
25. Use the tech companies strengths and size against them.
26. by Thales S. Teixeira

by David Weinberger

The articles in this collection look forward from where we are. Grounded in current realities, they point to technologies that business leaders and managers need to be considering now to see how they might be useful, threatening, or perhaps transformative.

But imagine instead that we are looking backward at today from some distant-future vantage point. In this light, these articles also reveal to us how were thinking about technology these days.

The most obvious point is that when businesses think about technology today, theyre usually thinking about digital, connected technology firstAI, blockchain, 5G, connected productsand not about, say, the remarkable advances in genetics, medicine, energy, andwe hopeclimate engineering that are likely to transform our lives in the coming years. Thats surely not because those disciplines are less important than the digital realm. Rather, our current focus points to some fundamental facts about business. To start, it reminds us that the work companies do is relational and connective. It is about people collaborating to offer products and services, about reaching customers and users, and about the way those users then interact with the business and other users. Thats true of virtually all companies, whether based in technology or not.

The overwhelming importance of the type of digital connected technology we now take for granted also makes clear the extent to which businesses have come to embrace the chaos of life, work, and markets. Back in the old days, we thought we could reduce our business practices to relatively simple maps of processes, and we were confident we could manage and control our potential customers by managing and controlling the information we gave them. Now that anyone can connect with anyone else, its become manifest that if you look closely enough, everything is an exception because everyone is a unique individual and every circumstance is new. In practice, this means that it will always remain a mystery why last week readers clicked on your ad with the yellow background 2% more than the ad with the green one.

That perhaps explains why the word disrupt makes so many appearances in this book decades after the Internet first rumbled and then exploded into the world: Disruption continues to be an accurate description of the way we move forward these days, for the Internet has disrupted not only our old ways of doing things, but even our idea of how progress works.

Now AIespecially machine learningis beginning to reveal our world in a new way. Machine learning systems generate models from data that are as complex as they need to be in order to produce accurate results. These models dont suffer from the human need to reduce complicated situations to a handful of broad strokes of causality and influence that we can understand and rely on. Instead, businesses are learning that they can gain solid benefits by allowing the machines to go hog wild in discerning complex data correlations. This is enabling businesses to see more clearly, and to acknowledge more thoroughly, the messy chaos in which we all live.

We used to think that progress was a relatively low slope headed up a long mountain, with occasional steep steps marking an invention of consequence. But overall, progress was slow, steady, and incremental. Now, as the articles in this book show, progress is about blowing up the entire slope and the mountain it climbs.