The Atomic Human

Understanding Our Copoprations in the Age of AI

Neil D. Lawrence

TIM, Rome

Communication Bandwidth

  • Human communication: walking pace (2000 bits/minute)
  • Machine communication: light speed (billions of bits/second)
  • Our sharing walks, machine sharing …

Three Parts to Information Topography

Three parts:

  • Storage
  • Channel (transmission/communication)
  • Coupling (interface)

HAM

HAM

AI Changes Information Flow

  • Changes customers
  • Changes markets
  • Changes flow within organisation

Judgement Layer

  • Bottleneck analysis
  • Old bottleneck: human to information
  • Generative AI is a human-digital coupling.
  • New bottleneck: human to society coupling (accountability).
  • What decisions are key?
  • What decisions can be handed off?

Monitoring Change

  • Needs to occur across organisation.

More Information Topography

Information and Money Flow Together

Training and Culture as Hub

Agentic Debt

  • Agentic AI could pay down technical and intellectual debt.
  • But it can create agentic debt: delegation without authority/authorship

Agentic Debt

  • Delegation of workflows without crisp boundaries.
  • Agentic debt is about unsafe or illegible delegation.

Why did I start Trent?

The Trent Approach

  • Work with People who are close to Systems.
  • Address real pain points now.
  • Hold a view on the long term change (information systems).
  • Use the best agentic AI technology (proprietary).

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Lawrence, N.D., 2024. The atomic human: Understanding ourselves in the age of AI. Allen Lane.