Millennials: Are we influencing them or are they influencing us?

Millennials. Most of have heard something about them by now. A friend of mine, who is a millennial, shared this video with me via Facebook:


Given that it's been a few years since I uncovered this generation, I thought it was a good refresher on the topic. However, I think a couple of caveats are important to the phenomenon:

• Millennials are middle class: As Sinek notes that millennials have the entitlement notion. However, that can only develop if they've been insulated from reality of life. That is, they've always had a "safe zone" to fall back on: namely the bank and couch of mom and dad. This is not a reality of people who live in poverty inside or outside of Canada/US/Europe/Australia. 
• Boys adrift phenomenon may be a confounding factor: Dr Leonard Sax wrote, Boys Adrift, a phenomenal book that explores why boys - specifically - have "failed to launch". This includes video games, pornography, misguided education approaches education and other factors. Definitely important to look at Sax's work when the individual in you are trying to help or advise is male. 

That being said, what I thought was interesting is: who is influencing who? Specifically, when Sinek spoke about smartphone addiction I thought "uh oh is he talking about me?" 

I recently commented to a colleague about how I have a propensity to ensure that I clear all my notifications and maybe that's a good thing because that way I am up to date on all my emails, slacks, and texts. However, after watching this I realize that in my desire to remain constantly productive, I am favouring the virtual world or the physical world. 

Although these devices are amazing in terms of helping us doing more with our dead time (e.g. driving ). That's how I "read" Dr. Sax's book - by listening to it on Audible while on the go. However, am I now at the point where I tend to prefer the screen of the smartphone? It is truly a strange thing for me. Early on in my career as a junior auditor I found the most effective way to deal with clients and colleagues was not by phone but actually going and discussing with the person live. In fact, when I returned to Deloitte in 2012 the new virtual mode of connection took a while for me to adjust as we used Lync (now Skype for Business) to conduct meetings - no more physical presence. 

So how can it be that I've been accustomed to the "millennial approach" to interaction?

Neuroplasticity. 

Nicholas Carr, who wrote an article for the Atlantic "Is Google Making Us Stupid?", which he later followed up with "The Shallows" actually talks about a similar phenomenon that he went through. He noticed how it was hard for him to get through books. What he discusses in his book is how by being immersed in the era of tweets, blogposts, and YouTube clips is that our brains are actually been reshaped by neuroplasiticity to favour this type of engagement over reading. 

Combine that with the dopamine bursts that Sinek talks about, it's no surprise that I have suddenly become millenialized. 

However, there is hope. 

Carr discusses how by disconnecting and forcing himself to read he is able to restore his brain and once again consume long-form material. The key is to purposely retrain our habits  to return to world of physical interaction and put away the smartphones as Sinek suggests. 

For more on the positive side of neuroplasticity see the work of Barbara Arrowsmith-Young who was able to rewire her brain. It's a truly inspirational story about how a woman was able to overcome her learning disabilities and help others as well.

Author: Malik Datardina, CPA, CA, CISA. Malik works at Auvenir as a GRC Strategist that is working to transform the engagement experience for accounting firms and their clients. The opinions expressed here do not necessarily represent UWCISA, UW, Auvenir (or its affiliates), CPA Canada or anyone else

Telsa Autopilot Fatality: Let's not blame the robots...yet.

By now most have heard of the fiery crash involving a Tesla roadster. This episode from the Young Turks does a good job at examining incident:

For more sensationalist coverage of the incident, watch the following:


The gentlemen at the end of the video notes how he would never trust a computer to drive him and his family.

So are such fears of computers warranted? 

If you look at the original press release from Tesla, it notes:

"What we know is that the vehicle was on a divided highway with Autopilot engaged when a tractor trailer drove across the highway perpendicular to the Model S. Neither Autopilot nor the driver noticed the white side of the tractor trailer against a brightly lit sky, so the brake was not applied. The high ride height of the trailer combined with its positioning across the road and the extremely rare circumstances of the impact caused the Model S to pass under the trailer, with the bottom of the trailer impacting the windshield of the Model S. Had the Model S impacted the front or rear of the trailer, even at high speed, its advanced crash safety system would likely have prevented serious injury as it has in numerous other similar incidents."

So analyzing the incident both the auto-pilot system and the driver didn't recognize the truck in the distance. With the fear of robots, it's easy to fan the flames of "robotophobia" and quickly blame the robots. For example, some could claim the driver would have been vigilant had he not had such an auto-pilot system. But this is mere speculation and hard to prove. 

A couple other things should be noted when evaluating this incident.

• Robot record is superior to the human only record: As Tesla has noted, that the car has driven safely 130 million miles, contrasting this to a fatality every 94 million miles driven in the US and 60 million world wide. In other words, the robot record is superior to the human only record. 
• What about the times the robot has saved people from crashes? The other problem is how do you balance this bad news with the good news that never gets reported. This refers to the time the autopilot acted to save the human beings from crashes. It similar to investments in information security that save the company from countless malware incidents. However, because nothing happens no one really notices the value of technology. Similarly, we're not able to balance the "fear, uncertainty, doubt" associated with this incident with all the times the auto-pilot system actually avoided a crash. 

The incident does point out, however, a bigger looming issue of how human beings and machines work together. Despite the caveats, people are already eager to let the auto-pilot drive them around. And really why not? Commuting is giant waste of time and we could be more productive while letting the computer drive us around. 

Nicholas Carr explores this issue in his latest book The Glass Cage. In the book, he explore how the more reliant we are on a technology, the less connected we are to the world. For example, by moving from manual to automatic transmission, in his opinion, driving is less fun. He also points out how airplane pilots are really just babysitting the computer that actually flies the plane. The trouble occurs when there is a crisis situation where the pilots are unable to handle the situation because they have lost their ability to actually fly planes. 

To be fair, this was not the issue in the Tesla crash - it's way too soon to say that the individual driving the car was overly dependent on the car. However, it is plausible to see how this will occur quite quickly if someone like Google were to offer driverless cars to the massed (as I noted in this  post). However, the government didn't made it mandatory to learn to ride a horse - just in case all the cars stopped worked. So I doubt they will force us to learn to drive cars, just in case the autonomous cars stop driving.