Petzoldt

McKinsey: Second Economy

McKinsey recently published on the “Second Economy”. Below two quotes on how it is defined and it what sense it acts intelligently. (This pragmatic definition of intelligence is extremly helpful, because it acknowlege that a service like Google Search is intelligent even though it will - hopefully - never posses consciousness.)

Interestingly business analytics is a much bigger player in this second economy as in the visible one. Think credit scoring, price optimiation or campaign optimization.

Quotes from the article:

If I were to look for adjectives to describe this second economy, I’d say it is vast, silent, connected, unseen, and autonomous (meaning that human beings may design it but are not directly involved in running it). It is remotely executing and global, always on, and endlessly configurable. It is concurrent—a great computer expression—which means that everything happens in parallel. It is self-configuring, meaning it constantly reconfigures itself on the fly, and increasingly it is also self-organizing, self-architecting, and self-healing.

[…]

There’s a parallel in this with how biologists think of intelligence. I’m not talking about human intelligence or anything that would qualify as conscious intelligence. Biologists tell us that an organism is intelligent if it senses something, changes its internal state, and reacts appropriately. If you put an E. coli bacterium into an uneven concentration of glucose, it does the appropriate thing by swimming toward where the glucose is more concentrated. Biologists would call this intelligent behavior. The bacterium senses something, “computes” something (although we may not know exactly how), and returns an appropriate response.