ManaGPT: 4,080 NLP Prompts and Generated Texts

ManaGPT: Generated text length by input-sequence subject

“ManaGPT: 4,080 NLP prompts and generated texts. Output from an LLM trained on a corpus from organizational futures studies” • March 26, 2023

SUMMARY. This dataset includes 4,080 texts that were generated by the ManaGPT-1020 large language model, in response to particular input sequences. ManaGPT-1020 is a free, open-source model available for download and use via Hugging Face’s “transformers” Python package. The model has been trained to generate analysis, predictions, and recommendations regarding the emerging role of advanced AI, social robotics, ubiquitous computing, virtual reality, neurocybernetic augmentation, and other “posthumanizing” technologies in organizational life.

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ManaGPT-1020: An LLM Generating Insights into “Posthumanized” Organizations

ManaGPT logo

ManaGPT-1020 • March 23, 2023

SUMMARY: ManaGPT-1020 is a free, open-source model available for download and use via Hugging Face’s “transformers” Python package. The model is a 1.5-billion-parameter LLM that’s capable of generating text in order to complete a sentence whose first words have been provided via a user-supplied input sequence. The model represents an elaboration of GPT-2 that has been fine-tuned (using Python and TensorFlow) on a specialized English-language corpus of over 509,000 words from the domain of organizational futures studies. In particular, the model has been trained to generate analysis, predictions, and recommendations regarding the emerging role of advanced AI, social robotics, ubiquitous computing, virtual reality, neurocybernetic augmentation, and other “posthumanizing” technologies in organizational life.

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A Better Way of Forecasting Employees’ Performance: Evaluating the use of composite ceiling-floor models for predicting the likely range of workers’ future job performance

A joint range model created with Comport_AI

Medium.com • March 12, 2023

SUMMARY: This text is Part 3 of a three-article series on “Advanced modelling of workers’ future performance ranges through ANNs with custom loss functions.” It demonstrates how custom ceiling and floor models can be combined to create a composite prediction interval that can outperform simpler models based on MAE or SD in forecasting the probable range of workers’ future job performance.

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Optimize Your Performance Intervals! Use ANNs with custom loss functions to predict probable ceilings and floors for workers’ future job performance

A ceiling model created with Comport_AI

Medium.com • March 12, 2023

SUMMARY: This text is Part 2 of a three-article series on “Advanced modelling of workers’ future performance ranges through ANNs with custom loss functions.” It investigates the mechanics of independently modelling the likely ceiling and floor of the range of a worker’s probable future job performance using separate artificial neural networks with custom loss functions.

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One Number Is Rarely Enough: Why prediction intervals are critical (and challenging!) for HR predictive analytics

A joint range model created with Comport_AI

Medium.com • March 12, 2023

SUMMARY: This text is Part 1 of a three-article series on “Advanced modelling of workers’ future performance ranges through ANNs with custom loss functions.” It explores why it’s useful to predict the probable ceiling and floor for an employee’s future performance – and why it’s difficult to do so effectively, using conventional methods based on mean absolute error or standard deviation.

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Comport_AI™

Comport_AI screenshots

Comport_AI™ (version 0.3.22) • March 5, 2023

ABSTRACT: Comport_AI is a free open-source HR predictive analytics tool in the form of a Python-based web app that uses advanced machine learning to forecast the likely range of a worker’s future job performance. Rather than mechanistically deriving the predicted ceiling and floor of a worker’s future performance from a single predicted target value using calculations based on MAE or SD, Comport_AI treats the likely ceiling and likely floor of a worker’s performance during a future timeframe as independent entities, which are modelled by artificial neural networks whose custom loss functions enable them to formulate prediction intervals that are as small as possible, while being just large enough to contain a worker’s actual future performance value, in the vast majority of cases. This allows more precise, nuanced, and useful forecasting of workers’ future job performance. Comport_AI utilizes TensorFlow, Keras, scikit-learn, FastAPI, Uvicorn, Jinja2, NumPy, Pandas, and Matplotlib. It’s developed by Matthew E. Gladden (with support from Cognitive Firewall LLC and NeuraXenetica LLC) and is made available for use under GNU General Public License Version 3.

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Synaptans WorkforceSim™

Synaptans WorkforceSim screenshot

Synaptans WorkforceSim™ (version 0.1.081) • December 31, 2021

ABSTRACT: This software has been developed for educational and research-related purposes by NeuraXenetica LLC and is distributed free of charge. It creates a virtual population of simulated factory employees with diverse personal characteristics and abilities and then simulates their daily workplace behaviors and job performance through a specified number of days. Users are able to adjust the values of arguments including the number of persons employed in the factory; the number of days of activity to simulate; the minimum and maximum age of workers; and the mean value and standard deviation for employees’ characteristics such as their attendance rate, industriousness, eagerness and ability to learn, ability to teach others, degree of conscientiousness, ability to inspire and lead others, positivity of attitude, and degree of supportiveness displayed toward their fellow workers. Once such arguments have been specified, the software generates a quasi-randomized virtual workforce possessing such characteristics; simulates the activity of the virtual workforce during the desired period; and then presents the results through a series of visualizations. By building such a model of a simulated factory workforce, it becomes possible to manipulate variables, test hypotheses, and explore causal relationships in a way that isn’t feasible or desirable with real human beings in a real-world factory setting. For example, the software can facilitate investigation of the kinds of organizational elements, psychological factors, and interpersonal dynamics that have an influence on the motivation, satisfaction, and job performance of employees in a factory setting. A user can also examine the manner in which changes to a virtual workforce’s size and to the psychological characteristics of individual employees impact the structure and performance of larger organizational units such as production teams and entire shifts. The software also makes it possible, for example, to investigate the extent to which variations in the performance of different managers’ teams or shifts may result from random differences in their subordinates’ personal characteristics, rather than from differences in the managers’ own managerial abilities.

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Novel Forms of ‘Magical’ Human-Computer Interaction Within the Cyber-Physical Smart Workplace: Implications for Usability and User Experience

International Journal of Research Studies in Management (2019)

ABSTRACT: The growing use of advanced AI, ambient intelligence, augmented reality (AR), and virtual reality (VR) technologies of the sort found within the emerging cyber-physical smart workplace has been described as enabling new forms of human-computer interaction (HCI) that are “magical” in nature. This study shows that from an anthropological perspective, such a workplace environment can indeed be understood as “magical”; however, that “magicality” is a double-edged sword that can potentially both enhance and damage user experience (UX) for workers and other occupants of such environments. First, by analyzing existing social anthropological and philosophical anthropological accounts of magic, typical elements of magical practice are identified. Using Nielsen’s empirical analysis of HCI usability heuristics as a basis, a prospective heuristic evaluation is then carried out for the usability of a generic “magical” environment, in order to identify elements of magical practice that might be expected to enhance or impair user experience when they are required for interaction with the environment. A more specific heuristic usability evaluation is then performed for the “magical” aspects of HCI created by two kinds of constituent technologies that are typical for a cyber-physical smart workplace: those of (a) ambient intelligence and IoT-enabled systems and (b) AR and VR systems. It is shown that the magical aspects of HCI within the emerging cyber-physical smart workplace differ significantly in their potential UX impacts from the magicality involved with earlier forms of computing, and the implications of this fact for the management of future workplaces are identified and discussed.

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Megacorp: From Cyberdystopian Vision to Technoeconomic Reality

Megacorp (front cover)

ISBN 978-1-944373-30-6 • Defragmenter Media, 2019 • 322 pages

The image of the “megacorp” – the ruthless, sinister, high-tech global conglomerate that’s grown so large and powerful that it has acquired the characteristics of a sovereign state – is one of the iconic elements of cyberpunk fiction. Such a megacorp maintains its own army, creates its own laws and currency, grants citizenship to employees and customers, and governs vast swaths of cyberspace and the physical world. If it allows traditional governments to survive in some vestigial form, it’s only so they can handle those mundane tasks that the megacorp doesn’t want to deal with itself. By these standards, contemporary companies like Amazon, Apple, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, ExxonMobil, and Walmart aren’t (yet) “megacorps”; they’re the playthings that megacorps gobble up to use for spare parts.

This volume develops a comprehensive intellectual history of the megacorp. It locates forebears of the cyberpunk megacorp not only in earlier fictional works like Čapek’s R.U.R. (1921) and Von Harbou’s Metropolis (1925) but in a string of real-world organizations ranging from the 17th-Century British and Dutch East India Companies to the Pullman Palace Car Company, the Ford Motor Company, and late 20th-Century Japanese keiretsu and South Korean chaebol – as well as in the nearly indestructible oligopolistic “megacorp” described in the pioneering theory of American economist Alfred Eichner.

By investigating the nature of the cyberpunk megacorp as a political entity, commercial entity, producer and exploiter of futuristic technologies, and generator or manipulator of culture, differences are highlighted between the megacorps of “classical” cyberpunk and post-cyberpunk fiction. Classical cyberpunk megacorps – portrayed in novels like Gibson’s Sprawl trilogy, films like RoboCop and Johnny Mnemonic, and games like Cyberpunk, Cyberspace, and Syndicate – are often ostentatiously malevolent and obsessed with short-term financial profits to the exclusion of all else; the over-the-top depictions of such companies serve a dramatic purpose and are not offered by their authors as serious futurological studies. On the other hand, the more nuanced and philosophically rich portrayals of megacorps in post-cyberpunk works like Shirow’s manga The Ghost in the Shell reveal companies that are less overtly evil, possess a broader and more plausible range of long-term strategic goals, and coexist alongside conventional governments in a state of (begrudging) mutual respect. Yet other works like the game Shadowrun depict companies that combine elements of both classical cyberpunk and post-cyberpunk megacorps.

Drawing on such analyses, the volume concludes by exploring how the idea of the post-cyberpunk megacorp anticipated a new type of real-world megacorp – the unfathomably large, fast, and complex “rhizocorp” – that’s now being made possible through ongoing revolutions in the exploitation of robotics, AI, and the Internet of Things – and which threatens to become the dominant economic, political, and sociocultural power of our technologically posthumanized future world.

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Understanding the Cyber-Physical-Social-Intentional ‘Workforce 4.0’: Conceptual Foundations, Architecture, and Context

Workforce 4.0 as a Cyber-Physical-Social-Intentional System

the VIII Scientific Conference on Modern Concepts and Management Methods: Management 4.0 – Modern Trends in Public, Social and Business Sector • Military University of Technology in Warsaw • December 6, 2018

ABSTRACT: The widespread application of Industry 4.0 technologies relating to social robotics, embodied AI, the Internet of Things (IoT), ubiquitous computing, and advanced human computer interfaces is giving rise to a growing range of “cyber-physical” entities. By building on established definitions and analyses of the cyber-physical system, cyber-physical-social system, cyber-physical society, and cyber-physical-social-thinking space, this text formulates a conceptual framework for understanding the emerging “Workforce 4.0” as a specialized type of “cyber-physical-social-intentional system.” Attention is given to the heterogeneous agency, technological posthumanization, functional decentralization, and planned architectures or spontaneously self-organizing topologies manifested by Workforce 4.0. It is shown how such a workforce is situated within the context of cyber-physical space, a cyber-physical organization, cyber-physical ecosystems, a cyber-physical society, and the larger cyber-physical world.

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A Phenomenological Analysis of the Posthumanized Future Workplace

Impacts of Technological Posthumanization on Future Workplace Architecture

Kwartalnik Nauk o Przedsiębiorstwie 48 (2018), pp. 31-39; MNiSW 2016 List B: 12 points

ABSTRACT: Increasingly, organizations are becoming “technologically posthumanized” through the integration of social robots, AI, virtual reality, and ubiquitous computing into the workplace. Here a phenomenological approach is used to anticipate architectural transformations of the workplace resulting from posthumanization’s challenge to traditional anthropocentric paradigms of the workplace as a space that exists at “human” scale, possesses a trifold boundary, and serves as a spatiotemporal filter.

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Dynamics of Technological Posthumanization: Distinguishing the Anticipated Paths of Developed and Emerging Economies

Differing Paths to Technological Posthumanization

In ICTM 2018: Proceedings of the International Conference on ICT Management for Global Competitiveness and Economic Growth in Emerging Economies, edited by Jolanta Kowal, Anna Kuzio, Juho Mäkiö, Grażyna Paliwoda-Pękosz, and Piotr Soja • University of Wrocław, 2018

ABSTRACT: The processes of “posthumanization” can be understood as those dynamics by which a human organization or society comes to include members other than “natural” biological human beings who contribute to the structure, activities, or meaning of that organization or society. In the world of business, such posthumanization is commonly identified with the growing use of social robots, autonomous AI, and joint human-computer systems to perform work that in earlier eras would have been performed by human beings acting alone. Such “technological” posthumanization is often presented as a new phenomenon occurring largely in those developed economies that are pioneering Industry 4.0 paradigms (e.g., by expanding workplace automation) and that are uniquely positioned to harness such forces to drive economic growth. Here, however, we contend that such emphasis on the novelty of technological posthumanization overlooks forms of non-technological posthumanization that have been at work in human societies for millennia. Such dynamics of non-technological posthumanization have weakened significantly in many developed economies since the mid-20th century; however, they remain relatively strong in emerging economies. In this study, a conceptual framework is developed for identifying and comparing phenomena through which processes of technological or non-technological posthumanization manifest themselves in developed and emerging economies. It is argued that the ongoing and robust experience with non-technological posthumanization possessed by many of the world’s emerging economies may offer them unique and underappreciated psychological, social, and cultural mechanisms for integrating effectively into their enterprises, organizations, and institutions those novel forms of non-human agency that are at work in key Industry 4.0 technologies, like those relating to social robotics, autonomous AI, and advanced human-computer interfaces.

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Enterprise Meta-Architecture for Megacorps of Unmanageably Great Size, Speed, and Technological Complexity

Enterprise Meta Architecture for Megacorps

In Information Systems Architecture and Technology: Proceedings of 39th International Conference on Information Systems Architecture and Technology – ISAT 2018, Part III, edited by Zofia Wilimowska, Leszek Borzemski, and Jerzy Świątek • Springer International Publishing, 2018

ABSTRACT: The discipline of enterprise architecture (EA) provides valuable tools for aligning an organization’s business strategy and processes, IT strategy and systems, personnel structures, and organizational culture, with the goal of enhancing organizational agility, adaptability, and efficiency. However, the centralized and exhaustively detailed approach of conventional EA is susceptible to failure when employed in organizations demonstrating exceedingly great size, speed of operation and change, and IT complexity – a combination of traits that characterizes, for example, some emerging types of “technologized” oligopolistic megacorps reflecting the Industry 4.0 paradigm. This text develops the conceptual basis for a variant form of enterprise architecture that can be used to enact improved target architectures for organizations whose characteristics would otherwise render them “unmanageable” from the perspective of conventional EA. The proposed approach of “enterprise meta-architecture” (or EMA) disengages human enterprise architects from the fine-grained details of architectural analysis, design, and implementation, which are handled by artificially intelligent systems functioning as active agents rather than passive tools. The role of the human enterprise architect becomes one of determining the types of performance improvements a target architecture should ideally generate, establishing the operating parameters for an EMA system, and monitoring and optimizing its functioning. Advances in Big Data and parametric design provide models for enterprise meta-architecture, which is distinct from other new approaches like agile and adaptive EA. Deployment of EMA systems should become feasible as ongoing advances in AI result in an increasing share of organizational agency and decision-making responsibility being shifted to artificial agents.

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Neuromarketing Applications of Neuroprosthetic Devices: An Assessment of Neural Implants’ Capacities for Gathering Data and Influencing Behavior

In Business Models for Strategic Innovation: Cross-Functional Perspectives, edited by S.M. Riad Shams, Demetris Vrontis, Yaakov Weber, and Evangelos Tsoukatos, pp. 11-24 • London: Routledge, 2018

ABSTRACT: Neuromarketing utilizes innovative technologies to accomplish two key tasks: 1) gathering data about the ways in which human beings’ cognitive processes can be influenced by particular stimuli; and 2) creating and delivering stimuli to influence the behavior of potential consumers. In this text, we argue that rather than utilizing specialized systems such as EEG and fMRI equipment (for data gathering) and web-based microtargeting platforms (for influencing behavior), it will increasingly be possible for neuromarketing practitioners to perform both tasks by accessing and exploiting neuroprosthetic devices already possessed by members of society.

We first present an overview of neuromarketing and neuroprosthetic devices. A two-dimensional conceptual framework is then developed that can be used to identify the technological and biocybernetic capacities of different types of neuroprosthetic devices for performing neuromarketing-related functions. One axis of the framework delineates the main functional types of sensory, motor, and cognitive neural implants; the other describes the key neuromarketing activities of gathering data on consumers’ cognitive activity and influencing their behavior. This framework is then utilized to identify potential neuromarketing applications for a diverse range of existing and anticipated neuroprosthetic technologies.

It is hoped that this analysis of the capacities of neuroprosthetic devices to be utilized in neuromarketing-related roles can: 1) lay a foundation for subsequent analyses of whether such potential applications are desirable or inappropriate from ethical, legal, and operational perspectives; and 2) help information security professionals develop effective mechanisms for protecting neuroprosthetic devices against inappropriate or undesired neuromarketing techniques while safeguarding legitimate neuromarketing activities.

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Sapient Circuits and Digitalized Flesh: The Organization as Locus of Technological Posthumanization

ISBN 978-1-944373-21-4 • Second edition • Defragmenter Media, 2018 • 238 pages

Key organizational decisions made by sapient AIs. The pressure to undergo neuroprosthetic augmentation in order to compete with genetically enhanced coworkers. A corporate headquarters that exists only in cyberspace as a persistent virtual world. A project team whose members interact socially as online avatars without knowing or caring whether fellow team members are human beings or robots. Futurologists’ visions of the dawning age of ‘posthumanized’ organizations range from the disquieting to the exhilarating. Which of these visions are compatible with our best current understanding of the capacities and the limits of human intelligence, physiology, and sociality? And what can posthumanist thought reveal about the forces of technologization that are transforming how we collaborate with one another – and with ever more sophisticated artificial agents and systems – to achieve shared goals?

This book develops new insights into the evolving nature of intelligent agency and collaboration by applying the post-anthropocentric and post-dualistic methodologies of posthumanism to the fields of organizational theory and management. Building on a comprehensive typology of posthumanism, an emerging ‘organizational posthumanism’ is described which makes sense of the dynamics of technological posthumanization that are reshaping the members, personnel structures, information systems, processes, physical and virtual spaces, and external environments available to organizations. Conceptual frameworks and analytical tools are formulated for use in diagnosing and guiding the ongoing convergence in the capacities of human and artificial actors that is being spurred by novel technologies relating to human augmentation, synthetic agency, and digital-physical ecosystems. As the first systematic investigation of these topics, this text will be of interest to scholars and students of posthumanism and management and to management practitioners who must grapple on a daily basis with the forces of technologization that are increasingly powerful drivers of organizational change.

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Strategic Management Instruments for Cyber-Physical Organizations: Technological Posthumanization as a Driver of Strategic Innovation

International Journal of Contemporary Management 16, no. 3 (2017), pp. 139-55; MNiSW 2016 List B: 14 points

ABSTRACT: Strategic management instruments (SMIs) are tools used to analyze an organization’s strategic situation, formulate effective strategies, and successfully implement them. Despite SMIs’ importance, there has been little systematic research into them – and especially regarding the impact of emerging technologies on SMIs. Here we investigate whether the forces of technological posthumanization that are creating a new class of ‘cyber-physical organizations’ can be expected to affect innovation in the use of SMIs within such organizations. Through a review of strategic management literature, we identify nearly 100 SMIs and categorize them according to their use in (a) strategic analysis, (b) strategy formulation, or (c) strategy implementation. Meanwhile, an analysis of cyber-physical systems and technological posthumanization reveals three dynamics that are converging to create an emerging class of cyber-physical organizations: (a) roboticization of the workforce; (b) deepening human-computer integration; and (c) the ubiquitization of computation. A framework is developed for mapping the impacts of these dynamics onto the inputs, agents, processes, and outputs involved with the three types of SMIs. Application of the framework shows that technological posthumanization should be expected to both facilitate and require innovation in cyber-physical organizations’ use of all three types of SMIs.

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Technomancy and the Conjuring of Virtual Worlds: The Utilization of ‘Digital Magical Practice’ as Organizational Strategy

Technomancy and the Conjuring of Virtual Worlds

The 3rd DELab UW International Conference: Ongoing Digitalisation of Economies and Societies • Digital Economy Lab, Uniwersytet Warszawski, Warszawa • September 29, 2017

ABSTRACT: Efforts to formally define ‘magic’ and to identify the aspects that distinguish magical practice from other human pursuits have been made from both a theological perspective (e.g., St. Thomas Aquinas) and, more recently, an anthropological perspective (e.g., Frazer, Mauss, Durkheim, Malinowski, and Tambiah). Frequently cited elements of magic include its use of esoteric symbols, gestures, and speech that are only understood only by a small, elite group of initiated practitioners; its use of specially prepared ritual instruments; its attempt to harness the power of invisible, intelligent, nonhuman entities (such as demons or nature deities) to produce specific physical effects; and its attempt to manipulate hidden (or ‘occult’) forms of causality rather than obviously explicable physical causality.

As early as the 1970s, scholars noted that the practice of computer programming reflects several such aspects of magic as it is traditionally defined. For example, conventional computer programming requires mastery of an esoteric body of knowledge passed down between generations of programmers; it employs arcane symbols arranged in elaborate sequential scripts structurally similar to magical incantations; and it allows computers to perform highly complex, seemingly ‘intelligent’ behaviors by means of causal processes that may be comprehensible to programmers but which to ordinary computer users appear quite mystifying.

In this presentation, we argue that it can be expected that the ‘magical’ aspects of computing technology will be transformed and enhanced over the coming years through the development of increasingly sophisticated technologies for virtual reality (VR), artificial intelligence (AI), and ubiquitous computing (UC) that converge to create ‘magically responsive’ digital-physical ecosystems and ‘enchanted’ cyber-physical societies.

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From Strategic Analysis to Organizational Foresight: 65 Techniques for Diagnosing Present Realities and Potential Futures

ISBN 978-1-944373-11-5 • Synthypnion Business, 2017 • 298 pages

The challenge of developing sound organizational strategy is growing increasingly difficult as accelerating technological change transforms the world’s competitive ecosystems in ways that render many traditional approaches to strategy obsolete. What are the concrete tools and techniques that a contemporary strategic analyst can employ to understand the critical elements of an organization’s internal structure and dynamics and external competitive environment – and to predict the ways in which they may evolve in the future? This book provides a practical step-by-step guide to using dozens of the most important tools for generating organizational insight and foresight, along with an investigation of their underlying nature and purpose. It serves as an accessible introduction for those seeking to learn the essentials of strategic analysis, as well as a comprehensive reference for the experienced organizational strategist.

The book employs the concept of the Strategic Futures Hub as a means for understanding eight domains that are key to the development of strategic foresight for any organization. These are: (1) an organization’s financial resources and realities; (2) its internal architecture and capacities; (3) its current and potential products; (4) consumers’ needs and anticipated future behaviors; (5) competitors and their expected future behaviors; (6) the current and future dynamics of the organization’s competitive ecosystem; (7) causal chains and possible, probable, and desirable organizational futures; and (8) potential organizational strategies. For each of these domains, the reader is taught when and why to choose (or avoid) specific techniques in order to answer a range of the most frequently encountered strategic questions. The volume explains not only traditional analytical tools like market opportunity analysis, benchmarking, resource analysis, stakeholder analysis, SWOT and PESTEL analyses, and the Delphi method, but also emerging techniques like internal prediction markets for organizations, as well as longer-range diagnostic tools from the field of futures studies, such as emerging issues analysis, backcasting, morphological analysis, the futures wheel, and cross-impact analysis.

The nature of each analytical technique is clearly and succinctly described, along with recommended approaches to its use and investigation of practical considerations such as the time commitment and skills required. Discussion of the techniques is enriched by a wealth of diagrams and extensive bibliographic references to the best contemporary scholarship and practice. While a few of the analytical techniques are targeted specifically at commercial enterprises, most will also be of great value to nonprofit organizations, government agencies, and other non-commercial entities that are seeking to better understand their current realities and prospective futures from a strategic perspective.

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The Dystopian Megacorp: Non-Financial Strategies for Domination in Near-Future Cyber-Physical Ecosystems

The Dystopian Megacorp

His Master’s Voice 4th Annual Symposium: Utopias, Dystopias, and Ecotopias • Facta Ficta Research Centre, Kraków • March 25, 2017

ABSTRACT: Creators of cyberpunk science fiction envision a near future in which technological, political, and economic change yield a powerful new type of organization: the megacorporation or ‘megacorp,’ which is frequently depicted as contributing to (and exploiting) the dystopian nature of its society. By analyzing such fictional works, we formulate a definition of the ‘megacorp’ along with two conceptual frameworks: (1) a model of the megacorp as cyber-physical organism; and (2) a typology that reveals the ways in which different kinds of megacorps generate dystopian or (limited) utopian dynamics within their cyber-physical ecosystems. In developing the first framework, concepts from artificial life and management cybernetics are employed to argue that some megacorps are presented as incorporating artificial agency into their organizational architecture in such ways that they do not simply act ‘like’ living organisms but indeed constitute massive synthetic life-forms that inhabit the globalized digital-physical ecosystems of the near future. In developing the second framework, it is noted that contemporary corporations typically pursue a narrow range of strategies for achieving financial profitability so they can purchase resources needed to adapt and grow. However, we contend that – as depicted in cyberpunk science fiction – dystopian megacorps have available to them a broader range of non-financial strategies that they exploit to subdue competitors and obtain the resources needed to survive, evolve, and grow.

Such strategies may employ approaches that are legal and political (e.g., extraterritoriality; corporate courts; corporate citizenship; EULAs; ownership of individuals’ genetic code, cybernetic augmentations, and output); paramilitary (deployment of private military, police, and security forces; cyberwarfare); geospatial (construction of facilities isolated in fortified, orbital, or undersea arcologies; use of ubiquitous sensors and effectors to convert the entire Internet of Things into a corporate facility; virtualization and nonlocalization of organizational architecture; construction of new digital-physical ecosystems to dominate); biological (engineering of biomedical dependencies among employees and consumers; creation of ‘walled-garden’ commercial ecosystems requiring genetic modification for entry); psychological and sociocultural (direct neurocybernetic access to a population’s sensory, cognitive, and motor activity; cultural engineering; memetic warfare); or technological and informatic (monopolization of core global ICT infrastructure; ‘megascale’ data mining, computational simulation, and prediction; automated decision-making by AI; workforce roboticization and cyborgization). Three ‘views’ for analyzing competitive strategies of a megacorp are presented, each of which utilizes two dimensions to distinguish four types of megacorps according to their interactions with their ecosystem and resulting generation of dystopian or utopian dynamics.

The framework is then applied to numerous megacorps described in cyberpunk RPGs, including Arasaka and WorldSat (from Cyberpunk 2020); Evo, NeoNET, Proteus, Renraku, Saeder-Krupp, and Shiawase (from Shadowrun); Belltower Associates, the Picus Group, Tai Yong Medical, and VersaLife (from Deus Ex); Anubis, Augustus, and Imperial (from Ex Machina); and Golden Promise (from Interface Zero).

It is hoped that such frameworks can facilitate efforts to: (1) analyze the roles that creators of cyberpunk science fiction envision for megacorps in their worlds’ ecosystems; (2) explicate how megacorps’ competitive strategies contribute to the dystopian nature of their societies; (3) anticipate new competitive strategies that may emerge if our world’s actual business ecosystems evolve to resemble those presented in cyberpunk fiction; and (4) recognize any real-world corporations that begin to acquire characteristics of (dystopian) megacorps.

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