The Man Running Across the Bridge

One cold, rainy morning in London, Richard Branson was late for an interview.

I was working for Bloomberg. This was around 1999 or 2000, and we had set up beside the Thames, across from Parliament, to interview him live. The crew was ready. The cameras were ready. Branson wasn’t there. We were getting close to airtime when my cell phone rang. It was one of those Nokia brick phones everyone carried then.

I answered.

“Dylan, where are you?”

It was Richard Branson.

Not his assistant. Not his publicist. Not somebody from Virgin.

Richard.

It turned out he was standing on the wrong side of the river. I told him where we were.

“Okay.” A few minutes later, I looked across the bridge and saw Richard Branson running toward us through the rain.

Alone.

No assistant. No security. No entourage. No car waiting to carry him the few hundred yards to where we were standing.

Just a British guy in the rain who was late for an appointment.

He ran across the bridge. We did the interview.

And for some reason I have remembered it for more than twenty-five years. As I think about Branson running across that bridge now, I’m increasingly interested in something else.

He seemed free.

There was something wonderfully inefficient about the whole thing.

Branson was late. He was on the wrong side of the river. He called me himself. Then he ran.

None of this was optimized. A sufficiently well-organized billionaire could have had somebody else figure out where the television crew was. A driver could have been waiting. An assistant could have called an assistant. An entire infrastructure could have existed to prevent Richard Branson from ever having to run anywhere in the rain.

Instead, he behaved like a person.

That distinction seems more important to me today than it did then. We are entering an extraordinary period in which artificial intelligence is becoming increasingly capable of doing things we once believed were exclusively human.

Machines can write. They can speak. They can draw. They can reason. They can remember more than we can, calculate faster than we can and increasingly imitate the patterns of human conversation.

At the same time, much of our economic life has been moving human beings in the opposite direction. We measure productivity. We optimize schedules. We automate interactions. We turn people into data points, customers into acquisition costs, workers into units of productivity and human attention into something that can be bought and sold by the second.

And now we are worried that machines are becoming too much like people.

Maybe we’re looking at only half the problem.

Machines can be like people only if people act like machines.

The Wrong Competition If artificial intelligence can calculate faster than I can, there isn’t much point in my trying to calculate faster.

If it can search a million documents in the time it takes me to read a paragraph, I’m going to lose that contest too.

The same will increasingly be true of many forms of routine intellectual work.

So perhaps the answer isn’t to make ourselves more efficient versions of machines.

Maybe it’s to become more unmistakably human. Curiosity. Humor. Judgment. Affection. Adventure. The willingness to change your mind. The ability to do something for no particularly rational reason other than that it might be fun.

Calling somebody yourself. Showing up wet. Being late. Running across a bridge.

These things can look like inefficiencies in a system designed to optimize everything.

They may turn out to be some of the most valuable things we have. That doesn’t answer the enormous economic questions AI creates. I spent my career as a financial reporter, and I don’t think we should sentimentalize what happens if human labor loses economic value faster than our institutions can adapt. Ownership, wages, capital, debt and the distribution of the gains from artificial intelligence are going to matter enormously.

But economics isn’t the entire question.

There is also the question of what kind of people we become. I didn’t know any of this standing beside the Thames twenty-five years ago.

I just thought it was funny that one of the most famous businessmen in the world had called my Nokia because he couldn’t find us and then came running across a bridge through the rain.

Today I think I understand a little better why I remembered it.

Richard Branson looked deeply human.

And in the world we’re entering, that may become more valuable, not less.