Framers

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“Cukier and his co-authors have a more ambitious project than Kahneman and Harari. They don’t want to just point out how powerfully we are influenced by our perspectives and prejudices—our frames. They want to show us that these frames are tools, and that we can optimise their use.”
—Forbes

From pandemics to populism, AI to ISIS, wealth inequity to climate change, humanity faces unprecedented challenges that threaten our very existence. The essential tool that will enable humanity to find the best way foward is defined in Framers by internationally renowned authors Kenneth Cukier, Viktor Mayer-Schönberger, and Francis de Véricourt. 
 
To frame is to make a mental model that enables us to make sense of new situations. Frames guide the decisions we make and the results we attain. People have long focused on traits like memory and reasoning, leaving framing all but ignored. But with computers becoming better at some of those cognitive tasks, framing stands out as a critical function—and only humans can do it. This book is the first guide to mastering this human ability.
 
Illustrating their case with compelling examples and the latest research, authors Cukier, Mayer-Schönberger, and de Véricourt examine:
 
·       Why advice to “think outside the box” is useless
·       How Spotify beat Apple by reframing music as an experience
·       How the #MeToo twitter hashtag reframed the perception of sexual assault
·       The disaster of framing Covid-19 as equivalent to seasonal flu, and how framing it akin to SARS delivered New Zealand from the pandemic
 
Framers shows how framing is not just a way to improve how we make decisions in the era of algorithms—but why it will be a matter of survival for humanity in a time of societal upheaval and machine prosperity.“Although every moment of your life is filtered through your mental models, they’re often invisible to you. This sharp book reveals how you can recognize the lenses that you’re applying and rethink them as the world changes around you. It’s an important read—a steady hand for our turbulent times.”
—Adam Grant, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Think Again

“A tightly written prescription for smart thinking . . . A bold call to reinject pluralism and progressive human values into a decision-making process dominated by algorithms or gut instinct.”
—The Financial Times

“A paean to cognitive agility and the elasticity of the imagination . . . Convincingly, Framers is a plea for diversity in all its forms. It argues for the importance of ‘frame pluralism,’ in which ideas can compete vigorously yet still share space.”
—The Economist

“The book is stuffed full of examples of how some frames are more effective than others, and how amending a frame, or adopting a new one, can lead to scientific, economic, and emotional breakthroughs. . . . Cukier and his co-authors have a more ambitious project than Kahneman and Harari. They don’t want to just point out how powerfully we are influenced by our perspectives and prejudices—our frames. They want to show us that these frames are tools, and that we can optimise their use. And we can change them when they become obsolete or misleading.”
—Calum Chace, Forbes

“Framers provides an exciting intellectual tour of how people throughout history have developed mental models that have advanced human progress. It assembles research to support the idea that a diversity of backgrounds and viewpoints leads to better outcomes. And the book suggests tactics that we all can use to get better at framing problems, something especially useful in this moment of change.”
—ResetWork.co

“A fascinating look at what makes humans special in the age of algorithms—and how people can improve the way they think to stay ahead of the machine.”
—Mustafa Suleyman, cofounder of DeepMind and vice-president at Google

“Framers provides insight into how we can all nurture more of a beginner’s mind and manifest breakthrough ideas for building a better future.”
—Marc Benioff, chairman and CEO of Salesforce
  
“A great book filled with fresh perspectives to help us out during the rise of AI so we can usher in the Age of Humanity.”
—will.i.am, musician and entrepreneur

“Framers is packed with big ideas, great stories, values and verve that make it a delight to read. It will certainly change how you think—and might just change the world too.”
—Annie Duke, bestselling author of Thinking in Bets

“Framers brilliantly shows that mental models are at the heart of creativity, critical thinking, and innovation, and how we can get better at it to solve our toughest business and social challenges.”
—Aaron Levie, CEO of Box

“A captivating read. Framers will transform the way you think.”
—Marissa King, professor at Yale School of Management and author of Social Chemistry

“Wonderfully stimulating . . . It will teach you to see around corners.”
—Tim Harford, Financial Times columnist and author of The Data DetectiveKenneth Cukier is a senior editor at The Economist and host of its weekly podcast on technology Babbage. He is also an associate fellow at Saïd Business School at the University of Oxford. Viktor Mayer-Schönberger is professor of internet governance and regulation at the Oxford Internet Institute at the University of Oxford. He is also a faculty affiliate of the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard University. Francis de Véricourt is professor of management science and the director of the Center for Decisions, Models, and Data at the European School of Management and Technology in Berlin.

1: Decisions

The source of human power is neither muscle nor mind but models

Some threats are sudden and unexpected. Others are slow and smoldering. Both represent cognitive blind spots for which societies are unprepared. Whether pandemics or populism, new weapons or new technologies, global warming or gaping inequalities, how humans respond marks the difference between survival and extinction. And how we act depends on what we see.

Each year, more than 700,000 people around the world die from infections that antibiotics once cured but no longer do. The bacteria have developed resistance. The number of deaths is rising fast. Unless a solution is found, it is on track to hit ten million a year, or one person every three seconds. It makes even the tragedy of Covid-19 pale by comparison. And it is a problem that society itself has produced. Antibiotics work less and less well due to overuse: the very drugs that could once staunch the bacteria have turned them into superbugs.

We take antibiotics for granted, but before penicillin was discovered in 1928 and mass-produced more than a decade later, people routinely died from broken bones or simple scratches. In 1924, the sixteen-year-old son of American president Calvin Coolidge got a blister on his toe while playing tennis on the White House lawn. It became infected, and he died within the week—neither his status nor wealth could save him. Today, almost every aspect of medicine, from a C-section to cosmetic surgery to chemotherapy, relies on antibiotics. If their power were to wane those treatments will become far riskier.

From her colorful, plant-strewn office in Cambridge, Massachusetts, Regina Barzilay, a professor of artificial intelligence at MIT, envisioned a solution. Conventional drug development mostly focuses on finding substances with molecular “fingerprints” similar to ones that work. That generally performs well, but not for antibiotics. Most substances with similar compositions have already been examined, and new antibiotics are so close in structure to existing ones that bacteria quickly develop resistance to them, too. So Barzilay and a diverse team of biologists and computer scientists, led by Jim Collins, a professor of bioengineering at MIT, embraced an alternative approach. What if, instead of looking for structural similarities, they focused on the effect: Did it kill bacteria? They reconceived the problem not as a biological one but an informational one.

Charismatic and confident, Barzilay doesn’t come across as a typical nerd. But then, she is accustomed to defying categories. She grew up under communism in what is now Moldova, speaking Russian; was educated in Israel, speaking Hebrew; and attended grad school in America. In 2014, as a new mother in her early forties, she was diagnosed with breast cancer, which she survived after difficult treatments. This ordeal led her to change her research in order to focus on artificial intelligence in medicine. As her research gained attention, a MacArthur “genius grant” followed.

Barzilay and the team got to work. They trained an algorithm on more than 2,300 compounds with antimicrobial properties, to find if any inhibited the growth of E. coli, a noxious bacterium. Then the model was applied to around six thousand molecules in the Drug Repurposing Hub and later to more than one hundred million molecules in another database to predict which might work. In early 2020 they struck gold. One molecule stood out. They named it “halicin” after HAL, the renegade computer in 2001: A Space Odyssey.

The discovery of a superdrug to kill superbugs made headlines around the world. It was hailed as a “video killed the radio star” moment for the superiority of machine over man. “AI Discovers Antibiotics to Treat Drug-Resistant Diseases,” boomed a front-page headline in the Financial Times.

But that missed the real story. It wasn’t a victory for artificial intelligence but a success of human cognition: the ability to rise up to a critical challenge by conceiving of it in a certain way, altering aspects of it, which open up new paths to a solution. Credit does not go to a new technology but to a human ability.

“Humans were the ones who selected the right compounds, who knew what they were doing when they gave the material for the model to learn from,” Barzilay explains. People defined the problem, designed the approach, chose the molecules to train the algorithm, and then selected the database of substances to examine. And once some candidates popped up, humans reapplied their biological lens to understand why it worked.

The process of finding halicin is more than an outstanding scientific breakthrough or a major step toward accelerating and lowering the cost of drug development. To succeed, Barzilay and the team needed to harness a form of cognitive freedom. They didn’t get the idea from a book, from tradition, or by connecting obvious dots. They got it by embracing a unique cognitive power that all people possess.

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