Philosophy meets technology in a discussion on how society should react to the challenges and changes associated with the introduction of cognitive machines, including how machines and humans are clashing.

“It’s very important for us not to view technology as an abstraction; it has impact on society and getting that right is just as important as getting the technology right,” said Pat Casey (pictured), senior vice president and general manager of the Platform Business Unit at ServiceNow Inc.

Casey spoke with Dave Vellante (@dvellante) and Jeff Frick (@JeffFrick), co-hosts of theCUBE, SiliconANGLE Media’s mobile livestreaming studio, during this year’s ServiceNow Knowledge17 event in Orlando, Florida. (* Disclosure below.) 

ServiceNow has always focused on simplifying tasks and “solving real problems for real people,” Casey added.

Making it easier to do things that used to be hard

Answering questions including “What makes a platform a platform?” and “How important is time-to-market?” Casey weighed in on the importance of providing customers with an integrated platform that offers all the “underlying guts,” such as the user interface, persistence, workflow, business logic, storage and retrieval.

“You have all that, and the world’s your oyster. People are going to build cool stuff,” he said.

Delving into the philosophy of machine learning and the impact it will have on society, Casey said: “The world of creative production, the world of actually engineering things to change people’s lives; I think a lot of it is actually moving out of the physical and into the software world, the virtual.”

But, he cautioned that society has to be prepared to “invest time, energy, thought and resources into managing this transition.” Although there may still be jobs available, “Truck drivers can’t suddenly become software engineers,” he stated.

“Unstructured interaction with machines is the future,” Casey said. He sees one of the biggest benefits of cognitive machines as their ability to communicate in a non-structured way. ServiceNow is working toward this future by applying machine learning to practical uses, automating service management tasks and freeing up humans to focus on higher-level tasks.

Watch the complete video interview below, and be sure to check out more of SiliconANGLE’s and theCUBE’s coverage of ServiceNow Knowledge17. (* Disclosure: ServiceNow Inc. sponsored this Knowledge17 segment on SiliconANGLE Media’s theCUBE. Neither ServiceNow nor other sponsors have editorial control over content on theCUBE or SiliconANGLE.)

Photo: SiliconANGLE